Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,90

I crossed the line the other day, but that was an accident. I’ve got it under control.”

I climb onto his back and start biting his ears.

“But what should I do? What are you supposed to do?”

Finally the playfulness returns to his voice.

“Okay, okay,” he says. “First you have to fill a bucket with ice-cold water and dump it on my head. Then go into my backpack, grab the giant syringe from the box marked with a skull and crossbones, and stab it into my—”

Laughing. “Come on, Skunk, I’m serious! What would be the best thing for me to do?”

He tickles me.

“Then you have to take off my pants and take off your pants and climb on top of me and—”

Squealing. “You’re joking!”

“It’s true. That’s what you do when someone you love is psychotic.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

More tickling.

“Okay, okay, okay, you win, you win. I’ll throw a bucket of water on your head and then jump you.”

Since Skunk’s on an Enforced Sleeping regimen, he wants me to go on one too.

“I want to know when I’m dreaming that you’re dreaming too.”

“I don’t sleep anymore,” I inform him. “I unsubscribed.”

“Sleep’s not optional,” says Skunk. “You can’t unsubscribe.”

“Yes, you can. It’s like cable. You just get it disconnected.”

“That’s crazy.”

“It’s true.”

“Okay then, how about you meditate and I’ll sleep. But you have to lie down so we’re both in our beds.”

“All right, Bicycle Boy. Whatever you say.”

So we each lie down in our own beds, and Skunk’s meds knock him out and I burn on, awake, lit up from inside like a neon sarcophagus. I think it’s meditation. I see fractals, think thoughts, recite the Tao te Ching backward and forward all the way to the end. I text Skunk: R U REALLY SLEEPING?

He doesn’t text back, so I guess that’s a yes.

We do this four nights in a row. I soon realize Enforced Sleeping Time is the most productive time of my whole day. While Skunk’s sleeping, I make plans and speeches, learn concertos, argue court cases, solve for x. I listen to entire albums start to finish. I realize all sorts of previously unrealized facts about science, and music, and physics, and history, and love.

Skunk buys me a bag of loose-leaf tea from an herbal medicine shop that’s supposed to help me sleep. The bag has a gold foil label that says FLYING LOTUS TEA FOR CALMING OF NERVOUS, and the tea leaves are little black flakes like curled-up pine needles. The tea tastes like dried mushrooms and dead grass. I boil up a teapot full of it and drink it before Enforced Sleeping Time, but instead of Calming My Nervous I have to get up and pee sixteen times.

Really, sixteen times.

When Skunk keeps waking up to find a night’s worth of texts from me, he gets worried.

“If you go for too long without sleeping,” he says, “you might be having a Thing.”

“A thing like your Thing?”

“Or something like it.”

I admit that the possibility has crossed my mind. “Do I seem Thingy to you?” I ask him.

“A little.”

“Are all Things bad? What if I’m having a good Thing?”

Skunk considers this. “Does it feel good?”

Now it’s my turn to pause, a million contradictory answers crashing into each other like bumper cars. I feel great. But I’m exhausted. But I’m perfectly fine. But I’m desperate. But there’s nothing wrong. But I can’t seem to shut myself off. But I could stop anytime.

“It feels important,” I say.

My in-box piles up with emails from my parents, but I’m too busy to read them. They can tell me all about the sea tortoises when they get home. I stop answering the phone when the caller ID shows the cruise ship number. What would we talk about? Snurkleberries?

“Mom and Dad want to talk to you,” says Denny, standing in my bedroom doorway with the phone in his hand.

I let him hand it to me, but when he leaves the room, I hold the phone next to my synth and blast it with sine waves.

There is only one time all week when I really fall asleep, and even then it is only for a few seconds.

I’m lying there, making up lyrics to songs, when all of a sudden I slip. I fall into a great yawning cavern of pent-up dreams that come rushing at me, yapping and desperate, like a pack of starving dogs. The dreams had been waiting for me all this time, their faces pressed against the gates. When I fall asleep, they swarm me and