The Art of Adapting Read Free Page B

fine. It was the window that posed a problem. The window faced east, letting in early morning light, which woke Matt up before he wanted to be awake. The sun refused to be stopped. Like Buddha had said, “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” Matt’s sister Becca liked to quote Buddha, and he liked that one the best.
    Matt’s old room at Spike’s had faced north, so no sunrises or sunsets had glared their way into his space there. Every change brought new problems, which was one reason Matt tried to avoid change. But moving to Lana’s house was a change Matt just had to live with. Like the window, and the sun. Matt had tried closing the blinds, but the light still found a way in. He added a sheet over them for reinforcement, but the effect was all wrong: rumpled sheet, slats of light visible through it, dust motes escaping out the bottom. Eventually Lana had brought home blackout curtains for him. They were much better at muffling the morning light, but they were a deep maroon color. Matt preferred blue curtains. He preferred blue everything. But it was Lana’s house, even if it was Matt’s room. So he tried to like the maroon curtains. Lana seemed to prefer shades of red to any other color. Lana was sad sometimes, and Matt didn’t want to make her more sad by telling her he didn’t like the curtains.
    Matt was not good at sleeping. Even without the sunlight interfering. His mind kept him awake at night. He liked to take walks or work on his computer at night when he couldn’t sleep. He also used to drink and use Spike’s pills to sleep. The pills and the drinking weren’t allowed anymore, doctor’s orders, and mostly Matt was good about that. He missed the drinking all day long, but it was the worst whenever he wasn’t busy thinking about something else. He’d found some bottles of alcohol in Lana’s garage, in an empty red toolbox. Drinking them a little at a time helped at first, but they were empty now. The pills he only missed at night, and he missed them most nights. One night it got so bad he used Google to map the route from Lana’s house in the suburbs to Spike’s apartment near campus. He figured out how to walk there, and how long it’d take, but hadn’t gone. But he saved the route. Just in case.
    Aside from the pills to help him sleep, Matt didn’t miss Spike. For one thing, Spike didn’t seem to like Matt much, except when Matt was giving him money. The good thing about Lana was that she liked Matt no matter what. When she bought the weighted blanket for him, he felt how much she cared about him. That blanket was Matt’s favorite new possession. It was thick and soft and so blue and so heavy that it sometimes could make Matt’s body stay asleep even when his mind wanted to be awake.
    Lana had also bought Matt a noise machine. He was trying to choose the right sound for each night. He wasn’t sure how much it helped, but it gave him interesting things to listen to as he lay awake in the night. He liked the birds on Monday, a bustling forest waking at dawn. He liked the rushing stream sound on Tuesday, little trickles and drips across small pebbles beneath the roar of white water. Wednesday he used the raucous traffic noises. He’d never lived in a big city, and he wasn’t sure he’d like it, all those people, but he liked the car noises, trying to figure out what kind of car each one was from the sound it made. Thursdays he always listened to Bach. He was still figuring out the right sounds for sleeping on the weekends, because the routine in the house was different then—the kids were up later and Byron was usually in thekitchen eating around two a.m., just as Matt was trying to figure out what to do with himself.
    Those were the times when Matt most missed his nighttime walks. He and Spike had lived in a neighborhood where college kids were out late, and there