The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To Read Free Page B

tells them they’ll be switching groups. My group is Chris White, Alicia Henry, and some girl whose name I always forget but I think might be in choir. Alicia has already divided the project up into four equal sections, assigned one to each of us, and written her e-mail address on three identical-sized strips of notebook paper so we can just e-mail her our sections when we’re done and she’ll assemble them all in a nice little binder before the due date. She actually says “nice little binder.” We all just give in to how badly she wants to get into a good college and go back to our desks with lots of class time to spare.
    I’m almost done with
The Great Gatsby
and if we don’t get assigned something else soon, I’ll have to start reading my own books at the end of class, which I would enjoy except for the questions about what I’m reading and why I’m reading it. Getting asked what book you’re reading isn’t as bad as getting asked what you’re drawing. What you’re drawing is coming right from your head onto the page, it’s all you, but if a book you’re reading looks particularly nerdy, like it has a guy straddling a dragon on the cover, or when you start to describe it to the person asking you realizeit sounds particularly nerdy, you can always defuse it by tacking “… it sucks” to the end of your description. But then the question becomes “So why are you reading it?” Like, people stop reading assigned books once they realize they suck, they stop reading on page two if page one was too dense or too gay or too historical, so the fact that you’re pressing on with a sucky book that no one is even forcing you to read is now a red flag.
    Mostly people ask what your book is because they’re worried it’s something we were assigned when they were ditching out to go huff with some friends they have who go to Catholic school downtown, and they don’t think that just because they missed one day means they have any less of a right to know what books they’re supposed to half-try to read and give up on for being too dense, gay, and historical.
    Eric never comes over to me. He just nods when he catches my eye.
    â€œWhat if the scientist COULDN’T return to the present?”
    Eric is sitting in the shade of the loading dock when I go there after the cafeteria.
    â€œHe sends the cavemen back to the present to do his bidding, but why can’t he just go back and lead them himself?”
    â€œBecause the time-proof signals he sends the cavemen in the present need to get intercepted by the Temporal Ranger—”
    â€œI know. I know he needs to stay in the past for the story to work. But what I’m saying is, there ought to be a reason he has to stay.”
    Eric looks at me with wide eyes, expecting something, like as long as I don’t hit him, this whole thing will be very exciting.
    â€œLike—”
    He jumps before the words are even out of my mouth.
    â€œLike what if, unbeknownst to him the government has created a clone of him in the present and the clone him has invented an apparatus to prevent the real him from coming back? And what if … well, here, let me show you.”
    He takes his math book out of his backpack, opens it, and a folded sheet of paper falls out. He unfolds it, and it just keeps unfolding until there’s a diagram spread out in front of us. It’s covered in words like “scientist” and “Temporal Ranger” and “government.” Question marks are everywhere. Things are circled and connected to each other with arrows. It looks like a football play drawn on the blackboard in the locker room in a sports movie, except the players are words I’ve had in my head for the six months since I came up with this idea. Plus some new ones I don’t recognize, like “Dream Spider” and “O.M.N.I.” and “Wolfpack Genetically