Mind and Matter

07 | Emerson

Leo wouldn't stop looking at me.

I tucked a wild strand of my hair behind my ear and turned my eyes once again to Franco—self-proclaimed star of the soccer team—standing in front of Kalani and me. Kalani's eyes practically bulged out of her head anytime Franco so slightly glanced her way. Her cheeks flushed a cherry red, and I knew she would melt if I pointed it out. She thought she looked neutral, and I wanted her to believe that.

Sometimes lies were healthy.

With one smug smirk and the push of his hand against the locker behind me, Franco leaned into my personal space, getting close but not close enough to warrant me shuffling away.

"Tell your friend taking a picture would last longer," he said, and I wanted to scream. Some originality, man, please.

But after that snide comment, I grabbed onto Kalani's arm, making her jolt out of the Franco-is-so-dreamy trance she was in. I turned my head slightly to the side and found Leo still standing there with his friend Santiago, wanting to steer him away just the way I was trying to do with Kalani.

"How can one person be so hot?" Kalani asked, as we maneuvered our way through the bustling hallway. This was probably the tenth time in the past ten minutes she fixed her hair, undoing and redoing her ponytail. I'd never seen her so flustered.

"Kalani—" I began, but she cut me off with her ramble.

"I mean, seriously. I thought Brandon in physics last year was the hottest guy our age I'd ever seen, but Franco is on another level. I was pretty collected talking to him. I'm glad, at least."

"Just listen for a sec—"

"Wait, what?" She cut me off once again, and I began to grow impatient. I wondered if I should even tell her what I had on my mind, but because I paused before proceeding to say anything, she took it as a cue to keep ranting and raving about Franco.

We made it outside the school, and I began looking for Max. My mom had told me in the morning to make him walk home with me, because for the past few days, he was coming back later and later. He was letting freshman year get to him already and it had only been a couple weeks into the school year.

"Hey, Kalani, do you see Max anywhere?" I asked her, when she began to wonder who I was looking around for. At the end of every day, swarms of students stood outside the main school building. Knowing Max, I wondered if he was even in any of those crowds.

"No, I don't see him," she said, craning her neck.

"Let's check the back."

We walked around the front lawn of the school and to the back, where a certain kind of students usually hung out. When I stepped foot there, I immediately felt out of place, as most people's eyes turned to me as if I was invading an enclosed territory.

Two of those brown eyes were familiar.

"Max." I addressed him sharply, and he jolted. He was standing in a crowd of sophomores and juniors, all looking higher than a kite. One was laughing, seemingly at the stratus cloud in the sky.

"Emerson, what the fuck are you doing here?" he asked, almost rolling his eyes as Kalani and I took a few steps forward. He never spoke like that.

"You should be going home," I told him, trying to hide my anger. One of his friends stared at me with a blatant smirk to the point I was uncomfortable.

He rolled his eyes again, stuffing some potato chips into his mouth. With his mouth full, he answered, "I'm not going home now. Not with you, at least."

Kalani let out a groan from next to me as she took in the way Max was acting. She had a thirteen-year-old brother, so I knew she was familiar with the bratty antics.

"Listen here, you little twerp," she began, standing until she was only a few inches away from him. "You're not cool right now nor will you ever be if you keep this up. Listen to what she says."

A couple of his friends sucked in a breath and some laughed at him, making his face flush a beet red. He crumpled up his bag of chips and turned to me.

"Just hurry up and get a head start," he snapped, picking up his nearly empty backpack from the floor. As Kalani and I began to slowly walk away, the kid staring at me earlier yelled out to me, "Your friend is hot when she's angry!"

"Freshmen," Kalani said with a gag. I didn't get a head start like Max wanted and instead slowly walked away until I knew he was only inches behind me.

He said nothing to us the whole way home, blasting heavy metal music in his headphones instead and keeping about a three foot distance from me like I was contagious.

"I'll text you later, okay?" Kalani called as she turned to walk to her home. It was a few blocks before mine, and while I knew she couldn't just live at my house, I really didn't want to go back and deal with Max.

But when I opened the door and saw that he barged right past me to his room upstairs, I wondered if he wanted anyone's help at all.

☆

I wasn't an insomniac.

Or at least, that was what I convinced myself.

The issue with knowing the symptoms to a near textbook of disease names, it was hard to not self-diagnose at times. I didn't have the power or degree to do it, but I knew deep inside, I was close to becoming one.

My sleep troubles had started at the beginning of last year, when I'd started thinking seriously about college. My parents always told me there was no reason to worry and to just try to go to bed early, but how could I? Between juggling AP classes, clubs in the afternoon, and volunteering on the weekends, I barely had time for myself.

Worrying about the future led to me worrying about a multitude of things. At times I worried that if I closed my eyes, my brain would explode and shoot out in every direction in a million squishy pieces. If I were artistic, I'd have painted the thought, all graphic and pink and gnarly on a white canvas.

When I worried about anything—or everything—I couldn't sleep. And when I couldn't sleep, I'd worry about the fact I couldn't sleep and every irrational thing that would occur if I could never drift off and simply stop thinking. What if I had fatal familial insomnia? And I'd simply stay awake for good, counting down the days until my inevitable death?

And there I was, over a year later, staring up at my ceiling in the pure darkness of my room. I placed my hands underneath my head behind me and expelled a long breath, closing my eyes for a moment. I was so close to shutting down and falling asleep, when my eyes snapped open again.

It felt like someone was holding out a warm, fudge brownie to my face, putting it in my hands and snatching it away before I could bring it to my mouth. That was what sleep felt like on my bad days.

Dessert I couldn't eat.

My parents weren't aware of my insomniac progression over the last year. I never turned on the lights and did something productive when these episodes hit, because then they would know I was awake since my room was close to theirs. When I looked tired in the morning, I drowned myself in coffee and fashioned excuses.

"I read through two novels on my phone yesterday. You know what staring at a screen does."

"I must have worn the wrong shade of concealer." (This one was a pitiful excuse, since I never wore concealer.)

"Too many math problems."

I shuffled through an array of excuses like this, making sure to never use the same one twice in a row. I wondered sometimes why I didn't tell them already. Maybe I didn't want to stress them out on top of everything; they both worked demanding, full-time jobs and had two more kids besides me.

And maybe I was too proud to admit I had a problem while trying to figure out everyone else's.

Irony was a funny thing.