Insomniac

Insomniac 2

"Hey! Over here!"

I turned around in the hallway to see a boy coming towards me. He finally caught up to me in the crowded hallways and matched my stride. He had messy, black hair and a generally shy look on his face. He was nearly two inches shorter than me.

"Hey, isn't your name Dara?" he asked me with sparkly eyes. Frustration instantly boiled in my stomach.

"Yes, yes, it's me, the freak." I walked faster, and he struggled to keep up in the thickening crowd. Everyone was always either trying to figure out my problem with their friends, or dared by those friends to talk to me directly about why I was such a weirdo. I was tired of it, and just wanted to get to class.

"No, wait! I'm not trying to taunt you or anything!" he struggled to cut through the current of people with his short legs. I turned back around to give him a scrutinizing look. He took his chance and zipped under the crowd, back to my side. "Hi, I'm Mat." He held out his hand and stumbled over a dropped pencil. I grabbed his wrist to keep him steady. He grabbed mine back and shook it, "Nice to meet you."

"Yeah, a real pleasure," I rolled my eyes and pulled my hand free. Mat practically jogged beside me.

"Hey, did you know that I grew two whole inches last summer? People used to call me Shorty, but now I'm even taller than Greg!" Mat shouted over the other people's voices, referring to the most popular guy in the school, though Greg was only about five feet tall.

"Never would've guessed," I put on a blank stare at the back of some random person's head. I got an idea, and decided to test if this guy was dared by his friends to approach me, or looking for a friend. I looked at him with a blank mask of a face and said simply, "Did you know that I'm going to die in a matter of months?" he stared at me in what seemed to be a surprised expression, as if he didn't really understand what I was saying. Finally, he blinked a few times and recovered.

"Yeah, okay. Sure. And I'm going to enter the Olympics this winter." A hint of a smile pulled at his lips, as if he were asking me to accept his joke.

"Mmhm," I mumbled with a fake smirk. He accepted this with a loud laugh. Damn.

Was I really so impossible to see through?

+

"Oh, come on!" I yelled under the bed. My buddy was still hiding there. He hadn't slept or eaten for days, and my worry for him was mounting. He wasn't really a dog or cat, but a strange, flat thing with a long neck. He was the perfect size and shape to drape across my shoulder. He usually slept when he was there, the reason my mother got such a strange creature for a pet. She believed that he would influence me to sleep more often.

"Oh, fine! Just mope there until you die! That's not what I'm gonna do!" I yelled. I flopped face first onto my bed and tried to will myself into sleep. I knew it wouldn't work, but it was worth a shot, right? My mind wandered to Mat. What was with him? He didn't seem like the type of guy to make fun of me, but he didn't believe me when I said I was going to die soon. Maybe there was a middle ground. If so, he was probably the only one there. Maybe he just wanted a friend . . .