Shall Not Sleep [bxb]

Chapter One

Honestly, I forgot about the soldier pen pal thing until Mrs. Martin handed out our first batch of responses a week and a half later. For something I totally didn't care about, my heartbeat sped up a weird amount when I saw the envelopes Mrs. Martin placed into the eager hands of Cecily Trace and her giggling friends. It's like when you see a new notification on your phone. Mostly it's all junk, but when you see it, something in you sits up and takes notice. Hope stirs inside you, or something.

That's what I felt when Mrs. Martin reached my desk: hope. She gave the envelope a far-sighted, step-back-and-squint look.

"Someone didn't treat this very kindly, did they?" she said before handing it to me.

It was awfully grubby. Corners so bent they were soft, the whole thing smudged with dirt. War must be pretty dirty, but none of the other envelopes looked so weathered.

But I didn't care. This one had my name on it. Max Callan. Care of Oakbridge High School. It was right there, in the fanciest handwriting I'd ever seen. So many curlicues and unnecessary swoops. The letter inside was almost as dirty as the envelope, but the paper was obviously expensive. Thick, with a real heavy papery texture. The writing inside was the same fancy cursive as the address. It was almost hard to read, but I squinted and struggled through it.

Dear Mr. Callan,

What a funny surprise your letter was. While I'm not quite sure what to make of it, I suppose the only thing to do is answer it. It sounds as if no fibre of your being whatsoever wanted to write that letter, and yet you did. You must have quite a persuasive teacher. I am afraid I cannot make you enjoy writing to me, but I will gladly receive and return your strange correspondence, and be grateful for it.

It is odd... the paper you wrote on, so uniformly white. And the ink, so neat. No blotting whatsoever .... no matter. Anything is a welcome distraction from this place. I have not seen the sun in days. The gloom is perpetual and I feel I should die merely from the lack of light—if it were not more likely that I should die from a shell explosion or a bullet finally finding me in one of our holes in the ground. The stress and strain of always staying crouched, of weaseling my way through the ground like a worm, of wet socks for weeks... that could all be the death of me, as well. Sometimes the nearness of death is horrifically tempting.

I probably should not write such a thing. Is it blasphemy? My mother would certainly say so. And my father, I'm sure, would chastise me for cowardice.

Good God. I am sure you do not want to hear the real, grim truth of the war—that soldiers secretly yearn for death sometimes. May I interest you in stories of heroism so greatly exaggerated they bear no resemblance to the truth? Or do you have other topics of conversation in mind for the strange, reluctant letters you will write me?

Tell me about yourself. I would dearly love to think about something other than death.

Sincerely,

Captain Alastair Barrington-Stowsworth

Alastair Barrington-Stowsworth... my brain could barely wrap itself around the name. I was scared to try to say it out loud. Well, he was definitely British, I could tell that much. The fancy kind of British, judging by "dearly love" and "the gloom is perpetual" and "shall." I bet none of the letters my classmates were reading and writing had those words. Most American soldiers are lunkheads. My dad definitely proved that.

This was an odd letter. It felt special. I tucked it into an inside pocket of my backpack, made sure it was safe.

I took it out again as I walked home from school in Georgia's April heat. I tried to walk and read at the same time. There was something weird about the letter. I felt like I had to decipher it, like a puzzle.
Okay, so he was British. That kind of accounted for the language and maybe the handwriting. Maybe British people always use old-fashioned handwriting. Also, he was a captain. That's officer rank. He wouldn't be a young new recruit.

The lamp post seemed to come out of nowhere. I walked straight into it and stumbled backward, just barely stopping myself from landing on my ass. I took a good hard look around as I brushed myself off. Looked there was no one around—thank God. I tucked the letter back into my bag. I clearly didn't have the skills to walk and read.

I got home a few minutes later, to the little house in a row with a dozen others like it that wasn't going to be ours much longer. Mom had finally done it: she was leaving Dad, and I was going, too. She had waited until he was deployed to finally pull the plug, out of fear that he'd hit her again. Now that he was back in Afghanistan, there wasn't anything he could do to stop us. We just had to figure out where the hell we were going and how we were going to get there.

Which could take a while.

And there was actually a chance it might not happen at all.

I planned on running right up the stairs to my room when I got in, pulling out my notebook and a pen right away, but the sight that met me in the living room stopped me. Mom was on the couch with Douglas the shih tzu, soap opera on the TV and her laptop open on her lap. I recognized the website layout of our bank. She was staring at her account information, her knees jiggling, and toggling back and forth between a website for rental housing. She had been doing this exact same thing every day when I got home, ever since Dad deployed.

"Well, are you actually going to get the ball rolling today?" I asked her.

She turned around and closed the laptop in one swift motion. As if that would, like, erase what I saw or something.

"Hi, honey," she said, smiling awfully weakly. "How was school?"

"Okay."

"Okay," she repeated, teasingly imitating my voice. "That's it?"

Douglas squeaked a tiny bark from where he's curled up on Mom's feet. His tail wags. I scooped him up and snuggled him to distract me from what I was about to say.

"Yep. Just okay. As long as we're still in this house, that's all I can be."

"Max... it's not that easy."

"Sure it is. Take the money, go to someone renting out their place, and say 'we'd like to live here, please.'"

"Where? Just a stone's throw outside the base, where we can afford, and risk your asshole dad storming after us the second he's back on US soil?"

I buried my face in Douglas's soft fur. His little wiggly body squirmed against my face. He smelled like a baby.

"No. Somewhere else. Back to Vermont or Virginia. I don't care."

"Anywhere further than this county and we'd have to pay movers a whole hell of a lot of money. Money I don't have."

"So we sell most of our shit and buy new shit when we get where we're going."

"With what money?"

"The money we get from selling our shit here."

She sighed heavily. "I wish it was that easy."

"It could be. Easy as pie. We both get jobs wherever we're going, make a bit of money. We don't need anything fancy. I'd be fine with just a little apartment somewhere."

Anywhere that's not here, I added in my head.

Mom took Douglas from me and held him close. She was smiling, but it was thin. Like the ghost of a smile.

"Who's a baby?" she asked the dog in a high-pitched voice. "You're a baby! You're a baby!"

I wanted to tell her I was a baby, too. I was seventeen, but I felt like a helpless little kid.