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the Moth-in-Sink feeling. As in: Come on Ref! Feel the Right Thing already!
    That, and, also, about a dead body’s length away from Necro, I notice a piece of paper slowly uncrumpling on the pavement. It’s a drawing—his, definitely—of a shirtless, bearded, loinclothed man with rabbi curls and metallic biceps, emerging from the fiery rubble of maybe a British mansion, carrying what appears to be a younger man’s body.
    â€œTimex! A bomb! It was a Timex!” I hear Toby yell, heaving air as he runs back to us. “They used a Timex!” He holds out his palm, in which there is this bent, aluminum face of a Timex watch. He leans over, hands on knees, and spits out a yo-yo string of saliva.
    Echoes sproing off the bricks of houses and into the sky. Windows of the buildings around us flicker on to bright yellow. And here Necro is, here we are, miles long from a Plan, two or three snowflakes melting on my arm, and Necro’sthumb is on Wicked College John’s wrist, yelling: “All right, man, you’re gonna be fine, man, gonna be fine, you gotta do me a favor, man, you gotta keep your eyes open and you gotta think something for me, man, Playboy, man, give yourself a nice comfy hard-on, man, gonna have to nut up and think about something, Led Zeppelin, man; Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin, eyes open , man, Led Zeppelin, you and me we own this—right, man? right, man? right, man? right, man? right, man? right, man? Right, man?”

THE SAD ARCHIVES
    One, one, one, one, one, one, I go, whispering. One, one, one, one! , like I’m pissed off, like I’m ready to punch myself in the face. I flip my bedroom pillow to the cooler side. I count sheep until the sheep melt into potatoes, and the potatoes stretch into pills, and the pills elongate into hospital stretchers.
    Because when the paramedics strapped down Wicked College John, one paramedic folded up the wheels of the gurney while the other slid it into the ambulance. When I’d always thought maybe the wheels folded on their own, or always imagined how what if they separated from the gurney and coasted away, in a slow, infinite straight line that ignored gravity, the way a space shuttle peels from its tanks. And I figure out that I might be falling asleep, that tiredness has won only for now, and I’m finally no longer thinking about the zombie-mint smell of the hospital waiting area, or whether or not it’s weird that Necro really wanted to sleep in his own bed and drove us back to our cars instead of waiting there longer.
    But once the actual shape of my room appears through my closed eyelids—the sliding closet door with the WEASE bumper sticker on it, or, on my dresser, the Don Mattingly puppet I made from a milk carton in third grade—my brain thinks: Sleep has arrived! Then I realize I’m thinking this, and the stadium lights in my brain whoosh back on, and I jolt awake again, counting.
    So when I sit up and get my night eyes, I decide to forget counting and focus, really hard, as a Sleep Portal, on this little glass particle, way off in my mind.
    Hold on. It’s turning into something.
    I look at the light squeezing through the bottom of my bedroom door. As in, I can’t remember if we always leave the hallway light on the whole night, or did Mom recently start leaving it on to make it look like we’re awake when we’re really asleep.
    Like when I was way younger. Sometimes, I’d wake up around midnight. I could hear the dog-whistle-quiet noise from the living room’s TV, and Real Dad through the air vent, watching Mr. Show , laughing angrily, like he was showing Mom he really got the jokes.
    Or how, once, way even before that, when I decided to sneak out of my room, I could see Mom, at the kitchen table, staring at a four-pack of cigars she’d just bought—a hobby she’d taken on to one-up Real Dad’s going to Bug Jar shows. But she threw up every time she smoked