Places No One Knows Read Online Free PDF Page A

neck always looks smooth and I want to touch it.
    I think of possibilities and they are fucking terrifying. I could have made her see me. I could have impressed her. There’s just the little issue of how my voice stops working when I look at her.
    I say it now, just to myself, just whisper it. The answer to the question, the feeling of having something she doesn’t. Something that she wants.
    I close my eyes, and when I open them again the room feels less empty. For a second, I think I can actually see her, standing in my doorway, soft and pale in the light from the street. Then I squint and she’s gone and I’m stoned and lonely, and it’s late—so late.
    I roll over, feeling tired and stupid.
    I want to punch myself, because I know girls like her—the kind who act like I’m some disease, like I might get them dirty if I stand too close. I want to tell her she’s not that smart, that being perfect isn’t the only game in town.
    That I’ll be something else, something good. I’ll clean myself up if she wants. I’ll be anything.
    She is never looking in my direction.

WAVERLY
1.
    Some people are born wakeful.
    When I was little, the reason I couldn’t sleep seemed simple. I was too full of thoughts. The problem would work itself out when my skull got bigger. I didn’t know yet that the ideas just get bigger too.
    Back then, when I’d brushed my teeth and said good night to my stuffed lamb, exhausted every jigsaw puzzle and game, read all my books and the drowsy weightlessness still wouldn’t come, I’d go to the moon. That kind of inter-orbital travel is easy when you’re little—the membrane between real and pretend is still semipermeable. Your imaginary friends seem just as solid as anyone else. When they pinch you, it hurts. When they disappear, you wonder what you did to make them leave.
    Late at night, I’d stare at the ceiling and imagine myself on the moon. Up there, I would lie on my back, making angels in the drifts of pale lunar dust, peering down at my neighborhood with telescopic vision.
    Because it was pretend, the tiny roof of my tiny house would dissolve and then I’d be looking at myself where she lay under the sheets, wishing to be a physicist and a manticore and Carl Sagan. And sometimes, if I stayed there long enough, her face would go slack and she’d close her eyes. She’d fall asleep.
    That trick is broken now. The moon has disappeared, replaced by other allegories—mushroom clouds that bloom and expand in radioactive billows, and gleaming knives balanced on their points, rotating in perfect symmetry. I don’t need an expert to tell me that’s not normal.
    Some people are just born wrong.
    In my room, the urge to climb out of my skin is suddenly so big it feels criminal.
    I turn out the lamp and light my candle, illuminating the only place where nothing about me is for other people. A draft sends the glow flickering over the bed, desk, chair. My bookcase, home to three hundred comic books, thirty-seven collectible horror movie figures arranged in alphabetical order, Norman Bates to Xenomorph, and a pair of two-gallon terrariums that house my tarantulas, Franny and Zooey.
    Maribeth said once that it was fitting, how even my pets can’t be in the same room with each other without risking fatality, but the arrangement seems equitable. They’re just enjoying each other from a distance.
    When I lie down, my bed feels miles away. Already, I want to be up again, on my feet and pacing the room a few hundred times. But I need to sleep, and if I can’t have that, then I need to achieve some kind of doze or trance or hypnotic state.
    Courtesy of the Internet, some things I’ve learned today: insomnia is a harmless phenomenon that affects everyone from time to time, and it’s the sole province of the clinically insane. It’s a symptom of a physiological, possibly life-threatening condition, and it’s all in your head. Mainly, though, I’ve learned that the Internet is alarmist,