Sleepless Read Online Free PDF

that dear, sweet Julia would lose her heart to him. If so, I am lost.
    “Did Chimere teach you how to enter their bedrooms?” I ask.
    He shakes his head. “No. How?”
    I’m relieved when he leans forward, finally appearing interested in what I have to say. “You are completely invisible to humans. You are also able to pass quietly into their rooms without having to open windows, move furniture … All you must do is simply think you want to go through something, and you will.”
    “So we’re like … ghosts?” he asks, turning toward Julia’s window. The moonlight faithfully reflects our images. I look insignificant and mouselike next to his broad frame. “Phantasmic.”
    “Not at all. We don’t haunt people. We help them,” I say. I wonder if I will need to repeat everything more than twice. “And then we take our leave.”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I told you, I get it, I get it. But you never just … I dunno. Peek in their underwear drawers?”
    I give him a severe glance. “Surely not. You’re not to disrupt their habitat in the least.”
    He laughs. “Okay, okay. I was kidding. What else?”
    I take a breath. The next rule, I know, is going to be the hardest one for someone like this boy to comprehend. I can already tell that he is the type who isn’t used to walking into a room unnoticed. This is a dangerous quality for a Sandman to possess, and though they all eventually learn their purpose, it’s never without its struggles.
    “The next rule is: You are not alive anymore. You are not one of them. The sooner you realize that, the easier this is going to be.”

CHAPTER 5
Julia
    I pop the tab on a can of Red Bull and take a long swig. Coming to track practice today was obviously a mistake. Everyone must expect me to be in mourning, because I am having major flashbacks to when I was seven. My teammates keep acting like I’m the one who died and I just happened to rise from my grave. Dr. Phil says that everyone expresses grief in their own way , I want to tell them. I am perfectly normal!
    The way I express my grief, apparently, is by running a personal record in the mile. Instead of cheering for me, though, my teammates just gaped like I’d run on air. They seem to think that even if I’m not a blubbery mess, I should at least play the part.
    “You kicked ass out there, Ippie,” a voice drawls, and I know it’s Bret before I turn around. He’s on the track team, too, and the only one who calls me Ippie,which was once I.P., or Ice Princess. It’s a nickname I’m proud of, earned because he and Griffin knew I was the only one who could beat them in an insult-throwing match. I turn to see him lounging on the grass, iPod buds in his ears, his trusty unsolved Rubik’s Cube in his hands. Nearly three months ago he had this grand idea that he was so brilliant he could be like the guy in The Pursuit of Happyness and conquer the puzzle in two minutes flat. We’re still waiting for him to discover the secret. I can’t help thinking of the day Griffin stole it from him and solved it for him. Maybe not in two minutes, but he solved it. Griffin might have been a jokester, but he was also a genius, which was why teachers loved him, as exasperating as he was. “Was that a personal record?”
    I collapse next to him. “Yeah. I feel really good today. It’s weird. My lungs usually start to burn during that last lap, but I felt fine.”
    He sits up, throws the cube on the ground, and pops the buds out of his ears. “Interesting how your boyfriend’s death seems to agree with you.”
    “It does not,” I insist, though I was thinking the same thing. A familiar feeling rushes over me: the desire to punch him. If there’s anyone I fought with more than Griffin, it’s his best friend. Bret has always had it in for me. Together, the two of them were like machine guns, constantly firing at me. “When have you ever known me to get all teary-eyed?”
    “True,” he says. He doesn’t realize that before I