Sleepwalking Read Online Free PDF Page A

walking in silence across the lawn. The grass was no longer springy. The earth was becoming hard-packed, and leaves clotted the gutters. They decided they would sleep apart that night; it had been Claire’s idea, but Julian quickly agreed. He wanted to be able to think for a while. Back in his room, he realized he had missed it. The bed had not been slept in for many nights, and there was a fine settling of dust on the surfaces of furniture. Claire always refused to sleep there. “It looks like Chip and Ernie’s room on
My Three Sons
,” she said. But Julian liked his room’s stripped, plain look, and he stretched out on the bed.
    Claire had opened up to him the way he had wanted herto, but nothing much had changed because of it. She was a bit less of an enigma now, but Julian felt even more overwhelmed than before. Claire was certainly a full-fledged death girl. She could have been elected president of the national organization of death girls, if there were such a thing. She had told him everything—at least the surface of everything—he wanted to know. He understood that there had to be something more underneath, but he did not want to press yet.
    Their relationship had evolved so rapidly that it startled him. He was afraid of losing Claire before he got a real grasp on her. At first he had been in awe of Claire, stunned by her, but now he felt something more. He felt sorry for her. He wished he had known her when she was sixteen years old. He could have helped her, he thought. He would have turned her away from the night side of things. Like a good parent, he would have switched on every lamp in her room, pointing things out: See, this is not an image of death. It is only a chair with your cardigan draped over the back. See, this is not a death landscape. It is only your bedroom. Then he would have shut off the lamps and leaned over her bed. Sleep now, he would have said, his hand on her forehead, before tiptoeing out of her room.

chapter two
    She always had to be near the window. As a child she would fake impending motion sickness to claim the window seat in the car, and on airplanes she would spend the entire flight with her face pressed up against the tiny, sealed-off square of light. It was not from curiosity; it was just that she needed to have a sense of the distancing of things. She had been sitting at the window the first day Julian walked past. Several yards beyond her dormitory he stopped and looked upward. He was, she later found out, actually trying to guess which window was hers. When he saw her, he quickly turned away. He had not been expecting to see her there, he explained weeks after; he had hoped only for some emblem of her—a cracked prism, maybe, or a sprawling, browning plant.
    He looked back again, slowly, hopefully. After a momentClaire leaned over and pushed the window up with both arms. “Hello,” she said from above.
    Julian shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his windbreaker. “Oh, hi,” he said. “You probably have a lot of work, right? I should let you get back to whatever you were doing.”
    Claire had been reading Hegel by the window all morning, and the room seemed hot now, closed off. She looked down and he appeared eager, even appealing. He rocked back and forth on his heels, waiting. He had been looking at her oddly the past few days, scrutinizing her. First at the water fountain, then at the snack bar, and once at the bookstore. It flattered her and made her feel self-conscious. She was used to distant attention only—discreet yet obvious glances. There was always someone looking at the death girls from across a room whenever they went anywhere. This was different. Bright-eyed Julian, the graceful Frisbee player, was drawn to her. She wondered why.
    He reminded her of her brother. She did not think of Seth very often anymore, but whenever she did, or whenever he came to her unsummoned in a dream, his face was blurred, the features melded together. It was that way with