Stay Awake Read Online Free PDF

enthusiastically. “And are they ripe? Could I eat one right now if I wanted to?”
    “Well,” Brandon said. He was a bit taken aback by her excitement. “Actually, these could probably stand to get a little riper. If you put them in a sealed plastic bag with a couple of bananas, and keep them at room temperature, they should ripen up pretty quickly. They will have a yellowish hue when they’re ready to eat.”
    “Wonderful,” the woman exclaimed. “You are really very knowledgeable and helpful.”
    “Thank you,” Brandon said, and the woman clutched her tiny pears.
    “No,” she said. “Thank
you
!”
    The depressing thing was, he realized later that this was one of the nicest conversations he’d had in quite a while.
    He had been working at the grocery store for a number of years by that point. “What are you now?” his first grade teacher, Mrs. Love-Denman, had asked him. “Twenty-five? Twenty-six?” They had abruptly come face-to-face in an aisle where he was stocking cans of soup and he couldn’t believe she recognized him. “You’re Brandon Fowler, aren’t you?” she said in that gentle, unnervingly sensual Southern accent. “Oh, my land! I can hardly believe it! Brandon Fowler—all grown up!” He guessed that he had known that she still existed, that she was still wandering around town, but nevertheless seeing her freaked him outa little. She must have been at least seventy years old but she was dressed like a much younger woman, wearing an ill-fitting, stiff blond wig—and he had no idea what to say to her. He supposed that he’d been rude for not talking to her. He did say “Hello,” actually. And then he’d just smiled tightly at her and nodded in a kind of dazed way.
    It was the sort of encounter that was really problematic and it took a long time to get over. At night, as they were closing, he paced slowly down the spice-and-cereal aisle pushing a wide dust mop, listening to music on his iPod, and trying not to think. In the parking lot he collected empty shopping carts, stacking them, inserting one into the next until he was propelling a kind of millipede of metal and wheels across the asphalt. Still not thinking. In the basement he lifted boxes of cabbages, crates of tangelos, rubber-banded bunches of beets and mustard greens and parsnips.
    In the employee-only bathroom, he stood at the urinal stall and aimed toward the zinc cake that rested near the drain. Above the porcelain-and-silver piping of the toilet, people had written on the wall in pencil and ink and Magic Marker: various things.
    His favorite piece of graffiti said: PATRICK LANE, FLABBERGASTED .
    This had been scrawled above the urinal for as long as Brandon could remember, and he occasionally wondered about Patrick Lane as he peed.
    Patrick Lane had apparently once been a grocery store employee, and Brandon liked to imagine that they might have become friends. He imagined that Patrick Lane was the sort of person who wrote odd, quirky, self-deprecating graffiti about himself, just forhis own amusement. Perhaps Patrick Lane dreamed of becoming a cartoonist, or a singer-songwriter, or simply a perceptive and thoughtful wanderer in the mode of Sal Paradise in the Kerouac novel
On the Road
.
    Did people ever hitch rides in the boxcars of trains anymore? Brandon wondered.
    He liked to picture Patrick Lane, rambling across the country, leaving a record of his emotions— FLABBERGASTED—EXULTANT—INSULTED—DEVASTATED —and so forth, from bathroom to bathroom as he went.
    This idea really appealed to him, but then someone said:
Oh, he’s that poor kid that killed himself. I just couldn’t bring myself to scrub his writing off the wall
.
    Brandon was still living in the old house where he grew up, which he realized was probably a big part of the problem. His parents had been dead for two years, and his older sister, Jodee, was now living in Chicago with her boyfriend, Jake the Medical Resident.
    After their parents’