Wild Awake

perfectly fine. But I’m desperate. But there’s nothing wrong. But I can’t seem to shut myself off. But I could stop anytime .
    “It feels important,” I say.
    My in-box piles up with emails from my parents, but I’m too busy to read them. They can tell me all about the sea tortoises when they get home. I stop answering the phone when the caller ID shows the cruise ship number. What would we talk about? Snurkleberries?
    “Mom and Dad want to talk to you,” says Denny, standing in my bedroom doorway with the phone in his hand.
    I let him hand it to me, but when he leaves the room, I hold the phone next to my synth and blast it with sine waves.
    There is only one time all week when I really fall asleep, and even then it is only for a few seconds.
    I’m lying there, making up lyrics to songs, when all of a sudden I slip. I fall into a great yawning cavern of pent-up dreams that come rushing at me, yapping and desperate, like a pack of starving dogs. The dreams had been waiting for me all this time, their faces pressed against the gates. When I fall asleep, they swarm me and devour me, and the shock is so great I am suddenly awake again, my heart pounding, while the dream-dogs, dissatisfied, howl for more.
    “Why’d you stop practicing piano?” says Denny. “Isn’t your Showcase thing, like, ten days away?”
    Denny and I have hardly been speaking since he destroyed Sukey’s painting, or rather, he has been speaking to me quite a bit but I rarely speak back. He trails me around the house when Skunk’s not here, like I’m some kind of endangered species he has to monitor so it doesn’t go extinct.
    “Aren’t you supposed to be back in Victoria?” I snap.
    He looks confused for a second, then something seems to click.
    “I was thinking I’d hang around and catch your show,” he says.
    “Oh really.”
    “Yeah.”
    I eye him suspiciously. He takes a step toward me in the hall and wraps me in an awkward sideways hug.
    “Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
    I keep my body stiff. “It’s fine.”
    “It’s not fine. It really, really sucks, and I’m sorry.”
    I don’t know if he’s talking about the Showcase or Sukey’s painting or the bruise on my chin, but as he hugs me against his Old Spice–smelling T-shirt and doesn’t let me pull away, I can feel something broken in me setting like a bone.
    “I’m sorry too,” I say. “And Denny? I’m glad you came home.”
    After that, Denny doesn’t go skimboarding with his friend Chris as much. Instead, he hangs around the kitchen when Skunk and I are downstairs jamming, trying to catch a glimpse of Skunk or get a word in with him whenever we come upstairs to make coffee or get food. Denny, it turns out, was Birdseye’s biggest fan. I hear him tell Skunk that their music really spoke to him when he was going through a dark time last year. After Denny says this, Skunk starts talking to Denny a little bit. At first it doesn’t get much beyond “Hey, man,” or “Cool, man,” but after a while they graduate to complete sentences, and then all of a sudden we’re all making pancakes in the kitchen, Denny, Skunk, and me, throwing blueberries at each other and listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
    On Friday morning, I go to the print shop to make posters for our show. I copy the design from the card for Sukey’s show at razzle!dazzle!space:
    Daffodiliad
this saturday 10:00 p.m. at the train room,
e. cordova @ carrall st.
feat. new works by PHIL COSWELL of BIRDSEYE
and kiri byrd of sonic drift
    I highlight Skunk’s name and the word Birdseye to make it extra clear that this is really his show. When the posters are ready, I go out on my bike and tape them up all around the city until my roll of duct tape has dwindled to a cardboard skeleton, my sheaf of posters has thinned out to a few slippery rectangles, and there’s no lamppost or bus stop in the whole city that isn’t adorned with Daffodiliad signs.
    Skunk calls twenty times to see where I am. I give him an assortment of cheerful, reassuring answers.
    Oh, I am at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory eating a marshmallow-peanut candy apple.
    Oh, I am at Kim Fong Sushi House playing mah-jongg with old men.
    Oh, I am at the harbor investigating cruises to Japan.
    Oh, I am at the beach smoking hash with a sea tortoise.
    He can’t know that what I am really doing is announcing Phil Coswell’s glorious comeback to the world. Skunk, my modest Skunk, my humble and secretive Bicycle Boy, would