Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak

you?”
    I didn’t want to leave with things so unsettled, but with him not willing to talk any longer, I did what he asked and stood, brushing against him in the narrow doorway as I pushed past. For a moment, a flicker of energy leaped between us, like it had when he’d reached across to me at the fountain in the park, and I stopped there, waiting for him to change his mind. When he didn’t say anything, I shook my head, angry, and fled.
    After firing up the Blue Bomb and backing down the drive onto Cordial Run, I felt more sober than I’d been before drinking the six-pack. I stuck to the back roads anyway, drove slowly with the window down so that the cold October wind blew against my face as the red and yellow leaves of autumn appeared in the wash of my headlights.
    I didn’t know how to think about what had happened, about what he’d said and about that weird flash of heat and energy that had sparked between us. I was too surprised. By his confession, by the way I hadn’t pulled away from him, even as I started to understand. I’d just sat there and watched him caress my hand like it belonged to him. And then, to top it all off, I’d said nothing after he told me a truth that obviously hurt him to talk about.
    I was the one who should have felt ashamed. He’d been open with me ever since he’d come back and made a friend of me again.
    But me? I was a locked door. A door even I didn’t have the key to.

    When I got home, my mom was still up, reading in the living room, the room dark except for the light from her tablet. One of her nightly rituals. A chapter or two of an ebook before heading upstairs. Toby and Dad had made their way to their beds and were probably already off to dreamland.
    “Hey,” I said as I passed the room, hoping she wouldn’t stop me and see that my eyes were glassy or smell the beer on my breath and guess that I’d come home because Jarrod Doyle had semi-drunkenly held my hand while we sat on his bed and he confessed an attraction to me. I couldn’t deal with her prying into things even I didn’t understand yet.
    Before I could make it to the staircase, though, she said, “Aidan, I thought you were sleeping over at Jarrod’s tonight. Did something happen?”
    “Decided not to,” I said from the landing, “so I can get up early and help Dad.”
    “Well, that’s nice of you,” she said. “Why don’t you sit down here with me for a while, though? I have some things I need to talk to you about.”
    Here it comes,
I thought. The lecture on drinking and driving. And of course she would know that I’d done that, because my mom knew everything going on around her, even when she wasn’t there to see it with her own eyes.
    “I’m tired, Mom,” I said, and feigned a loud yawn. Through the entryway to the living room, I saw the portrait of my suicidal grandfather eyeing me in the foyer, judging my bad acting. I made a face like I would come at his portrait with a large knife if he kept staring like that, if he kept judging. And to my mom, I said, “How about tomorrow?”
    “Now would be better, actually,” she said.
    But I was already halfway up the staircase, pretending I hadn’t heard her. I’d sleep peacefully, I told myself as I got into bed, and when I woke in the morning I’d do work for my dad. And after that, maybe I’d get Jarrod to talk to me. If he
would
talk to me, that is. If he could.
    If we could talk to each other.

“S leep is a place a person goes to,” my mother once told me. “It’s not a thing a person does. It’s a place where we go to find peace for a little while.”
    I was a little kid when she told me that, and in the fog of my memory I could still see her sitting in a child-sized chair beside my small bed, leaning over me as she spoke, her hands pulling my comforter up to my chin. I can’t remember all the details—I was probably sick or unable to fall asleep for some other reason—but I do distinctly remember my mom brushing my hair from