Page 87 of In Somnis

“Yeah?”

“I’m cashing in every single one you owe me.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Nevan

I wake up standing.

Always the first sign that shit has gone wrong.

It takes a few seconds before the rest of the information catches up with me. The cold air, the damp smell of rust and oil, the hollow echo of my breathing bouncing off concrete walls that should have been torn down years ago. I blink slowly as my brain comes back online and tells me I wandered to the abandoned mill outside of town again.

My hand is raised, and when I look down at it, I see a red marker clutched in my grip. The wall in front of me is layered with years of graffiti—tags stacked over tags—with one large, freshly drawn word on top of it all.

STUPID

I stare at it, then let out a dry huff. “No shit.”

I’ve been staring at variations of this word for years. Different walls, different markers, same handwriting. My handwriting, technically, though I have never quite been able to claim it.

My pulse is racing, but not in panic, not anymore. Panic would require surprise, and this stopped being surprising somewhere around the fifteenth time. I do a quick inventory—hoodie, jeans, boots. Fully dressed. Thank fuck.

One time, I woke up here in nothing but my boxers. Once in only socks. Another, I was barefoot in February. But the worst might have been when I found blood drying on my leg and had no memory of how it got there. So yeah, fully clothed and holding a marker instead of something sharp? I’ll take it.

Small victories.

When I was a kid, it started as harmless sleepwalking, wandering into the kitchen in the middle of the night, standing in doorframes, and freaking people out. But somewhere along the line, probably sometime in my teens, it stopped being funny and started being dangerous.

I jumped through my window once, straight through the glass. It got me thirty-three stitches down my leg, and the glass missed my femoral artery by a couple of centimeters. With the tiniest shift, I could’ve died, bleeding out on the ground outside my bedroom.

Sometimes I still wonder how long it would’ve taken for anyone to notice I was gone.

Long enough.

Of course, nobody ever formally diagnosed me, but Google filled in the blanks well enough to scare the shit out of me. Apparently, I have a REM behavior disorder. My body doesn’t get the memo that dreams are supposed to stay internal. So, when I go to bed at night, I try to be as exhausted as humanly possible, which is the easy part.

I zip myself into a sleeping bag up to my neck, then slide on mittens so I can’t unzip myself, pick up knives, keys, or, apparently, paint markers. Most nights, it works.

Naps, though…. unplanned naps are where I get fucked.

I had a little time between the logging and the dinner shift earlier, and I remember sitting at my desk, sketching a new graffiti piece, while my eyes started drooping.

And now I’m here.

STUPID

The word on the wall continues to stare at me, but it’s always something like that. Dumb. Idiot. Useless. Nothing creative, just my subconscious grabbing a marker and saying exactly what it thinks of me. The fucked-up part is that it’s always spelled correctly. Every single time.

When I’m awake and want to read or write, the letters flip and slip, always impossible for me. But whenever I wake up from sleepwalking and find insults written in my own hand, the spelling is perfect, as though whatever part of my brain takes over at night doesn’t have the same problems as when I’m awake.

I thought about that too. What it means is that the only thing my subconscious can apparently spell are the words I don’t let myself say out loud. Not in front of Jasper or Mabel. Anyone really.

Out here, in an empty building at whatever-the-fuck in the afternoon, there’s nobody to perform for.

So here it is. The honest version. The one that lives under the grin and the practiced ease of a person who learned very early that being useful was the best way of staying tolerated.

“Okay,” I murmur to the empty building. “Let’s clean up this mess.”