The Boy Who Wouldn't Stop Waking Me Up

I could hear his voice yelling my name, telling me to wake up. But I didn't want to wake up. I just wanted to sleep. Couldn't he leave me alone? Wasn't he getting tired of waking me up every single day of high school? I mean, I get that he was a morning person. But not all of us are. I know he wanted to wake up early so we could catch the bus to school. That was why he also wakes me up early because I sleep until late. I also didn't and couldn't wake up early. I guess he thinks it was his job or something since my parents let me skip school to get some sleep. Didn't my parents rock?

His name was Desmond, and he had been waking me up since the second week of freshman year, which meant by the time we were juniors, he had logged what I once calculated, during a particularly bored chemistry class, as approximately four hundred and twelve separate mornings of unwanted heroics.

"Mara." His voice came from somewhere near my window, which meant he'd climbed the fence again instead of using the front door like a person with object permanence and basic spatial reasoning. "Mara, the bus is in eleven minutes."

"I know what time the bus is," I said into my pillow, which absorbed the words completely and probably understood them better than Desmond did.

"Then get up."

"I don't want to."

"That's not actually how mornings work."

I rolled over and looked at him through the gap in my curtains, which I'd never quite gotten around to fixing in three years, mostly because it gave me a reliable way to assess how annoyed I should be at any given moment based on his expression. Today's expression was the specific one he wore when he'd already been awake for two hours and had opinions about people who hadn't.

"Go away."

"I have," he said, with the patience of a man reciting something he'd memorized a long time ago, "tried that. Multiple times. It has never once worked."

This was true. He had tried going away. Sophomore year, after a particularly committed campaign of me throwing things at the window a shoe, a textbook, once memorably a half-eaten apple that left a mark on the glass that was still faintly visible if you knew where to look he had announced he was giving up and was never coming back and I could fail my classes and miss the bus and ruin my own life if that was what I wanted.

He had been back the next morning at six forty-five.

I want to explain something about Desmond, because if you only know him from the window-climbing and the relentless morning yelling, you'll think he was annoying, which is fair; he was, constantly, but that's not actually the whole shape of him.

Desmond lived two houses down. His mother and my mother had been friends since before either of us existed, the kind of friendship where the children become an extension of the arrangement without anyone asking them. We'd been doing the bus together since elementary school, but it wasn't until freshman year, after my parents sat me down and explained gently, the way you explain things to a teenager you're worried about that the school counselor thought I might benefit from "monitoring my sleep patterns," that Desmond appointed himself to a position nobody had given him and refused to vacate it for the next three years.

It wasn't really about the bus. I understood that even at the time, in the resentful, half-asleep way you understand things you don't want to admit.

It was about the fact that I'd started disappearing into sleep the way some people disappear into other things. Twelve hours. Fourteen on bad weekends. My parents had taken me to doctors who used words like "depressive episode" and "needs monitoring," and had eventually landed on a strategy that was less a treatment plan and more a collective shrug, let her sleep when she needs to, but make sure someone's checking on her every day, make sure someone notices if the fourteen hours become something worse.

Nobody had explicitly assigned that job to a fifteen-year-old boy who lived two houses down. He'd just decided it was his.

"Eight minutes," Desmond said now, still at the window, still completely undeterred by my silence, which had stretched on long enough that a reasonable person might have taken it as a hint.

"I had a bad night," I said. This was code, and he knew it was code, and the rules of the code were that he was allowed to ask one follow-up question and no more.

"Bad like tired, or bad like" He paused, choosing the next word carefully, the way he always did with this particular category of question. "Bad like you need me to actually do something, or bad like you need me to go away and tell your mom you're staying home?"

"The second one."

He nodded. This was the system we'd built without ever explicitly designing it, a kind of triage that let me communicate something true without having to say the actual words, the ones about how some mornings the weight of getting up felt less like tiredness and more like gravity had personally selected me for an experiment.

"Okay," he said. "I'll tell your mom you need it today. But Mara"

"I know."

"I'm serious. If it gets bad-bad, you call me. Doesn't matter what time."

"I know, Desmond."

"I mean it."

"I know you mean it. You've meant it for three years. I've never doubted that you mean it."

He looked at me for a long moment through the gap in the curtains, and something in his face shifted from the morning-person impatience into something quieter, something that had always been underneath the impatience the whole time, if I was being honest with myself, which I tried to be on the days I had the energy for honesty.

"Sleep, then," he said. "I'll come by after school."

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't have to." He was already climbing back down from the fence, his voice carrying up through the window gap as he went. "That's not why I do it."

He came by after school, like he said he would, which was the four hundred and thirteenth thing he'd done that he didn't have to do, in a tally I'd stopped consciously keeping around the two hundred mark because some numbers stop being about counting and start being about something else.

My parents did rock, for the record. They'd made a choice that a lot of parents wouldn't have made to trust a fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen-year-old boy's judgment about when their daughter needed to be pushed and when she needed to be left alone, to build their entire monitoring system around a teenage friendship instead of something more clinical and controlled. It was a strange, soft, slightly reckless way to handle something serious, and it had worked mostly because Desmond had simply decided, somewhere in that second week of freshman year, that he wasn't going to let it not work.

He sat on the end of my bed that afternoon with his backpack still on, the way he always did, like he might need to leave again at any moment, even though he never actually left until I told him to.

"You missed a test," he said.

"I know."

"Mrs. Halpert says you can make it up on Thursday."

"Okay."

He didn't say anything else for a while. This was also part of the system the parts where neither of us said anything, where he just sat there existing in my room with his backpack on, doing homework or scrolling his phone or sometimes just looking out the window at the same gap in the curtains he'd been climbing through for three years, while I lay there with the particular heaviness that doctors had words for and I mostly just called Tuesday, or Thursday, or whatever day it happened to land on.

"You don't have to stay," I said eventually, the same thing I always said.

"I know I don't have to," he said, the same thing he always said back.

He stayed anyway. He always stayed anyway.

Some mornings, most mornings, if I'm honest, I resented the hell out of that voice through my window, yelling my name like it had any right to interrupt the one place I felt like nothing could reach me. I resented the fence-climbing and the bus-minute-countdowns and the relentless, unkillable persistence of a boy who genuinely could not be discouraged, no matter how many shoes I threw at him.

But four hundred and thirteen mornings in, lying in a room with him sitting at the end of my bed, not saying anything, asking nothing of me except that I let him stay, I was starting to understand that the voice yelling my name wasn't really about the bus, and never had been.

It was about making sure that every single day, no matter how heavy the morning was, somebody showed up to check that I was still there.

And somehow, impossibly, annoyingly, he never once missed a day.