There is the immediate jingling of his belt buckle as it comes undone, and then the flash of pale skin as he pulls his jeans down and then up again in one swift motion, as if this were a trick he has performed many times before. What variety there is in what human beings will do if asked.
One by one, the secrets tumble out: who is a virgin and who is not, who has done what with whom. One of the girls, beloved by some for the size of her chest, is dared to take off her shirt, which she does, standing for a moment in the center of the circle, shivering in a white lace bra, arms crossed tight against her stomach.
A certain boy is dared to kiss a certain girl. “Without your masks,” calls the baseball player, which releases a round of protest from the group, a crossing into real risk.
“You guys, this is not right,” say a few of the girls. “It’s not safe.”
But they want to do it, this boy and this girl. Mei can tell from the way the girl slips a fresh stick of gum onto her tongue, and how the boy drops his mask on the floor while she folds hers quickly into squares and stuffs it into her jeans.
Even the brushing of one hand against another might be enough to spread this thing between them, just the breathing of the same recycled air. And yet, here they are, lips against lips, as if the danger is increasing the delight, like the pleasure of a diver as his feet leave the cliff. The kiss goes on and on, and it seems it is adding to their enjoyment, too, to be watched like this by the others, who cheer with such force that the campus guard comes rushing into the gym from outside, just missing the sudden parting of those lips, and then the clumsy return of the masks to their faces like two teenagers caught undressed in someone’s basement.
“Settle down in here,” says the guard. “Lights out in half an hour.”
Mei sits sweating all this time in her spot on the floor as they move around the circle, coming closer and closer to her. It’s a stupid game. They are too old for it, anyway. An idea, crisp and clean, floats into her head: to get up and go back to her cot.
But she stays right where she is.
When she is asked to choose between truth and dare, she sits quietly, holding her knees, picturing the motions of her legs, the straightening out of her knees, the standing up, the walking away from the circle. Instead, she says, finally: “Truth.”
“Okay,” says the baseball player. “If you had to hook up with someone in this room, who would it be?”
The room bubbles with laughter. Her face turns hot. She has lived side by side with these people for eight weeks, but they remain as they were at the start, a roomful of strangers.
She keeps quiet, head down.
The other kids are all watching now, waiting for her to speak.
Through the masks, it is hard to read faces, but she can detect the amusement simmering in the room. In the distance, Matthew does not look up from his reading.
“Wait,” she says. “I change my mind. Dare,” she says. “I choose dare.”
“Fine,” says the baseball player. “Then I dare you to sneak outside.”
She is a follower of rules, a fearer of consequences, and yet, how much safer it seems to take this risk and not the other. What relief there is in these words.
She feels a tiny thrill as she walks toward the exit sign, which glows green above her head. Maybe she really will leave here, escape and not come back. The other kids crowd behind her and wait.
She checks behind her—the guard is out front, not watching.
Her hands shake as she reaches out and pulls the metal handle. But something in the door resists. There is a faint rattling of what sounds like a chain.
She pulls harder, a panic rising in her chest.
“It’s locked,” she says. “We’re locked in.”
The others don’t seem to believe her. The boys push past her to try it themselves, the smell of alcohol and sweat rising up from their bodies.
Matthew, too, comes suddenly charging over from his bed.
“This is fucked up,” he says as he rattles the handle, the veins in his wrist visible beneath his skin. The bandage on his cheek has come loose and is dangling from his face, the scrape beginning to scab.
“Isn’t this a fire hazard?” says one of the girls.
This is how the game ends, and the mood sours in the gym, and soon—in one more stroke of lost autonomy—they are told to turn off the lights.
Later, Mei falls asleep to the small noises of her neighbors, the ones who kissed, now moving around in one cot.
She wakes sometime later to the sound of screaming in the dark. She does not remember, at first, where she is, her mind rising slowly from the deep. There is a clanging of metal against wood. Many voices.
“Stop!” someone is shouting, the word echoing across a vast space. “Caleb, stop it.”
It comes back to her suddenly: the gym.
It is too dark to see, but the sounds soon arrange themselves into a picture—cots sliding on the floor, banging one against another, like boats in a storm.
“Stop,” the voices shout in the dark. “Stop.”
Finally, someone finds the lights, and the buzz of that fluorescence reveals a cluster of cots lying crooked and overturned, sheets tangled on the floor. Everyone is squinting now, except Caleb, Caleb who is wide-eyed and walking slowly through all of these obstacles as if none of them were there, tripping again and again.
“He’s asleep,” says his roommate. “He does this sometimes. He sleepwalks.”
Caleb’s eyes are open—but like the eyes of the blind. He is walking toward the bleachers on the far side of the gym.
“But this is different,” says the roommate. Caleb is saying something they cannot understand. “He usually wakes up right away,” says the roommate. No one needs to say it, that this must be the sickness. “He’s never stayed this way so long.”
Caleb Ericksen, eighteen years old, a farmer’s son, an English major, and now this new distinction: the first of the sleepwalkers to be reported in Santa Lora, California.
As the paramedics tie his wrists to the stretcher, he kicks and he shouts, and the others wonder what parallel plot might be taking place in his dream.
But they soon make another discovery, even worse: two others among them are still sound asleep in their cots. They have slept through what no normal sleeper could.
And soon they, too, are carried away like the others.
18.
They sleep like children, mouths open, cheeks flushed. Breathing as rhythmic as swells on a sea.
No longer allowed in the rooms, their mothers and fathers watch them through double-paned glass. Isolation—that’s what the doctors call it: the separation of the sick from the well. But isn’t every sleep a kind of isolation? When else are we so alone?
They do not, these sleepers, lie perpetually still. The slow sweep of an arm across a sheet, the occasional wiggling of toes—these motions excite the parents, as do the rare moments when their children seem to speak in their sleep, the way a dreamer of a terrible dream might speak out in the night, her voice echoey in her throat, as if trapped at the bottom of a well.
Caleb arrives at the hospital still sleeping his wide-eyed sleep. He arches his back against the restraints of the stretcher. A doctor leans over him like an exorcist.
In that somnambulant state, Caleb has been wheeled through a thicket of camera crews, who called out questions to the paramedics as they passed. The flailing of Caleb’s arms and that glazed stare on his face will soon travel the world via satellite.
When finally his sleep turns quiet, he is placed in isolation with the others. He lies just a few feet away from Rebecca, whom he has known for only a few weeks but in whose body a small part of him has secretly remained.