Defy the Dark

Courtney Summers Sleepstalk

Jed Miller is a sleepwalker.

I found out the first night I went to his house. I wanted to break his bedroom window into a million pieces. I had a rock and it felt good and heavy in my hand at first but the closer I got to his place, the lighter it became until finally, I was standing on his front lawn and I wasn’t holding anything anymore. It probably would have looked bad to anyone who walked by: me, standing outside Jed Miller’s house, staring at his bedroom window with no rock in my hand to break it. But no one walked by. That’s how late it was.

It was also cold. Fall was giving itself over to winter and I could see my breath on the air. I wouldn’t have known I was alive, otherwise. Ever since my accident, I’d been so empty. I couldn’t feel anything. My parents kept telling me it could change if I just started making the effort, but they were wrong. I think they were wrong. The emptiness had to change on its own, and that night it did. It became an itch.

The itch made me pace for hours. It made me shove my knuckles into my mouth. It made my teeth bite down.

It made me crawl out of my bedroom window.

I had edged over the sill and jumped to the ground without hurting myself. I could have crept down the hall and left through the front door—I had the house key in my pocket for when I got back—but the window seemed right because it was the kind of thing I had done before, and I was trying to remember what that felt like. It was hard. I had to rewind past the Jed parts to do it except when I got past the soundless, fast reverse of him in my head, the tape would stop and if I tried to go back any farther, it was blank.

Once my feet were on the ground, I picked up a rock from our flower bed. I walked the streets with it, trying to make sense of this new feeling invading my bones, disturbing my cells. After months of nothing, it was this scream inside me begging to get out and I had to swallow to keep it down. I didn’t run into anyone else. The whole world seemed dead, and for a moment I really thought it was. I tossed the rock onto the road just to hear something. The clatter of it was too loud and it made me wince.

I should tell the truth; no one will believe me, but I didn’t know I was heading to Jed Miller’s house, not that first time. I was told to stay away from him and I did. And if I didn’t know I was heading to Jed’s house that means I didn’t set out to break his window, either.

It’s just when I got there, I wished I had. Broken his window, that is.

Because I wanted him to see me.

I wanted to see him.

I wasn’t wearing a jacket that first night. I crossed my arms and watched wisps of clouds drift across the sky. They were so faint, the stars shone through them. The moon was close to full and for as late as it was, I could see everything. It was that kind of night. Clear.

Nothing happened until something did.

The front door opened. The subtle click of a lock releasing interrupted the quiet all around me, and the Millers’ front door swung out. I was already still but I made myself go even stiller than that. I stopped breathing.

A boy stepped outside.

It could’ve been anyone. It could’ve been Mr. Miller. It could’ve been Jed’s brother, Erik, but it wasn’t. It was Jed. He stood there and turned his face to me, and it was like a thousand knives carved themselves into my skin. I worried I’d bleed out right there, while we stared at each other, and that would be the end of me.

My lungs hurt. I never thought I’d see him again, face-to-face, even though we lived in the same town, even though the only distance between us was mere streets. I worried he wasn’t happy I was there, that he’d want me to explain myself. I didn’t want to explain. I wanted to ask if he thought about me to see what, if any, emotion flickered across his face when I did.

But before I could, he walked down the stone path leading to the street. He passed me and he kept walking. The shock of it froze me into place. He saw me, but it was like I was so much a part of the landscape, it didn’t matter that I was there. It should have mattered.

Nothing should have mattered more.

I opened my mouth to call out to him when it hit me: he was sleepwalking.

I’d never seen anyone sleepwalk before, but some things you just know. His outfit: low-riding pajama pants, a rumpled T-shirt, mussed hair, slippered feet. Glazed eyes. He was there but he wasn’t, which meant that I could be there even though I wasn’t supposed to be, and with that realization, the clear night became clearer. I could breathe again.

I followed him.

I chose the opposite side of the street to do it. Each of us claimed our own sidewalk. I wanted space between us because I was still overcome with the fragility of our closeness. I didn’t want to ruin it in case that night was all I had.

As we walked, I studied him. My mother deleted and burned all of my photos. I had memories, of course, but months without him faded them out so I wanted to imprint this new visual on my soul. Jed Miller is beautiful and to describe him as anything less is less than he deserves. He’s a sturdy twenty-year-old with blond hair and blue eyes, the kind of eyes that make you melt. My mother said I needed to teach myself to see beyond them but I wasn’t sure how I could do that when they were just as amazing as I remembered them, if not more.

Jed kept walking. I wondered where he was headed, when he’d wake up, or if he’d make it back to his room before then. I remembered hearing somewhere that waking a sleepwalker can kill them, can shock their body dead. That scared me. What if I killed Jed Miller? What if I made a noise and accidentally startled him to death?

I’d never hurt Jed unless I had to.

I turned away and left him, and yes, it was the hardest thing I’d ever done even if it wasn’t the first time I’d ever done it. I took a shortcut through the Donnellys’ front yard, crossing lawns until I wound up back at my house where I went inside and crawled into bed. The itch was there until the sun came up and then it turned back into the emptiness because I knew Jed was waking up at that moment and he was waking up thinking of her, maybe, and waking up without me, definitely. In spite of it, I hoped he got home safe.

Since my accident, everything is different. I don’t go to school. I don’t see Jed. There are no more days.

No one would believe me, but I tried hard to reconcile with what happened that first night.

I tried hard to let it go.

I wasn’t supposed to be near Jed Miller, so I decided maybe it was the universe’s way of helping me make peace with everything that happened and then I’d move on. Because what were the odds after months of not feeling anything, I’d get that itch that told me to leave the house the same night he just so happened to be sleepwalking?

I also tried to convince myself the itch that displaced my emptiness was a fluke, that it wasn’t the universe, that I should take what I got and not get too greedy.

But I couldn’t help myself.

In the end, I went to Jed’s house a second night. Everyone would’ve gotten so upset if they’d known. I dressed for it. I put on a jacket and I stood outside waiting but he didn’t come out so I went home. I read online you can’t kill a sleepwalker just by waking them; you have to kill a sleepwalker like you’d kill anyone else.

It was a relief because I didn’t want to kill Jed Miller by accident.

I also read sleepwalking is sometimes exacerbated by stress, and then I started to hope maybe he was worried about me, he was thinking about me. The last time we saw each other was not good, so I could understand how it would torment him, and Jed’s life was stressful, anyway, what with the pressure of having a father in politics and the entire family constantly in the spotlight—maybe that added to it, too. But mostly, I bet it was me.

I decided I had to be sure.

So the third night, I went to his place again. He still didn’t come out. I thought I’d lose it. It was something to be there—the itch lessened, a little—but it was better when I saw him.

I sat on the curb across from his house and waited.

I went to the Millers’ place sometimes. Before. But I had to. I did work on Mr. Miller’s last campaign. The local TV station interviewed me and I told them I’d vote Miller if I was old enough to vote, and after that, I was occasionally asked to introduce the man himself at his rallies and talk about how much my generation believed in everything he said, like it was God’s honest truth. The only thing I really believed in was Jed. I don’t like politics. Politics is all strategy and secret keeping and climbing ladders and tearing people apart. But I got involved for Jed, so I had to come over. I had to. But it was usually Erik or Mr. or Mrs. Miller at the door—never him, no matter how much I hoped.

Until the day it was.

We’d talked before but only in public, at the kinds of events where everyone is on their best behavior and no meaningful words could be exchanged so nothing we said meant anything. But even when we had nothing meaningful to say, he knew I loved him. I know he did because the day he answered the door, he got right to the point. He invited me inside and told me he’d been watching me, too, and I stuttered over words that were so far removed from the normal formalities. He whispered things in my ear.

I have this way with the people I love. I always make sure they feel important around me and when you make people feel important, they want to be around you all the time.

For a while.

So that day he answered the door—Friday, June 10th, at 3:05 p.m.—was the beginning of everything. Each day after, I’d sit outside his house on the curb with my feet pressed flat against the pavement and my palms pressed flat against my knees, hoping he’d see me and invite me in and whisper those things to me all over again.

Sometimes he did. First, he’d open the door wide, gesture me over, and ask, What are you doing here? I never answered because there was only ever one reason I was there, and there was only ever one reason he’d open the door. Neither of us had to say it. It was our secret. He’d grin, and we’d go to his room. His hands would be on me, and I felt like I was made of electricity.

All through Jed’s father’s campaign it was like that. He would steal me into his room and run his hands over my skin, through my hair, and tell me how beautiful he thought I was and I loved it but I hated it, too, because as soon as those moments were over and I had to go home again, I’d feel the absence of that spark, a taste of existing without him.

I don’t exist without him.

The fourth night, he finally came out again.

I was so relieved. Being close to him was terrifying but also made me feel powerful because he wasn’t awake and I was and no one could stop us from happening. It was so nice. It was just like the first night; he stayed to his sidewalk and I stayed to mine. I tucked my hands in my pockets and matched his pace perfectly because I thought it would give me an idea of the kind of sleep he was having. It was unhurried and calm.

Jed. I whispered it so I wouldn’t wake him. Jed, do you think of me?

He didn’t answer.

Jed, do you think of me?

His mouth stayed closed.

I think of you all the time. Do you think of me?

He was supposed to say yes. Yes, he thought of me all the time. And he missed me. There was a second where it was like something stirred inside him, pulling him from sleep, and I was so sure he’d say what I needed him to say, but Roy Turner’s porch light went on before it could happen and I couldn’t afford to be seen by anyone, so I ran home.

The fifth night, he came out again and I followed him longer. It made me nervous. I worried he would wake up. I also worried he’d hurt himself and never make it back to his house so he could sleepwalk again and our nights together would end. That worry kept me awake.

The fifth night, no lights came on and I kept whispering that same question over and over because I needed to know.

Jed, do you think of me?

And then the most incredible thing happened: he answered my question.

But not in the way I guessed he would. When we reached the corner, he turned right. I had a feeling where he was going but I wasn’t prepared for it. He took another turn, left, and it made me feel cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. He was going to the river. I had to stop following him. I didn’t like the river. The river is where everything ended.

My parents wanted to move to a new town to get the ugliness behind us.

They meant well, but they didn’t understand. I couldn’t imagine giving up all these nights with Jed for days that would be hollow nothings.

I took a rock again, the sixth time out.

I wasn’t sure why, but the itch made me feel like I should.

I held on to it, and he didn’t show.

The seventh night was the same thing. The eighth night, I was so frustrated I decided to break his window after all. Even if it ruined everything, at least he would have to wake up and see me on his lawn. Maybe that was what was supposed to happen. He’d see me on his lawn and realize his family didn’t matter; that girl he was with now, she didn’t matter. What happened at the river didn’t matter. I raised my arm and steadied myself. I’d never broken a window with a rock in my life—but before I could, the front door opened. He came out.

I love him.

People are funny when you talk to them about love. I don’t think most people have the kind of heart I do. I’ve always been the kind of person who listens to my heart and follows it. When I say I listen to my heart, I mean I have to listen to it. It shouts at me. Sometimes it beats so loud, I can’t think. When it does that, I have to pay attention, no matter what. It wasn’t like the itch, it was different. It didn’t tell me what to do, it just guided me to the people I needed in my life and then it made me wide open for them. It made me love them so much, it was hard to take.

With Jed, my heart beat louder than it ever had before.

He was the one.

One of the last times we spoke, Jed told me I needed to get him out of my head. I tried to explain to him in a letter he wasn’t in my head, he was in my heart. But I didn’t explain it well so I had to write another one but that one didn’t do the job either, because he just didn’t understand, but now I think he might have understood more than I realized.

I don’t regret writing the letters, ever, but I wish Jed hadn’t showed them to our parents after my accident. It made things far more complicated than they had to be.

But what’s done is done.

It’s not like there was anything in them he could doubt.

I couldn’t follow him to the river that night, either.

Even though I wasn’t ready for the river, I was ready to get closer to him.

The ninth night, I crossed the middle of the road and raised my voice above a whisper, but the words that came out of my mouth weren’t the ones I meant to say.

Imagine you can’t breathe. Imagine you’re trying so hard to breathe, but every time you open your mouth, it’s full of water and dirt you can’t breathe.

As much as I loved him, I was angry with him, too.

That’s how you can tell you really love someone. It’s just, we had something good and he ruined it and now we were here and I couldn’t touch him, I couldn’t have a conversation with him, and my skin was burning with how much I wanted both.

I wanted to ask him how he could plan the rest of his life with her when she wasn’t the kind of girl who would die for anyone. I’d give up everything for him, and now here we were, trapped in an endless cycle of nights. I needed to know what the itch driving me meant. It felt like there was something I had to do but I didn’t know what and that made me angrier. I wanted him to taste the ground, but if I pushed him and pressed his face against it, he’d wake up.

Still. I bridged the distance between us and circled in front of him and then we were facing each other and seeing his half-open eyes staring right at me, I still wanted to make him eat the earth. That’s the thing that worries me sometimes. I feel everything so much, it makes me say or do the wrong things. I don’t think. And the things I do—from the outside they might look like the opposite of love, but they’re really just actions inspired by it.

How do you think of me, Jed? I asked. I knew he thought of me, but I had to know how. Do you think of me the way I think of you?

I walked backward as slowly as he walked forward, and I wished again I had the rock. When they pulled me out of the river, my teeth scraped against the dirt, the stony embankment. I wanted him to know what that was like. If I had my rock, I would aim it at his mouth and he’d stay asleep while I tore up his lips and forced it against his tongue.

But then he said my name.

My name.

His voice.

I stumbled a little. He said it again but there was no flicker in his eyes so I knew he was still asleep. To hear him say it made me feel so alive and disappeared every bad thought from my head. He kept coming at me. I wanted to reach for him but instead I sidestepped and backed onto the curb. I watched him make his way to the river and wondered if, when he woke up in his bed that morning, I would just be a dream he’d had. A good dream.

The second-to-last time I saw Jed was before my accident.

It was the night the votes came in. His father won them all, won by a landslide but neither of us was concerned because we all knew Mr. Miller would win. Jed drove me home before the party was over. We sat side by side in his car and there was a nice buzz in the air but there was also a familiarity in it, too, the kind of familiarity that comes with sharing someone’s soul, like you’ve been married for years and years.

Jed and I had that.

He pulled over an entire street away from my house and reached for my hand and then I was awkwardly underneath him and when we were finished, he said he was so glad we had time together, that I kept his head above the water, that he’d miss me. I put the first two compliments away for safekeeping, but the other I echoed back at him stupidly, not understanding. Still not understanding.

Miss me?

It was the first taste I had of drowning. The water was all around me, in my lungs, in my nose. Everywhere. I couldn’t breathe and Jed had to hold me until I calmed down and even then, I only calmed down enough to ask what he was talking about.

This was nice, he said, but now it has to stop.

It seemed to take forever for him to understand my lack of understanding and then all of these horrible words were coming out of his mouth about this other girl and how could I not know about her, it wasn’t like it was a secret. Her family was in politics, too. They’d been matched. They were in press photos together, it was broadly hinted at, well—everywhere.

You had to have known.

But love is exclusion. How was I supposed to see her in a picture of him? I said it before, but I don’t really like politics. It’s all strategy and secret keeping and tearing people apart. Selling your son off to another girl from a family even higher up the ladder because that’s what it was, they were selling Jed, they sold him.

I screamed when he told me they were engaged and I couldn’t stop screaming and in that moment, when I was screaming, I could see in his eyes how trapped he felt, stuck with her, a lifetime of her when it was supposed to be us. I kicked my legs, my arms out because I knew he didn’t want her, couldn’t want her.

Love is about expression.

You have to express it. You can’t just let it sit inside you. You have to tell people how you feel. You have to show them or they will never know. So I called him. He didn’t answer, but it was just enough to call him so he knew I cared. There were the letters, I wrote the letters, actually sat down and wrote them—no emails, no texts—and I sent them. My fevered handwriting had to make him realize how important he was to me. I did everything.

I sat outside his house and waited for him to be nostalgic about us, to invite me in. Nothing worked. He could never let on that we meant something to him, ever. I understood he was in a tighter spot than I was. He felt like he had a lot to lose, him and his family. He loved me but he was afraid he’d cost them everything. It’s a terrible thing when fear overpowers love and the only way you can reverse it is by shaking a person to their core so that the fog inside their head lifts and the only thing they’re thinking with is their heart.

I should stop calling what happened at the river an accident.

Jed’s sleepwalking is an expression of love.

That’s how I know what I’m going to do is right. I decide to go to the river with him the tenth night, the coldest night. I have no more time to waste. I know, after it, Jed won’t sleepwalk anymore. There is no way he will open the door and not feel the cold. This is our last chance. I put on my jacket and I put on my gloves. I grab a hefty rock from the garden. I finally understand the itch. I know what I’m supposed to do.

I stand outside his house, whispering.

Please come out, Jed. Come out. Please.

After an hour, my voice reaches his ears. He comes out, walking the stone path to the sidewalk and I walk next to him, dangerously close next to him, and he doesn’t wake up and to anyone who sees us, I bet we look like we belong. We belong.

He turns two corners. Left, right.

You do think of me, I tell him.

I trudge after him. I am as ready for this as I was the last time we went to the river, even if it didn’t end the way I wanted it to, then. It would this time.

The houses on either side of us gradually thin out and become less immaculately cared for. Jed’s family avoids this side of town even though every single house was a vote for his father. I glance into the windows. There are no witnesses.

That night, that last night we saw each other at the river, went so wrong for something that started out so right. What happened was I called him and called him and promised I would stop if he agreed to meet me and talk. He agreed but said we’d have to meet somewhere private.

I was the one who chose the river.

Eventually, Jed and I cross the street and reach the brush, the brush you have to go through to get to the green bridge. His slippers crunch over the dead leaves. He doesn’t wake himself but his sounds scratch my insides. When we finally step through the clearing, the roar of the water is in our ears. He pauses.

We have to go the rest of the way, I whisper.

He hears me. We move. The green bridge is what it sounds like. The metal is painted a washed-out green, always has been. It overlooks the dam and it’s a walker’s bridge. The wooden planks can’t support cars but they hold us. My stomach twists. I step onto it with him.

He makes his way to the middle of it. He stops in front of the rail.

The last time we were here, it was like this. I was here first, waited for him, and by the time he arrived, I was crying because he looked so unhappy to be there. That was how much his fear twisted him. It brought down the corners of his mouth, made his face empty. He didn’t want to be with her, but he didn’t know how to be released. Even though he didn’t say that, I could tell. I could tell because I know him better than anyone else.

You love me, I said, and he told me to stop it. He asked me if I wanted money. He thought I was there for money, to keep quiet about what happened and I just repeated myself over and over: You love me.

You love me, I said, and he shook his head. You’ll prove it to me.

And then I stood on the rail.

Things I remember: the shock of the fall, the shock of the water, the water in my mouth, my nose, the nothingness, and then the dirt against my lips as I somehow made my way out of it alive and my family knew and his family knew and that’s the only thing I like about politics now that I think about it—the secrets you’re forced to keep. It was all so hush-hush. Jed’s fiancée and her family could never know about us. My parents promised I’d stay away.

I remember the emptiness after. Because even though Jed was clearly bound to a life he didn’t want, his heart was supposed to kick in and give him the strength to save me from falling and the act of saving me was supposed to make him realize it was me all along, I was the one. I thought because he didn’t, it meant he didn’t love me but it turns out I was just mixed up. He wasn’t supposed to save me from drowning. We were supposed to drown together.

It’s a good thing I didn’t break his window that first night, now that I think of it. If I had—if I’d broken his window and he’d caught me outside his house—I wouldn’t have discovered he was a sleepwalker. I wouldn’t have heard the things he could never tell me in the day. I wouldn’t have gotten this chance to rewrite our history in the dark, the way it was supposed to be.

My fingers curl around the rock. It feels good and heavy in my hand.