“It’s okay,” I said, looking away from the bed in the center of my bedroom. “The first rule of sleepovers is that everyone at the sleepover has to sleep in the same bed.”
Once my mom had closed the door behind her to leave the two of us alone in my bedroom, Dmitri had been picking at the frayed ends of his sweatshirt drawstrings. When I told Mom that I wanted Dmitri to stay over longer so we could keep playing, she misunderstood and instead ushered us into my one-bed bedroom and told us that we could play in the morning. Sharing a bed didn’t mean anything out of the ordinary for me, but recently Dmitri’s face had been so pink. I couldn’t be certain if it was the same for him. He stood staring at my bed with his pink faced dipped down and his fingers pulling aimlessly at the threads of his sweatshirt strings like he always did when he was being dumb and thinking more than was good for him. I hated when he got like this.
Thankfully, Dmitri’s tiny fingers stopped fiddling when he heard the “rule” I created. He glanced up at me. The bashful pink color successfully faded out of his triangle of a face—now, it looked clear and curious. “Sleepovers have rules?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, improvising. Shimmying my hips, I shook the fluffy pink tutu I’d been using in our game off my body so I could get comfy in my pajamas. “It’s like, even if it’s a hundred people at the sleepover, they all gotta fit in the same bed. That’s what they told me.”
This time Dmitri’s reaction was even better: his whole face opened up—his eyes, his mouth, all of his features wide and eager and intent, like he had been when we were playing earlier that day. A straightforward, awe-struck appearance suited him a lot better than the rosiness that had been infecting his face lately. Still sparkling, he breathed, “Whoa… where did you learn that?”
Not even pausing to think up a better explanation, I said I’d learned it from a 6th grader at my old school. He bought it in a second. If Dmitri stopped being so slow and bothered to pay attention for once he’d see that I was clearly lying and that it was my first sleepover, too. I was a good liar, but I didn’t even need to try when it came to Dmitri. Even though his features were sharp and acute, he still bore soft, clueless eyes, and the sharpness of his features only made the dumb look in his eyes more obvious. A face like that gave everything away, made it easy for me, assured me that I really was smart.
One time I got him when we were playing outside by the school playground. He had been asking about my mom’s language.
“Laf, you can speak another language, right?” he asked.
I was crouched down, uprooting the roses growing in the flowerbed back behind the swing set. Grasping the thorny stem fully in one hand while plucking and crushing each bright red petal in the other, I nodded.
“Can you teach me how to say something?” he asked. I told him I could.
“Can you teach me how to say, ‘you’re pretty’?” He was trying to hide it, but his mouth bent into a stupid smile and a shy red tint bloomed on the tips of his ears and across his nose.
Even though my hand started to feel sore from holding the thorny stem, I tightened my grip. I already knew I was pretty and I didn’t like the way Dmitri wore that look (cheeks pink, dumb smile, bashful eyes at the ground) without my permission, so instead of “You’re pretty,” I told him how to say “You’re a pile of poop.” He caught on that something was up from the way I started cackling when he tried the new phrase out. He laughed right back at me. His cheeks and ears return to normal, and his face resumed the dumb, simple admiration I was used to.
But neither of us had had to share a bed with another kid before.
Dmitri hesitated at first, but encouraged by my new “rules,” he eventually flipped the lights off and plopped his head down on the pillow next to mine. He said something about how he’d never slept next to a girl before that I didn’t acknowledge. Shuffling under the covers so that I was a good foot away from Dmitri, I carefully positioned myself so that I slept on my back with my hands above the comforter, head square in the middle of my pillow. I folded my hands gracefully over the sheets, shot one last glance at Dmitri to make sure his face was easy and plain like usual, and closed my eyes.
The first time Dmitri snuggled his sweaty body against me, I shrugged him off and went back to sleep like it didn’t happen. When he did it a second time, I sat up and scooted away. The third time Dmitri even flung a constricting, sticky arm around me, so I shoved his face into the pillow on the other side of the bed.
“Stop it, Dmitri, you’re crowding me!”
At first his eyes seemed to look sheepish, but the lights were off and looking more closely his expression seemed more puzzled than apologetic. Even the shape of his head was hard to make out in the dark.
“You don’t wanna hug?” he said. “I always hug something when I sleep.”
“No. It’s too cramped.”
“But it’s dark, and–”
“No.”
“And it’ll be more comfy–”
“It’s too cramped! It’s not comfy for me,” I fought back and crossed my arms. I couldn’t see his face, but I think his head angled toward me before he finally rolled over in submission. I closed my eyes again and tried to wait for the night to pass.
Not a minute later, his stupid pity-seeking whimper broke the silence again. “Laf,” he started.
Gripping at the comforter in frustration, I forced my eyes open. I still couldn’t see Dmitri’s face or what color it was, but he was breathing on me instead of sleeping, with breath moist and smelling of sour toothpaste.
“What,” I said through clenched teeth.
His breath hit me again. “I can’t sleep, it’s too cold and lonely—”
“It’s not cold, Dmitri!” I said. Frustrated that he kept making the bed feel hot and sticky even though I was trying so hard to fix him, I inched away so I couldn’t feel his breath on my neck. If he would just stay on his side of the bed like I told him we could get the night over with and wake up tomorrow like normal, and his face wouldn’t be pink or red or anything. I wanted it to be nothing at all. “Shut up and go to sleep,” I said.
The air around me still felt stale and heavy like his breath was floating in the open space next to me. Dmitri’s chin dipped to his chest. It was so dark. He kept still with his head tucked close to his body and didn’t move until I spoke again.
“Another rule for sleepovers I learned is that there’s no hugging at sleepovers,” I said, clinging to some hope that this new lie would draw his head up and make his face shine like before. Dmitri let out a passive “Oh,” in response before I felt the sheets rustle as he rolled away.
From the other side of the bed, he said my name again. This time he didn’t sound nearly as pitiable.
“Laf.”
My hands remained balled into tight fists, gripping hard on comforter over our bodies. “What?”
His voice still came out a weak whisper like before, but rather than pathetic it sounded soft and tender like his eyes. “Sorry for hugging you,” he said. “I won’t if you don’t want to.”
The tension in my body had started to ease up from the relief regaining the status quo, but before I had the chance to fully secure his resignation he continued.
“But you don’t have to make up weird lies, you know.” The covers shuffled again, though I couldn’t feel what position Dmitri was in. “You’re always doing that.”
I couldn’t see the color of his face when he spoke. But the dark covered more than his face—I couldn’t see or even feel his body even though he lay inches away from me under the sheets. All I could make out was a vague outline of his head: a sharp chin, pointed ears, scalp full of short hair, and under the scalp I imagined a brain hiding in the dark that probably looked just as pointy as his face but somehow was still soft and pink and sweaty. The air in my room was so silent and unmoving that I could almost hear his brain thinking right now, thinking something while Dmitri lay far enough under the covers that I couldn’t even feel him, thinking something that belonged to Dmitri alone.
I wanted to grab his brain in my hands and wring the sweat clear out of it and see the waste spilling out right in front of my eyes and shake it clean so it’d be dry and cold and something I could understand. He was right there so I thought I could, and I thought I did, and I thought I always had his brain right there, secure in my hands. But I couldn’t grab hold of him. I couldn’t even see his face.
Lying in bed away from Dmitri, the sides of my body started to feel cool again and although I preferred the way the cold air felt against my skin, I forced my arms under the comforter and rotated my body so that my back faced Dmitri.
“Hey. Dmitri.”
He shuffled again after hearing me call his name. He was probably looking right at my back now.
“Here. You can sleep next to me like this,” I said, even though I couldn’t see his face.
"Okay.”
“No arms, though.”
“Okay.” This affirmation came slower than the first.
Dmitri moved up close under the covers, scooting, inching up, until his body was tightly packed behind mine. Against my back I felt Dmitri’s forehead and breath and the bridge of his nose bundled close into my backbones, felt the steady rising and falling of his sleeping body. He kept his arms against his chest like I told him, although at some point in the night Dmitri’s body found a loophole where the rule didn’t apply to his legs. The bone of Dmitri’s ankle dug sharp into my calf. His ankles sunk in like heavy stones. Even the bridge of his nose hurt me when it pressed up against back.
Stuck in position, I stayed quiet and wondered if the nobs of my spine emerging from my arched body hurt Dmitri’s face.
