Hello there, Reader. I just want to thank you for joining me on this journey. No one knows where this little venture shall lead us, not even I (which isn't a very good sign). But I expect it to be one laced with humour, poor characterization, and a third thing.

I hope you enjoy The Night of the Living Insomniac, or whatever I title it by the end of November. It is the story of a girl who cannot sleep.

Maureen Weston holds the record for the longest time spent without sleep with a whopping total of 449 hours - almost 19 days. Leila Gry was no contender for this record, but she sure as hell felt that way.

Leila had never been one for sleeping, and as she was consumed by her teen years and her body refused to go to bed before sunrise, the problem only worsened. She made an effort, far more than most other kids her age. She disabled her wifi by nine o' clock and was in bed by ten. She had a comfortable mattress, a thick duvet, and her pillows were always fluffed for maximum tranquility. By all means, Leila Gry was destined to have a good night's sleep. Yet three hours later, she still lay in bed, counting the speckles on her ceiling. Four hours later, she has counted to one hundred several times over and was almost completely awake. Usually it was five hours later when Leila finally got to drift into a scant unconsciousness, only to be awoken at six am by the shrill whine of her alarm clock. But in recent weeks, her poor sleeping habits had transformed into full-fledged sleeplessness. She still went to bed at ten, but the repose never came. The sun burned in a purple-blue sky, however Leila did not take the opportunity to enjoy it because she was just so. damn. tired.

She left her bed after three days without sleep wondering if Satan had taken a unique interest in her. Perhaps this was some sort of divine punishment, feeling like the human equivalent of a burnt piece of toast. A quick look in the mirror revealed eye bags the size of a metropolitan city state, and a face that radiated sheer hatred. Now, that may not seem particularly strange for teenagers awake in the early hours of the morning, but Leila preferred Eau d'Apathy over Mass Murder no. 5. But as her time spent sleeping went down, her thoughts contemplating homicide went up. She wasn't a fan of what she was becoming: bitter, short-tempered, mean. But she was too tired to fix it.

"Breakfast!" Her mother hollered from the kitchen, pulling Leila from her thoughts. She trudged her way towards the smell of bacon and pancakes, past two overnight bags situated by the front door.

"Good morning!" Danika Gry, better known as Mom, said cheerfully. If one were to open a dictionary and search for the definition of morning person, a photo of Mrs. Gry would appear. It would depict her smiling eyes with crows feet edges, and the physique of someone who got up at dawn for a 10 km morning jog. Presently, she was dressed in yoga pants and a sweatshirt.

"I just woke up." Leila muttered in response. 

"What's got you so moody?" Asked Chandler Gry, popularly called Dad. He was much like Leila in the right that he only got up early because it was required of him. But unlike his daughter, he slept like a log. The man oozed with zen relaxation, from his balding head to his rotund belly. He was in shorts and a t-shirt two sizes too big.

"I just woke up." Leila repeated.

"Well your father and I leaving for our weekend getaway today, so remember no parties." Mom warned playfully, accentuating her point with a spatula.

"If you do have one, make sure to lock away everything made of glass." Dad nodded, and then received a smack from the spatula.

"Don't listen to him... But make sure you clean up afterwards." Mom winked, before glancing at the clock. "Oh! We better get going if we're going to make our reservation!"

"Right. We'll see you in two days. Don't cause too much trouble." Dad said before pecking Leila on the forehead. She squirmed away from the touch.

"And get some sleep, you look exhausted." Mom said, a tinge of worry in her eyes. She hugged her daughter goodbye. Then, in a flurry of movement that should be illegal at six AM, Mr. and Mrs. Gry left the building, leaving Leila alone with her bacon and pancakes.

:: :: ::

Leila was almost certain that school was the cause for most of her life problems. People who believe she was being melodramatic likely haven't been in high school recently. Her fears were relatively universal among students in the first world. Being raised in a place where everything was marked with a grade, she needed constant reassurance of her capabilities in all aspects of her life: from appearances to her status in any given relationship. Then there was the added stress of achieving academic excellence in order to be accepted into a worthwhile post-secondary program, preferably with a scholarship since everything was so expensive. But encompassing those short term fears, was the overwhelming terror of not being able to find a job in a minuscule job market, or even worse, getting trapped in a soul-sucking career.It was probably these subjects that caused the abyss of unease in her subconscious that kept her awake throughout the night. However, school was unavoidable, so Leila found herself seated at the back of Monsieur Poitou's French class, half-listening to conjugations being droned out at the front of the class. Poitou was a short, stout man with large ears, a distinct overbite, and illusions of grandeur. He believed himself to be on a quest to save the world, one French translation at a time. He made obvious attempts to control a room with his voice, but it only came out as a pathetic man talking loudly. His mousy hair began late on his head and ended far past normal on his neck. As the class made its way to irregular verbs, Leila found herself staring out the window.

Copernicus Secondary School, home of the Heliocentric Hammerheads, was located on the brink of a forest. Often enough, the school was forced to lock down as wild turkeys or coyotes roamed the lot. As Leila stared out the window, she saw the familiar form of The Mudlady, an older woman with tan skin, wiry tussled grey hair, and an arthritic form. Everyone kept away from The Mudlady but no one knew why. People assumed she was homeless due to the fact that she wore the same green shirt and thrifty jacket every time she was seen, both of which were covered in dirt and mud. Her clothes are how she got her name. Being in the suburbs, The Mudlady was one of the few sources of town-wide intrigue, which birthed countless rumours. According to legend, The Mudlady was once a normal person, working at the wildlife sanctuary in the forest. But one day she snapped and killed a visitor, then tried to blame it on the animals. They say that she is the reason why the sanctuary was shut down. Another story goes on about how the Mudlady lives in a cabin in the woods, eating stray cats and dogs. Leila never believed these rumours. The Mudlady had always seemed like a harmless, albeit strange, woman who lived in her own world. 

Leila watched The Mudlady as she crawled on her knees, shifting through the leaves that were beginning to pile beneath the trees. Her olive green cotton jacket contrasted with the array of burning colours. Part of Leila was almost envious of The Mudlady. She was willing to bargain that the homeless woman didn't worry about honour roll or a barren résumé, The Mudlady could probably sleep for all the hours of the day, granted it was probably inside a cardboard box, but at least she was sleeping.

And that was how Leila began drift away, her eyes pulling shut like a Catholic's shop on a Sunday, imagining the life of The Mudlady. Just as she was on the cusp on rest, the background noise of Monsieur Poitou's voice came to a halt. In a moment, a wooden meter stick was slammed over her desk, falling just short of Leila's arms, and resonating with a violent crack. 

"Madamoiselle Gry, I don't believe I assigned a nap for work." Poitou said, his tone ever so smug and his muddy brown eyes gleamed with an arrogance unfit for a man who spent his days yelling at teenagers.

"Sorry, I'm tired." Leila murmured. She did not enjoy being the focus of everyone's attention, she much rather be in the median. 

"Sleep on your own time, not in my class. Or do you want to fail another test?" It almost sounded like a threat. But it was one that announced to all of her peers of her failure, a fact that most would have preferred to keep hidden. But Monsieur Poitou made it his personal goal to shame students into improvement. He was a firm believer that anxiety and fear leads to a better performance, apparently he was stuck in the twentieth century. Surprisingly, he didn't keep a dunce cap in his class.

"Go to the office and have a chat with the principal, you clearly don't care about what happens in this class anyway." He folded his arms across his chest, beaming with sadistic pleasure after humiliating a student. Leila felt the class' eyes on her as she left the room, back slouched and gaze boring holes into the ground. Her ears caught Monsieur Poitou continuing the lesson as if it was never interrupted, just before she closed the door behind her.

:: :: ::

"Whoa, Leila? What are you doing here?" Said the voice of an angel cursed to live upon this Earth for his beauty made God jealous, also known as Chris. The thing about Chris was that he had a unique kind of hotness that was missed by the more beautiful students at Copernicus High. One needed to be especially attentive to understand the appeal of Chris, and boy did Leila understand. While he may not have the looks to be on the cover of a multi-million dollar magazine, he had the innate charisma that may lead to him running one.

"Oh hi." Leila said. If there was a way to rush those two words, she managed it. "I need to see Ms. Green. What about you?"

The content of her words were concise yet she managed to say it like a ramble, emphasizing the wrong syllables and adding unnecessary pauses. She sat on her hands as she felt them begin to tremble. She cursed hormones.

"I was actually just talking to her about the tech requirements for the assembly tomorrow." He said, swinging keys attached to a green Copernicus High lanyard. Chris was the leader of the school tech crew and a loyal grade representative on student council. These positions meant that nearly everyone knew of him: students, teachers, custodians. But they spread him so thin that very few actually knew him well enough to be considered his friend. "But a meeting with the principal, huh? I didn't know you were such a rebel."

"It was Poitou." Leila's three words were enough for any student at Copernicus High to understand. Everyone who's had the misfortune of being taught by the man knew that the best tactic is to keep one's head down and hope he targets someone else. Everyone who's had the good grace of never meeting the man, has heard the rumours. Chris fell into the prior category.

"Man, I feel you. I once got in trouble because I sneezed in his class. Plus he made this one girl have a panic attack because she didn't use the correct auxiliary during a presentation."

If there was one good thing about Monsieur Poitou, it was that he brought people together through mutual hatred of him. There was a sense of unity and understanding between all his students, like countrymen suffering under the same dictator. Chris and I were just inhabitants of Poland.

"Leila? Ms. Green will see you now." The secretary said, his voice permanently caught in the sickly sweet tone people use on the phone.

"Good luck!" Chris said, giving a double thumbs up in her direction. 

"You too!" Leila shot back automatically, a smile on her face. It was only after she turned around and was halfway through the door of the principal's office did she realize that her reply made no sense. She spent the entirety of the meeting thinking about what an idiot she was.

The walk home from Copernicus High took forty minutes. Most of the time, Leila enjoyed the walk. She strolled on the path between the street and the forest, playing a game in which she would duck protruding branches at the last possible minute. Along the way, she would pass row after row of identical houses, all on subdivisions sold to the same developer. The only thing that changed were the cut of their lawns. But there were a few homes that were older than the rest, shorter buildings with large backyards. An inhabitant of one of these homes was Chris. Now understand, Leila wasn't stalking him. They just lived along a shared route. Every once in a while, she would allowed herself to imagine them walking home together, bumping against each others shoulders as they tried to walk side by side on a path designed for single file. Together they would talk about happy little nothings, just enjoying the sounds of each others voices. Much to her chagrin, those moments were locked in her fantasies, because she could never muster the courage to tell him how she felt. For all the words that ran through her head, very few left her mouth.

Alas, her present case of exhaustion left her drained and unamused. So instead of savouring the crunch of fallen leaves, or basking in the rays of sun escaping past the canopy of brilliant colours, she slogged through the journey. Her footsteps were as heavy as her eyelids, and her body weighed down on her like an ocean. She didn't even have the heart to envision a relationship with Chris. She had received a halfhearted warning from Ms. Green, who met with a student from Monsieur Poitou's class almost every day. But the talk made Leila agitated and bitter, so she kicked up a pile of leaves, imagining it was the French teacher's face. As her eyes traced the leaves floating back to the ground, they caught a movement within the forest.

The Mudlady was attempting to climb a tree. Her older physique was unexpectedly spry, and she was roughly two and a half yards up the tree, but her movements were awkward. It took a moment for Leila to realize that the woman was only using her right hand to climb. Her left hand was holding something else. The Mudlady's thin climbing form made her look like a green disjointed spider. Leila began to approach, wanting to know what the woman held in her hand, when she felt a rough smack on her back.

She wheel around, ready to kick her attacker, but then paused as she recognized the face as someone from her school. He was a corpulent boy, with a posture and face reminiscent of a pug. Leila couldn't remember his name, but he was the type of person who seemed destined for insignificance. He was one who inspired others to forget about him the moment he left their vision. There were many of those people at Copernicus High, Leila was one of them.

"What a weirdo." He said, an air of familiarity in his tone. Leila had no idea where it came from considering the fact that they had never spoken before this moment.

"What?" She replied, keeping her voice flat in the way that you do when you want a conversation to end. The boy didn't catch the hint and continued.

"The Mudlady, you see her right. I bet she's trying to get a baby bird so she can eat it later. Raw." He grinned at Leila as if he had just told a funny joke.

"That doesn't make sense. Why would she catch a baby bird to eat? They have, like, no meat." Leila deadpanned. There was something irritating about the boy. maybe it was the expectant look in his eyes. They were like hooks laced with the bait of gossip, waiting eagerly to catch someone as vile as their owner.

The boy was not phased by her response. He shrugged. "It's 'cause she's crazy. Billy, you know Billy, right?"

Leila did not know Billy.

"He saw her pick a dog right up out of his neighbour's yard. Why would she do that if she wasn't gonna eat it?" The boy beamed, far too happy at the idea of eating domestic animals. Before Leila could supply a list of reasons to counteract his argument (the top of which was: Billy was probably lying), the boy continued. "I bet she doesn't stop at pets, you know. I bet she eats kids too!" 

He cackled and Leila was wondering how someone could have left elementary school while being so stupid. She looked to see if The Mudlady was still climbing the tree, but the green coat was nowhere to be found.

"Aw, she's gone. Now that poor bird is going to be made into some soup." The boy frowned, "Anyway I've got to get home, see ya."

The boy ran off, never once uttering her name, giving Leila the distinct feeling that he didn't know it. The boy would've stopped anyone in hopes of trading tales about The Mudlady. If Leila were in a more active mood, she likely would've joined in as well. On another day, Leila and the boy may have even bonded over idle discussion of regurgitated rumours, exaggerating them even more in an attempt to one up each other's story. The realization left a sour taste on her tongue and she couldn't help but feel sorry for the strange old woman. 

:: :: ::

Falling asleep in an empty house is rather difficult to do, especially if one already suffers from difficulty sleeping. Thus, Leila's quest for rest was yielding no results. It was midnight and she had been in bed for two hours. Her homework was completed, albeit at a substandard level as she couldn't be bothered to put in an effort. Her wifi was down. Her pillows were fluffed. Her duvet wrapped around her like a tortilla on a burrito. And thoughts of Ted Bundy breaking into her house and bludgeoning her to death thrashed eerily in her mind. 

She sought solace in counting the speckles on her ceiling.

... 909... 910... 911... is the number someone will call after finding my dead body...

Leila groaned and pushed the back of her head into the pillow. This needed to stop. She couldn't go on like this, night after sleepless night. The thing about not sleeping is that one never really wakes up. Instead, conscious moments just slowly transform into one long lucid dream. Everything is muffled - lights, sounds, thoughts, even physical touches. It wasn't the loose tiredness one feels after exercising. The exhaustion that Leila felt seeped into her bones and joints like tar; her muscles were molasses and her brain nitroglycerin, highly viscous and ready to explode.

She tried to settle her mind by thinking of something calming. The golden crust of a perfectly made pancake, the satisfaction of getting back-to-back Tetris, the feeling of scissors gliding through a paper. And as she pictured that paper-end being cut free and drifting every so gently through a grand void, she saw it transform into a leaf. It was the colour of a blood orange, and it drifted into a larger pile filled with other flashily pigmented leaves. Then there was The Mudlady sifting through them. Leila wasn't sure why, but she pictured a gentleness to her actions, as if she wanted to avoid crushing any of the leaves. It was oddly soothing. The Mudlady carefully digging through the mound on loop. And Leila felt a restfulness flow through her, like a welcoming breeze on a cool day.

WHACK!

The image of Monsieur Poitou slamming a meter stick on her desk filled her mind. Her imagination recast the man to look even more villainous. His overbite grew crude stones as teeth, and his ears grew ten sizes. His eyes were coals that burned with sadistic joy.

"You can't sleep in my class!" His voice grated within her ears, cutting through her ear drum. He cackled and the pain was worse. It melded with the laugh of the boy from the walk. Their laughter teemed with misbegotten superiority. Leila's heart pounded in her chest, but it only seemed to pump blood into her lungs. She felt like she was drowning. In a clearer state of mind, she would attribute the nightmare to feelings of being outcast and surpassed. In some sort of cruel, metaphoric manner, her brain was telling her that she feared being inadequate. But Leila was not in a clear state of mind. In fact, she felt like she was dying from the inside out.

She woke up coughing. Her body attempting to force out the imaginary liquid that filled her chest. It was a sickening feeling and worst of all, she was still tired. Leila glanced at her alarm clock to find that it was only half past twelve. Under other circumstance, she would've been grateful for that thirty minute respite, but the ordeal at the end left her feeling even more worn. 

The girl sat at the edge of her bed, rubbing her bleary eyes. She saw a book on the ground and realized that it was what caused the cracking sound that triggered the night terror in the first place. She moved to pick it up, enjoying the cool wooden flooring on her feet. She had worked herself into a cold sweater and felt uncomfortably warm in her pajamas. The book was a hardcover edition of The Secret Garden. She brushed her fingers over the bevelled title before sitting it back on her shelf. It wasn't nestled in between two books so only the spine was showing, she loved the cover too much for that. It was lavender, framed in black foliage, with a silhouette of Mary Lennox running with the key. 

'This isn't working.' Leila thought to herself. She had spent the last three nights laying in bed, waiting for sleep to claim her, and it had yet to work. Her usual tactics were failing her as well. She needed to try something new. She recalled how her mother went on a short jog on the nights that she had problems sleeping. Now, Leila was not the active type, her relationship with exercise was even less palpable than her one with Chris. 

'But a walk wouldn't hurt.' 

She imagined the refreshing fall breeze on her face as she walked on a path lit by amber streetlights. The idea immediately entranced her. Leila could almost feel the peaceful quiet of the town, solitary yet surrounded by so many people, all of whom were asleep in their homes and unaware of the night traveller. She wasn't particularly afraid of running into an unsavory crowd. Her town was small and couldn't remember a crime actually occurring within its borders. The most her parents had warned her of was to avoid people who smelled like skunks and wore hoodies. She figured that as long as avoided those crowds, the walk would be blissfully uneventful.

So, still dressed in a Copernicus High sweater shirt, and pajama pants with a cartoon owl print, Leila slipped on some sneakers and went for a walk.