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Cartman hasn’t been sleeping lately.
For most kids his age, not sleeping isn’t a big deal. He knows Kenny stays up practically all night, every night, and other than being dirt poor and dying all the time he’s overall doing fine. Stan averages about five hours and he’s quiet, sure, more withdrawn maybe, but overall fine. Clyde Donovan is almost always cheerful and he stays up playing Call of Duty well into the morning.
But for Cartman? He needs it. He’s read studies on this. Sleep changes EVERYTHING, and without sleep, he can’t operate. He can’t be on guard. And if he’s not on guard, he doesn’t stand a chance against him, someone who has it in their religious ideology to make his life a living nightmare.
It’s on this night actually that they are in the middle of texting, well, arguing over text. It’s not one of their normal arguments, not ideological in nature, and not related to politics or morality or Kyle’s religion or Cartman’s weight. It’s about if Kyle saw a dog at the abandoned house on second street. Cartman swears he didn’t see a dog, that Kyle’s making it up, that he was trying to distract him to steal from him.
A discord notification sounds off on Cartman's phone.
Kyle 🤢: let’s say your bigoted stereotypes are true, and I was trying to steal money from people. Why would I target you?
Cartman glares, his thumbs moving quicker than the speed of light.
Cartman: HOW MESSED UP TO MAKE FUN OF SOMEONE’S SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS! Especially when you act so fucking Hugh and mighty
Stan: Hugh and mighty
Kenny: hugh and mighty
Cartman: Kenny isn’t your phone a slab of trash from outside your house how the fuck are you in the group chat right now
Cartman closes out of the discord chat, going onto his voice memos. He has tons, enough that his storage is suffering, but he’s diligent when he wants to be, maybe not with math homework but with matters concerning Kyle, which isn’t anything other than him being good at maintaining a rivalry.
He thumbs through them, trying to find the conversation from that day.
April 19. Got it. He pushes play on the recording.
“Dude, that dog was so insane looking, I’ve never seen a fur pattern like that!”
“What dog?”
“You didn’t see that big ass fucking dog outside that house?”
“No, Kyle, I’m afraid I didn’t. Are you sure you’re not hallucinating?”
“I’m not hallucinating, asshole! It was right fucking there!”
“And it’s conveniently not there anymore. Right. Got it.”
Cartman rolls his eyes at his friend’s delusion as he listens more. He’ll have to screen record this in order to send it to their server, but he can’t send it yet. It’ll be even better if he sends a companion one, that way he can catch him in the act twice. He needs to think of another argument, something, something that can be a gotcha.
He searches through more. Arguments about St. Patrick's Day, the Fourth of July, platypi as mammals, the meaning of the film the Little Mermaid, YouTube comments, colors, everything under the sun. Okay. Good. He has to listen. Try to find something good.
He turns on the St. Patrick's day argument, closing his eyes to fully lock in on the conversation.
"I'm just saying, green is a gay color. They should change it."
"Four leaf clovers are green, fatass! That's the point!"
"Oh, of course, you're defending them. From the neck fucking up you're a goddamn leprechaun! If only you weren't so freakishly tall!"
"You're short and fat, you're built like a stretched jpeg!"
He's continuing this activity when he notices a total jump to another part of the conversation. Did the recording skip? "Goddammit," he mutters, before his attention is pulled to the time. Five minutes later than when he had started it. Had he fucking fallen asleep? No way. No. Absolutely not.
"This is important, goddammit!" He says to himself. "Stay. Awake."
Maybe this one is too boring. Another argument then. Who vs. whom?
"See, Kyle, you're trying to control how I speak by correcting my grammar. Doesn't that seem fishy to you?"
"The only thing fishy right now is your breath, tubby."
He's there, in front of Kyle. They're in the cafeteria. Kyle is eating the vegetarian lunch, because he's obsessed with fitness or something, and Cartman is eating the rib special.
They're yelling at each other, about whom vs who, about leprechauns, about the color red, when midway through, they stop. Kyle looks at Cartman's lips, and vice versa. They inch closer together and-
"AH!" Cartman shoots up in his bed. "GROSS!" He just needs to turn off these voice memos and just go to sleep, he realizes. Thinking about Kyle too much before bed is bad for him.
He tosses his phone onto the ground, not caring about if it shatters or not. His mom will get him a new one, eventually, even if she has to not take showers for a week to afford it. Whatever.
Okay. Sleep. Sleep now. He closes his eyes. Sleep.
Nothing.
"Come on. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep NOW!"
His body is tense. Way too tense to sleep, almost hyper, despite his tiredness. Like he wants to run around the backyard or something, which is crazy, because he hates running. And his heart is weird and tingly. Fuck.
He grabs his phone from the floor, which is thankfully not shattered. Maybe he does care. Who cares.
He ignores the discord notifications from his group chat, instead opting to open up his YouTube account (well not his, Clyde Donovan's family has premium and he figured out his password), where he types in "Sleep ASMR."
He's greeted by the sound of a woman whispering, the click of acrylic nails, the soft popping of bubble wrap. None of it works. Gay, gay, stupid, gay, stupid.
There's one option, he realizes. It's what lulled him to sleep earlier. No! No. That would be… too weird. Too weird.
"But…" he says to himself in his dark room, "if I sleep to them, it'll make me remember all of my gotcha points even better. And then I can really get him."
Deciding that to be sufficient enough, he turns on the voice memo, going to the orange vs. apple juice debate, and embarrassingly enough, falls asleep within minutes.
And if in his dream they do share a kiss and go see a movie together holding hands, so what? Dreams don't mean anything.