The goal was not to fall asleep. The goal was to stop hating myself.

It worked, mostly.

Tonight, however, was not one of those nights. Heck, tonight didn’t even make the Billboard Hot 100.

Currently, I was watching Inception. I was kind of a Christopher Nolan junkie. (His movies were like puzzles, and like I said, I loved puzzles.) Inception was my favorite. The irony was not lost on me—an insomniac obsessed with a movie about dreams. There was just something soothing about taking something so vast and abstract and unknowable—dreams—and making them structured and rule-bound. Formatting the mechanics of dreams into a heist movie was a stroke of genius.

I was two hours in—halfway into the climax—when I heard it. The soft clicks of the lock. The gentle squeal of the front door opening and closing. Whoever it was, they were being awful quiet.

I glanced at the time on my phone. It was a quarter to midnight.

Leaning over the armrest, I caught my dad creeping quietly toward the stairs. He froze when our gazes connected. Blinked. Regained his composure in an instant.

“Hey, Ez,” he said. “Whatcha watching?”

I’ll just say it: My dad was cool. And not the sort of cool where it’s obvious they are trying to be cool. He just was. Purely effortless. It was all in his confidence. The way he carried himself, the way he spoke—casual but brimming with intelligence. And when he took the time to talk to you—which he did with a lot of people—he seemed to genuinely care, and he made you feel special because of it. In short, he was the ultimate people person.

He was the exact opposite of me.

“Inception,” I said.

“Ah. The dream-within-a-dream one, right?”

“Within a dream within a dream within a dream,” I said.

Dad chuckled. “Have you figured out if the top falls over or not?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to figure that out. It’s an open ending.”

Dad nodded discerningly, like that totally made sense.

“I mean, I have a theory,” I said.

“Of course you do!” Dad steered into the living room and sat on the adjacent armchair. “Let’s hear it.”

Dad was never home. But when he was, he at least tried to make up the difference.

“So, DiCaprio’s wife kills herself because she thinks they’re still in a dream and she’s trying to escape, right?” I said.

“Right.”

“But what if she’s not dead?”

“Huh?”

“What if she was right all along? What if they were in a dream, and she escaped, but DiCaprio never does? The entire movie is just a layer of dream that DiCaprio never escaped. That’s why the top keeps spinning.”

Dad’s eyes widened. He raised his fists to his head and exploded his hands open.