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A Catalogue of Sleepovers

A Catalogue of Sleepovers

– Nonfiction Essay by Devon Rae –

Featured in Issue 18 of Dreamers Magazine

Homemade Insanity

You are a child, and it is night. All is quiet. Your best friend lies beside you, sleeping. You listen to the sound of her breath. You are in second grade, and you love sleepovers, but you also fear them. You love going to your best friend’s house in the afternoon and singing the entire Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat album with her and her four sisters. You love sharing Shabbat dinner with her family, tearing the warm challah, your small faces flickering in the candlelight. You love climbing in the bathtub with all five girls after supper and filling it beyond the brim with bubbles. And watching The Parent Trap with your best friend in bed and daydreaming together that perhaps she too has a long-lost identical twin because, like Lindsay Lohan, she’s a redhead. Though you can’t quite figure out why someone with so many sisters would want more.

What you love most of all but will never say is the way the sleepover allows you to seamlessly slip into your best friend’s family. The way you pretend it is your own and, at the sleepover, this pretending becomes something like real, at least plausible. You are a counting error. In a family with five girls, who would notice one more?

But now it is night, and you are frightened. You are in an unfamiliar bed, beneath unfamiliar sheets. Everyone in this rambling gingerbread house (two parents, five children, a dog, rabbit, and turtle) except you is asleep. You feel terribly alone.

Maybe you will wake your best friend’s mom and ask her to call your dad so he can bring you home. Maybe you will go downstairs and discover that she wasn’t asleep after all – that this fear of being the last one awake in the world was unfounded.

Or perhaps sleep will take you, and in the morning, you and your best friend will lie in the trundle bed together reading Laura Ingles Wilder books. The rustle of paper as you turn the pages. Your best friend’s mom will come in carrying steaming mugs of tea, filled with sugar and cream. You will sip them as the sun rises and the city returns to life.

You are in high school, and it is night. You are in a basement with your five dearest friends. You snuggle in the sofa bed beneath the Star Wars duvet and read side by side. The Perks of Being a Wallflower or Saving Francesca. You eat the lemon squares you baked that afternoon. Or you watch Crash and your friends cover your eyes at the scary parts. You tell secrets and play MASH and truth or dare. Your friends talk about the boys they like but you don’t like boys. You like books. And you like them.

You are in CEGEP, and it is night. You are wrapped in a borrowed blanket on the couch. Two friends doze on the carpet beneath your feet. The aftermath of another party – solo cups and beer bottles – strewn about the house. You danced or gave the boys haircuts in the kitchen or baked a Turducken. You drank, which is still new for you, and you like it – the way it gives you permission to be too loud. The living room swimming with colour and sound. Your friends played piano and guitar and you fell in love with all of them. Now the couples have paired off and are kissing behind closed doors. No one ever kisses you.

You are all grown up, and it is night. You are supposed to be too old for sleepovers now. At least of the platonic variety. Now, the shared rituals of brushing teeth and going to sleep and having breakfast together in the morning are reserved for partners and lovers. But you try to resist this narrative. Aren’t friendships worthy of the same closeness and care? Of long stretches of time in each other’s company? You visit the city where your best friend from childhood now lives, and she invites you to spend the night. You haven’t seen her in years. You buy pints of ice cream and eat them in bed while watching The Parent Trap. Just like old times. You go on a cycling trip with a friend and call it a week-long sleepover. One evening, they bike 20km to pick up pizza and beer while you nap in the tent. You have supper together on the beach, and then journal in your sleeping bags by the light of your headlamps. Now, you call a friend and tell her you are writing an essay about sleepovers. “Can we have a slumber party?” you ask. “We can get snacks and watch Netflix and stay up all night. For research purposes,” you clarify. Of course she says yes.


Devon Rae

About the Author – Devon Rae

Devon Rae is a queer writer from Montreal, QC who now lives in Vancouver, BC. Her writing has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, Plenitude, Prism International, SAD Magazine,  and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, Thirteen Conversations with My Body, was published in 2024 by Anstruther Press. 


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