About six years ago, they were at a Christmas party for the high-end jewelry designer Mignon Faget, where Sleepy worked along with Luke’s wife. Luke noticed Sleepy standing off to the side, still in braces, anime tattoos peeking out from under their sleeves.
“It’s like we were at the kids’ table. They said, ‘I don’t fit in with these people.’ And I was like, ‘I’m just here because my wife brought me.’ And we sat and talked about video games all night,” he recalls. But quiet and unobtrusive isn’t really how Luke and another good friend, John Preston, remember Sleepy. They were more mischievous than that. Instead, the two remember a rainy November night in 2018, out in the Louisiana woods with friends, all from a club that role-played skirmishes with BB guns and armour.
They remember Sleepy, giddy with drink, and armor flirting with their new crush. Wrestling their helmet on, imbued with what Luke calls Sleepy’s “devilish joy”, demanding to duel John. They remember Sleepy driving 13 hours north to visit the parents of their best friend and roommate, Emily McDonald, where they saw snow for the first time since childhood. Sleepy, in a video, plunged through fresh powder, doing a funny sideways crab-hop in a knee-length olive coat, throwing snow in the air, and singing, “I love it! So fluffy!”