Of Painted Water (Logan Lerman Love Story)

Grocery Store Badass

You know, there are hundreds of ways to wake up in the morning. Someone could throw cold water on you, someone could shake you awake, hell, you might even be woken up by a loud noise. But never in my life had I expected to wake up via dog tongue. Now, I have seen the many things and places Sage has licked. I do not wish for my face to be one of them. But I suppose that when you're sleeping on the family room floor, it's the perfect place for a puppy to take advantage of your situation. So, I woke up the next morning with a raspy tongue rubbing against my cheek. Then my nose. And my lips. And my eyes. And pretty much every other accessible part of my face.

I brought my hands up to push her little puppy face away from mine, and opened my eyes.

That's when I noticed the feathers.

The whole family room was covered in millions of tiny down feathers, all white and floating around. I also noticed the fan was going.

That meant that the power was back on, and the wind created by the ceiling fan was stirring up the huge piles of tiny feathers. A couple feet from me was a sad lump of a pillow that had clearly faced Sages wrath during the night, and my father was passed out on the couch. He must have come in at an extremely late hour, and had been too tired to run up the stairs, so instead he just slumped over the side of the couch and crashed. Clutched in his left hand, dangling by two fingers, was a red plastic gas can, clearly empty of any fuel. Dark circles were prominent under his eyes, and his bathrobe was mud stained. There were a few other things like leaves and such knotted into his hair and clothing.

The boys were still asleep next to me, Devon with his mouth agape and his arms spread eagle overtop of myself and Logan. Both Logan and myself were curled up on either side of him on the edge of the blanket that had been laid out under the sheet roof, (that had fallen during the night) trying very hard to not be smothered by Dev.

The only consolation I had about him hogging the pillows and such was that he would most likely have a hangover when he woke up.

I rolled over and got to my feet, dusting off as many feathers from my body as I could. Since the power came back on sometime during the early morning, the air conditioning had started up again as well. I was loving how cold it was, how cool my skin felt.

But there were still things that needed to be taken care of, such as the empty beer cans that would definitely get me in trouble if mom saw them. So I picked them up and threw them in the recycling, noted the time, (6:00 am) and decided what to do next.

The night had been relatively miserable, mostly because it had been hot and Devon was a bedhog. But the empty fuel container in my dads hands must mean that he either already loaded the generator, or that he was unable to attain fuel last night. I took the red plastic container and put it back in its place in the garage before leading my father up to his own bedroom, where he would hopefully get a few more hours of sleep in a proper bed.

Then I slouched back downstairs and crashed on the couch. I had been tired, and it was brother-free.

When I woke up for the second time that morning, it was because of the noise.

Mom had her vacuum out and was running it furiously over the carpets like a madwoman. I blinked my eyes at the light streaming in through the window, and decided that it must have been around ten. The boys, like me, were rubbing their eyes and looking around with confused expressions at the heaps of feathers that surrounded them.

"Why are there feathers everywhere?" Logan asked, before making a face and pulling a large, wet feather from his tongue. I had to stifle a laugh, instead deciding to answer him. It was the first time I had spoken directly to him since the kiss.