Time Loop

Day 1

No words passed between them, both refusing to start the day off as a fight. His mother didn't say anything about the chores that still needed to get done when he returned from his father's house. She knew he would fight against her at any chance he could on Tuesdays. He squinted his eyes at her as he continued to drink from his cup, imploring her to not say anything about the fact that it is Tuesday.

He raised an eyebrow at her as she added cream to her coffee and waited patiently to see if she would break on this Tuesday as she had so many times before. She grimaced at the coffee, looking at it as if she wanted to spit it back out. She continued to drink it though, knowing she couldn't make it through the day without it. John finished off his first coffee of the day and refilled his cup. They kept eye contact as they drew sips from their individual cups of coffee.

Their apartment being placed in the worst spot for people who aren't good with mornings which John and his mother happen not to be. His mother, had gotten curtains throughout the apartment to try and shield them both from the blazing morning sun. The sun shone too brightly through the windows since they lived on the east side of their building. The blackout curtains they had put up in the apartment only worked when they remembered to close them. They hadn't when they went to bed the night before, so the sun burned directly in John's eyes. Despite this, John kept his eyes trained on his mother as he continued to drink his coffee, hardly taking a chance to blink in case she saw weakness. He implored her, in his mind, to look away first and give in.

He finished off his coffee and placed his cup in the sink, not yet bothering to rinse it. He watched as his mother squinted menacingly at him, telling him through telepathy to rinse his cup before he walked away. She watched him step back from the sink, ignoring her instructions, and he saw her hands clench around her mug as she began to yell at him in her head to rinse it. He fought back with his own mental yelling match of how he would come back to rinse the cup later. It was one of those things that they always fought about but never could resolve.

John continued to back away slowly from the sink and back to the darkness of his room where he could continue to wake up enough to tolerate the day and simply get through it. His mother watched him like a hawk, keeping her mouth shut, though the tension in her jaw told of how hard she was fighting against telling him to rinse his cup before he went back to his room. A smirk appeared on his face as he stepped into his room.

It was as he was closing his door that she began to say something to him. Before she could get any words out John closed his door with a loud and very final thud, cutting her off before she could even make a sound.

He would not hear of her nagging him to clean the apartment today. She knew only a fraction of what happened on Tuesdays. They always ended up awful in some way or another. Something that others would use against him for weeks to come. He was just glad that Tuesday was one day a week and that it wasn't over the weekend. Neither he nor his father could stand each other for a full day. It just wasn't acceptable. John couldn't handle the trauma for more than those twenty-four hours.

He took five minutes to get dressed and come out of his room, looking much more like a human being than he when he had woken up. Having washed his face and slipped on some clean looking clothes that didn't smell, he had deemed himself presentable enough to go out in public. The clothes he chose to wear were baggy and hid the muscle he had earned from working out.

He gave his mother a quick look when he came out. She held her hands up in surrender as he went to the sink and washed his coffee cup and put it on the drying rack next to the sink before he picked up his bag to leave for school. He didn't look at her or say anything more as he went out the door to school.

It was going to be one of the better Tuesdays, he thought as he walked to school alone, trying to convince himself of it.

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