I straightened in my chair as the front door handle shook, someone pushing it down without realizing it was locked. May. Everyone else went straight for their key; my sister liked to think that it would be open and she wouldn't have to rifle through the gum wrappers and dried out Expo markers in search of a key. It never was.
I almost always beat my sister home, even though we went to the same school and got out at the exact same time. She preferred to stay after the bell rang and chat with her friends for twenty minutes – you know, like a normal high school student with an actual social lives – while I immediately made a break for the exit and shoved my ear buds in as soon as I could. Seven hours per day was more than enough of my peers.
I always clicked the lock into place once more after trudging inside from my car, more out of habit than anything else – it had been drilled into me from the time I turned twelve and was determined old enough to stay home alone, that the door must always be securely locked if there wasn’t an adult in the house. And while I doubted that anyone would even bother breaking into the Barakat residence, old habits die hard. Or, in many cases, not at all.
The door rattled open, my sister shrugging her backpack off before stepping into view, a single ear bud plugged in while the other hung down in front of her t-shirt
“’Sup Jack?” she called with a grin, eyes moving from me in my favorite corner chair, with my beaten up Converse and socks dumped on the floor and school supplies spread around me, to the TV in the corner playing Wall-E. I was starting to get to the point where I could recite that movie line for line, but it was cute and I needed background noise while I worked, mindless television serving as the perfect antidote for that necessity. I liked my music loud and had a bad tendency to turn it up until it captured my focus – something I cared less about was always safer.
“Not much, bro,” I responded, returning her smile as May chuckled and ran off to the kitchen. We had an odd relationship. I literally could not remember the last time I’d discussed anything serious with my sister, but the joking attitude we had around each other was fun and relaxing. At least we were better than those siblings who were constantly bickering - being brother and sister, petty fights were inevitable, but we just ignored each other for a day and then continued on like there had never been a spat over who had to wipe down the table after dinner.
Truly, I’d love to have someone I could have deep, contemplative discussions with, but a suitable person didn’t seem to exist. Anytime I said anything semi heavy or thought provoking, there was always a strong suspicion at the back of my mind that whoever couldn’t care less about the topic of conversation. Always an extremely effective way to kill my enthusiasm for talking about something. If only there was someone who had the same variety of disconnected, erratic interests that I did.
May reemerged a moment later with a glass of bubbly fruit soda – she drank the stuff like fish gulped water – and a plate of leftover spaghetti from last night. It looked like enough for an entire dinner, rather than after school snack, but she’d fallen into the same unreliable, sketchy eating habits as me long ago. She just didn’t have enough time to make meals in the morning; was too busy getting speed dressed in five minutes and sprinting out the door after consistently oversleeping.
I skipped the day’s early meals because I preferred spending time on making myself somewhat presentable and staying wrapped in my happy bubble of blankets as long as possible, even though I was always fully awake as soon as my alarm went off, with a zero percent chance of falling back asleep. Not once had I slept later than intended, something that would be good, if that fact couldn’t be attributed to my stupid sleeping habits. I always took at least half an hour to fall asleep at night, even when I was dead exhausted. I usually was, too, despite the fact that I was knocked out from ten to six every day.
“So we got our math tests back today, and Mr. Geller took two points off this question because I forgot to put the meter sign in. Seriously, I would have gotten a fricking A if I remembered that!” May whined as she gulped down a bite of pasta, seemingly oblivious to the sauce smearing her chin. I looked away from the laptop screen in front of me that held the website necessary to complete my science homework, tsking at the silly grade drop. Getting a test question wrong because you just had no idea what the answer was, or didn’t know how to do it, was one thing, but idiotic mistakes were completely infuriating. There had been pathetic amounts of tests that I’d gotten back and looked over, kicking myself for the rest of the day over how, if I just added instead of subtracting on one problem, I would have gotten the right answer and another four points.
You’d think that eleven years of schooling would remedy those slip ups, but, nope. Humans are imperfect beings made with limitless room for error, and I was no exception.
“You should just write the signs in and then show him the test again. Just be like, ‘Look, Mr. Geller, you marked this wrong! I deserve an A, you bastard!’” May laughed, shaking her head and taking another bite of her food as she rolled her eyes at me, “Ok, maybe not that last part, but you know what I mean.”
“Some of us are actually against cheating, Jack,” she chuckled happily, sinking into the couch with a burp. I raised an eyebrow when she didn’t say anything about it, only getting a shrug in response.
I responded that that was not cheating, just some harmless lying for the greater good, along with a statement that my morals had combusted long ago. Our jolting, randomly jumping around conversation continued in the same manner, thereby dividing my attention between my work and sister. I didn’t really care that it was distracting, considering that I seriously lacked human interaction lately. While it was entirely my own fault that I locked myself in my room and refused to leave the house until after two o’clock on weekends, staying completely silent for hours got rather uncomfortable.
Two hours later, and I had moved on to History, dissecting George Washington’s farewell address – that he never actually physically gave, lazy asshole – and contemplating the meaning of life. It was one of those assignments that was so intensely boring that I would literally rather stare at the wall across from me and let my thoughts entertain me then do it. I’d found it near impossible to fully concentrate on anything lately, with my mind always running and undercurrent of detached thoughts, pulling my attention off what I was supposed to be doing.
It was when my head was turning to whether or not the itchiness of my hips was normal and healthy, that the robots playing on screen were interrupted by a loud clunk from outside. Dad.
He clomped through the door with a slam of work boots and jingle of keys, metal clipboard that he used to keep his customer’s papers straight in one hand, worn blue plastic coffee mug balanced in the other. He took it with him in the morning and usually didn’t come home until his various handy man jobs for the day were done, carrying the cup around in his truck.
The only reason I’d moved in the past couple of hours was to retrieve something to drink – well, I’d actually gone to the kitchen to get a refreshment and come with a cup of grapes, bagel, donut, and glass of water. Not quite my intention, but I did not retain ability to restrain myself around food.
“Hey Jack, what do you want for dinner?” my dad asked, precariously placing his coffee cup on top of the metal plate in order to drop his keys into the pocket of his cargo pants. I resisted the urge to scoff at the question, since that he asked me almost every day, and I had never had a helpful answer.
“…Chicken. Chicken and bacon.” I replied, totally aware that two meats were not, under any interpretation of the word, meals. But, seriously, he really shouldn’t expect anything different.
My parents had gotten their stereotypical rolls switched; Dad acted as more of a housewife than my mom ever had. There were four meals that she could make well, and only occasionally cooked on the weekends, whereas my dad would get home and make dinner around three days of the week. He either pulled recipes from magazines, of the internet, or just made something plain and simple. Freezer food and stir fry were frequent populars for nights when no one felt like putting in an effort.
But ideas ran short and he’d always look to the rest of us for suggestions. I, however, could not be less useful when it came to this.
I was incredibly indecisive. So much so that whenever I was asked a question, I would spew out random words that completely avoided actually giving a real answer in order to buy myself more time to think and decide on what the best possible way to go would be. For example, yesterday Zack asked me whether or not I was planning on attending Matt Flyzik’s party on the upcoming Halloween, and I had said ‘I don’t know, maybe’, refused to make a decision, and danced around the topic for the rest of the day.
The fact that I had to think so hard about such simple things to come to a conclusion, was, frankly, fucking ridiculous. Like, it should be really simple because yeah, Flyzik was famous for his kick ass parties and I’d be allowed a free invite from being friends with the school’s star quarterback; I had nothing else to do with my night besides stay home and hand out candy, and I knew that yes, I did want to go. But I was unable to answer with a simple ‘yes’, because what if I found something else to do with that night and ended up flaking out on Zack? I didn’t want to be a terrible friend.
There would be alcohol, which I had little to no experience with, what I looked like an idiot for staying sober? So what if Zack, who’s alcoholic grandpa died of liver cancer, would never touch a drop of the stuff in his life, and was perfectly well respected by everybody for it? How about the reality that my two friends might wander off and leave me alone? It didn’t matter that parties were the optimal place to hang out with all those half friends from school, and that there was about a two percent chance that I would actually manage to end up alone. No, none of that mattered, the ‘what ifs’ stopped me from making snappy decisions, no matter how absurd they were.
So that was how my dad ended up huffing humorously at my incredibly ineffective input and going off to set his stuff down in the little granite cut out between cabinets at the side of our kitchen where his shit always ended up. The speakers he plugged his phone into and played eighties music while cooking where there, perennially next to his clipboard and wallet.
I shrugged to myself and peeked at the time in the lower corner of my computer, clocking that my mom would be home in around an hour. She’d immediately go complain about her accounting job to Dad, and we’d eat sometime after her whining wore itself out. I didn’t have anything against Mom’s venting – everyone has to blow off steam and let out the shit they deal with every now and then – but I was glad to not have it directed at me.
At least she had Dad to put up with it. While it seemed that my parents weren’t exactly in love anymore, they definitely did love each other, and I supposed that was good enough. They were happy in their twenty year marriage.
I wondered if I would ever be with someone for that long. Love another so much that even after the romance diminished, we would still happily spend the rest of our lives together. It didn’t sound too bad, though I liked to think that, maybe, someday, I could find love strong enough that it'd last forever.
I’d like to believe in true love, I really would, trust in that romance of the Disney movies. But I seemed like just that – something from a fairy tale. And how realistic are those?
That night was exceptionally average, nothing special, and quite boring. A lot like me, actually. But despite that, it was a good enough way to end a decent day. It wasn’t like I spent every second of my life tempted to dive off a cliff. The bad moments, those really fucking bleak times when nothing at all mattered, weren’t constant, but they happened often enough.
I didn’t know what brought them on, and that’s scary, isn’t it? Having no control over yourself. Stupid, ‘cause, theoretically, you are the only thing you have total power over. There’s a reason why theory and fact are separate things, I guess.
I often found myself thinking about how I could spend my life divided between contentedness and borderline depression. I didn’t quite see how it was possible, but I suppose what they say is true; anything can happen.
There were so many other impossibilities that I’d rather see come to life, but, be as that may, the world did not care what I wanted.
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I'm still worried that this story is really just incredibly boring, despite what you guys tell me. I think this chapter is the worst offender on that front, and its probably a really shitty way to come back from a two week break, so I apologize for that. There are just some things that I need to write, and the stuff in this fell into that category. I hope you, by some chance, liked it anyways. Please comment and vote and tell me you didn't fall asleep!
xoxo
Rose
P.S. My trip was actually amazing! Thank you guys for all the well wishes and for putting up with this chapter's delay, and I had a great time, although I do have a new found appreciation for Cali weather and my bed. Besides that, best week I've had in a long time.