A World Alone

Chapter 4: Bad reputation

Scraping walls isn't even as funny as it sounds. I don't even think it sounds like a lot of fun, to be honest, but one may think 'oh, we gotta do some painting, first let's do some scraping, how hard can it be?'

Extremely hard, that's the answer. And not because it's really difficult, or because it's a nearly impossible task, but because it's just... tiring. It's having this tool in your hand and using it to get rid of some wall's painting, and then just... well, then you do the same thing over and over again, until your fingers are numb and you wonder why did you even say yes to such an idea in the first place.

Not everything's bad, anyway. To be fair, actually, nothing besides the scraping is actually bad. Matt's extremely mysterious, and only talks the necessary amount of times, says the right amount of things, and does the right amount of questions (he hasn't changed much in the span of three days anyway), but at the same time, he's nice enough to put up with my random questions, random conversation topics, and the fact I kinda insist on painting the pool before anything else so I can use it, to which he agrees.

By the way, I learn a few things about Matt during my first week helping him with the house.

The first and main one is that he's a pretty reserved kind of guy. He doesn't mind me talking, I guess, and he sorts of opened up a little bit as days went by, but he'd rather talk about anything but himself. I don't blame him, though, and to be honest, I hate making conversation with people I don't like, but that's definitely not the case with him. I dig him, he's okay, so I like talking to him... maybe he's just reserved and a quiet, kind of guy, or maybe he doesn't like me... I doubt it, because I wouldn't be helping here if he did, but... well, I don't know. You never know, I guess.

If there's one thing Matt and I definitely seem to have in common is that we both go out at night all the time. It's personally not my favorite plan in the entire universe, but it's better than staying in my house, so I just go wherever the party takes me. And Matt, as quiet and reserved as he seems, is always looking for a place to crash and some party to go to. Maybe it doesn't even have to be a party, just a club in which some random band is playing and people can have a good time, you know what I mean? And then, after midnight, he usually leaves for home and I stay a little longer, because there's always someone I know somewhere. He gets me in two different night events during that first week, and by Friday, he's already inviting me to another one.

My dad's a film director, and my mom is a director of photography, or basically a photographer. Even when I lived in Argentina from the ages of five up to ten (since my mom's from there) I used to come here for the summers, and I used to meet the same kids over and over again —sons and daughters of friends of my parents. As I grew up and moved back here permanently, we still hung out a lot, since our parents still did, and do, and they introduced me to the party life, and a lot of people. Some of them were okay, and some others were complete assholes. Most of them are, to be honest. They're arrogant assholes, vain assholes, misogynist assholes, and overall just plain idiots who think that because they were born and raised in a big house they have the right to treat everyone who crosses their paths like shit.

By the way, I was pretty shy when I was a kid. I think hanging out with people I didn't quite like changed a lot of things for me, since I realized that... well, I needed to stand up for myself. I didn't always think like that by the way, and I certainly wasn't like that either. When we were kids and still lived together, Lily used to hang out with me and my so-called friends a lot. They were her friends as well, and she had other friends as well. I was just entering my teenage years back then, and I was still a shy, introverted kid. Lily used to stand up for me when some asshole boy or girl said something about me that wasn't quite nice, even if they always said that 'it was a joke', or stuff like that. I guess that's the kind of thing stupid people say when they are being the stupid people they are but just don't want you to think that they are.