<No new messages>
Nari frowned at the computer screen. She closed her emails, then opened them again to check one more time.
Not that her father knew her email address. Nari didn't know why she expected anything. But she didn't have a phone, so he had no other way of reaching her.
After the hasty message she left him, Nari....well, she wanted some kind of recognition from her dad that she wasn't living with him anymore.
But nothing. For all she knew, he hadn't checked his answering machine.
Heck, for all she knew, he didn't even know she wasn't there.
Nari wondered if the god of family relations were laughing at her. Like,
'you haven't been living at your house for an entire week! Guess who hasn't noticed? That's right, your drug-dealing, alcoholic father!'
She rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes, frustrated.
"Hey, you up?" The door to the guest room creaked, and Nari quickly closed the window on the computer as Jeno entered the doorway.
"Yeah," she said, clearing her throat, which had closed up. "Yeah, for a while."
He grunted. "How long, exactly?"
Nari glanced at the window. "I don't know. A few hours, maybe?"
Jeno's face twisted. "A few hours? It's like, fuckin' noon."
"So?"
"It's Saturday."
Nari sighed.
How typical.
Jeno would be the kind of person who slept well into the afternoons on weekends.
Not Nari. She was an early bird. "You know, some of us enjoy the morning air."
"Yeah, well, some of us are idiots," he retorted. "What the hell do you do the whole time?"
"Things." Nari turned off the computer, silently resolving not to make any more desperate checks to her emails.
If her dad didn't care, fine. She didn't care about him, either. "I made pancakes."
Jeno perked up. "Pancakes?"
"Yes, and there's some left over. You would know that, if you got up on time."
He made a face at her, then turned to trot down the hallway into the kitchen.
Nari got up and followed, making sure to close the door behind her.
The guest room was, like every other room in the house, gorgeous. On the bottom floor, with windows looking across the backyard, it was huge.
It had a queen-sized bed and a TV on the wall, and its own computer. There was an armoire in the corner that Nari had at first avoided using, but eventually it had been too good to resist.
Last Saturday, she and Jeno had taken his monster truck down to the trailer park to grab some things.
Her father was out and the door had been locked, but Nari hopped in through the always-open kitchen window and packed most of her clothes in an old suitcase.
Jeno teased her for breaking in, but she thought he was secretly a little impressed.
Now she'd been living in his house for an entire week. It was already starting to feel like a home, and that scared Nari.
