Kenny Loggins: Danger Zone
Liam
I couldn't sleep.
There were some things I could do perfectly without even trying, and sleep was one of them.
When I was a child, I had a teacher who we called Mr. Do-Not. He was so strict and gave us rules to follow at the beginning of each day. From Monday to Friday, he gave us one rule each day to follow. They were the same five rules he repeatedly gave us; Sleep before 9:00 pm, Do not talk back at your parents and teachers, Do not go out in the night after 8:00 pm, Do not date without your parents' knowledge, and Pray always.
These five rules, he repeatedly read them to us each day we came to school before starting to teach us. From the day he started giving us these rules to follow, I had never broken any of them. Even without thinking about the rules my teacher had given me as the absolute highest law, my ill health forced me to always sleep at any little chance I got.
In short, sleeping is my talent.
So I did not know why I found it hard to fall asleep now that I felt absolutely fine, and the weather was nice tonight.
After tossing for the hundredth time, I sat up on my bed. I sighed and got up to go to the kitchen. Since I couldn't sleep, I thought that a cup of water will help. I don't know why I thought that water would help me sleep, it just popped up in my head. I planned to Google it later and see whether that was possible. It was already 11:32 pm, so I had to be very quiet so that I would not wake anybody up.
Especially Phoebe, err no, Sia.
Today was the most horrible day of my life. After everything I told myself, after years of training myself to ignore whatever bad thing people say about or to me, I still cried like a baby today. In front of my classmates and my teacher, and embarrassingly, my crush.
At that time, I really wanted the earth to open up and swallow me.
I thought about it for a long time, but I could not understand why these days extraordinary things were happening to me. Most of them were good things, things I didn't expect to happen.
First was Amos, my once-upon-a-time bully who was now extra nice to me. After my embarrassing ordeal, he nearly fought with his two friends, because of me. He now calls them ex-friends, because of me. He was so angry that he was vibrating like a dying fowl. But I was not scared one bit. I felt really safe like he was the elder brother I never had.
The second was Phoebe, who was now called Sia, short for Sapphira. Yesterday I was so shocked that I thought my heart was going to stop. I still can't believe that someone I had been seeing in my dreams for more than a decade is real. I have no explanation for that. Even my mother was speechless. If not because she had been seeing my sketches for a long time, she wouldn't have believed me. My friends are as baffled as I am. No one had an explanation for what was happening.
And it seemed like she hated me at first, but today she defended me. She acted as if she hated my guts one minute, then the next minute she acted like I was her friend. She was very confusing.
After quietly opening my door, I walked on the tip of my toes to the stairs leading to the first floor of the mansion, then I continued to the kitchen. I didn't think I could walk on my toes again, they were sore already. It took me almost a whole minute to open the fridge, and another two minutes to take the bottled water from the fridge. I looked around quickly before closing the fridge. Taking the glass and pouring the water took a significant amount of time and by the time I finished drinking the water, I was almost sweating with the effort it took.
