Peri

Chapter 8: Regularly Scheduled Programming

I woke up later than usual that day, around one, feeling annoyingly drowsy. I had gone to bed pretty early the night before, so I had to have gotten at least sixteen hours of sleep, which should have more than made up for how little I'd slept the day before. I considered trying to go back to bed, but, if anything, the problem was probably too much sleep. So, throwing off the covers, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and pushed myself into a standing position, determined to get a good late start to my day.

The cold tile of my bathroom floor against the soles of my bare feet helped shock me awake a little, but that didn't keep me from staring groggily at my reflection while I washed my hands. I couldn't stop glancing at the bags under my eyes, which had been a staple of my look for the past few years. My glasses helped to hide them, but my friends always told me I looked better in contacts, which usually meant I went with the latter and just tried not to think about the bags too much. I attempted to fix my hair a bit, because I wasn't completely down with Peri seeing my wild bedhead right out the gate, but it felt like everything I did only made the cowlicks worse. I ran a wet comb through them, but nothing short of soaking them would get them to lay fully down. It was really frustrating, because it would have been easier if I had just showered, but I became so hungry during the time I wasted on my hair that making that correction was off the table. I was just going to have to walk downstairs looking like a disheveled, half-drowned rat and hope Peri didn't see me. I almost starting trying to fix the part again, but a loud gurgling from my gut told me it was good and truly time to give up. So, I took a deep breath, peeled myself away from the mirror, and headed to the kitchen.

It must have been my lucky day, because Peri was fast asleep on the couch. That worry out of the way, I quietly bustled around the kitchen, searching for something I felt like eating. I ended up making a TV dinner, partially because I was feeling impatient, but mostly because I didn't know how to cook anything that required a process more complicated than boiling water in the microwave and tearing open a flavor packet. I wasn't sure why Mom had thought it would be a good idea to leave me home alone considering I was essentially a helpless baby.

I felt less angry and a bit more awake after eating. While dining on my fine meal of graying roast beef, watery mashed potatoes and tasteless vegetables, I noticed my sneakers on the shoe rack in the laundry room, which was a bit odd because I usually kept them by my bed. However, I assumed I'd accidentally left them somewhere else during all of the excitement yesterday, so Mom had brought them down before going to the airport. She was really overdramatic about me keeping my shoes in my room. When we first moved into the house, she would come upstairs just to take them down and put them on the shoe rack, but I was just as persistent. After a few months, she would only move them if I left them anywhere else in the house; that was our reluctant compromise. Every now and then, one of us would push it to see if the other was ready to budge yet, but up to that point we had both held strong.

I took an especially long shower that afternoon. At first, I got sucked into thinking about how I missed my family, but that train of thought got derailed by a strange ringing in my ears. It was truthfully more akin to a looping soundbite than a ringing, kind of like a shovel breaking dirt over and over. Something about it seriously set me on edge, even making me a little nauseous. Shoving my head under the stream, I tried to force it out with the sound of the water beating against the back of my skull. Eventually, I managed to replace it with a bit of CRJ, which inevitably led to me lip-syncing and performing an improvised dance routine right there in the shower. When all was said and done, I got out feeling uncharacteristically confident in myself, ready drop jaws in my baggy sweatpants and over-sized hoodie. The moment I saw my final look in the mirror, I knew it was going to be a good day, because you couldn't hardly tell I'd taken a shower at all.