Beauty and the Pharaoh

Chapter 11 - [Beauty and the Alcohol]

As unbelievable as this may sound... I kind of wasn't surprised when suddenly Atem became a little bit of a better human being. In the past, he tried oh so hard to keep up that image of being a tough guy and now... well, he still tried to keep up that image but sometimes he'd let it all go and be nice.

The prime example was with Grandma Seetha.

Atem treated Grandma Seetha very well.

He was still fairly quiet around her but he did all that he possibly could to keep things easy on her. Like, he never let her lift anything really heavy. And he always went out of his way to help her.

It was strange. But in a good way, of course.

With me... well, not much changed.

He definitely was a lot less snarky with me. He still barked at me sometimes when I did things that annoyed him but he stopped with a lot of the insults.

He stopped calling me ugly, that's for sure.

In terms of his education, he was improving drastically. As I've said multiple times before, Atem was a fast learner. By the time October rolled in, he could read small chapter books with some ease... though vocabulary was his biggest weakness.

The harder the book got, the more frequently they used words that were unfamiliar to him. Which meant he would constantly be asking me questions on what certain words mean.

But that was fine. I could deal with that.

I was just too proud of his progress to deny him any sort of help.

Halloween was on a Thursday night this year and though I stopped going trick-or-treating when I was sixteen, it still saddened me to think that there was a day of school after Halloween.

But despite the fact that I didn't go trick-or-treating... this was still a problem.

Sunny had heard about some frat house Halloween party that she was dying to go to and wanted me to come along too. "I've been to the one held by these boys last year with my ex and it was amazing!" She said as we walked towards the subway station at which we would part ways to go home.

"It's kind of last minute..."

"I'm sure you've got nothing to do tonight though!" Sunny grinned, "C'mon! It'll be fun."

That was what she said about the clubbing event... the same clubbing event that even she thought ended up being horrible.

"Bring Aurora," she then said. She had seen Aurora a couple times since we first met and the two of them liked each other. Sunny also knew that if Aurora came, I would come for sure.

I thought about it for a second but then nodded, "alright! I'll ask Aurora and text you?"

Sunny looked thrilled, "yes! Meet me there at eight, okay? The Frat house is just down the street, not too far from here but I'll send you the address anyways."

I nodded, "sounds good!"

"And you have to dress up! You can't come in without a costume!"

I chuckled, "alright." I know I had an old Halloween costume lying around somewhere.

And then we split up.

I called Aurora when I approached my apartment and told her about what we could do that Halloween evening.

But to my surprise, she said no. "I'm so sorry, girl," she started sounding really sad, "you know me... I'm a procrastinator and I have an essay due tomorrow. I completely forgot about it until this morning and just started it right now."