Rooftop

10.

                "Hey Dad. I left you a voice mail last week, but you didn't respond, so I thought that I would call you up again, just to make sure that you got it. So if you get this one, please call me back. I really want to talk to you. Thanks, bye." I close my phone and stick the piece of masking tape that I wrote down his number on, back up to my wall, with the other phone numbers I have up there. Which, in all fairness isn't a lot: only my dad's, my mom's, Brad's, and mine (just so that I wouldn't forget it). I start to look around my room, and realize exactly how incredibly bland it is, with just some white walls, wooden furniture, my closet, and the white sheets on my bed. There aren't even drapes on the window, which doesn't seem like the best idea considering the fact that it has no screen, and never closes, allowing bugs to come in whenever they want to.

                I quickly run downstairs, where I grab a hammer and nails out of my mom's toolbox in the garage, because we gave our electric screwdriver away, and even if we still had it, I was always too scared to use it so it wouldn't have helped me out very much. I go back up to my room, and grab some of the records I know I have extras of, from my wooden bookshelf. I pull them out of their covers, and start pounding them into the walls. I finish up my fifth, and then go back to my bed, to grab another one, and then see Brad sitting there.

                "I have a front door, you know."

                "Where's the fun in that?" He asks me, while looking down at one of the records, eyebrows scrunched together in confusion, "Why are you hanging this one up? It's one of the best Foreigner album ever."

                "I have two other copies of that one. I have extras of all of these, except for the one over there," I reference to one of the other records, "which was one of my really old ones. I would play it almost constantly, because it's one of those that tells you a bedtime story, this one being Cinderella, which was one of my all time favorite stories growing up. So by now, it's so scratched  up I wouldn't have even known what it was if it didn't have a label." By now he has gone over to the shelf with my records on it, and is picking out one, which I'm assuming he wants to listen to. He puts it into the record player, and I know within the first note of the song that it's a Bruce Springsteen album.

                "Can you come over here and help me nail the record up?" I ask him, because he hasn't really been doing anything productive since he got here, and it would make my life much easier. He comes over and takes the hammer from me and a nail off the floor, then pounds it in. Then he curses.

                "I hit my thumb!" I take a quick look down at it and see that it doesn't look too hurt, and that he's just being dramatic, as usual.

                "You would, idiot. Can I have my hammer back?" He reluctantly hands it back to me, and I hang up the next seven records without hitting any of my fingers once, and then the song playing on the record player changed to Dancing in the Dark.

                "Dancing in the Dark!" Brad yells, for no apparent reason.

                "What?"

                "It's the song that's playing right now."

                "I knew that."

                "Then why didn't you say it?"

                "Because I didn't know that I was supposed to. But, I'll definitely destroy you next round."

                "But you probably already know every song on the record, and the order of it. So it wouldn't be fair unless we used a record that you hadn't heard a million times already. You know what. We should go to the Bean to play!" He runs down the stairs as I'm putting all of the nails onto a shelf and slipping a pair of shoes on before going down to follow him. When he sees that I'm going down the stairs, he sarcastically looks at his wrist with no watch on it, as if he's checking the time.