Pulling Heart Strings

♥ T h r e e

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C h a p t e r T h r e e

WHEN PHOEBE WAKES up for school the next morning, everything from the night before has disintegrated from her mind like a hazy dream.

But that may be solely because of the fact that she's too invested in trying to trample down an eight-legged spawn from the depths of hell with her bunny slippers.

"Die, you stupid demon!" she bellows thunderously as she stumbles into her bathroom, the flashy fluorescent lights piercing her still-bleary eyes painfully. She waits for her vision to adjust before grabbing her toothbrush and squeezing some toothpaste onto it, still on guard for the hairy beast.

She hates spiders. With a passion.

She spots the thing crawling across the door frame and refrains from squeaking out in terror. Instead, she finishes up with her mouth-swishing, wrangles her hair into a quick ponytail, then prepares to battle the offensive beast to the death.

Her bunny-clad foot slams down onto the spider, but after further inspection (and to her growing horror) the spider escapes its impending doom and skitters through the crack under the door.

"Fucking spiders," she mutters to herself, prying the door open with one foot and sliding out into her room.

Within seven minutes, she has successfully completed the task of pulling her jeans on by hopping around the room as if she's in a potato sack race, expletives directed at the spider falling out her mouth like a hyperactive chipmunk on caffeine.

Speaking of caffeine, she really needs a whole cup of it if she's hoping to dissolve her cranky I-hate-Mondays-as-passionately-as-I-hate-spiders sentiment.

"You okay there, Pheebs?" her dad's voice drifts up from the front foyer.

"Swell!" she responds with faked enthusiasm, backtracking throughout the room with narrowed eyes. She reaches out behind and opens the door of her closet, splurging only a brief moment of rifling through the mass of unkempt clothes for a clean shirt before poking out her head again.

She can hear her dad fiddling with the car keys. "If you say so," he says, then adds, "make sure you eat something other than a bowl of ice cream before heading off to school. I'm leaving for work, all right?"

Phoebe's pretty sure she replies back with a positive answer, but she's too occupied with smoothing out the wrinkles on the front of her shirt and allowing her catastrophic fear of spiders getting the best of her. She even contemplates letting the thing off the hook for the sake of salvaging her punctuality to class as she weaves her belt through the loops on her jeans.

But then she spies the daddy long legs innocently trekking along the base of her bookshelf and, once again, the need to destroy it into smithereens becomes all too overwhelming.

That is, until the plop sound abruptly rips her attention away from it. Turning around, Phoebe's mouth immediately flies open to let out a scream at the sight of a slightly disoriented-looking Adrian sprawled on her unfolded pile of laundry, but she slowly settles for a surly lip-purse when he makes a big show of clamping his hands onto his ears.

Grinning, he picks himself up, lifting a lacy red underwear from the pile. "Nice."

Phoebe's nerves feel like they're fizzling. "You mean... that whole thing last night wasn't a dream?" Amidst her tossing and turning during the wee hours of the night, she'd repeatedly chanted "not real, not real, not real, not real" to the tune of "I'm A Little Teapot" until she almost convinced herself enough to get some shut-eye.