Staccato

Await the Evening

Because the next day, a Saturday, I wake up to Laurie hopping onto my bed like a puppy and rudely shaking me awake.

"Wake up. Wake up wake up wake up-"

My eyes refuse to open and my mouth feels dry and I am barely conscious of anything except for wanting to smack Laurie around her head hard. I press my face into the pillow and groan.

"Wake up Noeykins!"

"G'way Laur I did homework till fuckin' one am," I slur.

"What?"

My mumble sounded incomprehensible to my own ears.

And I groan again as Laurie proceeds to tug me up by my arms.

She gives up when I stay obstinately glued to my bead, and instead yells into my ear, "Efrim's coming home for dinner this evening."

"WHAT?"

"Knew that'd get your attention."

I'm sitting bolt-upright and staring at her, my sleepy, puffy eyes wide as saucers. Laurie has a shit-eating, brazen grin on.

I groan, falling back down onto the bed.

Yes, my sister suspects that I have an obsession, at least a mild one, on Efrim, because of the numerous times I bring him up whenever we talk about our school life or friends. Not that Efrim comes under the category of 'friends'.

He comes under the category of 'people up their own asses'. Did you see how he just stared and refused to answer when Ms. Drew asked him the reason why he checked off the entire multiple choice paper in a perfect pattern of one right answer followed by six wrong answers? I mean why would you deliberately fail your test?

Laurie's reply was simple: "Because he is an asshole."

Did you see how he just walked off when Giselle was still talking to him?

To that, Laurie had said, "I bet that made you happy, 'cause you're glad he didn't talk to her, ha! Admit it you're in luuurve with him!"

But what she really thinks is this, though (as she has told me during the rare times when we aren't joking and pulling each other's legs): that my broken heart still hasn't mended even after these nine years. That that's all that's there to this. Nothing more. An unfulfilled expectation that remained unfulfilled in me, and festered.

That's what I think is really there to it, too.

"But I wasn't kidding." she says.

I frown, eyes closed, arm thrown across my face, shielding my face from the morning light entering through the window, lighting up my mirror-world into bright, ricocheting endlessness.

"What?" I mutter, quite blank in my head.

"I wasn't kidding. He really is coming this evening. Mom just told me we aren't allowed to go anywhere this evening and she told me not to 'waggle my leg when sitting at the dining table' cause there'll be, well, people. Oh and the douche will be here with his mom and dad."

I remove my arm off my face and stare at her. She doesn't notice my dumbstruck expression and keeps talking.

"Erm, as stupid it sounds it actually isn't. It's a dinner party, boy." she cheers and whoops, raising a hand to the air. "The whole lot's gonna be here, the Eliasson family, the lawyer guys, and this time the Asshole family too. Yayy." she says, mocking jadedly.

"What?"

She looks at me, curly hair pulled into a messy bun over her head, a smirk on her face. "You suddenly slow or something? What's two and two?"

I make an unamused face.

"My god, you are in disbelief," she says, and she, as opposed to me (or my carefully maintained facade), looks very amused. "I bet you wanna jump up and down with glee right now."

"Shut up Laurie, I really don't wanna be waking up to your taunts," I groan, pulling an arm back over my face. I try to make it seem like it's out of annoyance, but I'm shocked and distressed at the blush that promptly floods across my face, and don't want her noticing that now and drive me mad with more taunts. "And get off my bed."

She does get off, but only after taunting me some more, then splattering the whole jug-full of water sitting on my nightstand hard on my face, soaking everything from my pillow to my blankets.

But she didn't have to do that to make me get off my bed.

I am too shaken anyway to be lying still for too long.

~*~

I walk down to the basement, with the intention of spending the rest of my day until evening in my warehouse.

It's a huge work area that we built at the basement, for all the sciency things that I do.

Considering the fact that I have plans to build a 2.3 million electron volt betatronic particle accelerator right here in my warehouse makes it more badass than nerdy if you ask me. I might start working on it next year, or the year after, but definitely sometime in the near future, and definitely after my dad takes me on that promised visit to Fermilab this year.

There's all the paraphernalia that's associated with a typical mad-scientist room - starting from a sign at the door that says, 'nerd-alert, enter at your own risk', to random wires and amps and transformers lying about. But the centre stage is the huge empty area cleared toward the far right of the room, for the 400 pounds of transformer steel that will sit there one day, when I begin my project. Currently, a soft yellow flood light bathes the space, as though the space is in waiting, priming itself for the fate that awaits it.

On the wall to the adjacent right to this area is a big greenboard, like that in a school.

It's scribbled all across in white chalk with equations and circuit diagrams.

I walk up to it, my eyes alight under the soft yellow glow from the flood light, and my eyes search through the maze of circuit diagrams, through the equations of Lorentz transformation, Schrödinger's equations for wave function, Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism..

All of them for a math far advanced than the curriculum prescribed for a fourteen year old eighth grader.

But us Williamses have a history of doing things far advanced for our age. Or at least of knowing people who do that.

Because it takes a person who does things far advanced for their age to design a tax and accounting software at the age of fifteen, and get it to run at his own dad's company.

And the person who has achieved this is none other than the 'douche' who is supposed to be visiting us this evening.

~*~