Out on a Limb

4

Life Lesson: If people are already pissed off at you, don’t piss them off more.

Although I slept two hours earlier than planned, I woke up later than I expected myself to. I must’ve felt so bitter and depressed the previous night that I forgot to set my alarm to four in the morning. It was four-thirty, and I was still spread out on the bed sheet with eye bags, hair grease, an empty stomach and one helluva stink.

I even forgot to switch on the air conditioner, resulting in my shirt sticking to my back and my pants sticking to my thighs. I was sweating like hell. Literally like hell. I felt like I was burning up all over.

I lifted my seemingly heavy head up and struggled to hold it place before gravity overpowered my muscles. All I could see from my limited vision was the rest of me, my closet, and the door to my bathroom. The more I urged myself to get my ass up and move around, the more distant the walls appeared to be.

I bent my back backwards and heard my bones crack.

“Gaah…shit,” I went limp like a ragdoll and fell out of bed. What a waste of oxygen I was. At least the thick blanket was able to soften my landing.

“Unf…c-clothes then...uh…shower…yeah.” With the blanket wrapped around my body as if I was a burrito, I crawled with my elbows and knees to pull out whatever fell out of the closet first. With just my luck, I got some old and worn-out shirt that had some compass-like figure on it, except the arrows were all different lengths and sizes; it was some remarkable shape. I then grabbed a pair of jeans, a pair of socks, fresh underwear, and a pair of shoes; all of these were on the top of the pile. My parents always complained that I didn’t “rotate” my clothes, meaning that I was supposed to grab something from the bottom which would end up on top after being laundered. However, I had a strong affection for the top three of everything,

I stuffed everything in my giant burrito wrapping and crawled into my bathroom. I was extremely tempted to set the bathtub faucet on warm to soothe myself, but I did what had to be done; if I needed to wake myself up, then I had to get the startle of near-freezing water.

I undressed (again, in the burrito), crawled out naked, and climbed into the tub in one giant splash so I wouldn’t flinch before I would even dip an entire pinky toe. Sitting there without moving a muscle while waiting for your biological structure to adjust to the water temperature was pretty damn annoying. It was totally worth it though, because my energy level skyrocketed off measurability.

“WOOOH, THAT’S COLD,” I had some kind of freak spasm in the water and chattered my teeth. Damn right I was awake.

Within the next five minutes, I was able to bathe, get dressed, do a lot of personal hygiene crap and eat breakfast. Sooner or later I was gonna get sick of eating jam sandwiches.

So much for being the early bird all the time. What if they were already in the car, waiting for me? What if they already drove off? They could be on their way to the Fence, or on their way here to drag me out of the house…but what were the chances? After last night they probably couldn’t care less about me anymore.

I swore that the first thing that I would do upon seeing them - if I did see them at all – was to apologize for being 1. A pretentious dick, and 2. Late.  My predicted reactions for each of the four were, as follows: Dawn would tell me to forget it and get in the car. Jarvis would be like ‘whatever man’ and laugh. Lexus would smile forgivingly. Braxton wouldn’t even care; he seemed like a nice guy after all.

 I knew Jarvis and Lexus much, much, more, so I supposed that my assumptions for them would be more accurate. Nevertheless, I was never the expert on foretelling; I was leaning towards the factual side of knowledge.

Before I left, I took a quick peek at my parents’ room. They still weren’t home. I really hated it whenever they would stay overnight somewhere else and not even bother to tell me. I used to always wait up for them all night as a child because I couldn’t go to bed without a ‘good night’ from both of them. Over the years, that hope had diminished into nothing but a tiny urge to even care about their whereabouts.

I took a deep sigh and went back down the stairs to leave. It was still reasonably dark and I needed to use my phone light to make my way down the sidewalk all the way to the R subdivision.

Wait, I have a phone.

Coming to the realization that I could call my friends at any given moment, I stumbled over my own foot and nearly fell; fortunately, I was able to balance my stance before I broke a bone or anything. Apparently, my brain cells seemed to shy away during the dim hours prior to dawn. And speaking of Dawn, like, with a capital D, damn, I really wanted to avoid her in the current time.

My hands fumbled with my phone as the light on the opposite surface danced around the darkness. It was terribly eerie. The shadows of the trees and poles constantly changed due to the rapid moving of the light that I even thought that I saw a person running on the opposite sidewalk. Now I really badly wished that I rolled past six blocks in my burrito blanket instead of blindly treading down six blocks like an idiot. Well, the first one would make me look like even more of an idiot, but better a safe idiot than a sorry idiot.

Eventually, I scrolled down through my Contacts List to Lexus and called her. It rung several times and my heart nearly sunk to my stomach when I concluded that she already may be driving when she picked up just as I was about to drop the line.

“Hey,” I heard Lexus say from the other side of the line.

“Hey, hey!” I over-excitedly answered back. “Are you, are you, are you, are you still at your house?” I was picking up speed now, running as fast as I could without ending up falling on the pavement.

“Actually…” I could hear the anxiety in her voice. Obviously she was withholding something she didn’t want me to hear.

“Actually?! Actually what?” Oh my god, didn’t she dare tell me they left me behind…

“Actually, we’re waiting for you. Looks like the early bird’s late. No, but seriously, you just wasted half an hour of everyone’s time.”

“Oh, really? Okay, great. I’m almost there, just like, two more blocks. Yeah, fine, I’m not the early bird anymore. You happy now? And yes, I know I woke up late. Sorrysorrysorry…okay see you, I’m nearly there,” I took in everything Lexus said, threw back answers one by one, and immediately hung up before she could bombard me with more concerns.   In frantic situations such as these, I wasn’t of much help as I got discombobulated all the time.

I picked up my pace a little more; I was gonna get there real soon if I strived hard enough. I was running for what felt like forever and my legs had retained the same motion for so long that they were going numb when I heard a voice I had longed to hear from several feet ahead of me.

“Keep the noise down, idiot. You’ll wake the neighbors.”

I shone my light directly in front of me, and there was Jarvis, standing straight in front of the car, cross-armed, and very irritated. I moved my wrist around so that the light shone on the entire car along with its occupants: Lexus was slacking in the driver’s seat, Braxton was sitting on the trunk, and finally Dawn was lying down on the ground, having used up every last ounce of her potential patience. What all these people had in common was that in less than 24 hours they had been all fed up with my bullshit, and two of them only officially met me yesterday.

As soon as I got near enough for them to hear me at regular conversation volume, I said sorry eight times in a row; two for each person for the two reasons to my necessity for apology.

And as for my predictions on how each person would react upon my arrival, I was way off. The looks they were giving me at that moment were beyond anything I deemed in the danger zone.

“You fellas better be making a promise to me this instant,” Dawn pulled off her wool hat and frustratingly ran her fingers through her short locks of hair.

“As soon as we get there, we are definitely throwing this boy at the Fence.”