Chapter One: Lava Lamps and Incense
I look over at my clock which reads exactly eleven fifty-three, and I rub my eyes. It's Friday night and I have nothing better to do than sit in my room watching movies, but I'm not complaining. I'd much rather be doing this than be out with a bunch of ignorant people who are just talking bad about each other, calling each other foul names, telling strangers their best friends biggest secret just to get into the strangers ¨clique¨ and having sex with people they probably just met. This isn't unfamiliar to me, this is what I do. I sit at home laying in my big queen size bed, under all of my cozy blankets, watching movies, all movies, and drawing. I just finished watching Stand By Me and I'm not even a little tired. I have a pile of movies on my bedside table, the same movies I watch every weekend, in the same order. No, I don't get sick of them. Every weekend I watch Forrest Gump first, then A Series of Unfortunate Events (which also happens to be the best book series in the world), Dirty Dancing, The Breakfast Club, Peter Pan, The Lion King, Stand By Me, and lastly The Goonies. Only some of the best movies known to man. I don't know why I randomly threw two Disney into the middle of a mix of 80s movies, but I never bothered to change my order, I still won't. I have a nice flow going with my movies.
I'm about to put in my last movie and yet I'm still wide awake. The Goonies is the only movie (out of my every weekend movies) that is a VHS rather than DVD, so every time I watch it I have to wait for it to rewind back to the beginning from the previous weekend. I groggily roll out of bed and walk over to my DVD/VHS player and put in my movie. While I wait for my TV screen to go to blue so I can hit rewind, I walk over to my desk and turn on my lava lamps. I have five of them, all from my best friend Brady. I pick up my box of incense sticks from the shelf on my desk and carefully pull one out of the little plastic bag inside. I hold the long, thin stick up to my nose and inhale deeply. After about ten seconds, I exhale, they smell like laundry detergent. Call me weird but I love the scent. I take my deep green lighter out of my front right pocket and light the stick then set it down in its holder, being careful not to burn any loose pieces of paper I have on my desk, then set the lighter on top of the box of incense sticks. I can see my TV screen turn blue out of the corner of my eye so I walk over to it and hit rewind.
I decide that I'm kind of hungry and walk upstairs to get some food. My room is downstairs, in the basement, away from everybody else. I like being in the basement. It's like I have my own house down there because I have the whole space to myself. This includes my room, a bathroom, and a living room. The only bad thing about living in the basement is that it's always cold; I keep probably four comforters on my bed. I walk to the refrigerator and looking inside... nothing. I walk into the pantry hoping to find Oreo's or something along those lines... nothing. All we have left in the cupboard is five packages of Ramen Noodles, bread, peanut butter, and mashed potatoes. My parents are out of town, and my brother and I devoured the food within the first three days of them being gone. I grab a package of ramen and crush it up, then put it in the microwave.
While my ramen is cooking I walk down the hall to check on my brother to see if he's asleep. I do this every night before I go to sleep, that boy means the world to me. His room is right across from our parent's room just in case there's ever an emergency. His door is always open because he's scared of the dark, it may sound stupid but he's only six.
"Peter?" I whisper quietly in his room. His eyes are closed, and he's curled up in all the blankets on his bed. I close his door quietly when I hear the microwave beep, making sure not to wake him up. After I finish cleaning up the kitchen I head back downstairs to my cozy room. My walls are a dark wood, which in my opinion is very comforting. I have a light gray carpet and I hate the way it feels on my bare feet, but that's with any carpet. I have this dark wallpaper coating my walls that is the image of what looks like a crowd of children as terrified as someone walking in a graveyard alone at midnight. Scattered frivolously across my walls are random drawings that either I have done, or that have been done for me over the years. One wall, the wall behind my bed, is covered of pictures of my best friend and I. The pictures vary from when we were in first grade, to seventh grade, to now as juniors in High School. One of my favorite pictures of us, right above my head when I sleep is a candid shot of Brady, my younger brother and I at the park across the street from my house. I had just fallen, go figure, I'm clumsy like no other, and Peter, was laughing at Brady and I because when Brady tried to help me up I pulled him down with me... and that was when the photo was taken, right as that little punk Brady got pulled down too. It's my favorite because we all look so happy, we were only freshman then. There's a good thirty-some-odd pictures of Brady and I at a photoshoot we did together last year when Brady was modeling. He doesn't do that anymore though, he thinks it's dumb. There's some pictures from prom, pictures that we just take on our lazy weekends, and there's even one of Brady and I in the newspaper. We did a lemonade stand together the summer after fifth grade and just so happened to serve someone who worked for our towns paper, she thought we were ¨the most adorable little things since puppies!¨, that my friend is how you land front page in the daily newspaper.
Anybody who doesn't know Brady or I would probably walk into my room and assume that we're dating. I wouldn't be surprised, that's what the pictures make it look like. But we're not. I've known Brady since we were in kindergarten. He sat next to me in Mrs. Sauer's class and he always made fun of my glasses. I hated Kindergarten, the tables were always lined up in precise rows with exactly five chairs on each side of the table, all of which were too small for me to sit in and be able to comfortably scoot my chair under in. Not only that, but the walls were decorated in bright cut-outs of shapes like triangles, squares, circles, and other dumb shapes that just gave me a headache to look at. They were like the neon-highlighters! Brady at the time was a jerk, but he didn't care because everyone thought he was cool being he was the tallest kid in the class. He had bright blonde hair at the time, it's brown now, light freckles on his cheeks and hazy brown eyes... which he proudly flaunted in my face because his eyes could see perfectly. Really, twenty out of twenty vision. Anyway, he and all of his friends would call me four eyes, and tease me. This wasn't hard to do since he could say something as simple as ¨Duh¨ to me when our teacher answered one of my ¨dumb¨ questions and I would cry. Brady and I were not friends. My "best friend" in kindergarten was this girl named Jane. She always told me that the reason Brady made fun of me was because he wanted my attention. So, I, being the dumb kindergartner I was, asked him. He denied it at first, telling me that he'd never want to be friends with somebody with two more eyes than a normal person should have. Then, he told me on the bus that he really just wanted to be my friend. I can't remember a single day since then that we haven't talked. Silly little back story, but that's how I came to find my best friend.
I carefully take my Ramen Noodles out of the Microwave with a paper towel firmly wrapped around the bowl so I don't burn myself. When I get back in my room I hear my VHS player click loudly, that means it's done rewinding. So, I curl up in bed with my Ramen and hit play.
~
I'm halfway through my movie when I hear someone knocking on my door. Peter peeks his head in,
"Carson?"
"Yes, sweetie?"
"Can I sleep in here with you?" Peter has really bad nightmares.
"Of course, come here." Peter crawls on to my bed and curls up next to me, he likes to cuddle. He falls asleep almost instantly, and so do I.
