What It Seems | Wattys 2023

Chapter 36

ADALYNNE

The crisp, silky snowmen wrapping paper crumbled through my fingers like a bag of chips, being cradled and snaked around a box. Piece after piece of tape pasted the paper down after every fold to make the box vanish from site under the wrapping material. The red fabric was soon tied around the papered box, and turned into a bow at the top. A tag, that matched the wrapping paper, was placed on the present, and the name 'Aiden' was written.

I chucked the box under my bed along with Jo and Baylor's gift. I ended up buying Jo makeup she's been wanting by watching makeup videos on YouTube.

Once I was finished, I exited my bedroom to check up on my sickly brother. He wasn't down with the flu, just a cold and a fever. When I finished walking down the hall, I approached him where he was resting on the sofa. His head was turned towards the TV and a heavy comforter cascaded around his built figure. I sat near his legs and glanced at him.

"On a scale of one to ten, how bad are you feeling at the moment?" I ask, feeling his warm forehead.

"About a seven and a half," he spoke groggily, pulling the blanket over his shivering body.

"Do you want anything?"

"Coffee and chicken noodle soup." I cringed at the mixed combination but got up to fix his requests.

As I put the can of soup under the electric can opener, I waited for the top of the aluminum can to pop off. It sank into the soup, but was soon demanded out. I poured the soup into a clear, glass bowl and set it in the microwave and pressed three buttons, two minutes and thirty seconds.

While the soup was cooking, I poured some of the left over coffee into a mug and waited for the soup to finish cooking. I grabbed a fork from the silverware drawer and a pack of crackers from the pantry to kill time. I retrieved the hot bowl with oven mittens and sat it on the stove beneath the conventional oven. The coffee mug was placed in the microwave, putting it on for a minute.

I hadn't even heard Jo come in until I heard a sulking voice say, "Hey babe, how are you feeling?"

The coffee was done and I took the mug by the handle and balanced the pack of crackers on the circular sides of the bowl. The fork was placed in the bowl along with the chicken broth, chicken, and noodles.

Aiden was sitting up beside Jo, leaning his head on her shoulder. She was running her hand through his messy bed head, but once she laid eyes on me, she paused.

"Hey Adalynne," she smiled. "Are you going to the party tomorrow?"

I nodded, "Yeah, are you?"

She shrugged her shoulders. I sat the prepared order on the coffee table and propped my body in a recliner.

"Eh, I mean, I don't know them really well. And it depends on how he feels." She pressed her petite hand on the side of my brother's face and kissed the top of his head.

As Aiden ate his soup and drank his steaming coffee, we settled for World War Z with Brad Pitt starring. There's something between my brother and me dealing with zombies - he likes a movie about zombies and I like a show about zombies. Although the infected, dead human beings in the movie ran, like, two times the speed as cheetahs (which I really didn't get), yet on the TV show of The Walking Dead, the zombies wobbled like a new born zebra (but they could walk well). Aiden laughed here and there as the zombie gritted its teeth, making fun of the created zombie by gritting his own teeth.

I began to develop chill bumps as my body began feeling cold. I was lazy to get up, but I was nearly freezing from the dismissal of the heat. Due to Aiden's sickness, he was at the level of a hundred-point-one degrees inside, and he wanted to be cold on the outside. But a nice, warm blanket would cure my cool body temperature.