Absolute

2

We moved in during the middle of the night. The neighborhood went to sleep and woke up the following morning with four more residents to their little road. Arriving late was not the intention. Or at least I wasn't under the impression it was, but it wouldn't surprise me if my parents had gone out of their way to devise a plan to make us arrive in the middle of the night.

Either way, we did. And Dad wasn't going to just let us go to bed, he ordered us all to help. Mom got to stop helping once the bedding and most of the boxes for her room were unloaded. We had minimal dishes for a four person family and no living room furniture beyond the recliner that technically was Dad's. This house had a dining room, which would remain empty, and a separate laundry / mud room.

Marie and I had rooms upstairs. I was too busy carrying Mom's tote of her many magazines to notice when she slipped off, but when she returned she hissed at me.

"My rooms on the front side of the house," she said.

I didn't even really know what that meant, considering I hadn't been able to make my way upstairs. I decided not to say anything, and she didn't stick around for a response anyways.

Unloading the truck and the moving trailer took a little bit of time, but considering we'd done it countless times before, it was also a breeze. The top of the stairs was an open hallway with a bedroom that took up most of the front half of the house, with a bathroom, a hall closet, and then the room that took up the back part of the house.

Marie's room was surely bigger, not that she'd let me see it before she'd shut the door loudly. She had even moved everything to her room herself, except the mattress that Dad helped with.

Overall we only spent a few hours moving, and by the time the sun was starting to rise in the sky, I'd officially unpacked.

Over the years I'd acquired a bookshelf, well two actually. One wash short and long, with three shelves for books. I used this one for my study material. The other bookshelf was tall but slimmer, and had seven shelves that I used for my pleasure reading. The shelves were crammed in the best I could without looking bad, and more books were in stacks on top of the shelf. My current reads were stacked on top of the short bookshelf.

I stood back and admired the way my bed looked. Really it had been no problem to break my twin bed frame. I'd learned a while ago that the only way to get anything in this house was to absolutely need it. So when the age that Marie had turned when her bed switched from a twin to a larger size had come and gone, I knew it was time to take the matter into my own hands. So I broke the bed frame. It took a while, as I had to do it over several weeks, complaining a bit about it here and there until it could finally break.

Maybe I was being over dramatic, but it worked... almost. Dad was ready to get me a new bed, bigger he'd mentioned, because I wasn't a kid anymore. But Mom had deflected and so for a while I ended up with no bed frame, just a box spring and a mattress on the floor. But I hadn't worried. We'd be moving soon, I knew. I'd have my opportunity.

And then it came. Dad told us we had two days to be packed and ready to move. It was easy, really, with the mattress already being worn out. I'd had the thing since they'd finally gotten me a bed beyond my toddler bed. It wasn't hard at all to have a few springs poke out here and there.

Dad had been slightly irritated when he saw the mattress. I'd shrugged and said it was like that when I took my sheet off, that it had been uncomfortable for a while now. He'd only sighed and left the bed behind. I wasn't sure when he'd picked up the new one, but it was a full sized pillow top mattress with a simple metal frame. I'd pushed the short bookcase against the end of the bed as a sort of footboard.