Every Breath You Take

4

So freaking warm.

When did anyone ever want to leave their bed? Especially with all the fuzzy blankets on it, I could just burrito wrap myself in them and go to sleep forever.... With snack breaks of course.

Ugh. Summer come back please. I missed going to bed at three in the morning and waking up whenever the heck I wanted!

My eyes were heavy and for a good few minutes, I considered ditching school altogether for sleep. Peeking at the neon clock on my bedside table, I realized I had five minutes before my alarm was supposed to officially go off. Five minutes?! Only?!

Even though I could hear dad's radio playing downstairs and Aiden making a ruckus in the kitchen doing God-knows-what, I was not wasting a second of those five minutes doing anything else besides sleeping.

It seemed as soon as I had found a comfortable position on my stomach, buried beneath my blankets, a pillow on top of my head, the damn alarm went off. I had never wanted to take a sledgehammer to the thing as much as I wanted to do so now... Damn thing! I needed to find an alarm that didn't have those annoying rings.

Rolling along my bed, the blankets rolling with me, I faced my window. The light was harsh, and I had to squint for a little before my eyes adjusted to the light. My cheek pressed against the soft pillow; my arms tucked inside the blankets. SO WARM!

My eyes drifted from the window to the small bedside table squished between the wall and my bed. Crap. I needed to get up, Casey would be here in a 25 minutes to pick me up and I was still in bed, dead to the world.

Buttttt... I could always stay in bed all day and not go to school.

A loud crash came from down stairs and I jerked upwards. Maybe not...

Groaning, I flopped back on the bed, glancing at my night stand. Besides the empty Gatorade bottle, my eyes fell on the small picture frame, clearly made by four-year old me with glitter and stickers. The small, glittery pink and blue frame bordered a small photo of my mom and I.

We were on summer vacation in Cabo. The same trip Aiden got a really bad sunburn on his back and Isaac tried teaching me how to do a dive into the pool—which ended up with little me going head first into the bottom of the pool...not a great experience.

I could barely recall that specifics of the Cabo trip or the night the photo was taken, but then again, I was barely five years old and all I ever wanted to do when I was five was eat chicken nuggets, play with some random kids, and sleep. But if we were really throwing some serious shade, I could also blame my memory loss of that night on dad, who had let me have a little too much of his Pina Colada—mom was not happy about that.

The photo was taken on one humid night in Mexico, my mom and I sitting in one of those outdoor restaurants with tiny lights that floated above us, the camera catching only blurry lights that actually made the lights look like fairies flying by. The photo, taken by Aiden accidentally when he was testing out dad's new camera, was focused on mom and I. She had lifted me just the slightest from her lap, our foreheads pressed together. We were both laughing as the camera caught just one second out of a million.

My eyes trailed down the photo to the small gold necklace around my neck. The necklace had been a birthday present for me that I had never taken off, not ever. The moment my parents had given me the necklace, I had fallen in love with it right away. It had been my pride and joy and I always wore it everywhere I went, even in the shower which mom had warned me many times about.

See I had this thing where I lost necklaces quite frequently, whether they broke while I was on the swings or falling off my neck and down the drain of the shower. Again, luck and I didn't get along so well.