part one: longest. day. ever.

I don't think I'll ever get used to the racket that our above-us-neighbors (is that a word? I guess I just made it up) make. Like, seriously. They're really loud. Well, not them, but their pipes make a ton of noise. At any rate, so all that mess started at like... hm. I don't remember. I was asleep. Sort of, anyway. I shoved my extra pillow over my head and tried to drown it out. Surprisingly, that was enough that I caught a couple extra winks. Until my marvelous dad, who must have been woken up by the noise, decided that 5 o'clock in the morning is the perfect time to watch television. What the hell, Dad? And he just had to turn it up to-- wait for it, I would've thought this was impossible-- louder than the Room 704 Racket. That was just smashing. (I like the word 'smashing.' It sounds British. I kinda wish I had a British accent, just a little. Then I'd be a blonde American girl with a Chinese name and a British accent. How cool can you get?) But I guess it was his birthday. I couldn't remember how old he was. 


Well, now I was awake. So I got up and went into the living room. I don't really mind getting up early, honestly. Just the noise was annoying. I sat down on the couch. I could hear my dad doing something in the kitchen, so I watched the TV. (If only I could hear it over the racket! Oh, wait.) Of all things, he was torturing our poor speakers in order to watch a nature program. About slugs. Did you know? Slugs are possibly the least fascinating creatures in the animal kingdom. According to Dr. Davis Rodriguez, the Special Guest! on the show, though, they were definitely the bee's knees. He had wanted to be a mollusk biologist since he was fifteen years old. (I wonder if his friends knew about this problem. If he had any.) Here's a piece of advice: don't watch early morning television.


My dad came back out of the kitchen, providing a much-wanted distraction to the slug show. I yelled at him. Nicely, though. The kind of yelling that says "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!" Unfortunately, I had two competitors in the noise category, named The Illustrious Banging Pipes of Room 704 and Dr. Davis Rodriguez, Slug Expert. I wasn't sure if he'd heard me. He did respond, though, but Dr. Davis Rodriguez took that moment to announce that "THERE are TWO beautiful kinds of slugs: MARINE SLUGS and LAND SLUGS!" (Cool it with the slugs, dude. For realz.) So I yelled back, "WHAT?" I tried to project, like they told me to in that one drama class that one time. He looked a little exasperated and said, "I SAID, WHAT?" Oh. I guess he didn't hear me after all.


"Oh!" I said. "I just said, 'Happy birthday, Dad!'" (I kinda feel like I just got overenthusiastic with my apostrophes/quotation marks. But technically there are supposed to be three there, right?) 


Dad looked surprised for a half second. He said "thanks" and then burst into a fit of coughing. My guess is that he hadn't known it was his birthday until I told him. I'm really not that insightful. It's just that he's forgotten the past ten years, too. Once he asked why I made him a cake. Psh. Dads. 


(I'm really not as funny as I think I am. I apologize. This whole storytelling thing is a bit new to me.)


After a brief exchange in which I made a joke about my dad being old (and he appropriately snarked back), I went to go shower. I had to shave my legs for swim practice, so it took me a bit longer than usual. Is that TMI? I think it might be. But I'm a swimmer! Leg-shaving is kind of the... nope. I was going to make a funny analogy, but it's just not there today.


I got out of the shower, admiring my newly shaven shins (alliteration! say it out loud!), and then realized I was late. So I grabbed a hairbrush and tried to comb my hair. I kinda hit myself in the thigh, though, because there weren't any tangles. I have really short hair as of two Thursdays ago. I'm not used to it. I keep seeing my reflection and freaking out. On Saturday I flat-out shrieked because I thought there was an intruder in my mirror. I'm a bit absentminded.


Dang, I keep getting off topic. I went to school, okay? Not much happened. It's the tenth grade. If it weren't for AP classes, we'd all just sit around picking lint out of our navels. Oh, and there was swim practice at some point in there. I swam. Shocker. Actually, there was another swim practice after school. We're preparing for a big meet. Or just trying to turn ourselves into human prunes. I keep meaning to ask our coach about which one it is.


After the afternoon practice, I went to the orphanage with the team. We volunteer occasionally. I actually like it a lot. I like kids. And animals. Well, some would say kids are animals. But they don't meow. Most of them.


I mentioned I like volunteering? Well, I stayed after the rest of the group left. This big black guy was looking kinda bothered by all the mess our group left behind. So I helped gather up all the extra toys and stuff that the kids left all over the place. I talked with him... okay, at him... about our swim meet, and about how I was going to go buy my dad a birthday present right after this, and about my dad being a mailman, and did he know him? he didn't. I think I may have been annoying. Bother. He just kinda looked exhausted. I say 'kinda' way too much. So I'm going to try and stop that if I can. 


I walked to the bus stop to catch the 8:20 bus. I hadn't meant to be out this late, but dammit, I was going to buy my dad a birthday present. I would've last weekend, except for Hana's party. While I waited for the bus, I checked my phone. My dad had called at some point that afternoon. He sounded pretty sad, which was probably because the message was about him getting a flat tire on his mail truck, and how he was going to be late. 


The bus arrived, and I took it all the way out to Flenox Mall, which is in the next town over. I browsed around the mall looking for things my dad would like. He likes coffee, and cats, and being awkward, and musical theatre. (British spelling!!) And apparently slugs. I was being indecisive, but that was okay, because some jerk bumped into me and snatched my purse. I ran after him, but I may have fallen in the fountain... I don't really want to talk about it.


No purse. Hm. Well, I supposed it was time to just go home. 


Wait. Crap. My bus fare was in my purse. I searched my pockets. There wasn't any change. I looked around on the ground, and in the fountain, but there wasn't any change. So I reached into my pocket-- and my phone was dead. How do phones just die when you've just charged them? I'd like to ask a deity about that one. Oh... and the house key... in my purse. Wait, had I even had the house key? Maybe I should've thought of that.


I looked around at the people milling by, but none of them seemed to say Hey, Ask Me To Borrow A Phone. And I was a bit smelly from the orphanage and stank of chlorine from swim practice. My hair may not need combing anymore, but it certainly is still capable of looking like I'm a hobo. I felt really self-conscious. So I didn't ask anyone for their phone. I sort of wandered around aimlessly. I kept checking the time... it was getting really late. I knew the last bus left at 12:30. It was getting close to that, so I went outside to the stop. Someone else flagged the bus when it got there, and I tried to slip on behind them as discreetly as possible. An old woman gave me a look, which either was constipation or a nonverbal accusation of juvenile delinquency. 


Probably constipation.


So I rode the bus for awhile. People kept getting off at their various stops, until there were only a few of us. That's when the driver looked in her mirror and saw me. "Hey, you." I pretended to be texting on my dead phone. Nope, that didn't work. "You. Blonde chick with the blue T-shirt." Oops. That was definitely me. The only other people on the bus were a group of short Latino guys, and they weren't wearing blue.


"Hi!" I said. 
"Did you pay the fare? I don't seem to recall you paying the fare."
"Urrrr. Um." I was a terrible liar.
"That's it," said the driver, and pulled over. "Get off of my bus. I've had enough of you stupid teenagers freaking scamming me. Get off my bus." I obliged. 


Thankfully, it wasn't cold outside. Less thankfully, I was barely on the outskirts of town.


Around four o' clock in the morning, I staggered up the stairs in Castle Apartments, with some severe enhancements to my hobo look from earlier. I knocked on the door, but for some reason, my dad wasn't awake. I banged for about fifteen minutes, and then Ms. Lannes came up the stairs. Thanks to a previous encounter on the stairs (although not at 4 AM), I knew she was the woman responsible for the noisy pipes before five every morning. She lived in 704. 

"Honey, what's wrong?" she asked me. "What are you doing out this late? Isn't it a school night?"
Yes. It was. Damn, I had math homework. 
"Yes!" I said. "And I went to go to the mall and my purse got stolen and I got kicked off the bus and had to walk and my dad won't open the door!" I was a little traumatized, maybe.


"Well, hun, you can come upstairs and wait for him to wake up if you want to." Ms. Lannes was actually really nice, despite her terrible shower pipes. She was about fifty, I think, and sometimes gave people rides to school. Okay, she used to. Now she has the night shift at somewhere I can't remember, and so she can't anymore. Point is, I felt perfectly comfortable following Ms. L up the stairs and chilling on her couch watching America's Next Top Model while she showered. 


A bit too comfortable, maybe. It was, after all, 4 in the morning. Maybe I'd just lie down for a minute. 


That was a mistake, methinks.