Page 18 of One More Chapter
penelope
I learneda lot of things about Anthony Ellis on our Christmas vacation.
For instance, he eats sugary cereal for breakfast with cartoon characters on the boxes.
He tans a warm, bronzy color that most women are envious of, but his nose burns no matter how much sunscreen he applies.
He feels like a mess-up, a mistake, in most areas of his life. He does not feel like he is good enough.
Do you know what Ifailedto learn?
Anthony Ellis is a seventeen-alarms kind of guy.
And they’re all loud asfuck.
Seriously, when the first one goes off at—oh, fuck me,four-forty-five A.M.—it sounds like an army siren. I pop out of bed thinking there’s an air raid. The world is ending. I willnotsurvive the draft.
But then it’s over.Did I dream it?No. Because by the time my heart rate drops from the speed of a rabbit’s and I finally settle back into my pillow and get to the edge of sleep, it happens again. The house-shaking, Richter Scale alert, bomb sound.
I am up and out of bed, this time with the closest object I can find to use as a weapon. I follow the noise straight intoAnthony’s wing of the house. Right as the sound ends abruptly, I push open his bedroom door to see him snuggling back against the pillows. He’s lying on his stomach, both arms wound around the pillows in a hug. He groans, and my body betrays me, because I can’t help but trace his bare back, and the hills and valleys of his shoulders.
It’s totally fine. I snap out of it as soon as his damn alarm goes off again. This time, only one thing is louder than its siren sound.
“ANTHONY ELLIS WHAT THE FUCK?!?”
I shake him awake, gripping those shoulders I only felt through his ratty old Red Sox T-shirt the last time I touched him.
“Hmm? What?”
His head pops up like he’s a toddler being woken from a car nap, not a grown man being shaken awake to diffuse the bomb that won’t stop going off. Still, he reaches over—to theoppositeside of the bed from which he is sleeping on, might I add—and whacks a camo-colored dome shaped item to silence the sound. He settles back against the pillows, a sleep drunk look pasted on his face as he sighs, then yawns, then blinks up at me and tilts his head sleepily.
“Why do you have my mom’s Elvis squirrel?”
“Why do I…” I look down. Sure enough, I am clutching a weird thrift store statue of a squirrel dressed as Elvis. My weapon of choice when I scurried out of my bedroom. However, that isnotthe matter at hand. I stomp over to his bedside table and pick up his clock, shrieking, “Because I thought we were beinginvaded by a foreign country! Whatthe fuck is that?”
“My alarm clock.”
“Absolutely not.”
“What do you mean?—”
“Not while you’re living here,” I chuckle, kind of manically.
Ant groans, roll-flops across the bed, and lifts the clock to his eyes.
“Pen, it’s not evenfive-thirtyyet. I still had two more alarms to snooze!”
My jaw drops. The only appropriate reaction.
“You’re telling me that I would have had to endure notone,buttwomore rounds of this?” My voice has dripped down to a venomous quiet. One step before DEFCON 1.
“It’s the only way I can wake up, and I have to be at the house early today, which means I have to get in my gym timerearlier,” he whines.Whines. Like a teenager whose mother just told him to get off the PlayStation.
“You have a roommate now, and there isno wayI am suffering through this until you move out in…”
“December,” he mumbles, clearly still pissed I woke him up before he had to be.As if he wasn’t doing that to himself.
“Itcannotcome soon enough. Merry Christmas to me.” I round the foot of his bed, taking my victory in the fact that he’s still pouting, and clearly won’t be getting back to sleep anytime soon. “Get an Apple Watch or something. Or turn the damn thing down. I am not waking up to World War III every morning for the next four months.”