How annoying to wake up and find yourself alive.

This was my first thought, hurled unkindly into my mind by blazing sunlight and beligerant alarm clocks. The morning heralded the fact that I had failed yet again; groggily, I tossed the white capped bottles into the waste basket.
These days were too outspoken for my taste.
What a pain in the neck.

“Gosh you’re noisy.”
Through the crack in the doorway, I could just see the owner of that voice- one clear blue eye watching my every move. Little punk.
“What’re you here for, Slugger? Dropping out of school already?”
“I don’t gotta go if I don’t wanna”, the little Punk declared, then admitted that his school was closed. “Snowed too much. And don’t call me Slugger. It’s sissy.”
I’d forgotten he had quit t- ball last spring. Little football- playing punk.

“You look awful. What happened to your eyes?”
I told him it was probably nothing worse than what was going to happen to his eye if he didn’t stop hiding back and spying on me. “Come out from behind there, will ya? You sure are inquisitive this morning.”
Punk informs me that it’s afternoon, inching his way into my room as he speaks. “Maybe that’s why you look like that- you slept so long it messed your eyes up. Gosh you look just terrible. You couldn’t pay me to want to look like that.” His last statement was made from behind the wall. He’d lost his nerve.
“Not for a million bucks.”
I heard the Punk’s footsteps running for his life down the hallway, like I was coming after him or something. Fat chance. I wasn’t going anywhere.
Peering at my reflection, it soon became apparent he was right- I looked like a fucking corpse. Not enough eyeliner in the world to make up for that mess.
Shivering, I swung my legs out of bed. The realization that I was going to be snowed in with that Punk all day, feeling like this, hit me as I hit the floor.
What a fucking nightmare.
I took a long drink from the half empty tumbler on my bedside table. Punk’s squeaky voice tunnels through the plywood walls to my ears-
“Not for a million bucks, Mom.”