1 ~ Miserabilia
7.6k 20 183
X
Reading Options
Font Size
A- 15px A+
Width
Reset
X
Table of Contents
Loading... please wait.
A note:

I originally had a longer explanation here that warned about the story centering on a flawed character... but as I wrote more chapters, it wound up immediately getting a lot more lighthearted and ridiculous. I guess I'm not really interested in representing outright toxicity and find it more fun to play with absurd self-rationalization and utter obliviousness. Give it a couple of chapters, and you'll see what I mean.

<3

I’d wager a guess that when most people are woken by the sun peeking through their blinds, it’s one of those nice early morning start things. You go downstairs, get a glass of orange juice and read the morning paper or whatever like a responsible (read: boring) adult.

When I wake up from the sun through my blinds it means it’s 3 PM and the fucker finally got the right angle to blare directly into my eyes, cause my window is on the other side of the house. And that, in turn, means my sleep schedule is comprehensively ruined. But I already knew that when I passed out at 4AM this morning.

At this point I had already slept through most of my college courses, and it didn’t feel worth bothering with the one that was left. But that’s the best part about being in college, right? Professors don’t care if you show up or not, as long as you do well on the exams. And I was doing fine.

Mostly.

…In a manner of speaking.

I squished a pillow over my face to block the sunlight and groaned into it.

Okay I was pretty much screwed in Calculus II and banking on the first part of the semester to carry me through the end with a D, but… well, thinking about it made me feel bad. So I didn’t! Problem solved. It was just so hard to care about any of this stuff. Or, well, anything at all, really.

But that’s just fine. A decade on the internet had taught me that caring is weakness.

I stifled a yawn as I rolled off the futon. Stumbling to the bathroom across the hall, I brushed my teeth, staring absentmindedly at the striped pattern of the shower curtain because that was better than looking straight ahead at the mirror.

Did I really need to shower? Probably not. It had only been a day or so and it’s not like I had left the house in that time. There was a dark-colored hoodie hanging off the towel rack, and giving it a sniff confirmed that it smelled mostly okay, so I threw it on.

There, now I was a person. I guess. A hungry one. I wandered downstairs to the kitchen to see if I could scavenge some kind of breakfast.

Unfortunately, the box of cold pizza on the kitchen countertop was guarded by the most dangerous of creatures: terrible roommates.

Okay, sure, Avery himself wasn’t that terrible - he and I had gone to high school together, and were still on good terms, if maybe not as close as we once were. See, he had a vibrant social life with lots of friends and clubs and activities, whereas I hated just about everyone and everything other than myself with the intensity of a distant dying star. But recently he had gotten it in his head that I wasn't doing well, and now half the time he talked to me it was in this kind of hesitant, patronizing tone, like I was some stray dog about to bite his hand off.

And even worse than that… Jenn also sat at the table, studying with Avery. Avery had met our third housemate in one or another of his clubs, but from the very beginning the two of us had gotten along like oil and water. If the oil was on fire and the water was poisoned, anyways.

She looked up from some stupid psychology textbook and gave me a look like I was something she had stepped in and needed to scrape off her shoe.

“Hey Greg,” Avery said. I shifted my glare to him, and he wilted.

You know, when they assigned usernames and email address for college, mine had amusingly ended up being ‘grickett’ from the first initial and seven letters of the last. For like a week I entertained the idea of having that as a nickname. It was goofy but it sounded like some kind of creature that lived in a swamp, which was how I felt half the time. I kind of liked it.

Better than fucking ‘Greg’ at least.

But then, Avery had known me for way too long to call me anything other than my first name, and it wasn’t like I had any other friends. So that went nowhere. Whatever.

I made some sounds vaguely approximating a ‘hello’ and then trudged over to the pizza box.

“Did you skip all your classes again?” Jenn said.

I looked over my shoulder, and sneered at her. “None of your business.”

Avery looked between the two of us, clearly flustered. He always wanted us to get along, but had thus far been sorely disappointed. “I think what she’s trying to say is that we’re a little bit worried about you, Greg.”

The pizza was rock hard. My jaw ached as I tried to chew through it regardless.

Avery valiantly kept on. “It’s just… you haven’t left the house in a while. Even if it’s not class, some fresh air would do you good. We were thinking—”

“Avery!” Jenn hissed. “Don’t invite him!”

He continued over her loud sighs, “We were thinking about going to this social mixer thing tonight at the student union. Maybe you could come too?”

I smirked at Jenn, who was clearly pissed off. But not even pure spite could get me to go to a ‘social mixer thing,’ whatever the fuck that was. “Not interested,” I said. “What kind of losers throw a party at the student union? On a Wednesday, no less?”

“It’s the school’s LGBTQ Alliance,” Avery said.

I stopped chewing pizza. “What?”

Jenn shot me a look that could have stripped paint off a wall. “See, this is why I didn’t want you to say anything. Now the creep’s gonna be shitty about it.”

“Me?” I placed one hand to my chest and used the other to wave my half-slice of pizza to protest my innocence. “Why oh why would I ever be anything less than perfectly polite?”

“Because you’re a pathetic misanthrope who deals with his bottomless hatred of himself by externalizing it onto other people,” she said. “Textbook antisocial tendencies. You should get help.”

I raised an eyebrow, affecting an air of disinterest. “And you are a shitty excuse for a psychologist.”

Excuse me?”

“Because, my dear Jenn,” I said airily, “anyone with an actual degree and license would know better than to make an armchair diagnosis of another person to win points in an argument. Or have they not gotten to professional ethics in your class yet?”

Her face twisted in a scowl, and she looked over at Avery.

“Well,” Avery said uneasily, “he kind of has a point.”

“Ugh!” Jenn slammed her book closed, leaving it on the table as she stomped off towards her room.

“You really should be nicer to her,” Avery said, looking back at me. “And… she shouldn’t have said that, but I don’t know if it’s that far off the mark, either.”

The pizza suddenly tasted even more like cardboard than earlier. I sat my half-uneaten slice back in the box and closed it, before dumping the whole thing into the trash.

“I’m just saying…” Avery said. “Maybe if you spent some time with other people, you might make some friends? Feel better about things? It doesn’t have to be the mixer, I just thought…”

“You thought what?” I said sharply.

He just looked back at me in that sort of wounded woodland animal way that I always despised.

“Sorry, I have things to do,” I announced, and turned to go back to my room.

It wasn’t a total lie. I did have plans: to do the one thing that actually did make me feel a bit better about the purgatory of my daily life.

Ruining someone else’s day.

183