Chapter 5: Night Time Wonders

Night Time Wonders

The phone rang. Startled, I opened my eyes and shot up in bed. The clock read 3:15, and it was dark outside. Who could be calling? I picked up my phone and saw “Roger” tattooed across the screen. I picked the phone up.

“Hello?” I asked, my speech slurred with words.

“Shit, you were sleeping. I’m sorry.” Roger sounded strained.

“No, its okay. That’s what my cell phone’s for. What do you need?” I asked him, stifling a yawn.

“I…um…how was your day today? I didn’t get to talk to you earlier besides at three.” Roger said after a moment.

“It was fun. We hung out, saw a movie, I did some homework. Basic stuff.” I replied. I reached up to my eyes with my free hand and dug the sleepies out of them. You know, the stuff that gets in your eyes in the mornings. I was actually glad that Roger had woken me up – my body was sore, and I was sweating underneath my blanket. “Roger?”

“I’m here. Ummm…Tinabrokeupwithmeafewminutesago.” He mumbled. I heard him inhale, long and kind of shaky.

“Okay…slow down. Repeat what you just said.” I said, leaning my back against the bed.

“Tina…she broke up with me a little while ago. Well, we broke up. I caught her with another guy this evening.” Roger said slowly, clearly.

“Oh…that sucks! Are you okay?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure how to feel. My heart was racing, but I’m not sure if it was excitement for myself or sympathy for him. I think he was crying.

“She cheated on me.” He said. If he had been crying, he was done now. “I went up to her house to surprise her and Chris – that’s the name the EMTs told me – answered the door half naked.”

“EMTs?” I asked him, my voice deepening with disapproval. If there was one thing he had, it was an anger management problem.

“He fell onto the concrete steps and cracked his head. And then he was having some breathing trouble.” I could hear the mischievous tone in Roger’s voice.

“He fell? Or did you help him?”

“Well, I grabbed his arm to pull him outside so we could talk, and he fell.” Roger sounded guilty now.

“And the breathing?”

“I stepped on him.” Roger said quickly.

“Repeat that?” I asked him. I cleared my throat when I was met with silence.

“I, um, I stepped on his throat. Not hard…he’s not dead.”

“You…” I paused, and took a breath. He did have a right to do it, but it didn’t make his life any easier when the charges came around.

“I was a little bit pissed off.” Roger admitted. He was so adorable when he was feeling guilty. He sounded like a puppy looks when it pees in the corner and it knows that you know.

“Did you really need to hurt him?”

“He’s a fucking bastard!” Roger defended himself. I shook my head in the dark of my room, muffling my laugh.

“Are they charging you with anything?” I asked him, keeping my voice stern.

“Um, no. The police statement from me reads something like, ‘I heard moaning behind the door, and a little bit of screaming. When the man opened the door half naked, I thought he was raping Tina, so I acted in her best interests. When I realized that she wasn’t in trouble, he was bleeding from his fall down the steps, and he would have gotten up and ran away, when he really needed medical care, so I kept him still until the medics came.”

I couldn’t help but laughing this time. Roger had the best excuses for the dumbest things that he got into. Even if an incident was entirely his fault, he would never get charged.

“So what are his injuries?” I asked. Roger sounded relieved that I wasn’t angry with him.

“Umm, two broken ribs, broken nose, and a few abrasions on his face. I didn’t hit him.” Roger replied. He almost seemed proud of himself.

“Good job on not hitting him. What are your injuries?” I asked him. He met my question with silence for several moments.

“I’m pissed off, and no one’s ever gonna love me. But I’m okay physically.” He said sheepishly.

“Hey, don’t say that. I love you.” I contended his statement.

“You’re just sayin’ that to make me feel better. You don’t have to make me feel better.” He commented.

“If I say I love you, then I love you; so don’t argue with me.” I continued before he could argue any further with me. “And you shouldn’t be pissed off. Its not your fault she cheated on you. At least you guys weren’t living together, right?”

“Yeah. Hey, I’m sorry about calling so late. I just…I needed to hear your voice.” He said.

“It’s okay.” I said. I got up to shut my bedroom door. “Can you go to bed? I guarantee you’ll feel much better in the morning.” After a moment of silence, I asked again. “You there?”

“Yeah.” Roger sighed.

“I can stay up with you for a bit.” I lamented. I wasn’t that tired, and I didn’t have to work the following morning. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Eh…I should go to bed in a minute. I have to get up and cut down a tree for my neighbor, do my laundry. That sort of thing. Adult stuff.”

“I’ll have you know I do my own laundry, thank you very much!” I defended. “And wait a second. You shouldn’t be making fun of me. You’re still in trouble for hurting that asshole.”

“How can I be in trouble if you just called him an asshole?” Roger shot back. This was our normal banter, the few times we spoke on the phone.

“Because I said so!” I commanded with the voice of god. I heard him laughing in the background, and my voice changed to a higher tone. “I hear that! Leave me alone! I’m not little!”

“Are so, munchkin.” Roger snickered.

“I’m not!” I squealed, burying my head under my pillow.

“Uh huh. You keep denying it.” He said, laughing inn the background. He always found great amusement in teasing me.

“So…” I said, choking down the urge to argue. “Did you respond to the thread about nuclear weapons on the site? It seems like a hot topic for the others.”

“Umm…no.” His voice changed tones again, to that of an educator about to explain his views.

“Whether or not the third world countries have nuclear weapons is of no consequence to us. If we have the weapons, and refuse to get rid of them, then others will follow our example. Its stupid, yes, but if we get rid of our nukes, then they’ll blow us up. If we tell them they can’t have theirs, they’ll try to start a war. So instead every country spends billions of dollars developing their war nukes, and all for no reason. But hey, it creates jobs, and raises employment levels in those countries. So therefore, it doesn’t really matter.”

“Damn. You have that all laid out in your mind. But what if one person or another sets off an accidental nuclear explosion? Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t have those tools?”

“Yes, of course it would. But, we’d still be polluting the air, and we might still have nuclear meltdowns, like that one in Chernobyl in 1986.”

“Wouldn’t know what happened then. I wasn’t alive back then.”

“Well, I’m sorry I’m too old for you.” He said indignantly. I laughed.

“I’m sorry for teasing you about it. You’re not that old. Just older than me. Its not your fault your parents had sex before mine did. Were my parents alive when your parents were doing that?” I paused, thinking to myself. I was really just doing it to bother him.

“Blow me.” Was his only response. I laughed triumphantly.

“That’s what you get for teasing me about being short. But I’m not short. So you see? Its karma.”

“Not quite, that wasn’t three times as bad as what I did to you.” He admitted. “I tease you constantly. You barely ever tease me.”

“Exactly. So you admit that you’re cruel to me.” I commented.

“Yes ma’am, I am horrible to you. But, you like it.”

“Mostly.” I admitted. “Are you feeling better now?”

“I always feel like the world is the right side up when I’m talking to you.” He answered me. “I’ll let you go to bed. Are we going to get together tomorrow on some possible brain storming ideas? I kind of want to work on it all a little bit. It seems like its slowing down.”

“Yeah, I should be around all day. Are you okay? I’ll stay up as long as you need me to.”

“I’m fine.” He insisted. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. You get some sleep. You’re going to need it, because we’re going to push really hard tomorrow.”

“We? I’m the one that does the site work. You just kind of help a little bit.”

“I take offense to that! I do some of the work!”

“Not the technical stuff.” I retorted.

“Well, its not my fault I’m dumb.” He shot back. I could tell he wasn’t really serious.

“You’re not dumb, silly. You’re just not as technologically advanced as us youngsters.”

“I’m hurt. And again, I repeat, blow me.” He paused, and I struggled to control my laughter. If I got any louder, my parents were going to wake up.

“I’m sorry. I won’t tease you again.” I apologized. He laughed.

“No, its okay. Hey, sleep well, alright? I’ll call you when I wake up tomorrow. Or you can call me, but don’t blame me if I wake up grumpy. Its not exactly been a perfect evening, if you know what I mean.”

“Okay. You sure you’re alright?” I asked, concerned. I still wasn’t confident.

“I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself. Good night, Storm.”

“Good night.”

“Bye.” He said awkwardly.

I laughed. “Bye.”

I hung up the phone and looked at its lit up display in wonder. He had just broken up with his girlfriend, and there he was, laughing with me only a few hours later as though nothing had happened. Was that how he dealt with grief? By laughing it off? Maybe. I should probably write down the fact that he called. I flipped on the light beside my bed. The bright yellow light flooded my vision, and for a moment I could not see. I blinked the blurriness out of my eyes and glanced towards the notebook lying on my floor. I shook my head and got up from the bed, bending down to grab the journal and the pen attached to it.

I got a new journal each year around halloween. Not one of the fancy ones with decorative covers, but instead the cheapest one I could find with 70-300 pages in it. Generally, spiral bound. I’d been doing this since I was twelve. This particular one was 150 pages, a lime green, spiral bound. It wasn’t too torn up and abused yet, considering I’d had it for only a few months.
I opened to the spot where I had left off and carefully pencilled in the date. And the time.

Just a note; Roger just called me kind of upset. He broke up with the bitch because he found out she was cheating on him. So that ends that, leaving him available and single. I think I’ll hold off on making any moves for a while though – he’ll let me know if he wants to play around like that. Back to bed.

I closed my eyes, and found I couldn’t sleep. Roger’s call had woken my mind up, and now it was racing with various thoughts. Its not like I could just subdue them – it was like they had taken over my brain. Every time I made the decision to go to sleep, for once and for all, all the random, suggestive things he had ever said to me popped into my head. He had been with his girlfriend for a while – over a year. But we played around, made jokes, like any friends do. Fetishes, etc – you name it, we discussed it. I had mine, he had his, and for the most part, they matched (to be discussed later, you horny reader, you!). Now that he was free…that could be very, very interesting in the near future.

I mean, I was seventeen. One more year, and I’d be cut loose from my parents and into the college world. I could do anything I wanted. Anything.