The next morning, Franc went about his morning routine as though it were any other morning. He was exhausted, but no one else need know why.
As per typical in his morning schedule, he had spent the last half hour sitting outside the bathroom, occasionally knocking to make sure his brother remembered that he was still waiting. As per usual, his brother continued to ignore him, humming to himself the whole time, and as per usual, Franc began thinking, because he had nothing better to do.
Aren't girls the ones who are supposed to take forever in the bathroom? What did he even do in there? . . . on second thought, he didn't really want to know.
If there was anything Franc could have been doing to get ready other than sitting next to the bathroom door waiting, he would have been doing that, but by this point, he basically just needed to brush his teeth and pee . . . the peeing quickly becoming significantly more important than the brushing. Having been through this routine over and over again, however, he had figured out that he could hold it. He had also figured out that what was most infuriating about the situation was not the fact that his brother was taking forever as much as his humming.
It wouldn't bother him if he were humming an actual tune, but it was more like he was mumbling to himself and occasionally punctuated it with a hum. It also wouldn't bother him if he just did it every once in a while, but he did it basically the entire time he was in the bathroom . . . all 45 minutes of it. Why couldn't he just shut up and get things done?
Franc looked down at his watch. Assuming things went as they did every morning, his brother should be just about done. He knocked once more, and, as expected, Jermaine finally and very grumpily opened the door.
"What do you want?" His voice was far more ignorant than it should have been. They both knew Franc had been waiting and knocking quite regularly. The feigned ignorance, however, was far less frustrating than the way he punctuated his sentence with a little smack. Every time his brother smacked, Franc wanted to smack him.
He resisted the urge . . . this time.
"Just get out of my way," said Franc rather calmly as he gently pushed Jermaine aside and rushed toward the sweet relief of the toilet.
After an unnecessarily long walk to school with Jermaine filled with punctuatory smack after smack all leading toward the inevitable violent return smack that finally parted their ways, Franc met up with Tom in their first period history class.
"Franc, you look awful," said Tom, his voice full of genuine concern. "Seriously, bro, what are you doing at night? You need some real sleep. Soon!"
Franc proved his point by letting out a huge yawn. "It's nothing. I'm fine. Where's Trystan?"
"He's home sick," said Tom matter-of-factly. "Pretty weird for him. He usually just comes to school to infect as many people as possible so he's not the only one sick."
The two were forced to drop the matter by the arrival of their teacher who, uncharacteristically, was actually almost on time. "Alright class. Quiet down," he said, dropping his book rather loudly on his desk, knocking over the can of pens that always set on his desk and that was toppled almost every morning.
Trystan was sick? Mr. "immune system of an ox" couldn't bring himself to get up? Mr. "If I'm going down, I'm taking all of you with me" was going down alone? More importantly, Franc would have at least one entire day with Tom and no Trystan?
Maybe staying up night after night was having more of an impact than he thought. Maybe his little project was actually working!
"Alright, class. Today we will be having a pop quiz. I hope you all did your reading last night."
Then again, maybe it was just a fluke.
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