That afternoon when I returned home to our apartment, drained and weary from a day’s hectic nightmare of having to bustle to and from the park on an extra comfortable ride, I found that our considerate and well-meaning guest Mr. Sumpson had kindly, nobly, and graciously taken Charles’s bedroom as his own.
“Of course I’m not kicking Charles out of his own sweet little bedroom!” Mr. Sumpson cried indignantly, hurt and horrified at the injustice of my incriminating accusations as he continued to kick Charles out of his own sweet little bedroom.
Charles, now reduced to huddling and curling up on the living room couch like a prehistoric caveman over the cold night, sniffled dismayingly at the existential wasteland that is his dreary future life without a bed. After resolving on our lives to commit to serious hunger strikes to crusade for the unassailable right over our sleeping comfort (but having to stop our protest three minutes later because the baked chocolate cookies from next door just smelled too delicious), we had to grudgingly cede Charles’s bedroom to the magnanimous Mr. Sumpson and arrange so that Charles and I would take turns using my bedroom over the night instead.
I had also found out that Mr. Sumpson and his daughter had been secretly arranging a party over the evening that would leave behind little of what still remained of our helplessly bled-dry food storage.
“Of course it’s not a surprise welcome-home party for you, Phil!” Mr. Sumpson started wagging his crumb-crusted fingers like cemetery shovels as he proceeded to honor the death of our last jar of buttermilk cookies with his crematory mouth. Charles swallowed so hard that I was able to hear the disconsolate slosh of his spittle from far across the room. “But even better! Guess what? It’s a surprise guest party for me and Lil for being such helpful and selfless contributors to this beautiful household!” He had sounded so truthfully convinced that I almost believed him.
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Meanwhile, Lil was having one of her selfie fetishes as usual.
“Just what, in the bloody name of the universe, are you taking selfies with that for?” I asked guardedly with my wary back to the camera, careful not to get shot in the face by her epileptically flashing lenses. She had started moving around the room like a reckless ninja paparazzi, aiming for a better angle for her pictures, so I had to start moving around the room like a reckless ninja paparazzi as well, to avoid her camera. She started crawling in circles on all fours like a secret service blood hound. So I crawled in circles on all fours like a secret service blood hound. She started hovering here and there across the room like a frenzied phantom acrobat. So I hovered here and there like a frenzied phantom acrobat. It went on like this forever.
“Taking selfies with what, Phillida?” Lil asked, smoothing her hair all the way up to the top of her head, flying heartbreakingly unbearable kisses to a speck of peeled-off wallpaper.
“That thing,” I pointed towards the peeled-off wallpaper she had just been infatuatedly taking selfies with. She had now moved to another spot of flaked-off wallpaper and was now doting upon it like a nine-year-old with his favorite pet goldfish.
“Phillida,” she turned around and sounded real serious, her camera flaring with such an intimidating glare that my hands flew straight up to cover my face. “You do not address this… this sad and beautiful piece of remarkable wallpaper as that thing. It is horribly sacrilegious!”
There was another strip of shedding wallpaper at a low-bottom corner of the room, so she would have to stand on her head like a tumbler toy and cuddle in real close for her face to appear smack in the camera right next to it.
“Did you know,” she asked dreamily, collapsing to the floor with a breath of vicarious pleasure after several shoddy attempts to situate herself upside-down along the wall. “Your brother used to prance all around this room like on a children’s carrousel and tell me all those places he’d see in every crack of wallpaper there is and how he’d fly a plane around the world just to see them. Those long, deep gashes in the wall the Great Rift Valley, those round, sagging dimples the Manson Crater, and those crayoned little crevices the coral reefs worshipped with treasures…”
I slapped my forehead in exasperation. If she was going to