September 14

"Mom asked you to distract me, right?" May asked. "Because you are acting really weird, and because I am 99% sure that Mom is planning a surprise party."

"You're going to have to act surprised tomorrow," I said, coming clean with the truth since I was tired playing card games in our room for the whole morning and afternoon with May.

"That's easy enough," May said. "Oh my gosh, Mom. I'm so surprised by this!"

"You need to tone down on the sarcasm and practice your acting skills."

'You want me to start crying?"

"I think that'd make Mom happy," I said and pulled out an old board game. I'd play Scrabble, but May is not into it since it "requires too much brain power" to play, and I'm honestly too lazy to punch numbers in a calculator and keep track of values. I remember that a long time ago there was this fantasy board game that I can't remember that we'd all play at one of Dad's coworkers' houses, and I wonder if one of the abandoned toy stores would have them. People were hoarding food, water, toilet paper, even survival books in the beginning, but I doubt anyone broke into stores to loot board games. Though, honestly, who knows what people are thinking?

We spent pretty much all day in the room, and by the time Mom called us out for dinner, I think anyone who had a brain cell could figure out that Mom was planning something. Dinner ended up being super awkward since the planners (aka Mom, Mira, and Dad) were pretending that everything was normal while the people stuck in the room (May and I) pretty much knew that whatever they were saying was to try and distract us from what they were actually doing.

Still, I do hope that tomorrow is good. I remember the day of the wedding, with the glowing lights and aroma of food drifting throughout the air, and even though I know that I said I would look back and hate it someday in the future, at least for right now, I wish that tomorrow would be like that. Everything seems so down right now.

September 15

It turns out that Mom was planning a spa day.

"With everything going on, we haven't had much of a chance just to relax and unwind," Mom said. "Maybe it'll feel more normal."

Well, it certainly wasn't normal since we had never actually done a home spa ever before, but I think she thought it'd take our minds off of the bloodshed that was probably in the north and everything around us. Even though doom and gloom might be keeping us alive, I guess even she is tired of constantly worrying about our safety and not dying.

In the morning, Mom and Dad grabbed some old aromatic candles that an old neighbor had given to us a long while back and lit them while I was assigned to mix boiling water with cold water in old pots, so that they'd be a pleasant warmth. Apparently, the reason that Mom took so long to call us out of the room was not because she and Dad weren't able to find a lotion or facial, but because she and Dad spent all day gathering enough water so that we wouldn't run out when we were doing this.

After I had finished mixing the water, I was assigned to help Dad with running the whole spa thing since it was a whole girl's day even. "We'll have a guys' day out," Dad said. "Just you and me doing whatever we want."

"Whatever," I said. I didn't mind not getting a special day for myself, and spending all day with Dad seemed tiring, and anyways, having Mom, Mira, and May in the same room, doing the same things together really helped heal whatever is happening in between them.

I noticed that even though it was May's birthday, Mom was being extra-nice to Mira. Maybe it was because Mom feels bad about being hard on Mira about the guns, and that she's starting to understand why guns are needed to survive in this world. I don't really know how to feel about this because while it's nice that Mom and Mira aren't spending all day glowering at each other, at the same time, I'm scared that everyone will start carrying guns around, like everything is just normal.

Anyways, for the first part of the day, I didn't really have to do much work since Mom was mostly taking care of Mira and May, with the whole deep shampooing and conditioning aspect while I was just running around to pick out the various lavender and citrus and eucalyptus scented lotions from the giant pile that Mom had laid out front of the bathroom.

It was then when I realized that Mom found out about the magazine.

When I searched throughout the cabinet, it just wasn't there anymore, and I knew that someone had taken it, probably Mom or Dad, and that just sent me into a panic because what if they jumped to premature conclusions. I guess I just want to maybe tell them about this, but on my own terms once I've figured everything out because right now, I only kinda know but have no clue how to say it.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Anyways, after a few seconds of irrational panic, I realized that Mom and Dad wouldn't be able to trace the magazine back to me, and if anything, they'd probably go to May or just think that it was just some old magazine that made its way into the cabinet a long time ago. But still, finding the magazine and returning it back gave me some other purpose today other than serving all the women of the household and celebrating May's birthday.

Unfortunately, that task started out much harder than I expected to be after finding May and Mira sitting in one of those laid-back pool deck chairs, towels on their heads and holding magazines with stacks of magazines next to them.

"How do we look?" May asked, holding up a magazine and posing.

"Like rich, white women from some old sit-com."

"Well then," May said. "Go serve me some tea with one and a quarter sugar and a dash of cream. Hurry up."

"I'm not your servant," I said.

"Well, you said that I was a rich white lady..." May said. "So, yeah, you are my servant. And it's my birthday, so I can do whatever I want, so get me some tea and deal with it."

"Where'd you get all the magazines from?"

"Everywhere," Mira said. "It was May's idea, just to give it a more professional feel rather than some DIY project."

"Well," I said during my first attempt to get the magazines back. "It looks a bit tacky, I'd say. Do rich people that can afford a couple thousand-dollar spas really read gossip magazines."

"Duh," May said. "How else do you think they keep up with all the celebrity gossip?"

She flipped a page. "Like this stuff about Brad and Angelina, whoever these two nobodies are."

"How do you not know about Brad and Angelina?" Mom asked. "Everyone knows."

"Well they're probably old and dying," May said. "And they're probably, you know, kicking the bucket at the moment, so who cares?"

"Well, you shouldn't be turning your brain to mush reading all this garbage," I said, trying for a Dad approach to making them hand back the magazines.

But that failed spectacularly. "I have a right to turn my brain into garbage, and it's not like I've got a ton of use for it since, you know, school has ended forever."

"Not forever," Mom said. "Just temporarily."

Even though May didn't say anything, I could literally hear her saying "Totally" in her mind, and I was about to go for my third attempt when May interrupted me, "Aren't you supposed to be finding the eucalyptus lotion?"

"Yeah," I said and decided to bide my time to get my magazine back since if I acted too weirdly or too defensively, they'd know that something was up. So I went into the bathroom and picked out a eucalyptus lotion for May and a couple of other creams, just in case Mom and Mira wanted them and went back to work.

At noon, we actually had lunch for the first time in forever ever since we've cut it out and replaced it with brunch and din-unch or linner (or whatever a dinner-lunch hybrid is called). It was just a simple chicken, beans, and rice mixture, but like all non-soup food right now, it tasted like heaven. Well, maybe not heaven since I'm sure that that would taste more death-like, but like something really good.

Unfortunately, the afternoon was when I was sent to work to paint Mom, Mira, May, and even Grandma's fingernails since I'm the only artistic person in the family sadly. After a long period of deliberations, Mom and Grandma both went with clear polish since it wasn't too flashy while May went with white colored ones. For the first time, it was Mira that was waffling over which polish to choose.

"Well, just test all the colors out on this magazine," May said as she happened to pull out the only magazine that I cared about and flipped to the only pages that I cared about. "Let's paint over this hottie."

"Just get a bit of tissue paper, and I can test it on it," I said, trying to turn May the other direction. "The colors might not show up on the magazine well because of all the colors."

"First of all, I'd like to save all my bathroom paper and not waste it," she said. "And second of all, if you haven't realized it, nail polish is not clear, so who cares what is underneath it."

"I care," I nearly said before realizing how misinterpreted that could be, so instead, I said, "Well, we might burn these magazines in the future, so it's probably not a good idea to spread toxic nail polish over them."

"Why are you being so weird about this?" May said.

"Just choose a color," I said to Mira, probably too aggressively because she gave me that look like I'm involving her in an argument that she has no part of.

"Blue," she said. "The bright one, not the dark ones."

"Great," I said before getting to work. It was only after a couple of seconds that I noticed May, approaching with a sharpie in her hand, probably getting ready to draw devil's horns and a giant stache on that guy's face just because she can.

"What are you doing?" I asked, even though I already knew.

"I'm bored," she said. "And it'd be absolutely hilarious to draw all over his face."

"Just stop touching it," I said, snatching the magazine from her hands.

"What is up with you?" she said. "Since when did you care about a dumb magazine."

"Just do something else and stop touching and drawing on them," I said. "Read a book or something."

"Whatever," May said and crossed her legs. She tried reaching for her phone, but it wasn't there and hasn't been there for months. Still, old habits tend to die hard, and eventually, she got up with a huff and left.

"You know, it's just a magazine," Mira said.

"Just don't touch it," I said because there was no other way to say that it wasn't just a magazine. I don't even know why I'm so attached to it because it scares me, sometimes, the way that I feel, the kinda attraction that feels new and familiar. Maybe I'm keeping it around me to remind myself, so that I don't forget or let my doubts take over me. Whatever the reason, I don't think I'll ever figure out the right way to say it. They'll probably think I'm weird for pining over some paper guy that I'll never meet. Yeah, it's definitely too weird.