Nothing more.

Chapter 20

The worker guys are back, pounding away in the backyard. I notice that the boss, Mike, the Little League coach, hasn’t arrived yet. I guess that’s one of the perks of being the boss. I resolve to try to be the boss, no matter what I decide to do. Maybe I will just be the boss of watching conspiracy videos.

Right now, for instance, it seems I am the head honcho of lying in bed. No, no, it’s not really normal to lie in bed for approximately two days. That’s clearly not a healthy thing for a seventeen-year-old person to do. But something seems to have happened to me where my back stays glued to the top of the bed and can only wheedle its way over to gather a few pillows and open up a laptop and start exploring the world inside said laptop, rather than the world outside my bed.

That world is scary. That world has uncertainty and voodoo charms and construction bros and the thing that cannot be mentioned. But this world here, this world behind this blue light, is safe and endless. This world takes me back to ancient aliens, through the fall of the Roman Empire, through medieval times with possible dragons, through a dozen wars between England and France, the discovery of the New World, up until the present. The time when the blue screen was invented to teleport me out of reality. And there is some reading, dear friend, I have taken the time to read a book a week . . . lest you think I’m just eating bonbons all day. But that, too, involves lying in bed. So it’s positive, yes. But not exactly contributing to my cardio.

I did make the effort, once again, to try to reach my cousins on the phone. Abby and Ollie. This time from my cell. If I could just get them down here, maybe they would love it and we would have a blast! It would be like a Norman Rockwell painting. Abby and I would gossip and giggle all day and I’d let Ollie play Roblux until his face turned blue.

But, again, that same beep boop beep. “We’re sorry, the number you’re trying to reach is not in service. Please check the number and try again.” And I checked. And I tried. Checked. Tried. Checked. Tried. But nothing. The number I have is officially wrong and I am officially annoyed and officially sick of hearing that dumb automated message.

Fun fact: Three nights ago, in the middle of the night, I thought I heard that scratching sound again. But this time I was not fooled into getting out of bed. No, no, sorry. No, you cannot coax me out of my sweet warm cocoon with just some scratching.

You see, I have learned. The explanation is that there is a rather large dog, or possibly even a cat, who has some obsession with something in the ground there. That is the simplest explanation. Occam’s razor. And, since that is the simplest explanation, that is the most possible one and the one I have trained myself to believe.