My normal routine consisted of stumbling through to the bathroom, turning the shower on to heat up, answering the call of nature, and then getting into the shower which is exactly what I did this morning. In fact, everything was so routine, that it took me a while to notice something – my soap wasn’t foaming. No matter how hard I rubbed it between my hands and then on this poufy thing Mom had bought me to use in the shower, nothing happened.
Bringing the bar up to my face so that I could look at it closely, I didn’t notice anything obvious except for the fact that water was just running off it. I can’t say that I’d ever inspected soap before, but I was fairly certain that it didn’t normally drip off it like it was at this moment. It wasn’t until I lifted it to sniff it, though, that I realized what she’d done and my head fell back against the tiled wall behind me with a thud.
“For fuck’s sake!” She’d played my own trick on me and I’d fallen for it.
Two months ago, I’d climbed in through her bathroom window and swapped out her bar of soap with one that I’d painted with clear nail polish. That’s what I was holding in my hand – the exact same fucking bar. And I knew it was because my thumb had stuck to the wet polish when I’d been brushing on the stuff, and the rough and blatant fingerprint on the bar in my hand was considerably larger than Rose’s. It also sucked because I hadn’t bought another pack of soap during my last visit to the grocery store because I’d been in a hurry and had forgotten.
This left me with one option – the shower gel that my sister had left behind when she’d stayed here. The one that came with her perfume, so I was going to smell like a chick all day. Fucking awesome!
Knowing that I was safe from any other pranks - because we only ever played one at a time - I finished up, brushed my teeth, and made sure the beard I’d started growing in three months ago was neat and tidy, before getting dressed. The smell of my sister Catalina’s perfume followed me through it all, and my mood sank even lower as I put the pod in my Keurig and hit the button. The only thing that could fix my shitty morning moods normally was caffeine and the smell of coffee, but seeing as how I couldn’t smell it this morning because of the perfume, that first cup was going to need to be strong. As soon as it was done, I added a splash of creamer and lifted it up, taking a large gulp and relishing in the taste of…
I only just made it to the sink in time to spit it out, gagging as the taste registered and I spat repeatedly into the basin. “She wouldn’t have…” Oh, but she apparently had because the taste in my mouth wasn’t the taste of coffee – it was the taste of dirt, like the soil she used in the pots in her precious front yard.
It took a full five minutes of brushing my teeth and gargling with mouthwash to get it to a tolerable level – and even then the word ‘tolerable’ was pushing it – for me to go and look at the pod which was still sitting in the machine. The smell as I walked into the kitchen was further proof, but when I lifted the pod out the protective covering on the top of it didn’t look any different to me than it normally did. Not that I inspected them normally – although, I would be after this – I just lifted them out of the box and put them in the holder, but it looked ok. Ripping it off, I poked the soggy dirt where the coffee should have been and growled.
It was on. A man’s shower and his coffee were sacred things, and she’d ruined both of them for me. Even my brother and sister, Cat and Garrett, knew not to mess with both of those things, and we’d done some awful things to each other over the years.
Stalking through to the window in my living room that overlooked her house, I pulled the edge of the curtain closest to the wall to the side, and rested my shoulder against the wall to watch her house. Every so often her curtains would shift slightly, like someone was looking out of them, and then finally her front door opened and her head poked out.
It took her five full minutes to get the courage to leave her house, and then she ran to her car and almost slammed her leg with the door trying to get into it as fast as she could.