“You know what I mean.”
“You’re so full of yourself and you keep sucking on that straw, by the way.”
She suddenly realized what she was doing and put down her cup angrily.
“What are you implying?”
“That you have some kind of oral fixation, I guess.”
“Eww!”
“Do you even know what that is?”
“I know what it sounds like.”
“Hey, I was minding my own business and your father just comes at me,” I pointed out. “What’s the deal with that?”
“He’s not going to take any of your crap, and neither will I,” she said smugly. “So, watch it.”
“You watch it,” I warned. “You’re not the boss of me.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
“I never said I was. I want nothing to do with you,” I said, getting up.
“Fine.”
“Fine!”
I got up and pushed my chair back in towards the table.
“You’re a weirdo,” I commented as I started to leave.
“You’re the weirdo; how late do you sleep? Past noon?”
“Sometimes I stay up pretty late, as if it’s any of your business.”
“Didn’t say it was, but you made the whole family meeting run late.”
“I didn’t know we were having one!”
“Oh. Well, I didn’t know that.”
“What you don’t know could fill an iPhone. A good iPhone, with the most amount of storage available.”
She thought about that for a minute.
That would be an insane amount of information.
“You’re an asshole!” she snapped. “Just leave me alone.”
I paused at the hallway, not ready to leave until I had won this argument.
“The kitchen is a communal area,” I pointed out. “This should be the neutral zone. It’s where the food sleeps.”
“It’s where the pantry is, too,” she added. “Take it easy with the food in there.”
“If your dad is smart, he’s buying food in the can,” I noted. “We could see food supply lanes disrupted. It could mean many more people could starve outside the United States.”
“Do you even know what you’re talking about?” she asked suspiciously. “Because if you don’t…”
“The virus causes flu-like symptoms, but it incubates for like, two weeks in the body,” I pointed out. “During that time, people are contagious and that’s how it spreads. Everyone here might already have it.”
“No one’s sick.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Asymptomatic variants could be anywhere. You go to the gas station, the mini mart, a public bathroom, anywhere people go. They don’t know they have it. People are coming back from Italy and China, showing no symptoms or any signs of having the virus. No one is stopping them at the airports. And if they did, they’d have to quarantine them for at least two weeks.”
“They could test them,” she pointed out. “There must be a test.”
“It’s called the novel Coronavirus because it’s new. They don’t have a reliable test. The Chinese tried taking everyone’s temperature, but again, that doesn’t work. If you have the virus and a temp, you got infected two weeks ago.”
The light bulb finally went off as she clearly began to realize how insidious the virus was.
I was glad someone was listening to me, at least.
“Oh, God,” she said, thinking about it. “My whole campus probably has it! We had a lot of exchange students.”
“Not necessarily. They may have come to the U.S. long before the virus started to spread in other countries,” I noted. “But they trace this thing, rumor has it, as far back as November. The new semester started after Christmas, so…”
“Now I’m trying to remember if anyone I knew was sick. I mean, even at two weeks, that might be an indication.”
“Yeah, me too. The good news is, for us, the younger you are, the less likely you will be affected by it, unless you have a serious underlying medical condition. It’s going to be a few years before they figure all this out.”
“So, this lockdown is, for what? Two weeks?”
“Nah, definitely not,” I said, shaking my head. “That ship has sailed. I don’t think there’s any chance they can put the brakes on this. The only thing they can do is slow it down so that the hospitals don’t get overwhelmed. But if the asymptomatic variants are as numerous as they say, it may not matter. And the lockdown will be for nothing.”
She got out her phone and started looking at the Internet.
“Let’s see what the news says,” she announced, as if comforting herself.
I wasn’t going to tell her that reading the news would make her even more worried about this disease.
Instead, I decided it was probably time to leave the kitchen now, and to just chill and take a nap in my room.
At least Tracianne had calmed down some.
I had even managed to teach her some valuable information.
And if the world was going to end, I wanted to be well rested for it.Chapter Five - PhilI was up in my room, John having called me back. We discussed his amazing sex life with his awesome girlfriend he was about to propose to.