30Beautification
Part I: Wake Up.
It was mostly dark inside the room because the windows were closed. It didn't occur to any of them that results would probably be better if they attempted to wake someone up with more daylight around – it was the morning after all. As the three quietly made their way into the room to stand around the bed, a noise suddenly disrupted the silence, making the asleep girl move around on the bed and hide her head under the blue sheets. Allison Bayridge, the one that had had the dangerous idea of going inside that room, turned around and narrowed her green eyes, trying to find the cause of the sudden the noise.
"What was that?" she asked the other two.
Just then, Logan Vineyard stood up rather awkwardly, holding a red All Star in one of his hands. The blonde-haired young man shrugged and offered a silly smile to the two looking at him. It wasn't his fault that an All Star was thrown around in his way. Besides, he didn't have accurate eye sight, especially in the dark. He had had to wear contact lenses since age fifteen. Running a hand through his hair, the blonde put the All Star back on the floor and kicked it under the study table.
"Sorry, I tripped over some shoes," Logan said.
Most people didn't have good eyesight in places where light was scarce, but that had never been Joshua Marblestone's case. He was Allison's boyfriend and Logan's best friend. The brunette only narrowed his eyes a bit to be able to look around the room and take in the mess that it was. Practically everything was out of place. There were clothes and towels and other things thrown around the room. His cousin definetely needed to improve her organizing and cleaning skills. A whole lot. Something caught his attention.
"Why's there a huge pile of shoes next to an also huge pile of shoe boxes? Shouldn't the shoes be inside the shoe boxes?"
"Oooh, Josh. You're so smart." Allison rolled her eyes, he could clearly see it. "Did you figure that out on your own? I'm impressed. Really."
"Ally? You're an awful girlfriend," he retorded with a mock hurt tone. It didn't work, she paid no attention to him.
"But you love me anyway."
"Dude, Josh, you're whipped," Logan chose that moment to add his two cents.
"Shut up, Logan. You know nothing."
Actually, he knew a lot. Mostly everyone was aware of the fact that Joshua and Allison belonged together. They were real soulmates. The two had met through the boy's cousin, who had moved to a small apartment quite close to the university campus and had promoted an extensive search for suitable roommates to share expenses and keep them on check. After many, many interviews and quite a few indecent proposals from guys that were desperately in need of sex – or therapy, whichever – she made a few bad choices in the beggining.
The first roommate was a radical vegetarian and threw away everything that contained the slightest trace of animal cells or seemed to be animal made. It was a good thing the janitor had found everything in a box before it had actually been sent to the garbage deposit and returned it to the girl. The second roommate was a a recovering alcoholic that, in reality, had never fully recovered at all. Mostly, she had gone to rehab one day, done five steps in the morning, four more in the afternoon and skipped the last two to go shopping. Not as funny as it sounded when telling stories about the things that happened during those weeks. As people said it, the third time was a charm. That was when Allison had moved in.
Allison had been sitting around a table in the library with a wall made of books around her, trying to catch up with the contents of an upcoming test that was bound to ruin the good grades she had gotten on the entire first half of the year. Upon seeing that, Joshua's cousin had marched up to the blonde girl and made a proposition: she would help the girl if they lived together. A while later, the only reasonable explanation she could come up with was that someone that seemed to study as much as Allison couldn't have been a wrong choice. And, truly, it had been the best one.
"I'm the neat freak, darling. You should know your cousin wouldn't be able to keep her room organized even if her dear life depended on that."
"Allison has a point."
"Whatever, Logan," Joshua rolled his eyes at his best friend before turning back to his girlfriend with a look that obviously questioned her sanity. "You're actually going to wake her up, Ally? Are you one hundred per cent sure about that?"
"Yeah. Now, give me space," she pushed him away and leaned over the bed, hovering over her roommate's head. "Haaannaaaaaaah! Haaannaaaaaaah! Wake uuuuup!"
"Whispers in a sing song voice won't make it better."
"Ugh..." the body on the bed suddenly moved, curling into an even smaller ball. It was past the curling of the fetal position even. Both Allison and Joshua had always wondered how the girl could curl up like that. As far as they knew, she could have been a conturcionist at some cool circus, like Cirque du Soleil or that other one from Japan.
"She's grunting."
"We should back away," there even was a hint of desperation in Joshua's voice. "Now. Nice and slow. One step at tim-"
Allison had one of her eyebrows quirked. Her boyfriend never ceased to amuse her. That definetely was one of the best aspects of their relationship. Right when she thought Joshua had done or said everything and she had him figured out, he changed her mind about it. The young man was always surprising her in some way – it could be by giving her a flower on a special date or complimenting her out of nowhere. Her guess was that it was a way to keep the relationship as something fun and relaxed, so they would never get tired of each other. Allison just wished she could be as good to Joshua as he was for her.
The blonde girl remembered the day the two had met. Hannah had said something about a cousin dropping by to get a book to do a project, but Allison hadn't been paying much attention at the time because she had been watching a movie. It was Legally Blonde to be more specific. Allison had just nodded her head and forgotten about it after Hannah left to do her laundry. The girl's wardrobe had reached a critical point, where she didn't have enough clothes to wear and had even worn the same shirt two days in a row. No matter how much Allison nagged on her to keep her things organized, Hannah never minded about it.
When someone knocked on the door, a few hours later, the blonde hadn't given much thought to the matter before telling the person to go inside. She had just finished taking a shower and was wrapped up in a mini towel that only left the main to the imagination, but still gave a very good preview of her body. Allison had stopped dead on her tracks upon noticing that it was actually a boy that was standing there and not one of her friends. Things only got more awkward when her towel slipped and left her naked. She had blushed a deep shade of red and Joshua had turned around after a second or so without any reaction.
She had grabbed her towel and gone inside her room to get dressed. The boy had patiently waited until she had changed and gotten over a little of her embarassment and was sitting on one of the couches when she had come out of the room. Allison had introduced herself shyly and apologized, saying she had thought him to be one of her friends that was supposed to watch a Bruce Willis marathon with her. That topic, action flicks with Bruce Willis, had sparked the conversation between the two and they had only remembered about the book Joshua was supposed to get when Hannah arrived from her afternoon at the laundry mat and asked him about it. She had actually thought he was there to return the book already, since Joshua was a fast reader. Hannah had been quite surprised to realize the two hit it off so well.
"Josh?" Allison interruped him.
"Yeah?"
"Shut up. Besides, why should we back away?"
"Because. Hannah. Is. Grunting."
Logan said as if the blonde couldn't quite well understand what it meant. It was as if he was trying to teach Quantic Physics to a five-year-old kid. She half expected them to make some joke about her hair color affecting her brain, but then reminded herself that that was more like Hannah and not them. Frankly, she couldn't see what the big deal was.
"Yes, I heard it the first time. So what's with all the commotion?"
"She doesn't do mornings. It's like an universal truth or something of that sort."
Allison had never thought those two could exaggerate things so much. Logan had stated that as if it actually was as important as one of those universal truths. The blonde girl couldn't exactly remember which truths were the universal ones, but she remembered listening about them during a Chemistry class. Or had it been Physics? She had never been good with numbers and whatnot. Her notebooks for those subjects had always been full of doodles. It wasn't like she had to use half of them in university anyway.
She knew her roommate could be really nasty in the mornings or generally after not getting enough hours of sleep, but they were throwing it way out of proportion. And that was when it hit Allison. She understood what that was about and started laughing so hard that she had trouble to keep it down and control herself. The two guys stopped what they were doing, mostly the franctic wave of arms, and stood there looking at her as if Allison was crazy or as if she had grown a third arm from her back.
"I can't believe you two!" she finally managed to say. "Are you afraid of a girl?"
"I'm so not afraid," Joshua quickly denied, but seemed to have an after thought. "I'm just... cautious."
"Besides, it's not any girl," Logan offered his two cents on the matter. "It's Hannah Marblestone. She broke my nose once and gave me a black eye twice. Both things happened after I pissed her off. Unintentionally, of course. And waking her up before noon pisses her off, at least according to Josh."
"Whatever," said Allison after taking a good look at Logan and Joshua. "I'm waking her up or my name's not Allison Bayridge. And she won't even mind, I'll tell you that."
"Okay..." her boyfriend didn't seem to be too sure of it. "They both will be pissed off."
"I heard that, Josh. You're such a loser."
"Maybe, but you're dating me, aren't you?" he retorted with a smug smile.
"I hate it when you have a point. Doesn't happen often, but it's incredibly annoying when it does," the blonde girl replied and then gave him her back, focusing her attention on her roommate and best friend. "Haaannaaaaaaah! Hannaaaah!" seeing as the whispering wasn't working, Allison decided to take an extreme measure and yelled on her friend's ear. "Hannah! Wake up already!"
The brunette's eyes shot open wide and she sat up abruptly. Losing her balance for a second, Hannah Marblestone ended up falling off the bed and on her ass. She stated a series of profanities that were about best friends that woke her up by screaming on her ear, laughing cousins and the fact that the floor should be softer. Allison was trying not to laugh, but failed miserably at such task. What good were best friends if they couldn't be laughed at? Joshua didn't try to disguise his laughing fit at all, openly pointing at his cousin. Logan was the only one that wasn't outright enjoying the scene. Actually, he was eyeing her in a strange way.
It was possibly because the brown-haired girl was wearing nothing but boy shorts and a polka-dotted baby tee. Her attire didn't leave much to the imagination, but that thought didn't even cross her mind. Hannah was too busy glaring at her cousin. Joshua had tears coming out of his eyes already. He was such an exaggerating freak. She didn't think it was the smallest bit funny the fact that she had fallen out of bed, what didn't happen that often. The young woman seriously considered locking her bedroom's door from that day on, but such thing wouldn't work – most of the time it was Allison that woke her up. It was just that she usually did it in a better way, by turning on the stereo on full volume with some punk song playing.
"Ow! Crap! What is it? It's not funny!"
"Hahaha! Yes, it is!" Joshua still couldn't get a hold of himself. "You should've seen your face when you hit the floor! Haha! I wish I had a camera, man. That was such a priceless expression! Twisted Kodak moment material."
"Well, laugh a little more now, Joshua," she retorted with another glare and a tone of threat in her voice, "because you'll be crying by the time I put my hands on you."
"Pft, Hannah, don't be so agressive!" Allison said, waving a hand dismissively at her roommate and rolling her eyes for the upteenth time already. "That's not how girls are supposed to behave. And don't roll your eyes at me. Get up, take a shower, change clothes and let's go."
"Where?" the brown-haired asked, confused, as she got up and rubbed her butt. Her short hair was a complete mess and she didn't hold a yawn. The girl didn't mind looking like a total mess and it wasn't because she knew those three well, she didn't mind it in general.
"The mall, duh. We're going shopping, loser."
"Not a chance in hell, Allison! And you seriously need to stop watching Mean Girls."
"I told you she would complain," one of the guys said with a knowing voice.
"Wait and see, Logan," the blonde girl replied with a knowing smile.
This started out as an one-shot entirely written in dialogue, but I liked the characters too much and decided to explore them a little more. The chapters are rather short and there won't be many chapters. I'd love some feedback, whether you hated it or not and why. Thanks a lot and hope you enjoyed it!