Rules of Survivaccommodation pt 2

Paper airplanes were sadly decorating the carpet. They were right where I'd left them yesterday.

“The book needs to be fixed,” Grant said sternly.

“Why don't we just forget about it?”

My enemy number two shook his head. “It's my father's favourite compendium.”

It was with difficulty that I suppressed the desire to burn or drown the book. My mind told me that the president would punish me severely for what he loved. But my heart thirsted for revenge, and torn between these two emotions, I rushed to attack the nearest object of my hatred. “Couldn't you have said that before? When I was tearing up the book yesterday, why didn't you stop me?”

“I wanted to see where your shamelessness and imagination would take you.”

I exhaled slowly, begging myself to calm down. My tongue itched and I hadn't felt the need to curse so much in a long time. “All right. Where's the iron?”

I was carefully smoothing out the third sheet, which had been a former airplane, when Grant put aside the tape he'd used to reattach the pages. “I think we need to write rules for accommodation.”

“You mean the rules of survival?”

“Ha ha, very funny,” he said, looking at me reproachfully.

“Okay, okay, good idea.”

I grabbed a pen, pulled a white sheet of paper out of a desk drawer and wrote the headline ‘Siri and Grant's Rules of Survivaccommodation’.

“What terrible handwriting you have,” he muttered in my ear, snatched the pen away from me and wrote the same thing under my headline, only much prettier.

“And yours is like a girl's,” I looked at the almost calligraphic scribbles with disgust. “No, even girls don't write that elegantly.”

“You can tell a lot about a person by their handwriting,” Grant said thoughtfully as he stared at my scrawl.

I felt uncomfortable, so I hurried to distract him.

“First rule! Don't spend more than fifteen minutes in the bathroom.”

Circul nodded and obediently wrote ‘Rule#1’.

“Don't kick people out of bed,” the guy said next.

I looked at him with a smirk. “Let's just say, ‘Don't touch each other under any circumstances.”

Grant gazed at me with an equally grim smile. “I see you have a problem with tactile communication. Haptophobia?”

“No. I just hate it when people violate my personal boundaries.”

“All right. The third rule is ‘an eye for an eye’.”

I raised an eyebrow. I was beginning to like our ‘business relationship’.

“Better ‘two eyes for an eye and a whole jaw for a knocked out tooth’.”

What do you mean?" he wondered.

“Double the punishment-revenge. If I call you a dirty name, you can pour shame on me; if you push me out of my chair, I will throw you down the stairs.”

“Hmmm... what if I, like, cut your hair off?”

“I'll cut off your fingers,” I looked at the laugh lines in the corners of his eyes. “And shave off your eyebrows.”

“Eat your portion of food?”

“I'll put ten spoonfuls of salt in.”

“Don't let you go to the toilet on time?” said Grant with amusement.

I examined my fingernails with the expression of a hereditary aristocrat in her old age. “You'll wake up with your face in a bowl.”

“Kiss you?”

“Rape you,” And I choked on my words as I realised what I'd just said. “Or rather castrate you, perform circumcision according to ancient traditions. Without anaesthetic and antiseptics.”

“You're scary when you're angry,” he laughed softly in response.

“Write,” I turned away, trying to hide the blush on my cheeks, embarrassed at the stupidity of what I'd just said.

Almost until sundown, we restored the president's favourite medical anthology, adding new items to our list of survival rules along the way.

The last ray of sunlight licked the carpet and I rubbed my bare feet together. It was getting colder outside, and even Grant's oversized black socks, which he'd kindly lent me, didn't help against the biting draught that blew across the floor.

I berated myself in my thoughts for the umpteenth time for tearing up almost half a book. Punishment always comes for every deed. Whether good or bad.

I sighed mentally and accepted the consequences. At least Grant was doing all the hard work; I wouldn't have had the patience or the neatness to tape the scraps of pages together.

“This really needs to be photographed.”

A flash. Before we realised anything, Midi was on the threshold of the library, looking satisfied as she turned to us.

“Come down to the dining room in ten minutes. The pie is almost ready,” she gave us another smile. “It's a pity I can't show these pictures to the president, otherwise he'll think I'm mocking you. You look like you've been crying for three days.”

We turned our backs on the jolly housekeeper in unison. I had no strength to speak, my stomach was cramped with hunger and it hurt to look at the world.

Who'd have thought that we'd both become allergic to dishwashing liquid all over our faces and eyes?