Somewhere Between

One: 6 AM

The alarm clock was going off. Riley was already aware that something was wrong before she snapped her head up, discovering herself slouched over the table. The very next thing she discovered was her unfinished homework. Then the desklamp still being on. Then the daylight on the walls. It was a horrifying, horrifying moment.

Fear was first awake. He tumbled off the sofa and found himself on the cold, hard floor. Taking a moment to gauge his surroundings he went straight into panic mode.

"No, no, no!" he cried out.

Springing to his feet he made a beeline across the room to his companion, Joy, who herself was in a similar position as Riley, slouched over the Console, but on the way struck the floor again, back first, squealing with panic as he fell. Some of the scattered Memory Orbs he had stumbled over went flying, bouncing around like oversized colored ping pong balls.

What an awful morning.

Joy stirred and blissfully muttered something having to do with pizza.

Fear made it to the Console, still rubbing his back, and after a moment tried to shake her awake, only for her to wave a hand at him dismissively and moan, "Don't worry, no broccoli this time…"

So he took matters into his own hands. Pulling up a chair of his own he picked a switch on the control panel and threw it. Then another. And another. What would Joy do?

For a long moment Riley stared blankly at her desk, wondering how she could be so stupid. It took her that long to regain the presence of mind to reach for her mobile phone and shut the alarm off. At least it was quiet. Whatever fulfillment she had from her five-odd hours of sleep was lost in this pile of homework she was now sifting through. Panic set in slowly while it became apparent how much trouble she was in. The time was 6:03.

Joy regained her senses finally. The first thing she asked was, "Wait, what's going on?" Then, "are… are we finished?"

Eyes darting to and fro between Joy and the big screen that showed them what Riley saw, Fear frantically tried to get it across that it had happened again, but the words didn't form coherently so he gave up and let Joy see for herself instead. He didn't have the heart.

Joy took one look and it came together. Then she was all business. "It can't be much further now. Come on, let's get working."

"Joy," Fear said at last. "This was a bad idea…"

Joy was too busy to take heed. Her fingers worked the keyboard swiftly, familiarly, as she focused on warming Riley up.

A new, disappointed voice chimed in. "You have got to be joking. Please don't tell me you fell asleep on Riley's homework again…"

Fear straightened his back and narrowed his eyes, staring straight ahead. "No," he said, sarcastically. "We didn't…"

Disgust, always appreciative, exhaled, "Of course…"

Descending the winding walkway down from their living quarters, she went and picked up a Memory from the floor, a golden one with Joy's touch, examined the image it held inside, and announced, "Well, looks like there's your excuse. 'We had hockey practice.'"

Fear crossed his arms. "Yeah, good luck with that…"

Joy promptly came up and snatched the globe from Disgust's hands. "It was for morale," was her explanation. Disgust hummed dubiously while Joy was looking over the Memory, making certain that its color remained unchanged; no trace of Disgust and her signature green.

In the globe was a playback of a hockey puck at the end of a stick zigzagging back and forth in between a line of cones.

"…And how much did we drool on ourselves? Our face is so icky…"

Joy ditched what she was doing and ran back to the Console, where Disgust had officially begun her workday.

Riley scrunched her cheeks and touched her fingers to them.

"Fear! Don't do that. It's gross!" scolded Disgust.

"Well it is our saliva," replied Fear.

Moving past him, Disgust said, "Joy, we need to wash off."

"Let's answer this question here first."

"Where is your self respect, Joy?"

Joy threw her arms in the air. "Okay. Fine. We'll freshen up first. But I'll need you to help me sort out the mess later, got it?"

"Sure. Whatever you say."

Riley peeled herself away from the desk and crossed the corridor to the bathroom. Breakfast was cooking downstairs; bacon and pancakes, accompanied, as always, by the scent of coffee. Disgust detested bacon, complaining, perpetually, about "oil and carbs". Nor did she appreciate when Dad used his affectionate nickname for Riley when she came trampling down the stairs in her pajamas.

"Morning, Monkey!" He was already dressed up in a shirt and tie, glancing up briefly from the mobile phone in his hands while he waited at the table. Disgust curled her nose.

"Morning, hon," said Mom, perched above the stove. "Come have a seat."

Riley, who might have been in a hurry to find a chair, stopped dead in her tracks for a moment when Mom pitched her next question:

"Sleep well?"

It was a question Riley already hated.

Anger and Sadness had come into work while Riley was grooming herself. They saw the mess that Joy was in the process of cleaning and came to their own conclusions. Sadness was quiet about it. Anger, not so much, shrugging Joy off when she tried to tell them good morning.

"Don't good morning me! You let it happen again, did you? The queen of poor time management right here, everybody! I am tellin' ya!" He threw his meaty arms in the air for effect.

It was Sadness who suggested being up front with Mom and Dad, and not for the first time. Sadness, who twiddled her fingers diffidently when eyes landed on her. As expected, Joy hated the idea. After all, they'd been through this before hadn't they? There was no need, Joy rationalized, to make it a bigger problem than it already was.

Riley was already cringing on the inside as she tried to answer Mom's question.

"Yeah… you could say that."

Mom said nothing, sharing a glance with Dad as the girl found her seat and started shoveling food onto her plate.

A deep tremble ran through the floor as the foundations of a distant Island of Personality were violated.

"Which Island was that?" Joy demanded. She remembered something like this. They all did. "Tell me, quick! Somebody!"

Being the closest, Disgust set aside what she was doing and ran to the observation windows, pressing her fingers to the glass. Her answer was expected.

"Honesty. It was Honesty."

Joy came beside Disgust moments later, her hands practically slamming into the glass panes. She breathed a sigh of relief, seeing that it was still standing tall. Sadness soon joined them. After a moment, Joy broke away from the windows, faced again with the mess that was their work area.

"Well?" asked the green skinned one, facing Joy's backside. "What now?"

Joy didn't turn around. "We have to finish breakfast. Fast."

In an effort to be reassuring, she added, "We have this under control." At that, her colleagues looked at one another incredulously, and not for the first time in history.

It was Disgust who spoke up. "Under control…" she elaborated, panning her hands out. "Joy, you do realize that we're only half finished, right?"

"Fifty-five percent finished!" Joy protested. Elsewhere, unseen by them, Anger scoffed and shook his head behind a newspaper.

"Class starts in an hour and we still have to get ready!" Disgust shot back.

"Be careful, Riley! You might choke!"

It was Mom. Each of the Emotions tore their heads to at the screen, where Riley's parents were staring. It might have been comical, how her fork with a chunk of pancake just froze in midair while she returned the stare awkwardly. Finally, Riley dropped both hands on the table and blurted defensively, "Thirty minutes! I… I only need thirty minutes!"

It was at this point Disgust's agitation blew through.

"Fear!"

Fear's hands came flying off the Console like it was a hot stove. He grinned nervously in her direction before scooting backwards. Disgust, seeing Riley's plight, turned her attention back to Joy.

"How could you let it come to this?"

When Mom did speak, it was for the benefit of the doubt if nothing else. There were no illusions.

"Riley, I thought you were finished!"

"I have like, one subject left!" said Riley. Eyes flew to the windows as Honesty Island trembled again. Joy, with one hand clasped on the other arm, appeared hurt. Fear was reeling, knowing that he had responsibility for this. He always let Joy talk him into taking that ten, fifteen minute break because they "just finished Computer Fundamentals and had earned it". Now here they were.

Sadness pleaded quietly. "Joy…"

Dad cleared his throat. Suddenly breakfast wasn't as appealing. "Riley," he said. "You had the weekend. This isn't acceptable."

A newspaper ruffled. Anger was getting excited. "Unacceptable, hmm? Would you like to see 'unacceptable'?"

His eyes traced across the smooth, glassy floor the path he took toward the Console. Leather shoes clicked menacingly. At the side, his massive arms swayed, the rolled up newspaper in one hand. Suddenly all was quiet, each of the Emotions resigned to what was about to happen. That was, except for Fear, who impishly raised both hands up in front of him.

"Anger, what are you doing? Anger, please think this over!"

Anger may have been half Fear's height but the fact was that he was much more massive, brushing his tall, lanky colleague aside like a feather in spite of Fear's protests.

Anger stopped at the control panel and loosened his tie. Unaware, apparently, of the rest of his colleagues watching wordlessly, he seemed to speak directly to Dad, raising one finger at the screen while the other hand was winding up. The air above his head sweltered like charcoal.

"Hey, I have an idea! Why don't you…" He slammed a fist down on the control panel. Keys, levers, and any other loose objects rattled from the force.

"Screw the hell off!"

Riley's chair scooted backwards. Her parents were as stunned as her emotions were. It was only when she was halfway up the stairs Dad found his tongue again.

"Where do you think you're going? We aren't finished here, young lady!"

Not that it made much of a difference. They heard the door slam. Mom looked at Dad with eyebrows raised as if to say, "good going!"

Dad rubbed the back of his neck, sighing dejectedly

Up in Riley's room, the news wasn't getting any happier. When Disgust finally challenged Anger the response was that he had "saved our asses", adding, "You'll thank me later." Leaning back, he casually returned to reading his newsprint, whose headline conspicuously said, 'GROUNDED?' with smaller stories such as 'HOMEWORK "55% COMPLETE", SAY EXPERTS'. With nothing more to offer, Disgust went back to Joy.

"Now we have more time to finish," rationalized Joy, always the opportunist. "Sadness, help Disgust sort that stuff out!"

Sadness, who had been gazing at the screen furtively, said nothing. She spared Joy a quick glance before doing as she was told. "And don't touch the hockey ones!" Joy reminded them both. "Fear! I need a damage report! How much further?"

Fear was far from thrilled, reaching up towards his temples. "Well, we're grounded, and they're gonna pull us off the team, and we're going to be out of school and be out of shape…"

Joy gave him a couple of taps on the shoulder to snap him into focus. "None of those things are going to happen," she tried to tell him. On the screen was algebra, which had to do with probability and included a Sudoku puzzle because this teacher liked giving those out.

"Well," Fear said to Joy. "We're half done with Social Studies and haven't even started with Science yet… A-and we can't pretend to know how to do these, Joy." Fear gestured his hands towards the Sudoku puzzle, the icing on the Algebra cake. Saturday Sudoku, it was called. It was also full of eraser marks.

Joy reassured him that they'd deal with Algebra later. In the meantime they would handle Social Studies and Biology, where the answers were either memorized or in plain text. Riley started with Social Studies, flipping to the page where she left off. She hastily glossed over the words as she hunted for answers.

Joy called to Disgust. They needed social studies related material. Disgust happily obliged, after obnoxiously pretending to sort through memories from the hockey rink and then song lyrics from a recent Broadway musical. She tossed the necessary items across the room while Joy scrambled to catch them all. One by one, Fear read off the questions out loud. Riley did not need direct input from the Emotions to answer most of them. Objective pieces of information differed from Memories and were handled differently. Despite being preoccupied, Disgust would chirp in when she felt that she could phrase the answer in a "more meaningful" way. Joy would oblige with chagrin, tapping her fingers impatiently.

Riley had taken up the practice of doing the harder subjects first and working towards the ones she found easier. This meant that she should have been finished with Algebra. However, Riley could not find time arrange a meet up with the fellow classmate she relied on for help, and chat boxes and phone calls were hardly conducive to discussing math. At least that was what she told herself. Social Studies, on the other hand, was one of Riley's stronger subjects. Memorization was something she was good at.

When Riley did have to consult the textbook, Fear would tug Joy's arm to let her know when they were going "too fast" and thus more likely to miss something important. He knew how to work quickly without abandoning caution, which was what Joy needed. That was, when he managed to set his worries aside, which wasn't often. However, when he did find that spot, she refrained from arguing with him.

Somewhere along the line, Riley lost track of time. Every blank filled and sentence completed was a small amount of weight off her shoulders. She hated the uncertainty. She hated the idea that a second wasted separated her from a failing grade. Passively, she berated herself for not thinking this way sooner. At least her parents were generously giving her space and time, and for that Riley was thankful. More than once she had to refrain from checking the time on her phone. The walls grew brighter.

Dad came knocking, which jolted Fear, in turn jolting Riley, while they were invested in what was now her Science homework. Joy stumbled slightly, and some of the armload of Memories she was hauling to the Projector toppled to her feet. This slowed her down, having to pace forward carefully so as to avoid tripping over. Shoot, she thought.

"Riley! Are you finished?"

The time was 7:10.