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It´s seven in the morning on a Sunday. I glance at my phone to check for any news as I get up. Once I´m up, there is no way I can go back to sleep. It has always been that way. It will probably always be that way. I grab some random clothes out of my wardrobe and slowly make my way to the bathroom. Just because I´m awake and can´t go back to sleep, doesn´t mean I´m not tired, though.
I lock the door behind me, even though no member of my family ever gets up before ten on a weekend. My dad is a professor in the biology department at the local University. He has lectures every day, except Sunday, so this is his 'holy day, as God had intended it' and my mom works at a homeless shelter downtown. She´s really philanthropic and works very long and hard all the time, so we, my dad, brother Derek and I, are glad that she takes Sunday mornings off. My brother and I are both in high school. As of tomorrow he will be a senior and I will be a junior. Over the course of summer break, he has never gotten up earlier than noon. It´s a miracle that mom and dad didn´t object to that. They are both really nice people, but also very strict in our upbringing.
I grab a towel, toothbrush and toothpaste and get into the shower. I brush my teeth, wash my hair and body and when I´m finished, I just stand underneath the cascade of hot water and think. I think about how school will be now. I worry rather I practiced enough during brake to get into varsity track. I wonder what happened to my best friend Lily and her boyfriend. They went on a two week-long trip together, and her parents only gave her permission, because she and Josh had been friends since elementary school, and had only just recently become a couple. Which her mom of course didn´t know. Their flight is scheduled to arrive later this afternoon at around five p.m. I´m planning on picking them up from the airport in my little Mitsubishi Colt. It is a really sweet car, but everybody always complains that she is not 'American'. I get out of the shower and dry myself off, then I stare at the clothes I picked out. Really? I don´t care a lot about appearance, but sweat pants with a dressy light pink shirt? No. I wrap myself in a towel and make my way through the hallway into my room. I decide that the sweatpants could stay, only I needed another shirt. I pick out a simple blue t-shirt to go with my gray pants. I sit down in front of my mirror and put my long, brown, sort of wavy hair into a messy bun. I don´t even bother with make-up, since I´m only planning on driving to the library and come back here. I grab the books from last week and put them into my backpack.
Downstairs I scribble a note for my parents and grab a muffin for breakfast. Outside I throw my stuff onto the backseat and drive off. I stop for a coffee at Starbucks in order to wake up. It kicks in almost immediately and I jam to my favorite album on the twenty minute drive. I park in the underground garage of a shopping center only a block away.
The library used to be closed on Sundays, but Mike, an eighteen-year-old who just finished high school, thought it would be nice to be open seven days a week. Now he spends all his Sundays here. I love him for that. During school I have practice from four until six thirty and I need to do my homework afterwards and we have meets on Saturdays. There really was no time for me to come here unless I ditched practice, school or my homework. Now I finally have some time to come here. It´s almost nine, he should be here soon. I sit down on the stairs that lead up to the entrance of the old Victorian-style building.
I don´t have to wait very long. Only five minutes later Mike shows up. He is a little taller than me, maybe 5'9''. He has this really nerdy look, but he is actually really nice. He greets me and we walk inside together. I put my books on the front desk for him to check them in while I open a couple of windows and prepare everything else. I turn on the coffee machine; I flip on the light switch and turn on the Internet. This has become our weekly Sunday routine.
Officially the library opens at ten, but we are done at about quarter to, so I slender through rows and rows of shelves laden with books. I always read from varying genres: British Classics, Fantasy, Romance, Crime. I really don´t mind the genre, as long as the book is well written and interesting. I pick out four books and sit down in my favorite armchair. I read the first chapters of one of the books and just can´t stop reading. Others come and go and when I finally finish the rather thin book and look at my phone it´s already five thirty. I jump up and put the one book I just finished back where it belongs and run with the other three to the check out desk. Mike sees me and apparently gets that I´m in a hurry, because he hurries up with the customer he´s with at the moment. I throw my books at him.
"You in a hurry?" he asks.
"Ehm, yeah." I´m a little out of breath. "Lily and Josh are coming back today and I promised them I would pick them up from the airport in half an hour."
"Tell them hi from me!" He yells, as I run out of the door.
