Bothersome Boys

I tromped through the house, gathering up all the dirty clothes. Approaching Jack's room carefully, I knocked on his door. "Come in!" I heard from the other side so I opened the door. I was bombarded with the stench of week old pizza and sour milk. There were clothes and all kinds of other crud scattered across his floor as he sat at his desk, mindlessly playing some game. "Ew! Don't you ever clean?" I squealed and, in turn, I received a smirk from him as he seemed to look proudly upon his disastrous room.

Shaking my head in disgust, I asked, "Can you please help me gather up your dirty clothes?" He flashed a grin as he got up and started throwing clothing items at me. A scream escaped my lips as a pair of his dirty boxers landed on top of my head. Which only caused him to fall to the floor in hysterics. Then, in a moment, I let all my anger escape me then. "I hate you! All you've done my entire life is torture me! You don't help around here or anything. You're just a nasty, sloppy pig." I chucked the clothes at the floor and ran for my room, the tears were flowing freely at this point.

So many weeks I had spent holed up in that house with him and all his childlike doings had finally gotten the best of me. He was too much for me to handle and it made me want to call my mother and scream at her for telling Jack's stupid mother.

---

A few hours later, there was a knock at my door and a muffled "hello". "Go away!" I called back at him and threw my show at the door. Instead of doing what I said, he decided to barge in. His hands were in his front pockets and he was looking downwards, he almost looked as if he was upset about something. "What do you want from me?" A glare was clearly visible across my feature as I asked him, venomously.

"I just wanted to apologize for earlier. Look, I washed all the dishes and I attempted to do the clothes but I just got myself confused." He shrugged his shoulders, lightly. "I know you have some kind of system to it, plus my mom never really allowed me to do my own laundry." Then a lopsided grin fell upon his face and I felt the sudden urge to smile back at him. Instead, I choked it down and made me way to the laundry room, rolling my eyes at him.

I started separating the items into five neat little groups: whites, brights, darks, jeans, and towels. I was pretty picky about how my clothes had to be washed, no thanks to the OCD my mother had passed down to me. Glancing upwards, I watched to make sure he was paying attention to me. He was leaned up against the dryer with his muscled arms crossed over his chest, actually looking quite interested in what I said. It took me by shock and my gaze went back down to the clothes I was separating. "Once you've got that done, you start the washer and go ahead and put a capful of detergent in there - that way the colors are less likely to bleed into one another. The washer, typically, stays on the same settings. Then you just toss one of the piles in with a capful of softner."

After I do exactly what I told him, I look over at him and his eyes are gazing intently at me. Suddenly, his hand snakes out to brush the strand of hair that had fallen into my eyes behind my ear. I could feel the heat rush to the tops of my cheeks as I tore my eyes from his. Swallowing, I said, "So, I better go back to my room and study. I have some pretty big tests coming up." I scrambled to get around him in the tiny laundry and made a quick escape into the safety of my bedroom.