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I could tell mom really wanted to make this work. For her, I sucked it up.
“Yeah, sure,” I muttered.
“Good,” she smiled.
Tracianne was smiling with glee. What the Hell is wrong with her? So petty.
“We’re planning on shopping in rotation,” Richard explained.
“What good will that do?” I asked.
“It’ll keep some of us from getting infected,” Richard pointed out.
“Yeah, but it has a two week incubation period. Unless you’re going to stay away for over 14 days, it’s not going to matter if you end up coming back to the house,” I pointed out.
“We still think it’s best.”
“But it’s not doing anything.”
“Phil,” ma said warning.
“Ma, it doesn’t. Think about it.”
“Okay, you made your point,” said Richard. “But we’re doing it anyway.”
I threw up my hands. I make my point and they just ignore me. This sucks. Speaking of which, Tracianne was smiling at me with the straw in her mouth. She was clearly overjoyed I was frustrated. What a weird chick.
“Is there anything else either one of you want from the store?” mom offered.
I threw out my food list. Tracianne added a few things. She was playing innocent. Is she bipolar, I wonder? She wanted a bunch of food that was all die, of course. Probably anorexic, now that I think about it.
Mom and Richard head out. He looked at the list of food on his phone and made a face. He was probably editing my request. I got the sense he was like that--- Had to be the smartest guy in the room, right?
“Oh, you didn’t need that junk.” I can just hear it now. The door shut and I was left at the kitchen table with the brat.
“Smooth sailing, Phil,” she repeated.
“That’s not what he said, dumbass,” I corrected.
“You know what I mean.”
“You’re so full of yourself and keep sucking on that straw, by the way.”
She suddenly realized what she was doing and put down her cup angrily.
“What are you implying?”
“That you have some kind of oral fixation, I guess.”
“Ew!”
“Do you even know what that is?”
“I know what it sounds like.”
“Hey, I was minding my own business and your father just comes at me,” I pointed out. “What’s the deal with that?”
“He’s not going to take any of your crap and neither will I,” she said smugly. “So watch it.”
“You watch it,” I warned. “You’re not the boss of me.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
“I never said I was. I want nothing to do with you,” I said, getting up.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Fine!”
“Fine!”
I got up and walked out of the room.
“You’re a weirdo,” I commented as I left.
“You’re the weirdo, how late do you sleep? Past noon?”
“Sometimes I stay up pretty late, as if it’s your business.”
“Didn’t say it was, but you made the whole family meeting run late.”
“I didn’t know we were having one!”
“Oh. Well, I didn’t know that.”
“What you don’t know could fill an iPhone. A good iPhone.”
She thought about that for a minute. That would be an insane amount of information.
“You’re an asshole!” she snapped. “Just leave me alone.”
“The kitchen is a communal area,” I pointed out. “This should be the neutral zone. It’s where the food sleeps.”
“And the pantry too,” she added. “Take it easy with the food there.”
“If you’re dad is smart, he’s buying food in the can,” I noted. “We could see food supply lanes disrupted. It could mean many more people could starve outside the United States.”
“Do you even know what you’re talking about?” she asked suspiciously. “Because if you don’t…”
“The virus causes flu-like symptoms, but it incubates for like, two weeks in the body,” I pointed out. “During that time, people are contagious and that’s how it spreads. Everyone here might already have it.”
“No one’s sick.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Asymptomatic variants could be anywhere. You go to the gas station, the mini-mart, a public bathroom--- Anywhere people go. They don’t know they have it. People are coming back from Italy and China showing no signs. No one is stopping them at the airports. And if they did, they’d have to quarantine them for at least two weeks.”
“They could test them,” she pointed out. “There must be a test.”
“It’s called the novel Corona Virus because it’s new. They don’t have a reliable test. The Chinese tried taking everyone’s temperature, but again, that doesn’t work. If you have the virus and a temp, you got infected two weeks ago.”
The light bulb finally went off as she began to realize how insidious the virus was.
“Oh, God,” she said, thinking about it. “My whole campus probably has it! We had a lot of exchange students.”
“Not necessarily. They may have come to the U.S. long before the virus started to spread in other countries,” I noted. “But they trace this thing--- Rumor has it--- As far back as November. The new semester started after Christmas, so…”
“Now I’m trying to remember if anyone I knew was sick. I mean, even at two weeks, that might be an indication.”
