MILLIE
Emmett is coughing.
My alarm hasn’t even gone off yet, but he’s awake. Coughing. And I can tell just by the sound that he’s faking.
School refusal,the guidance counselor called it. My eight-year-old brother doesn’t want to go to school. So he pretends to be sick as often as he can.
I can’t say I blame him.
He knows I’m off on Mondays. Someone would be free to watch him, so why not make it a three-day weekend? We go through this almost every week. Some days he rasps through a sore throat… or moans with stomach cramps.
It’s the coughing that woke me today. Or it woke Clarence, and Clarence woke me. I’m not sure which, but I can feel the puffs of his canine breath through the blanket over my knee. His ears are perked toward the door, listening to Emmett’s cough, but being the good boy he is, he’s waiting for me to make the first move.
I glance at the glowing red numbers on my alarm:5:26.I have four minutes until the thing goes off. Five minutes until I have to wake up Mattie. Ten minutes until I have to wake up Harry. And fifteen minutes until it’s Emmett’s turn.
Except he’s awake already. Plotting.
With a sigh, I roll onto my back and stare at the shadowed ceiling, asking the question I’ve asked every day for the last five months.
What would Mom do?
She’d be patient… cheerful… and absolutely uncompromising. And Emmett’s ass would get to school.
I close my eyes, marshaling my will power and letting myself catch a few more seconds of peace and solitude—
And then the beeping starts.
I deliver the alarm clock a vengeful slap. Clarence lifts his head with a jingle of tags.
“Yep, buddy,” I sigh again. “It’s time.”
When I toss back the covers, my roommate/bedmate/soulmate and four-year-old Great Pyrenees rises with lumbering ease, stretches his massive limbs, and jumps off the bed.
“Let’s go wake Mattie,” I say, wrapping up in my robe before opening the bedroom door. It’s technically notmybedroom door. It’s the guest room.
Or, rather, the guest suite.
My room—the room I lived in until I left for college—is now Mattie’s. Before I moved out, she roomed with Harry. Like most twins, they were inseparable when they were little. When I went to Tulane, they were only eight years old, and I don’t think either one of them had ever thought about rooming by themselves until Mom offered Mattie my room. I guess Mom figured the two of them bunking together any longer would be weird, and the offer of my room—with its private bathroom and its balcony overlooking St. Mary Street—might be just the thing to get her to take the plunge. Mom was right, and Mattie moved. All the way down the hall.
I pass both boys’ rooms because Mattie needs to be woken first. Not because she’s a girl. Not because she primps or changes outfits five times before she leaves. But because she stresses when she’s rushed, and I don’t need her to be stressed.
Her door is closed almost all the way but not latched, so when Clarence pokes it with his nose, it opens soundlessly, and he slips in. I stand in the doorway and squint to see him boop her in the face.
The sight of it makes me smile.
Mattie, who sleeps on her side, makes a muffled sound, reaches out a hand, and scrubs Clarence behind one ear. “I’m up, Millie,” she says softly, and I can tell she’s smiling too.
Because if your mom’s not there to wake you up in the morning, a one-hundred-and-ten pound Great Pyrenees is the next best thing.
And, yeah, I learned that the hard way, but at least I learned it.
The wake-up routine is almost the same for Harry, except Harry is a stomach sleeper. This means he somehow roots his way under the pillows during the night. He may be fourteen years old, but when he’s asleep, he still looks like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys. Boney. All elbows and knees. Hair sticking up like a turkey tail from his pillow diving.
So most mornings, Clarence has to do a little excavating. He snuffles and snorts and pokes his big head under the pillow pile. And since Harry isn’t as easy to wake as Mattie, there’s usually licking involved.
“Ugh!” Pillows scatter.
I grin. Yep, he’s awake.
