I woke up with crusted blood on my face the second day in a row. It's not a good way to wake up. I felt immobilized and my mouth felt dry. It took a few minutes to shift into a position that wouldn't soil everything. Then I managed to find a sink, but not before a drink of water. I dabbed and patted it's remains with tissue paper but there's still a little bit of it left. I'm afraid it'll burst tomorrow morning and I'll wake up like this again. I never was queasy with my own blood, until now. I suppose I'm growing up, in some strange way. I think it's the involuntariness of the process. Except it doesn't feel out-of-my-control. It just feels like someone punched me in the face and I'm waking up after having passed out from a fight.
Are there deadlines in fourth grade? At that time homework left over for after ten o' clock was a taboo. There were phone curfews, some people slept early, others did their homework right after reaching home, and I admit I've done it in school if someone was late picking us up. Calling a friend to ask a particularly difficult question at eleven in the night was outrageous. You could tell it was - your parents thought so, their parents thought so, they thought so and you thought so. Eleven! What did you do the other six hours you had to yourself? That's what everyone asked implicitly, always implicitly because the question spoken aloud was always about how long it would take, when you would sleep. I remember calling a friend at six - six! - in the morning, to tell him excitedly how I'd solved the question we couldn't understand last night - this was seventh grade - and setting off a whole chain of calls that ended with people hurriedly scribbling homework before clas...
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