I Won't Let You Wilt

There has to be anger for there to be happiness

Last week, Sunny and Basil finally bought a laptop.

Classes had begun for high school and Sunny was not finding his new laptop productive. He was taking online courses for his final semester of high school, meaning that using the laptop to access the Internet was a necessity. It was just too bad that there were so many other fun things to do on the Internet.

Although college's started for Basil, he hasn't needed to use a laptop yet, so I get to have it all to myself!

Sunny found himself wasting hours browsing forums, playing flash games, and watching cat videos.

He couldn't believe how round some of those cats were. The cats in Faraway were practically blobs already but the cats in these videos had been groomed to spherical purrfection. Their big fuzzy fur begged for him to reach through the laptop screen and pet them.

Alas, the laws of physics were cruel, and his feline petting desires went unsatisfied.

Cats were unique pets because their main method of getting around was hopping. Rumors spoke of a time when cats could walk and run like dogs, but now all cats just hopped around, sometimes all the way up into trees where they'd get hungry and wouldn't come back down until someone offered them some fish.

Sunny's eyes fell into a trance watching these cats hop around, and they reminded him of the way Mewo used to hop up and down on Mari's bed.

Too bad his dad took Mewo with him when he moved away. Mewo was so adorable he just wanted to hug her and cuddle up inside a box with her and take a nap with her and make Basil search all over the house for him until he opened up a box lid to find him and Mewo napping together...

I really need to stop watching these cat videos and get started on my essay.

Sunny was taking four courses for his final semester. After plenty of discussion with Basil, he'd settled on English, Chemistry, Intro to Web Design, and Statistics.

He'd been looking at jobs that were high in demand and ended up discovering the field of web programming. With these courses he could hope to enroll into a college programming degree and land a job in web development.

This week he had an essay due on Shakespeare's The Tempest and he hadn't even gotten started yet. He'd opened up the word document but ceased all writing after the introductory sentence. Worse, he was only halfway done reading the book, so he needed to finish reading it first before writing his essay.

Sunny reached for the book on his shelf but his hand stopped when he got distracted by a cat video which had the audacity, the sheer audacity to insert a boing sound effect every time the cat hopped.

Mesmerized by the perfect visual-audio interplay, his eyes hopelessly tracked the bouncy cat as it hopped up and down trying to grab a yarn ball the owner held above her head. The round cat had orange and dark brown fur and it looked like a basketball being dribbled.

The notification sound of an email arriving in his inbox snapped him out of his nigh-unbreakable trance.

Is that from my mom, or...

More than a month had passed, and Sunny still hadn't received a reply from his mom yet. He was sure she was furious at him right now.

Last week, he had pressed on with Basil's plan and sent a second email to his mom warning her that if she didn't instruct the detective to stop pursuing them, they would press charges against her.

He mentioned that she brought this upon herself by telling the detective about their secret, something she'd promised never to mention to anyone outside their family. The moment he'd clicked send on that email, he knew that all cordial relations with her were over.