Goodnight Moon

1- Today Will Be Beautiful

“Today will be a beautiful day.”

Say it. Believe it. I say it every morning to myself in the mirror before I leave for school and I hope, every day, that it will be true.

I mean, my life isn’t awful by any means. I live in a big house and I have friends. I have a family. I have blonde hair- and everybody knows that that is a guarantee for success. I even have a puppy. Food, clothes and all of that good stuff. Yeah, my life isn’t awful, but it isn’t spectacular either. It’s… I don’t know, ordinary, I guess, but I want today to be beautiful. Not ordinary.

“Max!” I call to my puppy. Well, he isn’t really a puppy, but he’s a Tibetan spaniel, so he’s really small and energetic, like a puppy and I will always call him a puppy. He prances into my bedroom with his tongue out and his triangular ears flopping around excitedly for his breakfast. “Are you hungry, Boy?”

I walk out of my room and he follows me down the hall. Usually in the morning, he’s sleeping in his room (which is just my walk-in closet that I converted into a puppy bedroom) because he has his own doggie bed in there and that’s where he likes to sleep, so I call him to my room and we go downstairs together for breakfast.

When we get into the kitchen, I pour a serving of dog food into his dog bowl and water in the plastic bowl beside the food one. He eagerly prances to the full bowls and I pat his head of soft tan fur before standing up and going for my own breakfast which is just Fruity Pebbles.

“Today will be beautiful, Max,” I inform my cute little dog as he munches on his food. He loves food almost as much as I do, which is really saying something. “I’m telling you, it’s not like all the other days. This one is special.”

When I finish my breakfast, I make sure that Max is still in the kitchen and then I shut the safety door so that he can’t get into the living room. I’d love to trust him, but I just can’t. He likes to pee on carpets but he doesn’t have an issue with tiled floor and the couch is black and Max sheds like crazy, so I just keep him in the kitchen while I’m out. Sometimes, I’ll keep him up in his room, which is also tile, but it’s just easier to not have to go all the way back upstairs again.

“Have a magical day, Maxxie,” I call to my puppy as I throw my leather book bag over my right shoulder and grab my keys so that I can drive to school.

My high school is only about a fifteen minute drive from my house and I get there pretty early, so I get a good parking spot in the senior lot.

I used to meet my best friend, Leda, in the parking lot before school started so that we could walk into school together but now, she has a girlfriend, so they hang out together before school (aka making out in the bathroom). I’m just glad that she has a stable girlfriend now because before Dana, she was a very promiscuous lesbian. She’s been with Dana for five months though and they’re a very adorable couple.

I walk into the school and go for my locker that’s on the second floor. Luckily, our school organizes lockers so that your locker is near your first period class and that’s so nice of them because there are three floors to our school so I don’t want to have to go up two flights of stairs at once. I’m way too lazy for that kind of thing.

“Please tell me that you did the pre-calc homework,” Leda greets me at my locker with a frantic plead.

“Good morning to you too,” I chuckle, shutting my locker with my books cradled in the crook of my elbow.

“Homework?” She demands. We have pre-calculus together first period and the teacher is a stickler for homework so I can understand her hysteria for not having the homework.