by Jadyn Marshall
He’d make his own mistakes, exponentially (if he had to).
He hung the banana bunch in the closet after the first infection. Five-bananas-for-a-dollar had gone from fridge to freckled before he got a chance to hack them onto the family-sized box of cornflakes sealed in a roach-proof tub under his bed. The new bananas, barely ripe, fanned into a lime high school track jacket. Go Key Gators! he tried to think dryly, but the team spirit did feel appropriate. He supported the bananas, not the crooked command hook pushed onto the wall post-parental sendoff. It was like holding up a bunch of yellow relay batons.
A thumbprint bruised a banana’s soft arc. He wondered if the peels were scent-absorbent, like the baking soda his mom had insisted take up room in the fridge. It had been a week, and the liquid humidity in the room still swam in the tacky scent of unrolled masking tape. It might be his fault for forcing so many Treble Cliffs posters to cling to the overpainted, peeling, stinking walls. He’d buy a five’s worth of banana peels and hang them up like fly paper in Florida’s August. Annoyance, meet solution.
He domesticated in his room more than he’d though he would, and it was dangerous. The time he spent inhaling the tape-paint chemical cocktail directly related to the rate at which his brain cells died; he’d need those cells to transfer the neon citrus syllabi dates into his ScheduleMEE app. It wasn’t his plan to nerd it the whole semester, but it happened as an afterthought nevertheless. Command hook, command hook, command hook.
