At about eight the next morning, my sister shook me awake.
Since we're talking about me, I had completely forgotten about my sister while I slept. One would thus expect I'd be startled to see a girl in my room, but surprisingly I wasn't very.
With a level head, I recalled the circumstances of my sister being there.
Before my waking eyes were even a third of the way open, my sister said "Take me to the library."
After a brief pause, she added “Right now.”
She seemed quite prepared for an outing. I hadn't seen her dressed casually in a long time.
She sat on the bed, her hands thrust in the pockets of a gray cardigan, her legs wavering out of her navy-blue short pants, and her soft shoulder-length hair swaying along with that movement.
They were particularly skinny legs, almost seeming artificial with the black tights pulled over them.
I reluctantly got out of bed, took some unfolded dry clothes off a hanger and stuck them under my arm, headed for the bathroom.
The sink water was cold enough to kill a guy from shock, but it'd take a few minutes to get warm water. So I washed my face with that frigid water and quickly changed clothes.
Geez, it was my own apartment. Why did I have to change in secret like this?
I let out a few big sighs. I'd gotten into the futon last night not long after my sister, but ended up not getting much sleep.
Like many shut-ins, I was a night owl, so a constructive "sleep at 1, wake up at 8" schedule was exhausting for me.
Besides, for the past few years, I'd slept much more than I did in my first life. If I didn't get about ten hours of sleep, I was a mess.
Well, maybe it's more probable that I unconsciously slept more not so much for health reasons, but because my time awake was so harsh.
I wonder. Maybe humans can only wake up early when they have TV shows they want to watch, dates to go out on.
It's said that waking up early makes for a better life, but if you ask me, it's having a good life that allows you to wake up early.
Yet of course, even though I could tune out three alarm clocks at once, having a girl shake me awake will wake me up just fine.
Even if she was my sister who I wasn't on good terms with, who was skipping school, who was running away from home, that didn't make a difference.
I felt like it was the first time in a while I'd woken up in a human-ish way. It was common that I'd fall back asleep once or twice before actually getting up.
And even after that, I often stayed on my bed reading or messing with my phone, so if you wanna be accurate, it usually took about ten steps to get from me waking up to getting out of bed.
So yeah, my sister waking me up and me getting straight out of bed was a pretty big deal.
It wasn't even December, but the air had a chill to it like it was already the middle of winter.
As we were about to leave, I realized how lightly-dressed my sister was and went to get a Mods coat for her.
...When I put it like that, it sounds like I'm one caring big brother, huh? But to be blunt, I was just doing the bare minimum to look less terrible.
My biggest motivator was that I was scared of being blamed later, basically.
My sister looked at me holding the coat out as if to say "Wear it yourself," then snatched it from me.
The sleeves were a little long for her, but it was a pretty slender coat, so it didn't look too odd.
I put on a pea coat I'd worn since high school, lazily tied the shoelaces on my boots, and opened the door.
The cold wind hit my skin, and in seconds I was shivering. We got in the car, I turned the heat all the way up, and we sat together until we were warm.
[+]