Susie Solemn

“What’re you making?” Susie looked up from her phone. Charlotte stood at the edge of the kitchen, looking at the stove timer. “07:18, 07:17, 07:16…” The stove timer counted down the minutes and seconds till the muffins were done.

“Muffins,” Susie said, looking back down at her phone.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you making muffins?” Charlotte walked over to where Susie sat and looked at her, seemingly mad.

“Because,” she started, pausing to clear her throat, “we had bananas that had been sitting in the freezer. They’d been in there for almost two weeks. I figured it was time to make them into muffins.” Susie stood up, and started to leave the kitchen.

“Okay, I just don’t think we needed muffins right now.” Susie stopped and turned to look at Charlotte, who was looking at her with a look of annoyance and dismissal.

“Well, if I didn't make them today, the bananas would’ve sat in the freezer till next week, unless you were gonna make something with them first?” She ended her sentence as a question, but only to try and sound more polite. She knew her roommate was gonna let those things sit in the freezer till they rotted.

“No, I guess not,” she says with a huff, throwing herself down on the couch and pulling out her phone.

Susie goes down the hall to her room, where she spends the next few minutes putting away clothes. She was finally getting to the bottom of the pile of laundry on the floor. Just a few more minutes and she would have all of her clothes put away-

BEEP…BEEP…BEEP…

The oven timer goes off and she runs out of her room to turn it off. The smell of warm bananas fills the apartment as she opens the oven. Susie sets the muffins to cool on top of the stove, and starts to go back to her room, when a shout behind her makes her turn around. Charlotte stood behind her, one of the muffins in hand. She held a hand up to her mouth and started spitting. Her muffin filled spit landed on the ground and on to Susie’s face.

“Ah!”

“What are you doing?” Susie wiped her face, annoyed, and looked at Charlotte for an answer.

“It’th hot!”

“Well obviously. I literally just took them out of the oven.”

“Well why didn’t you say anything before I took a bite‽” To Susie’s discomfort, she dropped the bitten muffin back into the muffin pan with the rest of the batch.

“I- I didn’t see you grab them. And you were literally out here when I took them out. That’s just common sense.”

“Well, I didn’t know,” she said, seemingly upset again. She went back to the couch, playing on her phone again, her spray of spit still on the kitchen floor. Susie stared at it for a second, then turned towards Charlotte.

“Charlotte?”

“Yeah?”

“Your spit is all over the floor.”

“Okay.”

Susie stared at Charlotte, waiting for her roommate to get up or say something. She did neither, so Susie went back to her room. She walked past her pile of laundry and threw herself on her bed, pulling out her phone. She spent the next forty-seven minutes watching short-form videos, only stopping when the urge to urinate grew too strong. She got up and used the toilet. Then she showers, gets into pajamas, kicks her pile of laundry into her closet, then works on homework. From the last time she spoke to Charlotte to now, almost two hours have passed. Susie’s stomach lets out a rumbling sound, and she gets up to go get food.

“What do you want to eat for dinn-” she cuts herself short upon seeing her roommate asleep as she walks into the kitchen. She turns around, tiptoeing back to her room, only letting out a sigh after she closed her door. She raspberries her lips in frustration. Susie hated it when Charlotte slept in the living room, and she did it a lot. When she sleeps in the living room, everyone else has to tiptoe around her. Doing laundry, making food, getting water, and leaving the apartment were all off limits when she slept on the couch. All of those things were noisy, and all of them would wake her up. Susie spends the next two-and-a-half hours doing homework and watching videos on her phone, the rumbling in her stomach making it increasingly harder to focus.

It’s eight fifty-six by the time Charlotte wakes up. She comes down the hall and opens Susuie’s bedroom door. Susie is sitting at her desk, hunched over a stack of papers she’s annotating. She startles slightly as Charlotte opens the door.

“Oh- Hey, you’re up.”

“Yep,” she says, walking into Susie’s room and throwing herself on Susie’s bed. She says nothing more, just sits there and scrolls on her phone as Susie tries to finish this assignment. Susie, already being hungry, is growing increasingly agitated by her roommate. “Ew,” Charlotte says after a few minutes.

“Huh?” Susie back at her.

“Your closet is a mess. Did you know that?”

“Yeah, I know.” Susie turned back around, embarrassed. “I’m working on it.”

“Okay, just wasn’t sure if you knew,” she said, laying back onto Susie’s bed.

Susie let out a sigh, frustrated. She was getting closer to snapping at Charlotte everyday. She hates it when Charlotte doesn’t knock. She hates it when she walks in without asking. She hates it when she lays down on her bed in her dirty clothes she’d been wearing all day. Susie got up and left her room, letting out a deep breath as she walked into the kitchen.

This was starting to be one of those weeks. The kind of week that feels like it’ll never end, where you go through it like a Zombie. Susie felt like she hadn’t made more than a dent in both her chores and homework; the homework especially was never ending. Things often became ten times worse when she was forced to be around her idiot of a roommate, and that was most times. Susie was half convinced that Charlotte acted like this just to see how much she could get away with before Susie got pissed off. Charlotte was a smart person, so she just couldn’t believe that she wasn’t aware of half the stuff she did. And if she didn’t have enough weighing her down already, her mother would be the cherry on top. Constant text messages and phone calls from her mother filled her day. Between her roommate and her mother, Susie was losing her mind.

Susie grabbed a can of chicken noodle soup and dumped it into a bowl. All she wanted to do was relax in her room for a few minutes. Charlotte's high pitched voice filled her ears, and she couldn’t help but feel like she was living back home again.

Susie sat on her bed; legs crossed, laptop in lap. Just as she opened a blank document to do some schoolwork, her bedroom door flew open. Her mom marched in without so much as a knock or a word to Susie. She headed straight towards Susie’s bathroom. Susie watched in her peripheral vision as her mother opened her bathroom door, then as she turned to face Susie.

“Your trash is full. You need to take it out.”

“Okay.”

“No, not okay! Get up and take it out,” Her mother demanded. Susie slowly got up, carefully setting her laptop onto her pillow and walking past her mother to take out the trash. “I shouldn’t have to ask you to do this,” she said as Susie picked up her trash can.

It took Susie all of forty-nine seconds to take out the trash. When she walked back into her room, trashcan in hand, her mother was half laid out on Susie’s bed, half kneeling on the floor, and in her hands was Susie’s laptop. With the bed being right in front of the door, her body and legs were blocking the door. Susie stopped and stared at her mother, watching as her mother clicked through her computer. Suddenly, her mother glanced back at her.

“What are you doing? Go put the trash can away.” She looked back at the laptop.

“You’re in the way.” She waited. Her mother neither responded or moved. “I can’t get past.” Still no movement. Susie stepped over her mothers legs, bumping past her clumsily, the trash can dragging across her back.

“What are you doing‽” Her mother began yelling at her, scolding her for who knows what. That night, Susie slept with her door open. Bad children didn’t get to close their doors.

The beeping of the microwave brought Susie back to the present. She pulled the soup out, grabbed a spoon, and turned to go back to her room.

“For me?” Charlotte stood in front of Susie, looking at the bowl of soup in her hands.

Why the fuck would I have just made you a bowl of soup? “Sure.” Susie handed the soup to her roommate, then turned towards the cupboards, pulling out another can of soup. After the bowl was done, she took it to her room. Ten minutes of silence and a bowl of warm soup was all she wanted before bed. She got two minutes and eighteen seconds of silence before her door opened, with her roommate standing there again. She talked her ear off for half an hour, and when Susie finally turned off the light, locked the door, and went to bed, her door was knocked on three more times. Three more times in the span of an hour. She made her braid her hair. She wanted to talk to her. Well all Susie wanted was some privacy, but that was something she’d never had.