Another Summer Day

It was a sunny summer day, the kind of day that could be wasted away in the shade of a tree, staring at clouds. Eating ice cream, feeling the breeze lift the hairs off your neck.

Emily was in her room, going strong on the fifth hour of watching a Netflix series. With the blinds drawn and her door closed, she lay in bed surrounded by darkness, enraptured by the convoluted love triangle that was forming on screen. It took her a drowsy moment to register that her name was persistently being yelled from downstairs. After a brief pause in the yelling, there was a knock on her door and her mother entered. Emily frowned at the light entering her room.

“Your dad is furious.” Her mother sighed. “You remember that we switched internet providers last month, right? How we now have a bandwidth limit? We went over it.”

Emily slowly processed this information.

“I vaguely remember that… how do you even go over that limit? It was huge, I swear-” Her mother cut her off. “You went over it. Em, get off that computer and go outside.” Emily started sputtering, but her mother continued. “You, my dear, single-handedly Netflixed us over the limit. We have to pay a seventy dollar penalty fee. Go outside, it’s summer! And of course, no more Netflix for the rest of this month.” Emily’s mother left, the door hanging open.

Emily went through a couple of stages. She felt pretty angry at this obvious display of injustice, and hit ‘play’, continuing the episode. After a while, however, she pressed ‘pause’ and closed the site. She felt guilt, and dread as she imagined the lecture she would get later from her father.

She continued lying there for another ten minutes. There were lots of things to consider: How would the love triangle be resolved? How would she survive the rest of this month? How could she access the internet and continue watching?

Gathering her willpower, she slowly got up and dressed herself, brushed her teeth, grabbed her bag and laptop and headed out the door to the nearest Starbucks.

Along the way, she found herself enjoying the warm embrace of the late-afternoon sun. She was glad to be outside, and stopped for that ice cream cone. Maple walnut.

She paused underneath a tree and stared up at the clouds, adding to her SnapChat story: “3:54 PM. Enjoying the summer weather.”

She decided to enter a book store, and bought a book she remembered enjoying in her senior year of high school.

She saw that cute boy from her French class and he even said ‘hi’ to her.

Then, she located a Starbucks and marathoned the remainder of the show.