Skylar should have been asleep. She had a Spanish exam the following day, and yawning and fighting the urge to fall asleep during the test would surely limit her concentration. She also had swim practice at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, and her coach didn't have much sympathy for the swimmers who weren't early risers.
Even though Skylar was well aware of these events, something kept her awake, and she didn't know what. Okay, that was a lie. She knew fully well what painful memory from the previous day kept her from drifting away into unconsciousness. Even when she somehow managed to forget, as soon as her eyelids began to feel heavy and she began to slip away from the material world, Jenny Oppenheimer's shrieks rang in her ears, and she was suddenly wide awake.
Skylar sat up in bed, feeling defeated. She forced herself to relive the memory, to feel the emotions for the second time that day. She let the memory take over her thoughts...
It was a pretty average day. Skylar was sitting in science class next to her friend Eric, waiting her teacher to turn away from the students and free them from her piercing stare that strongly reminded Skylar of an eagle. As the teacher turned to write a formula on the chalkboard, Skylar had her chance.
She slipped her finger into her backpack, and palmed a tiny, paper-wrapped, object. She unwrapped the Super-Bubble gum and laid it on her hand. Gum was strictly forbidden in school, but Eric had promised Skylar that he would show her how to blow a bubble. She made a big show of checking to make sure the coast was clear (aka, the teacher was still looking away) and popping it into her mouth, making Eric laugh.
Skylar didn't find what came next quite as funny. As Eric demonstrated the proper steps for acquiring this skill, Skylar watched with rapt attention. She had never been particularly good at blowing bubbles, and she didn't want to make a fool out of herself. She molded the gum until it was flat in her mouth, pushed her tongue into the middle, closed her eyes, and blew.
She sensed disaster before she opened her eyes again because she realized that the bubble gum was no longer in her mouth. She peeked her eyes open, and then slammed them closed again. The gum wasn't in her mouth anymore because it was in Jenny Oppenheimer's perfectly styled hair. Skylar quickly realized what had happened. Instead of blowing a bubble, she had blown the chewed up wad of Super-Bubble into the back of her arch-Nemesis's head!
"Of course it had to have gone into Jenny's hair,” Skylar thought bitterly as Jenny's screams filled the air. "Of course it had to have gone into the hair of the girl who has hated me since kindergarten!" Skylar and Jenny had been enemies since Jenny had stolen Skylar's chocolate milk when they were six years old. Skylar felt as if she were spiraling down a long tunnel of humiliation, and the only sounds she could she could hear were Jenny's screams mingled with Eric's laughter...
As the memory came to a close, Skylar felt overwhelmed by her emotions. Her huge feelings of guilt and mortification were intensified by the dark and quiet atmosphere of her bedroom. Driven out of bed, Skylar decided that she would make things right, and fix the days events.
Skylar tiptoed downstairs, and powered up the family computer. She typed "How to get gum out of hair" into the Google search bar, and painstakingly compiled a list of all of the results. Noting that the most popular result was to freeze the gum using an ice cube, and to ease the frozen wad of gum out using a glob of peanut butter, Skylar found an ice tray and the last coveted jar of peanut butter. She wrote out careful directions on how to remove gum from hair and gathered the tray, the jar, and the directions. She arranged all of these objects in a large cardboard box and wrote out an address in large letters on top.
As she placed this box next to the mailbox to be picked up by the mail man, all Skylar could hope was that when Jenny received the package she would forgive it's sender.
Her deed done, Skylar padded up the stairs and into her bedroom with quiet feet. She climbed into bed and immediately fell fast asleep.