Upside Down Life

My phone blares with the standard iPhone wake up alarm. Or, as I call it, GET YOUR A** OUT OF BED YOU LAZY SON OF A B****. I groan and roll over, groping for my phone on the nightstand. I find it hooked into its charger and jam my finger against the screen until it shuts up. I yawn and stretch then roll over and hug my pillow, smashing my face into it. I lay there for about five minutes, contemplating how sick I have to act to get out of school, when my second alarm rang. I groan and reach over, jabbing at my phone with no success. I lift my head and look at it, immediately getting blinded and squinting at it until my eyes leaked until my finger finally found the button and turned it off.

I groan and struggle out of the sheets. They come loose and immediately fall to the floor, followed by my pillows as I sit up. I look up at the floor and groan. I’ll have to ask Jay to get them later. The floor is too far away for me to reach them, even if I jump.

Oh, and I do mean the floor. My bed is bolted to the ceiling. It's a problem but not in the way you’d think. You see, since I was born I’ve always had a problem with gravity. It just doesn’t work for me. While everyone else is walking around on the ground like normal people, I’m upside down like some kind of strange spider man. My family has tried every doctor that would see me, which was a lot. It's not everyday that a two year old can walk on the ceiling without holding onto anything.

After a while, I got tired of all of it and told them to stop. I don’t need to see another doctor, I don’t need to be fixed. This is just how it is. I need some extra help with some things—Okay, most things. Everything was made for people with their feet on the ground.—so the doctors decided to call me ‘disabled’. When people hear that word they always assume I’m just dumb but I’m not. I’m actually in the top ten percent at my school. I could be valedictorian or at least salutatorian (smartest and second smartest people in school) if I was able to do the volunteer work required for it.

I lean over and open the top drawer of the nightstand bolted to the ceiling beside me. I pull my slippers out and put them on my feet. The ceiling is so cold and weirdly textured with Spanish lace it hurts to walk around in the morning. I almost got carpet on the ceiling once, when we had to replace the carpet in the living room, but the people who were putting it in refused even after seeing my gravity intolerance.

I roll out of bed and walk out the door. You know how a door never reaches the ceiling, that two feet of wall that stands between the edge of the doorframe and the ceiling? Yeah, I tripped over that. I stumble into the opposite wall and groan. I rub my head where it had smacked into the wall as I walked down the hall and into the kitchen. Jay was already sitting at the table, munching on a bowl of cereal and scrolling through something on his phone. He wasn’t dying laughing so I don’t think he heard me crack my head open.

“Morning,” I yawn. He looks up and mumbles what I thought was a ‘sup’ but I couldn’t tell with the cereal stuffed in his mouth. I look up at him (and I do mean up) wishing that I could join him at the table. But the ceiling in the dining room is much higher than in the kitchen. So high, in fact, that the last time I tried to walk over there they had to call the fire department to get me back to the kitchen’s ceiling. So, I stay in the kitchen and pour myself a bowl of cereal, very carefully and upside down. Of course, the cereal does not share my aversion to gravity so I have to hold the bowl upside down and eat it upside down. And I sit above the sink as I eat it. You have no idea how hard it is to sit down while holding an upside down bowl of cereal. If you’re having a good day, sit upside down and try to eat Lucky Charms, that’ll get rid of it real quick.

After spilling half of it into the sink, I give up and steal one of Mom’s blueberry muffins. Afterwards, I head into the bathroom. If you think eating cereal is hard, try peeing upside down. I have no idea what I would do if I was a girl. To wash my hands, I have to step up on the step stool that Dad had drilled into the ceiling when I was a kid. The tips of my dark brown hair reach the counter. For some inexplicable reason, my hair has decided that gravity works so it's always standing straight up. I would be the ultimate screaming boy in a horror movie, because of my hair I already look terrified. I smile at my little joke.

Since my hair already stands up on its own, I got a mohawk. Hey, if you didn’t have to spend twenty bucks a month to get your mohawk to stand straight up, you'd do it, too. Getting dressed is a hassle. Just like most door frames, my closet does not reach the ceiling so I have to step over that and imminently trip. I search through my closet for my favorite shirt—upside down, of course—and a pair of jeans. I grab my sneakers from the top shelf, you know, the shelf that no one can usually reach so it's either storage or empty. That’s where I keep my shoes.

As I’m pulling them on, Jay throws my door open and walks in. I roll my eyes. “Don’t you ever knock?”

“Nope.” He grins and I know exactly what he’s going to say next. “It's time to go. If you take much longer, we’ll be late.”

I scoff. “The way you drive, we’ll be early. Or at a funeral home.” I sigh and rub my eyes, mostly so I wouldn’t have to see his evil grin. Unfortunately, you’re about to learn about the very worst part of my day. If you haven’t asked yourself this question, then ask it now. How do I get to school? I’m assuming you all have been to school before. You walk out the front door, get in the car or bus, and go to school, right? No problem. Well, I have a problem with the first part. Going outside.

So, how do I get to school? In the most humiliating way possible, that’s how.

“Do you think I can convince Mom and Dad to homeschool me?” I ask.

“You mean the thing you’ve been begging for since first grade and they still refuse because neither of them can—” He starts to list the reasons off on his fingers. “—stay home with you, find a computer that you won’t drop, they want you to make friends, and it's fun for me.”

I groan and pull the harness out of my closet and hook it on over my chest. Jay grabs the rope and my backpack and drags me out of the room. If you don’t understand what’s happening, let me explain it to you. You know how when there isn’t something under your feet, you go down, right? If you don’t, jump. Well, when there’s nothing under my feet, I go down, but to everyone else’s perceptions, I’d be going up. And up. And up. I’d just keep falling up until I hit the sun. So, my parents, family doctor, brother, and school unanimously decided that the best way for me to get to school would be for Jay to drag me around on a leash.

Jay holds the front door open for me but I pause in the doorframe. I see him wrap the rope around his wrist but I’m not sure if it's to make me feel better or to actually secure me. I take a step and immediately fall two feet. I jerk to a stop as the rope runs out. So here I am, floating, upside down, held to this earth only by my brother’s fist. He locks the door and walks over to his car, in broad daylight. In front of all the neighbors.

I feel like a balloon.

To get into his car, he has to pull me down until I can scramble into the back seat. He sets down my bag on the seat while I sit on the ceiling. “You gotta lay down,” Jay says as he starts the car. “I got pulled over because of you.”

“I can’t help it,” I say as I lay back. “If I could, my feet would be on the ground right now.” he doesn’t respond, just drives to school. Where I will have my second humiliation of the day. When you walk through the front doors, you step directly into the cafeteria with a thirty foot ceiling. It's also where everyone hangs out before school actually starts. Picture this, balloon boy is dragged into school on a leash in front of three hundred people that will watch this happen every morning for four years and laugh about it every single time. High schoolers are mean.