The Blanket Situation - Tealy and the Crew
The blankets had been a casualty of Tuesday.
Tealy did not want to talk about Tuesday. Tuesday had involved DumbDird, a level of enthusiasm that in retrospect should have been identified as a structural risk, and a sequence of events that had ended with every blanket Tealy owned being in a condition that could not be described as usable. The details were not important. The outcome was: no blankets.
He had done laundry. The blankets had not survived laundry. This happened sometimes when things had been through what the blankets had been through, which again, was not being discussed.
He had gone to bed on Wednesday night with a sheet, which was fine, which was manageable, which was not a problem.
Then it had gotten cold.
Not dramatically cold. Not emergency cold. Just the specific cold of a Florida night that had decided to actually be a night for once, the kind of cold that a sheet managed adequately during normal circumstances and did not manage adequately when you were already tired from a week of towel incidents and raisin bran and sugar pills and a number that turned out to be a timestamp.
He had looked at the linen closet.
The linen closet had towels.
He had stood there for a moment with the specific internal conflict of a person who had spent three nights screaming about towels, had processed that trauma with the help of a brother in a fake doctor's coat and a manufactured Latin word, and was now considering sleeping under towels by choice.
He had taken the towels.
They were horrible.
Not because of the towel association, which had faded sufficiently that he could look at a towel without his brain deploying its alarm system. The towels were horrible on purely practical grounds. They were too small, individually, to cover a person properly, which meant he needed several, which meant they kept separating in the night and leaving gaps, which meant every time he shifted position the entire towel arrangement had to be renegotiated from scratch. They were also the wrong texture, the specific texture of a thing that had been designed to remove water from a body and not to provide comfort to a body, and no amount of repositioning changed the fundamental fact that he was sleeping under a pile of bathroom infrastructure.
He had fallen asleep anyway because he was very tired.
He had woken up at 2 AM because the towels had shifted and one of them was now somehow underneath him and the others had migrated to the far side of the bed with the passive aggression of textiles that had never wanted this job.
He had reassembled the towel arrangement.
Had fallen back asleep.
Had woken up at 3 AM.
Not because of towels this time. Not because of a number. Not because of anything internal.
Because of a sound.
The sound was the front door.
Tealy lay in the dark and listened to his own house with the specific attention of a person who had learned, over the past week, that unexpected things entered his home at unexpected hours, and that the range of unexpected things was broad enough to include best friends with metal pipes, brothers in medical disguises, and on one occasion a lamp-based situation he still hadn't fully processed.
Footsteps.
Coming down the hall.
He watched the bedroom door.
It opened.
Blara was standing in his doorway at 3 AM.
She was wearing normal clothes. She was not carrying anything. She had the expression she always had, which was the expression of someone who had found the current situation mildly beneath their attention but was present anyway.
She looked at Tealy.
Looked at the towels.
Looked back at Tealy.
"Blara," Tealy said.
Blara walked to the bed.
She reached down and grabbed the top towel.
And then, with the focused efficiency of a cat that had decided something needed to be dealt with, she ripped it.
Not a small tear. A committed rip, two hands, the full width of the towel, the sound of terry cloth separating filling the 3 AM bedroom with an energy that had no business being there.
She dropped the two halves.
Looked at Tealy.
Turned around.
Walked out.
The front door closed.
Tealy lay in his bed under the remaining towels and looked at the ceiling and thought about what had just happened with the comprehensive blankness of someone whose processing capacity had been exceeded.
He was still looking at the ceiling when, approximately four minutes later, something came through the window.
Not a person. Not an animal.
A balloon.
A large balloon, the kind that had been in rotation at Dumb...Huh? for several episodes now, printed with the 👍 emoji, sailing through his open bedroom window with a gentle and purposeful arc, as though it had been thrown with specific directional intent.
It hit the ceiling.
Bounced once.
Settled in the corner of the bedroom, floating at approximately head height, the thumbs up emoji facing Tealy with the same energy as every other thumbs up he had ever received from the source he was now fairly certain was responsible for this.
He got up.
Went to the window.
Looked out.
The street was empty.
Except at the far end, barely visible under the streetlight, a figure was walking away with the unhurried pace of someone who had completed a task.
The figure was not visible enough to confirm identity.
It was definitely Dird.
He had the walk.
Tealy watched him go until he turned the corner and was gone.
He closed the window.
Looked at the balloon.
The balloon said 👍
"Yeah," said Tealy, to the balloon.
He went back to bed.
Lay under the remaining towels, one of which was now also the two halves of the ripped one, which Blara had apparently felt needed to happen and which Tealy had decided not to have opinions about.
The balloon floated in the corner.
Tealy looked at it.
It looked back.
He fell asleep with a thumbs up emoji balloon watching over him from the corner at 3:07 AM, which was either comforting or deeply strange and was probably both, and he was too tired to determine which, and it didn't matter, and he slept.
In the morning he sent one message to the group chat.
"Blara came in at 3 AM and ripped one of my towels. Dird threw a thumbs up balloon through my window. I have no blankets because of Tuesday. I slept under towels. The towels were terrible."
Dird reacted with 👍
Blara sent a photo of a ripped towel. Not his towel. A different ripped towel. She had a photo of a ripped towel ready.
Of course she did.
DumbDird sent: "DURR TALLY I'M SORRY ABOUT THE BLANKETS"
"It's fine."
"DURR IT'S NOT FINE TALLY YOU SLEPT UNDER TOWELS"
"I know."
"DURR TALLY I WILL GET YOU BLANKETS"
"DumbDird—"
"DURR TALLY"
"Please don't get me blankets the way you got me breakfast."
A pause.
"DURR WHAT'S WRONG WITH HOW I GOT YOU BREAKFAST"
"Raisin bran."
"DURR TALLY THAT'S DIFFERENT BLANKETS DON'T EXPIRE"
Tealy looked at this message.
This was technically true.
Blankets did not expire.
"Fine," he typed.
Beric sent: "I can source good blankets. I know a place."
Of course Beric knew a place.
Beric knew a place for everything.
"Beric gets the blankets," Tealy typed.
"DURR OKAY" from DumbDird, with a speed that suggested mild relief.
Greeny sent: "Why did Blara rip the towel."
Tealy looked at this question.
Thought about Blara walking in at 3 AM, looking at the towels, ripping one, and leaving, all in under a minute, with no explanation offered and none apparently felt to be necessary.
"I don't know," he typed.
"Did you ask her."
"It was 3 AM, Greeny."
"Fair."
Tealy looked at the two halves of the ripped towel on the floor.
Looked at the 👍 balloon, still floating in the corner in the morning light, as committed to its position as it had been at 3 AM.
Looked at the remaining towels on the bed.
He picked up the ripped halves.
Put them in the bathroom.
They were towels again now, technically. Smaller towels. Half towels. Towels that had been through something.
He understood the feeling.
He went to make breakfast, checked the milk first, confirmed it was not expired, and had cereal.
The good cereal.
The blankets arrived that afternoon.
Beric's place was good.
They were excellent blankets.
Tealy did not ask where they came from.
Some things you just accepted.
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