2024-11-24 “It’s A Plan” for Liza (born 2003)

Liza McDuffy had her hand on the shower door when her alarm went off. She had forgotten to disable it for the weekend. She turned back to her iPhone, rolled her eyes, and told herself once again that she needed to just schedule it for only weekdays.

Liza was not overly fond of showers and, had she not done physical labor the day before, probably wouldn’t have taken one. When she thought about it, she told herself she should have taken one before bed, but she was going to do laundry, so it didn’t hurt.

Showers forced her to decide between foggy glasses, tepid water temperature, or not being able to see. Since she had awoken so early—a half hour before the alarm for work that she didn’t have to go to—she decided she would conform to society norms once more and shave her legs. That meant some compromise between foggy glasses and tepid water.

As she began the shower and shave process her mind drifted back. Her internship work had been routine apart from when Will Roberson had called all the techs and interns in to give away ballet tickets. Volunteering for Humanity Housing had been both good and bad. She had hoped to get a chance to work alongside Devon, but he was at a different site. On the other hand, the expression on the old couple’s faces when Kent Marlon showed them their finally-repaired, freshly-painted house was amazing. Liza would treasurer that.

She let her thoughts move ahead. Fall semester was all but over. Spring would entail her last internship class and senior project, which was part of the internship class, but credited separately.

Reining her thoughts in to the immediate future… nothing. Another weekend day alone in her tiny “hybrid loft” apartment in Trenton NJ. 

She decided she’d start her laundry, then run some delves on her druid in World of Warcraft, then probably go back to Minecraft and work on the castle she was building inside a mountain. She figured if she got bored, she could add a few paragraphs to the fantasy novel she was writing that she figured no one would ever read.

Liza adjusted her position in the shower, picked up the shaving cream and set her mind on completing the—in her mind, pointless—ritual of removing the hair from various parts of her body as stipulated by the dictates of fashion.