It takes John Aguilar a while to realise that the rhythm-less tapping he's hearing has nothing to do with his dream.

Tap... tap... tap-tap-tap... tap...

Sleep leaves him slowly, the details of his bedroom seeping into his consciousness bit by bit through a thick layer of fog. His furniture is shadowy shapes, gradually morphing into a dresser, a desk, a television, and some clean clothes he forgot to pack away that are still stacked on the floor.

Rather than disappearing with the last traces of sleep, the tapping, if possible, grows even more persistent, and giving up on re-capturing his fleeing dream, John reluctantly rolls himself from his bed.

Roll is the correct description for his action since his bed is just a large mattress on the floor. It's not because he cannot afford a bed; he simply prefers it like this. A bed on the floor is convenient for surrounding himself with snacks while playing on his gaming console set up with the TV on a low cabinet at the foot of the mattress. It also lessens the possibility of serious injury while playing with his friends, and it turns violent. Falling from a mattress isn't as bad as falling off a bed.

The source of the tapping seems to be located in the vicinity of his balcony. John crawls a few steps towards the wall of windows and gets to his feet with a groan, pulling the curtains aside and sliding the glass door open in one fluid movement. He immediately gets hit in the face by... a frozen pea if the evidence scattered all around his small balcony is anything to go by.

"What the hell, Floren?" he growls, rubbing his cheek.

The old, red-brick apartment building in which John and Floren's families each rent a unit is built in a narrow U-shape, with two apartments per floor. The bedrooms of these apartments face each other over a thin strip of garden consisting mostly of tangled weeds and thorny bushes. Poor man's landscaping, as his brother-in-law calls it.

Floren Weaver is standing on the balcony opposite John's. She's fully dressed in her navy blue and white school uniform, holding a bag of frozen peas in the crook of one bent arm and a couple of peas in her other hand, raised, cocked and ready to fire. As usual, she looks waiflike and delicate, her brown hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail behind her head.

"Hi Johnny!" she grins cheerfully.

As far as John is concerned, Floren is the most annoyingly, persistently cheerful person on the face of the planet. The only person he knows who could possibly compete with her at being infuriatingly jovial all the time is his friend, Jared Hunt.

It's strange because Floren's life is nothing to be jolly about, and Jared's life is not all that much better.

"Sorry to wake you, but I think I left my science textbook in your room, and I really need it."

"Why didn't you just come and get it?" John complains. In contrast with Floren and Jared, John is probably the most apparently irritable person alive. Apparently, because underneath his eternal dark, angry scowl and grumpiness (his protective armour), a vast capacity for kindness lies hidden... and he prefers to keep it that way.

"It would take too long," Floren reasons happily. "The bridge is down."

John glares at the offending bridge, a contraption his friends helped him rig many years ago to make travel between Floren's room and his faster and easier. The makeshift structure probably violates a hundred safety laws, but they couldn't care less: it's an essential installation.

The bridge has slipped its moorings on Floren's end and is hanging limply between their balconies. It would have taken her a full 30 seconds to get it back in place, another few seconds to climb over the rail of her balcony and cross the bridge in two, well, maybe three strides (she's a rather small 15-year-old), climb over John's railing, slide open his door, grab her book and follow the same route back.

He wonders how long it took her to find the frozen peas and wake him by throwing them at his windows, one pea at a time. There is a legion of peas covering the balcony floor.

Just how many peas are there in a bag of frozen peas?

He doesn't say anything. It's too early in the morning to discuss Floren's usual lack of logic. Way too early! Besides, he might become tempted to raise his voice and wake the neighbours on the two floors beneath theirs. Instead, he turns around, goes back into his bedroom, and finds her textbook in the jumble of books on his desk - leftovers from their joint study session the night before. Her maths notebook is here as well, and so is her pencil bag and a girly, romantic graphic novel that John is pretty sure is not his.

He cannot understand why she couldn't just collect the stuff later when she came over for breakfast. Why is she up so early? He often has to use the bridge to run over and wake her up. Floren is not an early bird.

Gathering all her possessions, he steps out onto the balcony again, and for a full second, he considers dumping the load into the thorny shrubs in the garden below. Make her work for it as punishment for waking him before his alarm clock.

It's still almost dark outside!

He obviously doesn't do that, though. Despite the fact that he looks like he's about to invade a small village and slaughter all their puppies, he has no talent for actually being mean. He, therefore, tosses her items at her, one by one, careful to wait for her to catch and put down the previous one before launching the next one. John believes that he deserves a friggin' medal for his self-control.

"Thank you, Johnny! See you later!" Floren beams as she backs toward her open door, her arms now loaded with her treasures—and the bag of peas, slowly losing its contents.

"Wait! Why are you up so early? Breakfast is not ready yet and-"

"Oh! Sorry! I forgot to tell you!" she gasps, clearly regretting the oversight... that oversight and not any other one... not yet... "Can't do breakfast! I've got to be at the school gym by six!"

"Why?"

She clumsily heads into her bedroom, struggling to keep her cargo from escaping her grasp. Floren is way too small for her age, and John has to actively suppress the urge to vault the balconies so he can help her. She has, however, officially asked him not to rescue her all the time now that she's a grown woman (her actual words). She said it is a habit that tempts her to rely on him for everything, and - as he'd pointed out to her a few times when she'd tried to snuggle him - she's not a little girl anymore.

So what?! She's still the most clumsy person he knows!

"Gymnastics!" she explains, and then she's gone.

"Gymnastics?"

That explains absolutely nothing. John would love - or more possibly hate - to spend one day in the confusing labyrinth of Floren's mind. He's sure that he would get lost in there, get sprayed with glitter by naked fairies while being stuck on a candyfloss cloud in the middle of a forest of purple trees, surrounded by flesh-eating monsters for the rest of his life.

It's too early to care.

He gives the offending peas littering his balcony another dirty look while he considers cleaning them up. Instead, he decides to slide his door shut and flop down on his mattress to wait for his alarm to go off.

The birds can have the peas!

He emerges from his room a couple of hours later, dressed and ready for school and sits down at the table, giving his sister and her husband guilty looks while he fills the bowl waiting at his place with cereal and pours some milk over it. He'd already popped out of his room three times to apologise for getting up too late to make breakfast, but they both just shrugged it off as if it didn't matter, making him feel even worse.

It matters. It matters a lot... well, at least to John.

"Since when does she do gymnastics?" Marsha asks when her brother explains their neighbour's absence from the breakfast table.

"Beats me," John grumbles, listlessly shovelling cold cereal into his mouth.

He finally fell asleep again about a minute or two before his alarm went off, and then he went through hell, trying to wake himself up again. He had to wash and dress in a rush; there was no time to make their daily warm breakfast, and on top of that, his tie didn't want to play along and let him tie it correctly. He looks like hell, and he feels like hell.

Thank you, Floren!

Brad is calmly eating his cereal and taking sips of coffee in between. He seems unfazed by the lack of bacon, toast and eggs, but John and Marsha both know that he is actually put out and misses his normal breakfast. He loves bacon—in fact, he loves all John's cooking—but Brad seldom complains about anything. He is the perfect husband for feisty, quick-tempered Marsha, who is prone to sulking bouts and cannot cook to save her life.

Fortunately, Brad is the designated coffee maker in the family, or John wouldn't have been able to fill his mug with the steamy brew to perk himself up. If he couldn't have his regular morning coffee after such a bad start to the day, it could potentially have put him in an actual bad mood... and people might've been able to spot the difference.

"She decided to join the gymnastics club after playing Tomb Raider over the weekend and realising that she's not able to scale a wall by grabbing it and vaulting over. Seems to be an essential skill," Brad explains in the same calm, soothing voice he uses on days when everything does actually go according to plan. He folds the newspaper he was browsing and picks up his mug to drink his last few sips of coffee. "I told her that she probably shouldn't, but..."

Floren always lets Brad in on her secrets and crazy schemes. John usually just gets roped into them—almost always against his will—somewhere along the way when things start to go South. The siblings share a comprehending look and a smile of agreement, and then Marsha sets her coffee cup down and leaves her seat. She needs to put the final touches on her make-up and try again to tame her thick mass of dark and blond ringlets so that she can finally look like a professional dentist's assistant and not a pole dancer at La Mignon, a club in the even more, seedier part of town than the one where they live.

In her opinion, the mixture of bleached and dark hair looks very fashionable when it is styled properly, but it just looks like a bundle of tangled wool when it is not.

"She'll be back for breakfast tomorrow then," she states matter-of-factly while she hurries into the bedroom she shares with Brad.

Once he's done with his highly unsatisfying breakfast, John gathers the dirty dishes and takes them into the kitchen, where he removes from the refrigerator the lunchboxes he went to a lot of trouble packing the night before. He is relieved that he is at least not sending his sister and Brad to work without something decent to have for lunch, though he knows that Marsha would happily gorge herself on unhealthy take-out food.

He leaves his family's lunches on the counter for them and carefully stuffs his own huge container (he has lots of perpetually hungry people to share with) into his school bag. The last lunchbox he fetches from the refrigerator would fill the hearts of most little girls between the ages of two and eight with joy.

He taps the grinning doll face printed on its lid and wishes that he could leave it there and close the door. Floren does not deserve lunch; she ruined his sleep and caused them to have to eat cereal for breakfast, and John was going to have to run to school to make it in time! Sometimes, he thinks that Floren has been nothing but trouble since he met her five years ago!

And she's way too old for doll-printed lunchboxes!

Cursing his lack of aptitude for revenge, John plucks the offending container from the refrigerator rather aggressively and pulls his school bag onto his shoulder.

Though he would never admit it to himself or to anybody who asks, at least part of his current foul mood is because he is worried about the girl and missed having her at the table, chatting and giggling annoyingly all through breakfast.

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