Waking up is the worst part. It's all rumpled clothes and hair, which fans over my face like a veil; my sister Maddie would be disgusted. It takes time for me to get up. Most days, I'll turn over and go back to sleep, and only when I wake again an hour later, feeling gross and dazed, disgusted with myself for shirking my responsibilities, do I start the day. By then it's usually around ten-fifteen. Some days, eleven. (Those are the days I hold my breath and hope just to get through.) Breakfast consists of a Pop-Tart, maybe, or Cocoa Puffs, or nothing. They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but when you get up at lunchtime, it tends not to seem so important. I try to fill my days with productivity. As I walk downstairs to feed the guinea pigs—hay and water and a handful of food—I attempt to keep my mind on two things: first, what I should accomplish that day, and second, what I'm actually capable of accomplishing. Sometimes the two meet in the middle; most days, though, they don't. By twelve I'm usually deep into a book, trying to ignore the sound of the news or my sisters arguing. If not that, then I'm practicing, viola flung haphazardly over my shoulder, tenor sax pressed against my lips, bassoon resting against my thigh, or maybe my new pink electric guitar, Joni, sitting on my knee. We found her at a yard sale last week; 25 bucks and boom, I'm the new Van Halen. Well, not quite yet. I have to learn the C chord first. (And the rest of them.) I wasn't kidding, about all those instruments. My family is very musical. Between the five of us, we play just about everything, and with the quarantine, there's always some sort of music going on. Usually it's me—I try to practice two instruments every day—but sometimes it's my parents, their voices wrapping around each other as my dad strums an acoustic in the sunlight, or other times it's my twin sisters playing for school. (They aren't really twins. Technically we're triplets, but that's not really the right term, either. I like to call it “twins and an extra.” Mom and Dad like to call it “three for the price of one.”) Like I said, I try to be productive; I try to keep a smile on my face. But it is, admittedly, difficult. Because there are the days that I wake up feeling refreshed and excited—but there are also the days where every question I ask my parents ends in a “What?! I can't hear you!”, and I raise my voice too loud in response, and one parent comes in at exactly the wrong time, and I'm scolded for disrespect. Other times, when my sisters and I are arguing over nothing, more often than not the petty insults tossed around land on my shoulders like blows, and I crumple under their weight. I try not to be in my bedroom around the hours of one to four, because if I am, I'm bound to crawl into bed and fall asleep. Naps have prevailed among everyone in my household since the virus hit—my father will sleep around one, or in the evening; my mother whenever he does; and my sisters seem to exist in a permanent state of sleepy stupor, preferring to spend their days in their rooms, watching TikToks, replying to Snapchats, and browsing YouTube videos. It's not that I disagree with their lifestyle; it's just that I don't understand it. Dinner is a nightmare. Sometimes it's that way only for me, and sometimes it's that way for all of us. I just can't stand sitting at the same table, day after day, discussing the same topics—I thrive off structure, but I guess I hate routine. I can't stand when things stay the same for a long time, and that's exactly what this quarantine has been. All these things have their place, but at this point, they aren't enough. I miss my friends and I'm lonely. I try to go outside sometimes, go on walks, talk to people, but it doesn't happen often. Oh, well—c'est la vie, right? I go to bed later than I'd like: usually twelve to two, because I can't sleep. I lie (lay?) in bed, staring up at my glow-in-the-dark stars, and think about when I'll get to go to school again and what it will be like when I do. I wish I could say I prayed for all the virus victims and their families, but I'm only a fourteen-year-old girl, staring up at the stars plastered to my ceiling, and if I said that, it wouldn't be true.