Panic overcomes me as I stand in the doorway and observe my sparkling clean bedroom. My desk is free from clutter of lost homework assignments and doodles, the chair is pushed in. My closet door is closed and nothing is peeking out from underneath the door as per usual. The white carpet is clearly white, not black, now that I have vacuumed it, and everything that could have collected dust had been dusted thoroughly.

    But there, in the dark corner of my room, which at the moment is only lit by the mid-afternoon sunlight beaming in from the window, is an unmade bed. The pillows I sleep with are scattered about and my blankets are tangled into a clump in the center of the bed. My throw pillows, which my mom insists I keep on my bed, remain in a pile on the floor at the end of the bed where they normally remain overnight.

    My mom has surely gotten a glimpse of my not-quite-perfectly-clean bedroom by now and made a note in the back of her mind to give me an hour-long lecture about the importance of a clean room and how it reflects your personality. According to her, having a messy room equates my personality to that of a serial killer. A clean room signals that I am trustworthy, well-kept, and an all around good person. Sometimes I wonder if her daily use of Windex and multiple other cleaning products has made her a little loopy.

    I remember clearly that I had closed my bedroom door this morning before leaving for school, so I am positive that she has seen this colossal mess. This wipes out my plan of sneaking in and making my bed in hope that she will never even notice the fact that it was been unmade. I quietly make my way into our kitchen, from which my bedroom door is still visible. My mom is nowhere to be seen.

    At loss for a solution, I open the refrigerator door and observe my meager choice of junk food. I narrow down my choice between left over pizza and a gross-looking casserole of some sort. After making this rather simple decision, I grab a piece of pizza from the pizza box and take a big bite. Satisfied, I close the door only to find my mom standing right behind it staring intensely at me, a scene out of a horror movie, no doubt.

    “Hello there!” she greets me more energetically than I had been expecting. “How was school?”

    I hesitate, eying my bedroom door as I carefully construct my answer. It has to be perfect. I have to take everything I know about my mom and create an answer that will make her forget about the unmade bed completely. It’ll be so baffling that lecturing me will just slip her mind and maybe she’ll bake me some cookies if I am lucky. Suddenly I realize that my pause has been sustained too long and created an awkward atmosphere.

    “Good,” I say finally. Perfect answer!

    “Did you learn anything new?”

    Ah, the questions! They’re killing me! I take a bite of my pizza. Mom frowns upon talking with a mouth full of pizza, so she won’t mind that I take my time chewing it before I answer, giving me a proper amount of time to compose the perfect response to the question. I put a lot of thought into it. What would I have learned at school that would just knock her off her feet and make her forget about any flaws her dear child may have. I got it!

    I swallow my food, “In psychology I learned that Odontophobia is the fear of teeth.”

    “Oh really?” she replies, nodding in interest at my random fact. She shifts her weight and I can practically hear the start of a lecture coming my way.

    “And in biology I learned that the elephant is the only mammal on earth that can’t jump,” I spit out frantically.

    Now I knew something was wrong, she wasn’t even pretending to be impressed by my knowledge.

    “Why didn’t you make your bed this morning?” she demands before I can stall any longer. “You know how I feel about…”

    As she rants, I glance around her, looking for an escape path. To my dismay I find that I am cornered.

    “You didn’t give me a chance to explain!” I blurt out, interrupting her well rehearsed speech. She raises an eyebrow, interested in hearing my excuse. I nonchalantly take another bite of my pizza as I rack my brain for a valid excuse.

    “Well?” she prompts. I figure I might as well give it a try, even though I don’t have any rational reason as to why I did not make my bed.

    “So I was moseying around the internet last night, doing my usual, when I happened upon this nifty little article about how making your bed is actually unhealthy!”

    “Unhealthy?” She places a hand on her hip and cocks her head to the right.

    Seeing further explanation is needed, I continue, “It was something about dead skin cells accumulating and eventually causing disease.”

    “What sort of disease?”

    “Skin….cell…itis…..” my eye twitches, an attempt to make it all seem more dramatic. Hey, why rid the responsibility of making my bed for one day when I can possibly rid myself of the responsibility forever? “I think I have it,” I say, nodding.

    “What makes you say that?”

    “I have intense cravings for pizza,” I say pathetically. I take a bite, “that’s one of the symptoms.” This is the end. I have failed to come up with a good reason and now it’ll cost me two weeks without my cell phone and video games, absences of which might kill me.

    “Do you want to dig your hole deeper or shall we skip right to punishment?”

    “Okay, for real this time. This is what happened: I woke up an hour early today because the sun was streaming in through the window…or at least I thought it was the sun. It was actually a transporter beam from an alien starship that was hovering outside my bedroom window. It seems that they were on their way to Saturn for their spring break vacation, but instead of going to Saturn they got mixed up and went to Jupiter, which is understandable since they sound pretty similar and all. I get those two mixed up all the time! So anyway, I was teleported onto this ship and suddenly I was surrounded by ten or eleven of these little grey dudes with Mardi Gras beads around their neck. The inside of their starship looked a lot like a beach house. That’s some interior decorator they’ve got themselves! They were quite the chatter boxes, too. They each told me all about themselves. Bleepmeep, my favorite of all of them, told me all about the time his son tried to eat his moon rock because he thought it was cheese! Ha, kids. Anyway, they asked me for directions and when I told them that they could just head a few states south to Miami and spend Spring Break there, they thanked me for my time and teleported me back into my room. By this time I only had time for the necessities of my morning schedule such as getting dress and brushing my teeth. Making my bed just couldn’t have been fit in without making me late for school and you know how much I value my education.”

    My mom narrows her eyes for a moment and I anticipate grounding to follow.

    “Forget the bed, no more TV for you. It’s rotting your brain.” She turns and begins to leave the kitchen. “Aliens…” she mutters, shaking her head in disgust.