Karyn flailed out of bed like the quirky girl in a 90’s teen movie, a tangle of limbs and bedsheets hitting the floor with a thump as her alarm kept buzzing.
Her blonde head emerged from the tangle of linens, a single misplaced lock of hair covering the right side of her face. She blew a puff of air, sending that single lock skyward, only for it to gently fall right back into the same exact place it had been before.
With a slightly playful growl, Karyn shot out an arm towards her dresser and shut off her alarm, before extracting herself from the mass of fabric and physically pushing her hair back behind her ear with her hand.
Why had her alarm gone off? It was still an hour before the time she’d set it for.
The thought left her head as quickly as it had entered. Karyn felt full of energy, and wasn’t even considering going back to bed. She could practically hear the brightly-strumming guitar chords that were about to play over her getting-ready montage.
A tasteful shot that was just her shoulders and up in the shower with her hair full of shampoo suds.
Blowdrying in the mirror with a towel wrapped around her chest, followed by brushing, followed by going over every strand with a flat iron.
A shower of clothes arcing their way across Karyn’s bedroom from closet to bed, as Karyn pulls item by item with one leg bent in the air behind her
The obligatory fashion show, as she decides on the exact image that she wants to project that day. Corduroy overalls over a blouse with a frilled collar? No, today feels more like jean shorts and pink T-shirt with a denim vest.
A twist to the left, a twist to the right, a look from behind, and a twirl. Karyn nodded at her own reflection from over her shoulder.
Whew, this was taking a lot longer than Karyn normally spent in the morning. It was a good thing she woke up early, as it stood she was barely going to have enough time to do her–
The hypothetical brightly-strumming guitar, at this point, would have been interrupted by a record scratch if it had been real.
Karyn never took this long to get ready in the morning, she repeated to herself. And she never did her makeup just for a regular school day.
She stared into space for just a moment as she wondered why she had spent so much time that morning getting ready. But it had all felt necessary. And if she had the time to do her makeup, then why not put in that effort?
The moment passed and Karyn put the brief instance of doubt out of her mind, reaching for a few items of seldom-used cosmetics (some of them still sealed from the drug store), and retreated back to the bathroom so that she could apply them.
