Bluedragon - Quarantined With My Sisters

Chapter 1: Quarantined

“How long can this fucking thing LAST?”

The question was rhetorical, and not directed to me. My big sister Alexandra was barking into her cell phone while pacing back and forth in the kitchen, waving her hands for emphasis on her FaceTime call.

Although we had a “Great Room” setup, where the TV and big couches weren’t very far from the kitchen and had no walls in the way, I couldn’t clearly hear her best friend Emily’s response, but I could tell her tone mirrored Alex’s frustration. Speaking of frustrated tones, my baby sister Michelle yelled, “Lex, come on! If you’re gonna be so loud, can you take it upstairs?!? We can’t hear what Carole Baskin is saying!”

I glanced into the kitchen in time to see Alex roll her eyes and shoot Michelle a dirty look. She didn’t move an inch and said into her phone, “No, it’s just my bratty sister. Ignore her.”

Michelle sighed and shook her head, sinking deeper into the couch. She also picked up the remote and thumbed the volume button higher and higher ... and higher, until the sound was nearly deafening.

“CHELLEY!” Alex thundered.

“GO UPSTAIRS” Michelle yelled right back.

“Fucking kids!” Waving her hands for emphasis again, Alex stomped over to us and reached for the TV remote.

Michelle put the remote in a vice grip with both hands and held it out of reach while Alex bent over her trying in vain to get to it. All the while, the fancy surround sound system continued to blare at supersonic levels, and I rubbed my eyebrows just like that one Picard facepalm meme (in blatant disregard to medical advice to avoid touching my face). But seconds later, Alex’s problem-solving skills figured out another solution, so she snatched up the Roku remote, hit the home button, and the noise abruptly went away.

“Why do you have to be such a bitch?” Michelle howled, dropping the TV remote and bouncing to her feet.

“Why do you have to be such a baby?” Alex spat (not literally), although I saw a trace of spittle on her lips as she got up into Michelle’s face.

It wasn’t easy to get up into Michelle’s face. Despite being older than her sister by nearly four years, Alex was three inches shorter than Michelle. The two of them probably weighed the same, but whereas Michelle was tall and slim, Alex was shorter and curvier. That’s not to say she was overweight by any means. She was super-fit and worked out at the gym religiously, but genetics had given her a generous helping of curves in her breasts and butt.

“Girls, girls,” I interjected, standing up and inserting my hands into the space between their bellies and then spreading my arms to physically separate them. “Let’s everybody take a chill pill. Everyone is tired of being cooped up and we’re all just trying to get by, alright? Lex, would it really be such a big deal to take your call upstairs?”

“He’s right,” Emily squawked from the phone still in Alex’s hand.

Pursing her lips, Alex shot Michelle a hateful glare before exhaling slowly, visibly relaxing as she did so. She glanced down at her phone and muttered, “Fine.” With that, she turned and started heading for the stairs.

Taking a deep breath herself, Michelle exhaled and rolled her eyes before slapping me in the chest. “Thanks, bro.”

I shrugged like it was no big deal and sat back down. Michelle picked up the Roku remote and turned Netflix back on. She also remembered to grab the TV remote and thumb down the volume just before the Netflix “Du-DUM” intro blasted our ears again. And we sat back on the couch to resume our TV show.

But just before the show resumed, I heard Alex’s voice filter down through the silence as she bitched from upstairs, “I’m just so fucking horny!”

Michelle heard it too, and we glanced at each other with matching smirks. Michelle even started laughing, but then we returned our attention to the TV.

* * *

The term “quarantine” is not technically accurate. According to the dictionary, a quarantine is when those who have been exposed to a communicable disease are put into isolation to prevent them from spreading that disease to the rest of the population, but neither my sisters nor I had any symptoms or other reason to believe we’d caught the coronavirus. Still, it makes for a better adjective than “staying at home” or “under lockdown” or anything else. So everyone we knew just said they were “quarantined”, even if “isolation” was actually probably the better descriptor for our situation.

None of us had spent significant time together for years prior to the pandemic. Alex was a senior in college, only months away from graduation. I was a sophomore at a different university out of state. And Michelle was still a senior in high school living at home. When schools closed, I got kicked out of the dorms and had to come home. Alex lived off-campus in an apartment with her friends, including Emily, but she was immunocompromised, which counted as an underlying condition that put her into the “at-risk” category. So our parents insisted she come home rather than continue to shack up with a bunch of college students who were far more likely to “break the bubble” in the name of spending more time with their friends.

As for our Mom and Dad themselves, they’d moved a hundred and fifty miles away to stay with Mom’s parents, who were also “at-risk” due to their age and Grandpa’s liver issues. We kids were old enough to take care of ourselves for a few weeks, right? Alex was basically confined to the house, but Michelle and I could get groceries, stock up on toilet paper, and get all the things that Amazon couldn’t provide. Plus, knowing that we were taking care of an immunocompromised sister, we wouldn’t flaunt the rules or take risks like so many of our classmates.

But it was SOOOO boring.

All three of us were taking classes on Zoom, but those didn’t take up all that much time. Our teachers tended to hold class for fifteen minutes, point us to the class website for a list of things to do, and then everybody was on their own. I spent a good amount of time playing video games. My sisters FaceTimed with their friends. And we practically lived in front of the TV watching Netflix or HBO.

We got to be lazy. We got to slack off. It was a little like a staycation, and doing all that was nice for about week, maybe two. But two weeks became three. Three weeks became four, five, and six. There had been no classes during Spring Break, which meant that by now we’d caught up on everything GOOD to watch on Netflix or HBO and now were left with the crap no one would’ve watched if we weren’t trapped in our house because of the pandemic, and a lot of those movies were BAD. Maybe it was time to try Hulu.

I mean, we got out of the house a little. The stay-at-home order had been lifted after three weeks, and we’d started to do a lot of hiking and biking on the weekends. It was a great way to get some fresh air while staying in areas where Alex could easily maintain six feet of social distance. Michelle and I traded off getting the groceries. We’d also played tennis for the first week before the city closed all the courts. But it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

And yeah, we had started to get pretty sick of each other.

I take that back: Michelle was still pretty happy to have me around. That probably had something to do with Alex turning into a righteous bitch and me defending Michelle whenever she called her out on it. But my little sister and I had always got along pretty well. Alex had been a domineering big sister since we were toddlers, so Michelle and I had long held an “us --">