In my mind, I was secretly, desperately praying to whatever mysterious Webnovel gods had brought me to this world. I was hoping, begging, to be spared from the absolute, reputation-destroying humiliation that was about to occur if my sister didn't play along.
If Alex told the absolute truth right now, my peaceful, lazy second life was entirely over. My brain, working at lightspeed, flashed through the terrifyingly realistic punishments Claire Dunphy would unleash upon me.
Scenario A: A mandatory, excruciatingly awkward hours-long family meeting in the living room, complete with visual aids, about 'puberty, raging hormones, and appropriate household boundaries.'
Scenario B: Being forcibly dragged to a child psychologist to deeply explain why my thirteen-year-old self felt the psychological need to sleep in my birthday suit with the bedroom door completely unlocked.
Scenario C: Being grounded from all electronics. That meant no TV, no phone, and absolutely no future ultimate gaming PC until I turned thirty years old. It was a fate worse than death.
"Alex, honey, talk to us," Claire urged again, her voice tight with maternal worry. "What exactly did you see that made you scream like that?"
Alex stood rigidly in the center of the room, surrounded by the pile of papers she had dropped. Her genius brain, which usually calculated complex math equations and debate team strategies, was currently running a million miles a minute to process this unprecedented social disaster.
She looked at Phil's highly concerned face, then at Claire's absolutely terrified expression, and finally, she shot a quick, sharp side-glance at me.
She saw the sheer, unadulterated panic in my eyes. She saw my white-knuckled grip on the blanket. And in that split second, her brilliant mind hatched an excuse.
"Uh... actually, I..." Alex stammered, artificially raising the pitch of her voice to sound more frantic and disoriented. "I kinda... saw something hilarious... wait, no, I mean horrifying! It's... it was..."
"What was it?!" Phil asked, taking a brave half-step forward protectively, raising his flashlight again.
"A lizard!" Alex blurted out, throwing her hands up in the air dramatically. "A massive, scaly, disgusting lizard! It was roaming right over Luke's face while he was sleeping! And when I walked in to put away his laundry, it looked right at me and literally jumped towards me like it was trying to get on me! So I just... nervously screamed!"
My eyes widened to the size of dinner plates.
A face-jumping lizard? That's her genius excuse? I thought, my brain short-circuiting for a second. But honestly, I wasn't in any position to complain. I let out a massive, silent breath of relief, secretly thanking my little sister for her quick, albeit weird, thinking.
Phil and Claire, however, reacted exactly as expected to the news of a home invasion by a reptile.
"A big lizard?!" Claire shrieked, instantly jumping back half a step. Her maternal protective instinct was temporarily warring with her natural, deep-seated disgust for reptiles. "In the house? On his face?!"
"Wait, wait, honey, let's calm down," Phil said, though his voice had noticeably gone up an entire octave. He took two very deliberate, very quick steps backward toward the hallway. Phil was a self-proclaimed 'cool dad', but everyone in the family knew he had an absolute, paralyzing phobia of bugs, snakes, and creepy crawlies.
Phil pointed his flashlight at the floor like a weapon. "If it's a jumper, we need a tactical strategy. We can't just go in blind. As the patriarch, I should establish a perimeter."
"Phil, stop giving me excuses to get out of this and help me out!" Claire commanded, instantly slipping into her dictator-mom mode. "We need to find it and remove that lizard before it gets into the air vents! Look under the desk!"
"I am helping, Claire! I'm providing overwatch!" Phil argued defensively, his eyes darting around the carpet nervously as he firmly refused to move from the safety of the doorway.
Before Claire could yell at Phil to actually do something useful, a new figure appeared in the doorway, completely blocking Phil's only escape route.
It was Haley. She had one white earphone dangling from her ear, her head bobbing slightly as she rocked to whatever loud pop music was blasting from her phone. She was wearing her usual trendy clothes, leaning casually against the doorframe and chewing a piece of bubblegum. She looked completely unbothered by the chaos unfolding in front of her.
"Oh my god, what is all the loud drama in here?" Haley asked, pulling the other earphone out and pausing her music.
A sly, incredibly hopeful grin spread across her perfectly glossed lips as she looked at her younger sister. "Mom, Dad, are you finally giving Alex some kind of punishment? Please tell me she's grounded. I can totally help you guys enforce it. I'll take all her boring books away."
Alex, whose nerves were already completely fried from seeing me naked and having to lie straight to our parents' faces, instantly snapped. Her head whipped toward her older sister, her eyes narrowing furiously.
"Oh, shut up, Haley!" Alex fired back, aggressively pointing a trembling finger at her. "What about your little 'group study' plan, huh? Tell us, did you actually manage to study biology with that boy, or did Dad embarrass you so badly you had to leave early? Tell me, Dad, what kind of drama did she cause over there?"
Haley's smug, triumphant grin vanished instantly, replaced by a look of pure, defensive fury. She crossed her arms tightly. "You little witch! For your information, Marcy and I did study! Until Dad pulled a quarter out of Marcy's ear and started explaining mortgage rates to her parents for forty-five minutes!"
"It was a very engaged audience!" Phil defended himself from the doorway, looking slightly offended that his magic tricks were being weaponized. "They were very interested in adjustable-rate loans! I gave them my business card!"
"Both of you, stop it right now!" Claire yelled, slapping her hand against her forehead tiredly as a massive headache began to form behind her eyes. She let out a long, exhausted sigh. The Dunphy household could never just have one simple crisis at a time; it always spiraled into three overlapping, chaotic arguments.
Claire turned her sharp gaze to Haley. "Haley, nobody is in trouble. Alex just saw a big lizard crawling on your brother's bed, got feared up, and screamed. We came running to check on it. That's it."
Haley immediately wrinkled her nose in profound disgust, taking a quick step back into the hallway. "Ew, gross. A lizard? That's what all this screaming was about? Have fun with that, I'm going to my room to sanitize my hands just in case."
"No, you're not!" Claire snapped, pointing a commanding finger at the bedroom floor. "Okay, let's all go on a search. We are not sleeping until we find it. Phil, check the closet. Haley, look under the table near. I'll check the bed."
My heart, which had just started to calm down to a somewhat normal rhythm, instantly spiked right back up to maximum heart rate.
I was just sitting there in the middle of my bed, trying my absolute best to project an aura of total, lazy calm while desperately holding the thin blanket around my waist with a vice-like grip.