"Uh-oh," Katie cooed, sounding almost theatrically patronizing, "looks like someone's got tired eyes! Is my itsy bitsy cutie pie getting all sleepy, hmm? Is her heavy head starting to get all droopy and drowsy for me? Does someone need to be tucked in all snug like a bug under the covers, mmm?" It almost made Lacey want to bite her roommate's head off--of course she was exhausted, she'd been up since almost five o'clock this morning cramming for a stupid final she felt sure she was going to flunk despite her desperate efforts, part a whole clusterfuck of academic misfortunes that would almost certainly end in her washing out of college by the end of the semester and wind up with nothing but the fledgling OnlyFans account Katie had talked her into opening as a source of income. The stress and anxiety alone left her so debilitated she could barely see straight.
But no sooner did the surge of irritation hit than it faded back into the dull, grinding sea of enervation that had become the background radiation of the past three days. Lacey rubbed at her bloodshot hazel eyes, trying to scrub some of the exhaustion out of them, and ran a hand through her lank chestnut hair in frustration. For all that Katie's playful mock-mothering annoyed the crap out of her sometimes, Lacey had to admit she was at least right in this specific instance. Lacey's brain and body had just about hit their limit, and she was weary nearly to the point of collapse.
That didn't mean she had to accept it, though. "M'not sleepy," she mumbled, all too aware that the groggy frustration in her slurred and drowsy voice made her sound exactly like the cranky toddler Katie was treating her as. It made Lacey want to wad up a piece of paper into a big ball and throw it at her, but that would only further justify Katie's condescending attitude. Better simply to ignore her, push through these last... oh god, these last three fucking chapters... and then put her head down on the pillow for a few hours of sleep before dragging herself out of bed to take the final.
Which she'd fail. Lacey knew it, the same way she knew she'd already flunked the other two finals she'd taken this week and the same way she knew there was no way she could convince the Dean's office to give her another semester of academic probation. It wasn't just that the difficulty of all her classes had ramped up in her sophomore year, leaving her scrambling to prevent her already tenuous hold on the concepts she learned last year from slipping away entirely, and it wasn't even her increasingly desperate efforts to bring in spare cash to make rent once her father decided to punish her for her bad grades--which he naturally assumed to be due to laziness on Lacey's part, because god forbid his kids should ever be any less of a genius than he was.
No, deep down Lacey knew she was going to wash out because she never really wanted to be a doctor. She never had. It was simply a decision that was impressed into the malleable clay of her existence by a domineering father and a passive, simpering mother, and Lacey fundamentally did not have the drive to keep pursuing it once it got grindingly difficult no matter what she told herself. She didn't even know what she did want to be--she'd never had the chance to form her own drives and ambitions, not with four generations of family tradition weighing down on her. But it sure as hell wasn't medicine. Showing her tits to strangers on the Internet gave her more satisfaction and fulfillment than the vague promise of some imagined residency in a distant, future hospital ever did, and Lacey had grown weary of pretending otherwise.
Lacey didn't realize how completely lost inside her own head she'd gotten thinking about it until she heard Katie cooing to her in that same soft, patronizing voice again. "Oh, you're not sleepy, huh?" she asked, amusement leaking out around the edges of every word as though she was trying to conceal a chuckle at the antics of a drowsy child at bedtime. "Is that why those tired eyes keep drooping down and down and down, mm? Is that why my dozy little sleepyhead is getting all fussy and cranky? I think someone's just fighting sleep, that's all. I think my baby girl just needs someone to take care of her and tell her what to do."
