Sacrifice (title subject to change)

Comments are welcome! This is a piece made of sediments of mine and others's experiences. Please inform me how I can make it even more believable, or realistic, or natural in that I really have no idea how the average young adult male reacts to situations such as this. Thank you!

Howard woke up today feeling bad.  The bedsheets had entangled him so that he was, apart from his head and his neck, immobile.  Even so, when he tried to lift his neck, something took a hammer and smacked him in the forehead and he fell back into his lopsided pillow.  He wasn't feeling well, but he couldn't figure out why.  There was a strange pulsing in his ears, he felt congested, and his eyes were itchy.  But these were mere trivial things.  Maybe it was because he hadn't gotten much sleep.  No, he reasoned, he'd been laying in this bed for over 12 hours.  Or maybe it was the tendon in his ankle that had been inflamed for the past couple days.  Every which way he shifted positions, a surge of pain would reverberate through his leg.  Still, none of these misfortunes, he felt, were the cause of his bad feelings.

When he finally managed to sit up, the sun shone brightly through the window opposite his bed, right into his eyes.  A few words escaped his mouth and he suddenly hoped that no one had been awake to hear them.  He then remembered a particular moment the week before when someone had corrected his foul language.  At the time he had been too perplexed by the action to say anything in reply.  Swinging his freed legs over the bedside and bending down to pick up an off-white sock from the carpet, he strained his memory.  Who was it exactly that had corrected him?  When he couldn't remember, he decided it was unimportant and proceeded to to look for another sock.  Then he froze.  He could hear sniffling from beyond the bedroom door.  Immediately, he rose and walked (dizzy with pain in his leg) down the hall into the kitchen where the rest of his family was seated around the table in a solemn trance.  His mother saw him and offered him her chair at once.  "Howard," she said.  Her voice trembled.

They had received the call at four in the morning that Howard's grandfather had passed away and that his grandmother was in a temporary state of confusion.  His dad needed to fly out of town for the funeral by evening that day.  Howard stood in the hall on the second floor of apartment 12 in Poopface Hills, boring a hole into the door in front of him with his stare.  He was slightly stunned, and a little disturbed by his lack of emotion considering how his sisters had cried for hours.  Solely by circumstance, none of them had ever had the chance to really get to know their grandfather.  The one time his grandparents had come to visit was when Howard was three years old and even then, he and his sisters were to young to remember much at all.  *definitely subject to change

He raised his fist, and knocked.  There was a verse of frustrated yells from inside; something about "...can't get past this level ! " and other lousy complaints that continued until the door opened to reveal Jeff.  From the looks of it, he had stayed up all through the night playing Pacman.  His hair was a mess, and a glazed look had crept across his young adult-ish face.  Jeff had recently lost his job as a manager at a highly successful music store in town.  He hit rock bottom and was currently lounging around, surviving on pizza and tap water.  "Howard," he droned gleefully.  His eyes dropped down to Howard's feet.  "You've...got one sock on..."
"I need to use your phone," Howard spoke for the first time that morning.
"S-sure thing," Jeff said after a moment's scrutiny.  He then went out of his way to usher his friend into the messy apartment.  "Sophie tying up the line?" he asked with a grin, referring to one of Howard's sisters.  Howard didn't answer.  At that moment, his dad was arranging flight plans over the phone. 

He navigated his way through the cluttered living room and picked up the gray cordless phone that had been partly obscured beneath an empty pizza box.  His ankle still throbbed.  To walk on it was agony.
"Sooo, long time no see.  How's the fam?" came Jeff's voice from a different room.  He laughed at his own joke.  Jeff was a close family friend and came over as often as he could when his busy job had allowed, before he'd been fired.  He cleared his throat, "Had breakfast yet?"
"No."
"Well, there's not much of a selection here," he informed Howard, then in more of a mumble, "Hope you like kit-kats."  He slammed the pantry door shut and came in the living room.  Hurriedly, he turned off the power to his tv which displayed his paused videogame.  "This stupid level," he referred to Pacman that had been on the screen, "I keep dying."  A nervous chuckle.
Ignoring him, Howard pushed the numbers on the phone mechanically and collapsed on the couch.  He then hung up and shot a dirty look at Jeff as if his loss of memory was somehow his fault.  "What's Kayla's number?"
"Your girlfriend?  Howard, you never call her, is something wrong?"  There was everything sincere with the worry in Jeff's voice.  Howard stared at his friend, with a moment of hatred.  "No, " he turned back to the phone in his hands and racked his brains for his girlfriend's number. 

He dialed once and a metallic voice informed him that the number he had dialed had been disconnected.  He practically threw the phone at his feet, looked up at Jeff and told him that his Grandfather had passed away and more things unsaid burned in his throat.  Everything crashed down on him, and he told Jeff to just shut up even though he hadn't said anything.  Jeff, however, a trifle more worried, gingerly picked up the cordless and began to dial Kayla's number.  He set aside the pack of kit-kats he'd brought out.  These in particular stirred a memory in Howard's feverish mind.

He and Ayadell were good friends.  They talked about almost every little thing.  Recently, they'd had a conversation that confused him so. 
"So today I gave some kit-kats to that homeless man at the intersection by Meijer.  I rolled down my window and tossed them to him totally not knowing that I was holding up traffic.  He shouted his thanks, and gave this sheepish look at the car whose path he was obstructing and made his way back to the side of the road.  And even though I got a lot of stares from people driving by me, it felt good Howard.  I mean, if I could give like that, willingly, as often as I can, and with pure motivation, I would be serving my God.  It wouldn't be a sacrifice of life, but a sacrifice of lifestyle that one pursues for their own happiness," she paused, coming to a realization that Howard was completely lost to.  Then she continued very calmly, "I think that we as Christians should commit every single day to the Lord; stop worrying over circumstances and acting for our own needs.  It's so simple. We've got to die to ourselves in order to live for Christ."
At the time, Howard hadn't understood at all.  Sure, they had attended the same church for quite sometime, but for some reason, they were very different in their understandings.  In fact it had been Ayadell who had corrected his foul language the week before.  On top of that, Ayadell seemed so content and all he felt was...bad.

But he thought about it now.  Maybe the reason why Ayadell's problems were small to her was because she was so focused on the needs of others.  Maybe if he stopped focusing on his itchy eyes, aching head, and throbbing ankle, he could actually go back to his own apartment and be there for his grieving sisters.  Is this why Ayadell seems so happy?

He looked around at Jeff's pathetic apartment, then at Jeff who now had the phone to his ear, waiting.  Howard grabbed the cordless and hung up.
"Wanna come over for dinner?" he asked his dumbstruck friend. 
Then he got up and made his way over to the tv, despite his ankle.  He plugged the tv back into the outlet, picked up the nintendo controller and unpaused Jeff's Pacman game.