Young Writers Society

I was bustling around my house, furiously stashing away pictures that Cullen would recognize. He was doubtless going to recognize me, but I could explain that away. My past, however...he would recognize it, and that explained itself.

I bit my lip as I accepted Ana’s facetime call and placed my earbud in my ear. “Do you have him yet?” I asked, slipping a picture into a cabinet.

“Soon. His flight just landed. You have maybe two hours, if things are running slow.”

“Hopefully they are.”

My friend sighed, in a way that insured me that she had just run her hand through her long, glossy black mane of hair. “Lauren, it’s going to be okay. He’ll understand. Just because you took a year and a half to yourself doesn’t mean he cares about you any less,” she comforted me.

I sighed as well, wrapping my arms around myself. “I just don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“And you won’t. I’m here for you,” she assured me, and I heard rustling in the background as people bustled past her, chattering away.

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am. Now get your phone out, I’m gonna act like I’m playing a game so you can see some of the airport, and help me look for Cullen. You’ll recognize him better than me,” she laughed.

“Sure,” I replied, pulling out my phone as the camera flipped around to reveal masses of people walking through the gate.

“What does he look like again?” she asked, and I groaned.

“I should’ve come with you.”

“Yes, you should have. But you didn’t, and now I get to have fun finding him.”

“Shut up. He’s got brown eyes, a complexion kind of like yours, tall, brown hair. A lot of people think he’s Asian-”

“-but he’s not,” she finished my sentence for me. “I remember now. Is that him?” She pointed to a guy several feet away who looked slightly jumpy, but who was unmistakably the bass-guitarist-turned-global-sensation Cullen Pierce.

“That’s him. Now get home, I want to get this over with,” I whined, slightly nervously.

“I thought your plan was to avoid him?”

“It is.”

“So what are you getting over?”

“I don’t know, it just sounded good.”

Her melodic laugh rang through the speakers in my earbuds. “You’re crazy.”

I laughed as well, “So you’ve told me.”

She laughed once more before walking over to my old friend and delivering the cryptic password that let him know she was the person picking him up, “Friends hide in plain sight.”

He silently turned to face her, and I saw my old best friend for the first time in a year and a half. However, to be sure it was him, he still had to deliver his side of the password. “In the hidden places, friends become lovers,” his Melbourne accent whispered.

I bit my lip as Ana slid her phone into her pocket and the two of them got his bags and walked out to her car, a black Range Rover, one of the five that lived in our house’s garage.

As they drove, I went upstairs to the third floor, which housed my music room, gym, and indoor archery range, and shot over and over again until I had no more arrows. I then retrieved them, before proceeding to shoot them all once more.

My earbuds let me know that they were listening to my new album in the car, and for someone who knew me so well, Cullen was having a hard time recognizing my voice. He kept asking Ana who it was singing, whose album was playing. She simply told him that it was the artist he was going to record with, and that he would find out once they reached their destination.

He wasn’t satisfied with that answer, but he leaned back in his seat anyways as Mercí began playing. Absentmindedly, I sang along.

When the English verse began playing, Cullen spoke as if he had seen a ghost. “Who’s singing?”

Ana laughed. “I think you have your suspicions, none of which I will confirm.”

“No, not on the track. You unplugged your phone, and someone’s singing. Who?” he asked, and I immediately stopped singing and bit my lip.

“It’s nobody, just a friend of mine,” my friend waved him off.

“Is that the artist I’m here to work with?”

“Possibly.”

He once again took the answer, but even through the phone I could sense the change in dynamic in the car. What had been a relaxed, though slightly monotonous ride for anyone who had ever driven through the countryside, was now a tense, nervous passage of time that correlated unevenly with the passage of space.

I returned to my archery, switching over to farther targets and a recurve bow instead of my typical compound bow. The challenge of my lesser prefered weapon combined with the concentration required to aim accurately at the farther away and smaller targets held my attention, and over the next half hour I slowly relaxed.

All too soon, my phone went off, alerting me to the return of my best friend to our shared house, and of Cullen to my life. Placing my bow gently on its rack, I retrieved my arrows and stowed them in their quiver before going down to the main floor.

I paused on the last step, making sure to stay out of sight. Ana was showing Cullen around, and he was slightly awkward and nervous as she showed him around my house. I sighed. I could avoid him for today, but that would only be torture for everyone involved.

Shaking my head and taking a deep breath, I stepped out into my kitchen and started making a sandwich, so that it would appear as though I was already in the room when they walked in.

I was intently spreading peanut butter on my sandwich when I heard footsteps enter the room behind me.

“The house is lovely, really. Do you live here alone?” Cullen’s Melbourne accent came, and I paused, nearly fainting out of nerves. His voice hadn’t changed a bit, and it was going to drive me crazy.

“I have one housemate,” Ana’s lilting Portuguese accent replied. “And here she is.”

Cullen’s surprise was evident, as he hadn’t seen me when he walked in. “Hi,” he greeted me. “I’m, uh, Cullen.”

I returned to my peanut butter spreading. “I know,” I replied softly, slipping into Italian.

“What did she say? I, uh, don’t speak anything other than English,” Cullen asked Ana, and I didn’t have to turn around to see him scratch the back of his head.

“I don’t know, I only speak Portuguese and English. I think she’s reverted to speaking different languages, it’s what she does when she’s nervous,” Ana explained.

“That’s...interesting,” he said, sounding even more awkward at having made me nervous.

“She speaks seven languages. Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian, French, Mandarin, and Norwegian,” was her reply. “And half the time she doesn’t even realize that she’s changed languages.”

“But who is she?” he asked, still anxious to know whose house he was in.

I sighed and placed a slice of bread on top of my sandwich, reverting back to my native English without even noticing. “A ghost of who I was.”

“But strong in who you are,” Ana added, coming over and resting her hand on my arm.

Cullen cleared his throat. “Still here,” he reminded us.

I shook my head in an attempt to clear it. “You know who I am,” I told him, a bit more confidently. “You don’t need me to tell you that.”

With that said, I turned around, resting my back against the cabinets as I took a bite of my sandwich. As I had called myself a ghost, so his facial expression reflected him seeing one.

“Lauren?”

I nodded. “It’s been a while.”

He rushed over and enveloped me in a bear hug as I fell to my knees, holding me tightly as if he was scared I was going to disappear.

“We were so scared, especially Asher,” he whispered into my hair as our emotion at being reunited drew us both to tears. “He thought you’d been kidnapped, or worse. The only thing that kept him from filing a missing persons report was our manager.”

“Thank god for your manager, then. I disappeared because I didn’t want to be found.”

“So we guessed, even though we looked for you everywhere.”

“Apparently not everywhere, you never found me.”

“That’s true. It almost resembles our manner of searching for you the first time, how we looked. Where did you go that escaped that?” He played with my braided hair, still reluctant to believe that it was real.

“Brazil,” I replied. “I spent two months there. Then I went to Colombia for a month, then France for three. After that, I spent a month in China and two in Italy before finally settling here in Norway six months ago.”

“You’ve really been everywhere, haven’t you?” he joked, laughing softly.

“Not even close,” I replied, pulling away from him slightly to wipe my tears and breathe.

“We tried contacting you, but you never answered your email and you left your phone behind,” he told me, thinking I was going to say that I had been abandoned by the people I once thought of as family.

“She didn’t buy a laptop until, what, four months ago?” Ana told him, sitting down on the floor with us. “By the way, I’m Milana Vernice, nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too, Milana,” he replied. “So you’ve really spent this last year traveling and offline?”

“Yep.”

“And how did you two meet?”

“We ran into each other at the Oslo airport,” I laughed. “She was asking for directions in Portuguese, and I was the only other one who spoke the language.”

“We’ve been inseparable since,” Ana jumped in. “I didn’t have a place to stay, and she said she had an extra room, which I found out meant she had about a million extra rooms.”

I laughed. “I didn’t want to scare you! I mean, who else would have introduced me to the amazing world of Portuguese food if I had?”

Both my roommate and friend laughed. “That’s true,” Ana nodded. “You love my cooking.”

“Sounds like I have to try this food,” Cullen said, patting his stomach. “One question though: does it come in pizza form?”

I rolled my eyes. “Possibly, why?”

“TRISTAN WANTS ANOTHER SLICE!” he yelled, and I clapped my hands over my ears after momentarily shooting a middle finger in his direction.

“That was loud, idiot!” I whined indignantly. “I hate you!”

“And yet you what, write a song specifically for my voice?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ll show him the rest of the house if you make dinner?” I proposed, making puppy dog eyes at Ana, who laughed and agreed. The three of us stood, and as my best friend began to prepare dinner, I led Cullen to the second floor.

“So this is where all the bedrooms are, mine is the one at the end of the hallway. All the rooms have an en suite and walk-in closet, towels are in the bathrooms already,” I explained, walking to the last door on the left and opening the door. “This one’s yours.”

He walked into his new room and set his backpack down on the bed. “It’s nice,” he said, slipping his typical black converse off and sitting on the side of the bed. “The forest is pretty.”

I smiled, taking a seat next to him. “Hence why my house is covered in windows and built in the middle of the forest.”

“That would make sense, wouldn’t it?”

“One would think.”

He smiled and slipped his arm around my waist, pulling me into him. “You know Asher carries a picture of you and him with him everywhere he goes?”

I bit my lip. “I do the same.”

“He wrote our new single.”

“I haven’t heard it.”

Cullen sighed and turned to face me. “Lauren, every day without you breaks him. He needs you, and I know you need him. That song...you need to listen to it.”

“I don’t want to,” I replied, sighing.

“Why?”

“Its title is Shattered Paris,” I answered, visibly slumping over. “I know what that means.”

“Oh.”

“He took me there on the last date we went on before I left, and I was...cryptically distant. I don’t want to hear how much that broke him, it hurt enough to be breaking myself,” I whispered.

“It’s gonna be okay, Laur,” he assured me, pressing a soft kiss to my hair and rubbing my back. “The two of you will work things out.”

“I sure hope so. I need us to. Life without him...it’s too much.”