Young Writers Society

Four hours later, an hour and a half after we really ought to have gone to sleep, we were sitting in my hotel room playing with Christina’s old Magic: The Gathering cards. Many a childhood hour had been spent at our local game store with these cards. Well, I say local, about half an hour away by bike. You see why driving was so important to Christina? Anyway, I couldn’t imagine a better way to take me away from the present and its worry about Camillo.

“Abzan falconer,” Christina said, carefully placing the creature card next to two others that were incredibly similar, painfully similar when they were all out together.

“Really? So now Ghave has deathtouch, trample and flying?” I raised an eyebrow as pointedly as I could at her, so frustrated that I nearly missed a trigger for my Hamletback Goliath.

“Switch my swiftfoot boots to the falconer, get you for lethal in the air,” she said, grinning with one side of her mouth.

She started to turn her cards sideways to show they were attacking but I just sighed and scooped up everything on my side of the field.

“Good game,” I said as she looked up.

She grinned again and started to gather up her cards. “Game two?”

I put my arms out behind me and leaned my weight on them. We were sitting on my bed in the hotel room. There’s not much to tell about my hotel room, really. It was somewhere in between the sizes of the ones in Rotterdam and Montpellier, had a nice pink carpet. People sometimes ask me if travelling the globe all the time is disorientating but honestly, hotel rooms have started to merge into such a blur that it feels like I’m always coming home to the same place anyway.

I yawned. “I’m actually not sure. Might get a cup of tea first. You want anything?”

She looked over at the clock that was hanging up on the wall just above the complementary tea and coffee, and it was like a spell was broken. As soon as she saw the time, her eyebrows shot up and it was as if big black bags immediately appeared under her eyes.

“Uh, actually, I think I’m just going to head to bed,” she said, “I can kick your ass some more tomorrow.”

I nodded, kind of glad not to have to put any caffeine in my system at one in the morning. We’d got twin beds this time, since I knew in advance she was going to be here. It was the start of her study leave apparently, though I hadn’t seen a single study note in any of her luggage. But still, I’d jumped at the chance to have her around and booked the swankiest twin room that I could find to give her a treat. Camillo had even taken a single room next door. The idea had been to introduce the two of them, but I’d figured this was not the time.

But apparently blissful peace with your cousin is too much to expect from the world. As we were brushing our teeth there was a thud so loud from out in the corridor that I nearly choked on my toothpaste and had to hawk it back out my throat down the sink.

As Christina stared at me with wide eyes, I took a few deep breaths with my arm holding my waist and said, “I’m going to… go check on that.”

I shook my head to clear my head of the brief grogginess that had resulted from my coughing fit and made my way out into the main hotel room, then the corridor.

The corridor was dimly lit by a long line of windows with the blinds pulled down. Light from the street crept through the gap between the blinds and the wall but stayed soft and dim in little pools beneath their windows and meant that you could just about see enough to not bump into any of the household plants, but also not be disturbed by the dawn as you tried to sleep.

I could just about make out a single dark figure moving about near the far end of the corridor and figured the noise must have been that person slamming their door closed. That would have made such a loud noise that it could have been anyone, not necessarily Camillo, but what were the chances two different hotel guests would be in the middle of stress-fuelled tantrums this week?

But if it was Camillo, I couldn’t follow him. I’d got good at leaving Camillo to his space. I still fancied the crap out of him, and I didn’t think that was ever likely to stop, but I’d managed to keep it calmly locked away. Like fear of a meteor strike, it was always there, but you would never act on it. So I’d trained myself in respecting his boundaries. It would be moronic to break that now.

“Léo?”

The shout was more of a hiss, which made sense, given that presumably at least someone in our corridor would have gotten to bed at a reasonable hour. Camillo started rushing towards me and I paced forward as lightly as I could to meet him. We stopped just before we collided and just stood there for a second, hidden in shadows as we stared at each other.

“Where are you going?” I whispered, desperately searching in the dark for some eyes to look into. “Are you okay?”

“I’m going running,” he said. A short sentence and a gruff tone. But if he’d wanted me to leave him alone he wouldn’t have run back to me. Imagine it hadn’t been me that had come out into the corridor – that’d have been awkward. There was a good chance he didn’t care about awkwardness as much as me, but he’d still taken a risk running almost full speed towards what could have been a total stranger.

“It’s one in the morning,” I said, reaching forward to put my hand on the side of his arm.

“I want the darkness,” he said.

At this I almost burst out laughing right in his face. Camillo as an emo kid was a ridiculous image. But I could just picture him with his hair long enough for a fringe to sweep over one eye. He’d pull his black beanie down to hide the other and sulk off into the night. That was absurd. He must really have not been dealing with his dad’s situation very well at all.

“Cam,” I said, holding back the slight giggles that still tempted me, “I’m going to bed just now, but I’m here if you want to talk, okay?”

I’d heard that line from my friends at school so many times as my anxiety threatened to bulldoze my adolescence. This was something I could definitely help him with.

But he leaned towards me, a rush of grey against the slightly lighter grey of the hallway and practically growled. “I don’t want to talk. If you don’t want to come running with me, go to bed.”

I jerked back from him and tilted my head to the side, even though there was very little chance he could see that.

“You thought I would come running with you?” I exclaimed. Then, lowering my voice, “At one in the morning?”

“I thought my best friend might want to help me.”

He shrugged my hand off his shoulder and I could tell by the air that rushed past me that he’d turned to storm off. I didn’t stop him. What would be the point? I wasn’t going running and he was being an asshole. No, I told myself, he’s just struggling. But if he wasn’t in the mood to talk, I didn’t know what I could offer him.

I sighed and turned back towards my hotel room, bracing myself for Christina’s questions that were sure to come at me from all sides once I explained what had taken me so long. But there was one question nagging at me more than any she was likely to ask. I’m Camillo’s best friend? I grimaced at the irony of how satisfying that would have felt under any other circumstances.