Enemy Basis | ✓

23| unexpected events

I knew I couldn't stand there forever, united with the five boys as the sunshine splashed in through the window. It was Friday and I had school to deal with.

I checked my phone for the time and I realised that I had already missed half the day but despite my hesitance, school was the right option for the moment. I didn't know yet if the school had contacted my mother about my absence this morning and I didn't want them too. I also had dance practise after school, something that I couldn't miss.

As my eyes looked up from my phone, I couldn't help but notice that the five boys were all sitting on the sofa lazily with no means to get up and go to school. Marcelo switched on the television and put on some war game that I had often played with Lennox.

I wished that I could do what they were doing with no problems in the world but I had my mother on my back and I felt weirdly odd being so friendly with them. I think it was all too much too quickly.

Without telling anyone, I turned around and left the room.

Lennox shouted after my retreating figure, "Where are you going?", all the awkwardness from last night's declaration having been forgotten as I had wished. Even though I still felt weird at the situation, like him, I pretended that it had never happened and pushed the plagued thoughts from my mind.

I replied to him in the same loudness, "School!"

I walked to my car, today's weather was slightly more crisp and cool but I could still feel the sun on my skin as I opened my trunk and grabbed some clothes that I always kept in there.

Without asking Dorran or notifying anyone, I went back inside the house and explored, looking for a shower that I could use, not wanting to wear the same clothes I wore yesterday without changing.

As I walked up the grand staircase, I wandered the empty corridors with ease and comfort. I knew the boys were downstairs, his father not in because otherwise, I doubt Dorran would've brought us all in and his mother obviously wasn't in so I could. The last brought a sad shiver through me as I thought about his mother and her life and her death. My hands trailed the walls around me as I walked, wondering what relationship she had with Dorran, what impact she had on him, how much of her was still left in this house.

Feeling the urge to, I walked up and up the stairs until I got to the highest floor. When I trailed past the corridor to the only door up here at the highest level of the house and opened, I instantly knew that this was Dorran's room.

The thoughts of his mother emptied from my mind as I looked around.

His room was darkly coloured and clean. Everything was too neat and ordered, giving me the impression that no one truly lived here at all and he had no personal belongings out to even show a smidge of his personality. The room was painfully blank and if it had not been for the smell of him, the woody warm pine residing in this room, I would've thought that it belonged to no one.

But as I continued to look around, my skin suddenly became encompassed in goosebumps as a realisation hit me straight in the core.

His room looked exactly like mine.

Walls blank, shelves empty, room tidy and clean, no belongings out apart from schoolwork. I know why I kept my room like this; it was because my room was merely my room but just a place where I slept until I left it forever and moved on. It held none of my personality because I didn't belong there and none of me did in that house with a woman I could barely call my mother.

And maybe Dorran felt exactly the same. He didn't feel like he belonged in this house or in Richview perhaps with the ghost of his mother walking down these corridors or the petty fighting in this town that had all just gotten too much. Maybe we were both more alike than I ever thought was possible.