Closer to the Sun || A Fairy Tale on Hiking Trails

3.1 - Campbell - Intangible

Hours after Nora left, Campbell returned to the kitchen to scavenge a proper dinner. The sky was red at the fringes, blue overhead when he re-entered the breakfast nook.

His map was folded like an omelet on the breakfast table, sitting in the middle of a scattered rainbow of M&Ms. He should've taken the map with him, but the issue was that he couldn't accomplish it reliably. He managed to bring his shirt and pants and jacket – and his shoes, if he was really lucky – but more complicated things like his wallet and cell phone slipped right out of his thumb-having hands and clattered to the floor at his thumb-lacking paws. Maybe the map would have been simple enough; he had never tried it.

He unfurled the map and frowned as he ran his fingers over the teeth marks. The page was pocked and scrunched and there was a u-shaped hole above Crested Butte. He poked the scrunch of paper back into place and wiped off what he was pretty sure was a crust of saliva.

Gross.

Campbell stooped to pluck a few stray M&Ms off the floor. Callum's girlfriend must have gone home after his hasty exit hours earlier. He wondered if girlfriend was the right word for what she was to his brother. Prom date, yes. If he could recall, that was how their courtship had begun, in May of senior year of high school. But given that Callum had been absent all of senior summer, flew off to attend college in a different state, and had spent the only two weeks in Nora's presence fighting loudly with her, he wondered if girlfriend was an inaccurate title.

He wondered if Callum had even said goodbye before she left. Not that Campbell himself had been any better.

Campbell grimaced as he replayed the scene: her red eyes, him swooping awkwardly out of the room the moment she started to express her feelings in something stronger than words.

What is wrong with me and my family?

He'd left his phone on the table in his hurry to leave. Campbell picked it up and scrolled through his texts. He'd left it unattended for a mere few hours and yet his lock screen had filled with messages: evidence of his friends' inabilities to be alone for any amount of time.

I do NOT consent to this new group member. Campbell read the message from Eli as if it were dripping in poison, his usual speaking tone. Since when are we taking half of Colorado Mesa University on a field trip? I thought you told Shea to stop inviting people.

And then a second text that Campbell felt he needed a bit more context to parse: He's playing in a fountain. Why is he playing in a fountain?

Campbell ignored both messages text. Eli hated everyone new. Eli had hated Campbell for a while in middle school; it was a necessary part of the life cycle of Eli's friendships. He and Leonard would fight it out for a bit, Eli would get used to him, and the circle would grow to encompass them all. It was just how it always had to go with Eli.

He did agree with Eli on one thing, though. Their group was getting too big. And he had asked Shea to stop inviting people along.

Campbell slouched into the bench of the breakfast nook and picked at the chipped edge of the table. It was beveled in the delicate likeness of horses running along a field. His mother loved horses. His father loved dark wood. Between the two of them, they had enough dark wood horses to start a nutcracker rodeo. Campbell preferred this styling choice to the days when his father had a fondness for porcelain and his mother for foxes. He'd had his fill of gaudy porcelain foxes perched on stumps or yawning big wide yawns or squinting their little eyeliner-black eyes.

He did like the way they slept in little balls, though. He hated the word "cute," but there it was.

The horses were quietly elegant and western, emblematic of the heavily sanitized Scholastic textbook version of the great state of Colorado, where the plains were a thing to be carved up and obtained. He had to admit a fondness for the cowboy, or the cowboy he'd learned about in Westerns, who he'd at first suspected was highly fictional and then later confirmed through reading the actual bloody histories of his born-and-raised state.