Three Is A Crowd

Chapter 13: Sweet Dreams

Camila looks around the empty room, utterly bored and restless. It's Sunday night, and she's already done with her assignments, so now, she has nothing else to do other than play with her guitar and write half-assed lyrics which she immediately gives up doing once she realizes her mind is stuck elsewhere.

She tries to FaceTime with Taylor just for the principle of having to do something, because staring at the wall (or Lauren's empty bed) is getting too boring. But her old roommate is apparently too busy with her current boyfriend to be bothered by a long-forgotten BFF. Camila sighs and wonders what ever happened to their friendship. From Tay-Tay throwing a surprise birthday party for Camila, to their late-night talks about boys and love; then, when Taylor transferred, their thrice a week Skype dates turned into once a week, to every other week. Now, they're basically strangers.

It sucks, but Camila shrugs it off. You earn some, you lose some.

Normally, she would want Dinah to be here to entertain her, but she doesn't want another night of her non-stop teasing and interrogation especially when she's still nursing quite a bit of a hangover which means she couldn't handle Dinah's loudness in close proximity. Her meddler of a friend calls her awhile ago, probably guilty of the ruckus she and Ally caused last night, but when Camila mentions she has been doing nothing in her room but strum her guitar, Dinah snickers and says, "the good ol' strumming the guitar, huh? Is that why you always cut your nails short? Better fine-tune it, Mila... Strum all night long, please, so when I get back you won't be as high-strung as you usually are. I bet you were thinking about Lau--" That's enough to make Camila hang up.

Her next bet is Ally, but, as Dinah not-so-subtly implies, Linda Blair (Dinah's new nickname for her due to her demon-possessed sass and projectile vomiting last night) is either in church confessing her sins to the priest, and on her knees praying to Jesus; or, she is currently with her boyfriend, most likely also on her knees, probably chanting Hallelujah over and over and taking the name of the lord her god in vain as she loses her religion with Will.

Camila considers watching Buffy, but, in a way, this has become an unofficial thing with Lauren, so it doesn't feel right to watch it alone now.

She sighs as her thoughts wander back to her roommate. As much as she hates her smug and grating personality, Camila finds herself yearning for her presence. She even misses kicking stray clothes back to Lauren's side of the room and nagging her non-stop about etiquette and common decency. She's conflicted, at best, because their recent situation is kind of weird; she doesn't even understand what has happened, but she knows that something is changing between them, which, Lauren is obviously trying to avoid.

Whatever it is, Lauren made it clear she doesn't wanna talk about it, so that's that. It's not like anything real happened, anyway.

She stands up and starts pacing around for a while, eventually gravitating towards Lauren's messy bed and picks up a really battered paperback which she has noticed Lauren has been reading every now and then.

Glancing at the cover, black print in yellow background, she sees that it's a collection of short stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky. When she flips through the pages, the wonderful smell of old paper and a hint of vanilla immediately hitting her nose, she notices that there's a distinct part of the book where notes and scribbles litter the battered pages; most of the passages are heavily underlined as well. Quite poignant annotations written in tiny cursive letters, with the occasional doodles, she feels like she's seeing another part of Lauren she's sure her roommate didn't wanna show her. She feels like she's invading her privacy, but she couldn't help but pry a bit more.