Not Like Your Demons

Chapter 9

If life truly is a dilemma, then Camila, who is now thinking over things while sitting on her bed, definitely is living.

Shawn has left a few moments ago, after offering a million thanks to the Cabello men and not letting anyone else than him wash the dishes. Despite being annoyed at her airy cousin most of the time, Camila thinks it's sweet of him to insist helping around every time he's here. Sure, he came in uninvited and consumed almost all the food, but still...

Presently, she's contemplating whether or not she should talk to her fathers. It'd be nice to ask them for advice, but if she'll want to talk about the Lauren situation then she'll have to bring the school situation, too. Including all the wrong things she's been doing. She doesn't want to hurt her fathers; if they knew what she'd been doing at school, they'd be really disappointed in her. With stress on really.

And she has never disappointed them before.

Burying her face in her hands, she shakes her head at herself. She has messed up - so, so much - and just like most of the time, she doesn't know what to do.

She needs some sort of refreshing so she can decide well - of that she's certain, so she walks to the powder room and washes her face. It will help clear her mind, tell her if she should converse with her fathers. But one round of washing isn't enough to calm her mind, so she washes her face again.

And again and again and again and again.

She's pretty sure she has spent at least an hour inside the room when she realizes she really has to act like the mature person that she is supposed to be, get over this, and talk to her dads.

And stop washing her face. It will be detrimental to her skin and to her parents' water bill.

She has just finished wiping her now fresh-as-baby face when "Don't Rain on my Parade" sounds through the whole room. Well, Camila knows the song like she knows herself by now, and she can even sing it in her sleep, but she has long ago decided that she has to take every opportunity she has to hear it if she wants to slay the song when she auditions for the New York Academy of Arts. So ringtone, it is.

She stares at the screen before throwing her towel on the bed and placing the phone over her ear.

"Austin?"

"Hey," comes Austin's dreamy voice from the other line. Camila can hear "Defying Gravity" playing in the background. She's not the only one with a pre-birth prepared NYADA song after all.

"Hi, Austin. Look, I really appreciate you calling, but...uhmm...can I just call you back later? Now's really not a good time."

"No, I have to go somewhere in 30 minutes and I really need to talk to you about something."

Camila doesn't remember Austin telling him about where he should be tonight. "Wait, where are you going?"

"Uhm... Jason's having a small party, and I can't really say no to that. I had to blow him off last time because you said we needed to go on that date, remember?"

Camila closes her eyes for a while, remembering how disastrous that "date" was. It appeared like Austin had no idea what he was doing. It didn't bid well for Camila - who knows how obsessive compulsive Austin is at things - that her boyfriend seemed like he didn't make an effort for it at all, but she chugged it up to Austin's busy schedule. "Well, wha-what do we need to talk about?"

"Camila, please don't pretend that you don't know what I am about to talk to you about," Austin asks, almost exasperatedly, and she wonders what she did wrong.

She can't remember, though. "No, Austin, I have no idea."

A dramatic sigh is emitted from the other end of the line before a world-weary question. "What's happening between you and that freak?"