Reality And Us

Chapter Twelve

When Nicklas had woken up that morning he knew he had a problem. Not only him, but his parents as well. A serious one.

Halloween was the next day, and there still was no pumpkin in front of their house, and his parents were so in love with this day, that there was no way around putting a funny pumpkin somewhere people could see it.

But since it was Friday, he didn't have time in the afternoon for making said pumpkin with his parents, he had to spend time with Jamie after all.

And that's how he got there. In the middle of his kitchen, a dead pumpkin his best friend mercilessly had killed on the counter, and what Nick suspected to be the guts of the orange fruit all over his shirt, and a boy with dark brown hair and tanned skin laughing like a maniac in front of him.

And somehow, he found himself grinning widely.

He hadn't liked the shirt that much anyway.

His best friend just continued to laugh. Nick just looked so funny with pumpkin seeds and slime in his hair and on his shirt, it was unbelievable.

The taller boy shook his head, still amused. "We're here to make a pumpkin look great, not to make me look like a pumpkin, Jamie."

The boy  crossed his arms and said in a baby-like voice, "But orange really suits your hair!"

Nick's eyes opened wide. "My hair? I have pumpkin in my hair? Jamie Fleetwood, how dare you . . ."

Jamie gulped. Nick calling him by his full name was never good, it reminded him of his mother when she was angry. And Nicklas usually took things quite serious.

But suddenly the taller boy grabbed what he'd call 'pumpkin guts' with his right hand and threw it at Jamie, who definitely didn't expect this. The other boy wasn't one to take things lightly, usually.

What he didn't know was that Nick had thought a lot these past week. Since the last time he met Zane - eight days ago - he had considered being a bit less serious a lot of times, because that talk about tomatoes and carrots had him laugh for quite a while, and maybe it'd be funny to do something like that again.

To let yourself fall into that unbothered, childish state, where the world seemed like a playground. That state made everything less serious, made everything less big, less important.

It had made him forget, and he wanted to see if he could forget again, like that, if he could be free like that again, and everything about this situation screamed at him to do so.

And so he did, and that's why he got his hands dirty with that icky orange mass, because he wanted to let go, he wanted to have this kind of unbothered feeling, fun in a way he didn't really remember to have felt before.

He hadn't been sad before, no, there were a lot of pleasant feelings in his life, but that certain happiness of letting yourself fall just really wasn't there, and until last Thursday he hadn't even realized how much he had missed that feeling in his life.

Jamie didn't waste time on being surprised, he took another bit of pumpkin and threw it straight into Nick's face. After all, he could taste the fruit himself already and his forehead didn't feel as free as usual.

Nicklas gasped as the cold substance hit his cheek. "This means war.", he hissed, making sure the purple of Jamie's shirt was accompanied with a beautiful, intense orange.

They were now fighting in the kitchen, throwing the slimy parts of the fruit around like little children, laughing at each other, laughing at the mess they made, laughing with each other, it was fun.

They just had a serious problem at one point: there was nothing left to throw with, as the only part of the pumpkin that remained was hard and would hurt.