The Monster Under the Bed || Kickthestickz

Pj Liguori

"Hey, Calum," I say, tearing into my best friends room.

If there was any place I loved in the world, it was Calum's dorm. His walls were strewn with posters of smudgy punk singers and crazy haired pop bands and any other type of badass looking musicians imaginable. They were all tacked unequally to the dark wood panels. The floor we walked on was no longer the usual St Greene's splintery floorboards, it was scattered with about half a dozen mismatched rugs which were almost definitely all serious trip hazards. This place just screamed Calum from every nook and cranny.

"What's up, Chick?" The boy replied. He pulled his thick framed glasses from his face and chucked his copy of To Kill a Mockingbird to the side. Its delicate pages crumpled and folded as soon as it hit the ground next to his bed. Calum has an amazing talent of both looking extremely younger and yet a lot older than me all at once.

"Nothing," I begin. "I just wanted to chat. I miss you."

"You saw me literally just the other night. I planned yours and Pj's escape route to your mum's house, remember?" I smiled as a response and plonked myself down, next to him on the bed. "Oh, and sorry about the detention," he added. Calum pushed himself up from his laying position on the mattress and swings himself round to sit next to me. The materials of our trousers rub ever so gently together as he gets himself comfortable beside me.

"S'ok," I mutter. "It's kinda my fault anyway. I knew we shouldn't be sneaking out. They were going to give it to Pj but I took the blame for him. They would've kicked him out. Anyway, the school was bound to find out one way or another. I could just do without an hour and a half sitting in a freezing cold science room with Mr Cooper. But whatever, I'll still blame Peej.

"That reminds me," I hesitate, the thoughts springing to the front of my brain. "Do you know who he's been texting? He keeps being really secretive. All of these messages keep popping up on his phone. I never see him reply but he must be responding for whoever it is to keep texting him, right? It's really starting to frustrate me."

"Have you asked him about it?" Calum wonders.

"Yeah, but that only caused an argument. He's being all moody one minute and lovey-dovey the next. I don't know, it's hard to explain."

"Maybe he's on his man-period?" Calum laughs, his face breaking into a beautiful grin.

"Probably," I chuckle. "I'm super bored. Let's go outside and revise. I really need to work on maths; I don't think I'm ever going to pass that. Plus, you're super good at Pythagoras, Cal. You can help!" I exclaim the last sentence as I bound off of the boy's bed and run through the corridors to my own bedroom. Calum's laugh echoes happily through the halls of the school as he follows, slowly, into the cramped dorm that Pj and I share. I launch open the window and we both begin to climb down the massive tree to the ground at the back of the school.

After sitting in the shade for half an hour Calum reverts from his Italian revision book to his reading book. He flicks through the pages hungrily, eyes scanning from left to right as if they couldn't lap in enough of the story going on between the book's pages. I slam closed my own revision guide. "Why're you reading that thing? I didn't think Calum Clifford read books?"

Calum sighs, folding over the top corner of the page and removing his glasses from his face once again. "A friend gave it to me."

"A friend, huh?"

"Yeah. A friend."

Rolling my eyes, I kick back and lean against the thick trunk of the tree.