Phantasm (Phantasm, #1) - Camila/You

Epilogue [🌵]

1 year later

The mind was a fickle thing.

It's a wonder how something so fragile could contain glimpses of your life and store them for the future. It was also brilliant how the mind could pick out certain events as important or unimportant and contain them in genre specific boxes meant to be stored away or forgotten. You had no control over it even though, technically, it is your mind.

But then you would get these flashes of certain phenomenon entangled in dreams or, more precisely, what I've felt for the last two years—déjà vu.

You look so wonderful in your dress

I love your hair like that

The way it falls on the side of your neck

Down your shoulders and back.

My feet were frozen on the doorway once I opened the door and the song reached my ears. For some reason, hearing the song made me furrow my eyebrows in confusion. There was an itch in my mind that I couldn't quite reach and it became more and more frustrating as time went by because this was not the first time it happened to me.

It happened when I first heard Shawn and Camila's song a little less than a year ago. It happened when I saw a bow necklace on the internet. And even when Camila and Dinah got into a cliff diving incident. I even went to a doctor to see if there was something wrong with my brain but he found nothing.

And yet why did my heart seem to know things my brain couldn't comprehend?

"Y/N? Are you okay?"

Maya's voice made me look up as my feet finally cooperated and I made my way to the middle of my room. "Yeah, just—that's a nice song."

Her face lit up like a child getting handed a brand new toy as she clapped her hands. "Oh, I know! I love Ed Sheeran." I only nodded and proceeded to grab a bag from under my bed. "So, care to tell your roommate your holiday plans?"

"I am not staying in Boston if that's what you're asking."

"Aww, why not?" she cried out, throwing a pillow at my back.

I laughed as I bent down to pick it up only to chuck it back at her. "You are not using me as a scapegoat to get out of your family reunion."

She groaned as she laid back down her bed. "You are so not my best friend anymore."

"I can live with that," I said, shrugging, which earned me a pillow in the face this time.

It was already my third year in Berklee and in all honesty, I was having fun. Making music has always been a dream of mine and learning from it here was a good place to start. Julian's been like a father to me but of course if I ever told him that he'll just hit me with his trademark 'are you calling me old?' phrase.

My family was doing amazing too and I finally got them out of that cramped town after we finished 7/27. They were now living in Miami with a house I bought myself. It wasn't extravagant by any means but it was infinitely better than the sorry excuse for a house my father left us.

Oddly enough, the reason I chose Miami wasn't really because Camila was also from there (however, it was a plus). But because Miami felt... right. I looked at other cities but for some reason, I always got drawn back to it. By now, I stopped questioning why and just let my gut feeling lead my decisions. It hasn't failed me so far after all.

As I was packing my clothes, Maya and I heard a commotion outside. We looked at each other trying to discern if the other had an idea of what was going on. It sounded like a battalion was marching outside by the sound of numerous footsteps. The murmurs were a low hum at first but as it got closer and closer it sounded more like a pep rally than mere whispers.