guys like you [ prinxiety ]

[ 8 ]

"Virgil smiled, slightly. Maybe they weren't so bad after all."

Roman's POV

"I can't even call for help, my mouths sewn shut, OooOh! My scars they bleed and bleed... I can't BrEeeAAAthe!"
Roman sang as he walked home. He was listening to his favourite artist, I I I. The lyrics were really dark but the melody was always really cheerful, accompanied by a ukulele. This strange juxtaposition attracted thousands of dedicated fans, including Roman, who could appreciate a good chord sequence.

His day had been quite strange. First of all, he had searched through security footage with Logan and Anxiety, he had found out that Anxiety's name was actually VIRGIL, and he was actually quite nice. THEN, he found out that Dee had a boyfriend called Sam, which Roman, Virgil and Logan had discovered when watching the footage and needless to say they were scarred for life and would never see Dee the same way again. Why- why would someone do that at school? In a science classroom? Roman shuddered. And then, after lunch, Roman had spotted a pile of torn up paper next to the lockers. Since he had nothing else to do with his boring, mundane life, he decided to sellotape the pieces back together to see what it said when he got home. Hopefully it wouldn't be just some Year 11 maths homework, but he was almost 100% sure that it would be, since he found it next to his class' lockers. Roman absentmindedly kicked a pebble with his scuffed white shoes. The auditions for the school play were next week on Monday, and he wasn't ready. There was no information about the audition, he didn't know what they would have to do, if they were going to have to sing... Roman's stomach flipped and he took a deep breathe to calm himself. "There's no need to worry about that today, it's tomorrow's problem."

Roman walked up the long driveway towards his house, which was tucked away in a little side lane, hidden away by towering bushes and trees. In the middle of the drive, a ginormous oak sat, the leaves of which were beginning to glow a glorious amber. Roman took a moment to appreciate the beautiful scenery; the sparse clouds shone pink on the light purple evening sky. He opened the door and shouted a greeting to his mum, took off his shoes, and went to work on sellotaping the papers back together.

In the end, there were five pieces of paper. Each had some kind of poetry on them, and three of them were written in a different handwriting to the other. "Maybe two people are writing poetry to each other?" Roman mused as he shuffled them together. He read the one on top of the pile:

Nobody wants the
I'm can crying
Yes please know

It didn't really seem like poetry.
Another one in the same handwriting read:

They could have done
No might be just
I'm sorry stop about
Yes I am us

To Roman, it they were beginning to look a lot like coded messages. He stood up and walked towards the packed bookshelves on the far side of the room. After rummaging around for a few minutes, he found the book he was looking for: "Deciphering 101". He picked up the two pieces of paper with the most words on and tried a few basic Caesar ciphers based on the frequencies of each letter, but nothing really worked. Roman thought that it could possibly be a code instead of a mono-alphabetic cipher, but that didn't really work either. By the time he had finished theorising, the sun had very much set and he hadn't eaten dinner or done his homework. Roman shoved the papers inside his bag and decided to work on them tomorrow.