Us Against The World

"I can't believe he's coming with us." Ceri huffed for what seemed to be the hundredth time, crossing her arms over her chest and giving a half-hearted kick at the back of the car seat in front of her.

Cyrus, seemingly miffed, turned around and raised an eyebrow. "I am right here."

"I know. That's why I said it. You're going to wreck everything."

"If you even think for one minute that I care about what you do, then you have another thing coming. I'm only here in case you think about doing something really idiotic."

"Guys," I broke in, already fed up with their bickering. "If you're going to fight all week-end, I swear that I will make Stephen turn this car around and take us back home. I'm not going to put up with it." Sandwiched between Ceri and Emerson in the back of Stephen's car, I was hot, bothered and to put it mildly, pissed off. It was raining like there was no tomorrow, we had been stuck in gridlocked traffic for the best part of an hour, and Stephen was passing really bad wind after eating a curry the previous night.

"Ev, I don't think he could even turn this car around if he wanted to." Emerson attempted to stretch his arms out, running his hands through his carrot coloured hair that caused me so much amusement when teasing him about it.

"You may have a point, but that doesn't give them an excuse to be annoying."

"I'm not." Cyrus found it necessary to tell me. "Your friend is the one who is being difficult-"

She cut across him "I have a name!"

"- whilst I am being absolutely lovely and tolerable. I even offered to share my pretzels, but none of you want any."

Pretzels were, apparently, the ultimate festival food. Personally, I just thought that they dried out your mouth and made you extremely thirsty. However, this time as he waggled the packet over his shoulder, Ceri grabbed it, quickly rolled down her window and threw it out. Mouth agape, he turned around. "You did not just do that!"

"Believe it."

"This is a absolute abomination." With a frown, he looked out of his window at the gloomy sky and made a move to open his door. "I've got cramp, I'm going for a walk whilst it's stopped raining."

"Quincey, we're in the middle of a motorway. You can't get out." Stephen said, shaking his head.

"We haven't moved in half an hour. You've even got the engine off. It won't be too hard to catch up." With that, he opened the door and stepped out, happily stretching his hands above his head before bending down, picking up his discarded packet and waving it at Ceri's window. He received a death glare in return.

Stephen slowly shook his head, watching Cyrus wind his way through the maze of halted cars, over to the grass at the side of the lay-by. "That man has always, and forever will be, a great mystery to me. I have not a clue what goes on inside of his mind."

"I'm glad I'm not the only one." Ceri muttered. "I think we should all just have done with him."

Stephen quietly chuckled, scratching his the side of his head with much vigour. "It'd be cruel to turf him out. If I did that, he'd have nobody."

There was a sudden change in air which even Ceri seemed to pick up on, for when the did speak again, it was tentative. "So that's the reason why you're friends with him?"

"No." He began slowly. "He and I go way back. Quincey has gone through a lot of tough times in his life and he's a good and kind person despite everything. He's just got a strange way of showing it."

"You're telling me."

Stephen lowly chuckled. "He'll grow on you. I wanted to kill him the first few months that I knew him, despite how I made an effort to be amicable towards him. But if he wants you to like him, he'll do everything he can so that you do. It's kinda hard to ignore something so… Pathetic."

Emerson lent down across me, to peer out of the opposite window at the braced figure. "As pathetic as having a whizz on the side of a motorway?"

A drawn-out groan came from the front, leaving a few seconds of silence before he spoke. "That's not actually what he's doing. I don't know what it is that he's doing, but it's certainly not that, regardless of what it looks like. He's far too much of a prude."

And so, we all spent the next five minutes watching him trek up the grassy embankment, stand swaying in the wind for a bit and then return as the feeble drizzle of rain turned into a downpour once more. It seemed a fairly pointless expedition, unless his aim was to get completely drenched in cold water and spray us with it by shaking his head like a dog once he was back in the car. As he lent forwards to turn up the heating nozzle on the dashboard, he pulled a face of some expression I really couldn't deduce the meaning of. "The mickey-take of all of this is that I could see the camp from up there, as well as miles of blocked road. It'd just be better for us to walk across a couple of fields and go that way, instead of waiting here for hours."

"Yes, if you want to be chased by a farmer brandishing his shot-gun." Ceri slowly said. "Although you be my guest with that."

"I'm just saying that a ten minute hike cross-country would be far more sufferable that sitting here for a questionable period of time."

"Well, if you're volunteering to carry all of the tents, then I may be far more willing to participate in this."

His face slowly dropped before scowling and turning back to the dashboard, propping his feet back up upon it. "We can wait."

Before Ceri could respond with a presumably 'witty' remark, her phone began to ring and with a quick glance at the caller ID, she excitably answered it. "Darrell, hey!" There was a faint static noise in the otherwise silence which I guessed to be him replying. "No, no, we are still coming… There's just a massive road block on the motorway. We're not too far now, though." Another pause towards the end of which she let out a girlish giggle. I never thought such a noise could come out of her mouth.

The next five minutes continued in a similar fashion; her making coy remarks and flirting like a bimbo on a pub crawl, regardless of the remaining four of us sitting there in an awkward silence. "Well, it depends, do you want me in your tent?"

Cyrus, who'd been making faces at me in the rear-view mirror the entire time, now pushed his glasses up on top of his head, pinching the bridge of his nose and slowly exhaled before speaking completely dead-pan. "If she gets pregnant this weekend, I'm going to laugh so much that I'll piss my pants."

Even Emerson, the King of righteousness, cracked a lop-sided smile. "I'm not sure about the peeing part, but I'll sure join in on the laughing."

I had to duck to avoid a swinging arm. Taking the phone away from her face for a minute and covering the mouthpiece, she scowled. "If you don't shut up, you're all going to have a slight problem that only partially involves pain."

I feared for my life.

Anyhow, a couple of extremely hot and boring hours later we finally arrived at the entrance marquee, where a group of bedraggled-looking people where queuing to pay and receive wristbands in return. The clouds had cleared away and the sky was already beginning to turn an inky-purple colour. As Stephen dropped the four of us off, Cyrus seemed more like a duck in water than a man in wellies, standing ankle deep in tyre-churned mud, whilst a bitter wind whipped around him. I always knew he was weird. I would have been more then happy to jump straight back in the car with Stephen, turn around, go back home and spend my evening curled up on the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate, watching some sappy romcom. But oh no, I had to endure two nights sleeping on freezing ground whilst sharing a tent with the Queen of snoring – I could only hope that she was planning on sneaking out during the night. It was at the point of watching the pair of red taillights bump across the dirt track back to the main road that I came to wonder exactly why I had wanted to come to the damn festival so badly.

As Stephen's ford faded into a mass queue of cars waiting to leave, Cyrus turned around and smiled in a creepy way that was neither happy nor menacing. "Okay, we'll find a camping spot, pitch the tents and then you can do whatever the hell you want whilst I sleep. In return, I don't want to be kept up late, woken up unnecessarily nor annoyed throughout this weekend. Kapiche?"

"Kapiche." The three of us happily chanted, before following him over to the turnstiles. The dear was even kind enough to pay the five pound entry fee for us. Even Ceri seemed a little happier; remarkable really.

That was until we had found a small patch of hard ground at the edge of the sea of tents, and the two of us stared at the jumble of poles and fabric lying on the grass, that was meant to somehow form our sleeping quarters for two days. There always had to be a flaw in the plan. Tentatively, she bent down and picked up one of the longer poles which sprouted some strange plastic fork thing at the end. "What's this for? A weapon of self-defence in case we get attacked by bears in the middle of the night?"

"I think it's supposed to be the the central support." I replied, turning the instruction leaflet up side down to see if the ridiculously complicated diagram made any more sense. "You know, if you'd told me that the tent that your father owned had its instructions written in Swedish, I would never have agreed to borrow it."

She swung a half-hearted kick at the heap of material on the ground. "Yeah, well, I would have liked to have seen you come up with a better idea."

"I would have found one that didn't have the manual in a language which neither of us understand a single word of."

"Actually, I know that 'kuk' means 'dick'… But that's all."

"That's really not helping right now."

"It would be nice though," She raised her voice dramatically, turning in the direction of the two already erect one-man tents standing neatly next to each other. "If somebody cared to give us a bit of help."

At the lack of response, she stormed over to the red one belonging to Cyrus and pulled several of the standing pegs out, causing it to semi collapse. A rather peeved looking head exited from the crushed flap scowling. "What was that for?"

"We need help." She said pointedly. 'We haven't a clue on how to set the tent up."

"What a hard life you have." And with that, he retreated back inside.

"Hey Ev," she called over to me. "These pegs in the ground look interesting, I wonder what would happen if we took them all out."

"Oh, strewth." A leg appeared, shortly followed by another, and then a pair of arms which reached for the boots sitting beside the tent and pulled them on. The owner soon appeared, looking even more annoyed that before. He strode over to me and snatched the instructions away, before squinting to read it in the rapidly decreasing light. "It says that these ones," He picked up one of the fatter poles, and then the long, vicious looking one. "Fits into this one… And then attaches to the short ones. Once the frame is complete, you run the fabric up and over the sides using the clips. How hard is that to figure out?"

I could only blink. "You speak Swedish?"

"Yes. I speak a fair few languages."

"Like what?" Ceri piped up from where she was wrongly trying to wedge two short poles together.

He took one from her, slotted it onto the angled structure he was still holding and passed it all back to her before replying. "The basics: Spanish, French, Italian, German. Then the less so – Russian, Danish, Swahili, a bit of Cantonese."

Ceri raised an eyebrow. "Is that it?"

"Well, they're the ones I knew a decent amount in. I have a rough grasp of many more."

"I was being sarcastic." She muttered, shaking her head. "Why on earth do you know that many?"

He frowned for a moment, looking back down at the instructions. "You better get a move on of you want to finish this before it gets completely dark."

I miserably picked one up. "Where does this go?"

"On the end of what Ceri's holding."

As the two of us struggled to stick them together, she was determined not to give up. "You never answered my question."

Without looking up from the paper, his expression and voice stayed neutral. "As a young child, my parents spoke several different European languages to me – I picked them up in the same way as I learnt English. Then a few years back, I had a friend a who wanted to travel the world. They found it amusing how easily I could grasp a new language and made me go with them to a number of evening classes. It wasn't particularly hard."

There was a splintering crack as I finally managed to ram a support into place. "That didn't sound too good."

"Well," He slowly shook his head, waving the piece of paper back at me to take. "When you finish destroying this, come and get me, and we can have a mooch down to the stage to have a look around and find something to eat." With that, he stalked back over to his tent, stuck the unrooted pegs back into the ground, kicked off his boots and crawled inside.

It was going to be a long weekend.

Thirty or so minutes later, we'd somehow managed to construct a lop-sided but somewhat half-decent tent and were standing back, and admiring our work. Ceri proudly nodded, hands on hips. "Now that's what I call a damn good tent." I could only nod in agreement, whilst actually being more interested in the couple who were setting up next to us and were currently in the same situation as we'd been half an hour earlier.

The auburn-haired woman was standing, gingerly holding up a bit of waterproof covering whilst pulling a face. "David," she spoke over to her boyfriend who was crouching down and seemed to be trying to light some sort of camping fire. "This is looks awfully small... Are you sure it's big enough?"

Standing up, he walked up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist and propped his chin on the top of her head, looking consideringly down at it before smirking. "Well, you know what they say. It's always bigger when you get it up."

"I'm being serious." She attempted to scowl, only to start giggling as he buried his head into her neck, enthusiastically kissing it.

"So am I. You'll be very impressed at the result. Besides, it's not like we're not going to have a good time squished up lovely and close together. I think it's going to be a great couple of nights."

And it was then that I realised regardless of whether Ceri sneaked out to go and see Darrell, I was going to be kept up with some commotion or another. However, as Ceri noticed what I was looking at and joined in with the somewhat interesting watching, the increasingly familiar melodically low voice interrupted us as Cyrus appeared to stand on my right side. "What did you expect? Ninety per cent of the population of this field is going to be at it tonight. That's why I brought ear-plugs."

"Stop being such a smart-ass." I muttered, shaking my head as the neck kissing began to escalate into just a little bit more.

Emerson, who had also appeared out of his tent, simply shrugged. "It's alright for them, 'cause she's hot... But most of the other people here? Uhm, no."

"He's hot." Ceri mused. "But that doesn't mean that I want to be kept up most of the night."

"Says the girl who's planning on doing exactly that, only being the perpetrator." Cyrus remarked before turning away and beginning to stride off down the pathway formed by rows of tents, flinging a look over his shoulder. "Are you coming, or not?"

The three of us slowly followed, Ceri predictably muttering profanities at him under her breath whilst sending a text to Darrell to meet us down at the area assigned for food bars and assorted shopping stalls. I was rather intrigued to meet him by this point - I wanted to finally see what the guy who I had to endure hours of gushing about looked like.

My vague patience, however, was not going to last any longer. As our somewhat quarrelsome group reached the edge of the shantytown of makeshift accommodation, a large water balloon tossed from a rowdy group floated over from their camp, hitting me square in the chest, effectively drenching me in icy-cold water. "What the fuck?"

"Woah, sorry love." A burly teen, with dyed blue and black air and a lip and eyebrow piercing stepped out from behind a marquee, a surprised look on his face. "It was an accident, I swear."

"Darrell!" Ceri bounded over to the guy who I currently wanted to castrate and jumped into his arms, flinging her arms around his neck.

He simply responded with a happy "Oh, hi babe.", completely forgetting that he was the reason why I was angrily standing in freezing, soaked clothes. Once she'd heartily kissed him hello, she waved Emerson over, who'd spent the last couple of moments laughing in hysterics at me, and introduced them, all whilst still in his arms. Without so much as another glance at me, the three of them made their way through a maze of tents, with Darrell yelling "Hey guys, meet Ceri!" to his friends.

What a great first impression.

Meanwhile, Cyrus had been standing, hands thrust deeply inside his coat pockets, giving me an amused smirk. "Shut up." I growled.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking it."

"You can't stop me from thinking."

"Can you please being so bloody irritating for once?" I muttered, anger alarmingly beginning to wilt into the start of tears.

"Hey, hey, I'm sorry." His expression softened as he gently moved me other to the side of the path, out of the way of shoving bypassers. "You should get out of the wet clothes."

"And put on what?" I bitterly said. "It's fucking freezing and I'm not just going around in a t-shirt!"

"You'll be colder by keeping them on - you should take then off." He repeated before softly adding. "I don't want you getting a chill."

"It's a bit late for that."

He simply blinked before shrugging off his blue waterproof coat, holding it between his knees as he pulled off the fleece jumper he was wearing, holding it out to me. "Take off the hoodie and put this on." As I awkwardly started at it, he firmly pushed it into my arms. "Now. I'm not going to let you get hypothermia out of pride. We can dry it over the paraffin cooker later." I slowly obliged, peeling off my sopping wet sweatshirt and putting on his. I wasn't sure whether to welcome or be grossed out by the warmth of it. Even so, I was still shivering as he zipped his coat back up over a thin t-shirt. "Come on, we'll find to a burger or something to eat. Some hot food should help."

As he placed a light hand on my shoulder and led me into the bustling crowd by the fast-food vans, I couldn't help but slowly shake me head. "Why are you being so nice?"

A very small, and real, smile made its way across his mouth. "I have my moments... But I was hardly going to stand there and watch you cry, was I?"

I shrugged. "I feel stupid for it."

"Don't. Years ago, Stephen pushed me into a lake as a joke when we went to his parent's boathouse. I threw a hissy-fit, went inside to my room and cried for an hour, refusing to come out for dinner, or remotely talk to him for three days."

I smiled as he stepped up to a stall and placed an order. It sounded so like him in many ways, but completely different in others. A couple of silent minutes later, he passed me a couple of hamburgers which were handed over the counter to him. "Find some sauce whilst I pay. Put lots of mustard and mayonnaise together in mine."

'What an odd combination.'' I thought, as I found a small table to the side filled with sauce bottles of sorts. But then, when had he never been odd. After dousing mine in ketchup, and his only in mustard as there was no mayo, I turned back to look for him amongst the bustling figures. Finding an unmistakable bush of black hair not far away, I made my way over to it, saying "Hey Cy, there wasn't any mayonnaise, but I put extra mustard on it for you."

Stopping short from behind him, I was more than just a little surprised to find a woman embracing him, her arms tightly around his neck whilst he stood stiffly, looking fairly dazed. I was only noticed as she drew back, a smug cat-like smile on her face. "Who's this, Quincey?"

He turned round to look at me, a hint of desperation. "I, ah-... Um, this is Evangeline... Stephen's- You remember Stephen, don't you?" She nodded, a slight grimace entering her expression. "Right. Well, she's Stephen and Melanie's... Foster-daughter... Evangeline, this is Jennifer." That was it. No more explanation needed.

"Oh." Was all that came from her as a reply, before she added skeptically "And you're here together?"

"No, no!" He quickly said. "I'm supervising her and her friends."

"Right," With another smug smile, she took hold of his arm. "You can take a few hours off from your supervising duty to come and see everyone again, can't you?" He nodded, eyes flicking to the floor as she led him away, without so much as a glance back at me. As they disappeared, her voice floated back over. "And you're sure that that's all you're doing with her?"

"Of course. Of course - she's just a stupid little kid. I would never do anything like that with her."

His fucking hamburgers made a satisfying slap as they both landed in the bin. Stupid little kid - of course that was all I was.