This Winter. Alice Oseman

CHRISTMAS. Be thankful you don’t have siblings. I am tired. Oliver threw a pillow at me. Enjoy sleep. Bye. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

      Mum and Dad said we can’t wake them up until at least 7:30. It’s 6:17 now. I get up and open my curtains to find the world still dark, tinged yellow from the street lamps. I fall back into bed and put the radio on. It’s playing a quiet hymn for once, instead of All I Want for Christmas Is You. It’s nice. Oliver is spinning around in my desk chair and a choir is singing Silent Night, my eyes are closing again and Oliver’s sitting in my bed with me, the musical card on a pile of clothes on the floor, it’s 6:29, 6:42, 6:55 … Oliver’s pulling my hair gently, he’s talking about what presents he wants and whether Father Christmas ate the biscuits we left him and I’m mumbling something, I don’t know what, I’m drifting off …

      And then my bedroom door opens again.

      “… Victoria?”

      I wake up for the tenth time. It’s Charlie, just visible through the dim light standing at the door in a navy Adidas sweatshirt and checked pyjama bottoms. He looks tired but he’s smiling. “You awake?”

      “No,” I say. “I’m having an out-of-body experience. I’m just my ghost.”

      Charlie snorts and enters my room, shutting the door softly behind him. I turn to Oliver, who has fallen asleep against my shoulder, and give him a little nudge with my elbow. He snaps awake and sees Charlie.

      “CHARLIE’S HERE!” he yells and charges from the bed towards him, slamming into his legs and almost causing him to fall over. Charlie laughs and picks Oliver up like he’s a baby, which he does at least once a day, causing him to giggle. “Wow, you’re very awake, aren’t you?”

      “Can we go downstairs yet?”

      Charlie carries Oliver towards my bed. “Nope, Mum said seven thirty.”

      “Arrghhhh.” Oliver wriggles in Charlie’s arms and drops down next to me, immediately snuggling under the covers, and then Charlie sits down next to him against the headboard.

      “Ugh. Younger brothers are annoying,” I say, but I’m sort of grinning too. I curl up under the duvet. “Couldn’t you stay in your own beds?”

      “Just doing our job,” Charlie smiles. “Are you listening to Radio 4? What’s with the church music?”

      “I don’t think I can deal with Mariah Carey at this time of the morning.”

      Charlie laughs. “Me neither.” Like Oliver, his hair is sticking up from his forehead, though it’s not as manically curly. He’s got purple circles under his eyes and I can’t remember what he looks like without them any more. Aside from that, he looks almost his normal self, all long-limbed and gentle and healthy. Like he was early this year, before he stopped eating.

      “I only slept for like two hours,” I say.

      “Same,” he says, but I think his lack of sleep might be from different reasons to mine.

      “How many presents does Father Christmas give you when you’re seven?” asks Oliver, who’s now standing up on my bed and trampling over the duvet. Charlie and I laugh.

      “Seven,” says Charlie, decisively. “The same as the number of years you’ve been alive.”

      “So … when I’m eighty, I’ll get eighty presents?”

      Charlie prods Oliver in the chest and he falls over with a wide smile. “Only if you’ve been good!”

      “I can’t wait till I’m eighty,” says Oliver.

      “Me neither,” says Charlie.

      It’s good that we’re all back together now. It felt weird, just me and Oliver and Mum and Dad. Oliver’s still too young to talk to properly, and I don’t hate my parents or anything but I don’t feel like I’m too friendly with them either. Mum has this thing where she avoids talking about anything even slightly deep or emotional. Dad’s the same, but he makes up for it by talking about books all the time. We all get along fine, but I don’t feel like we ever talk about anything important.

      Even now that Charlie’s really ill they still don’t like talking about that stuff. I thought things might change; that we might start being more open about feelings and stuff.

      But we’re not.

      “Can you imagine being a really old man with a walking stick?” Charlie says, putting on an old man voice, and Oliver giggles, shuffling up to join us against the headboard. Charlie’s smile is contagious.

      They start playing I-spy. Today’s going to be difficult for everyone, but everyone has difficult days, I guess. I used to think that difficult was better than boring, but I know better now. There have been a lot of difficult days in the past few months. There have been too many difficult days.

      “Happy Christmas,” says Charlie, without any warning. He leans over Oliver and rests his head on mine. I lean a little too, my head on his shoulder. The radio plays. I think the sun is rising, or it might just be the streetlamps. I’m not going to think about the past few months, about Charlie and me, about all of the sad. I’m going to block it all out. Just for today.

      “Happy Christmas,” I say.

      I try not to fall asleep again but I still do, Oliver’s laugh ringing in my ears.

      It’s ten to twelve and we’re still in our pyjamas, sitting on the sofa playing Lego Harry Potter on the Xbox, which is essentially exactly the same as Lego Star Wars except the characters are less exciting. It was a present for Oliver, but he’s busy with the very large amount of toy tractors that people gave him.

      My parents got me a new laptop and Charlie a new iPod – things we both asked for. They don’t really do surprise presents. And while Charlie and I have never really tried too hard with presents before now, this year I got him a Bluetooth speaker for his bedroom and he got me a laptop case with Wednesday Addams on it. I think we both know each other better than we thought we did.

      “It doesn’t have the sense of danger,” I tell Charlie. “Where are the Stormtroopers I can slice in half?”

      Charlie, who is controlling Hagrid, casts magic at a Gringotts vault and steals all the money, which I’m pretty sure isn’t ours. “I think you may be missing the point, here.”

      I jump my character, Harry Potter, off a ledge. He explodes. “It hasn’t even got any confused droids running around.”

      “When was the last time you saw Harry Potter?”

      “Just saying.”

      “Kids?” Mum wanders into the room. She’s got her Christmas dress on – a purple thing that’s actually quite nice – and her hair curled. She always makes us dress up nice for Christmas, as if we’re supposed to do something other than stuff our faces and slob on the sofa for twelve hours. She raises her eyebrows at us. “You going to get dressed soon?”

      Charlie says nothing, so I say, “Yep, in a minute.”

      “Don’t be too long. Everyone’s arriving in half an hour.”

      “Yeah, we’re just gonna finish this level.”

      Mum leaves. I glance at Charlie, but he hasn’t looked away from the screen. I don’t think they’ve had an argument yet but I can feel one brewing. And I’m not going to lie, Mum is kind of pissing me off a little bit. She’s been really snappy with Charlie since he got home from the hospital, which isn’t helping anyone. And half the time she pretends that he’s not even ill, as if that’ll cure him. If she just talked about it casually, maybe Charlie wouldn’t feel so awkward about being the ‘ill child’.

      “You sure you want to have Christmas dinner with us?” I ask. “I’ll skip it with you if you want, I bet we can persuade Dad—”

      “I’m fine,” he says. I guess