Much of Saturday slips away before I even have time to acknowledge it’s the weekend. Naddie is with her mum, Max with his uncle, Zach off doing sports, and Jess has probably spent all day preparing for the DnD session. I’m about to search for motivation to do something, anything, when Richie shows up unannounced with Snowball.

Snowball slobbers all over me, then dozes off in my lap, a command to stay cross-legged on the bed for the foreseeable future. Though my legs go numb and dog fur spreads everywhere, I’d sacrifice my life for this ball of fluff.

Richie is pulling books out of my cupboard, leafing through a few pages, then putting them back, the movement awkwardly mechanical. Instead of his usual quiet lays a heavy silence, a sentence weighed down by too many adjectives.

‘Yesterday was fun,’ I prompt.

‘Mm.’

That was a fun conversation. Before I think of another topic to test out, he turns to me.

‘Do you have the Chronicles?’ he asks.

‘Oh! Definitely. Hang on.’

My whole face lights up at its mention as I search through the drawers, unsure of where I left it last. Finally, I fish out the huge ring folder from beneath a pile of abandoned notebooks. Its weight is warm in my arms.

The black covers of the binder are stretched to their limit, the title The Erehwon Chronicles glowing on the front, written in elaborate swirls of golden ink. It’s a record of the fantasy world, all our games and adventures preserved in Richie’s artwork and my writing.

The prologue is our humble beginnings, large wobbly letters spelling out adventures while scribbles commandeer half the pages. As we flip through the book, the words increase and shrink while the drawings transform into refined, nuanced depictions of creatures and places. Sentences and sketches meander through schoolwork. The last pages are sophisticated bursts of energy followed by months of nothing.

We never really stopped, but over time, different interests have taken over. Notes we easily reached before now sing flat as puberty deepened our tone. There are some exceptions, like yesterday, when our voices loosen enough to let go of the real world, but it’s never enough.

Richie and I read through passages at random, remembering the games that inspired them. Memories pop up, like when Jess was a fairy and climbed high into a tree, ending up with a scar on her forehead. Or the time Max was enchanted to not speak and acted mute through the whole school day until we found a cure.

‘The writing is so bad, but I love a lot of these ideas,’ I say, thinking out loud as we explore the past.

‘Yeah, it’s the same with the drawings,’ Richie says.

A wave of relief washes over me as I see his small smile, his shoulders relaxed as he dives deeper into old daydreams. The air around us is light and playful, letting us land in our castle in the sky.

‘You know… Maybe we could rework this into something,’ I say. My excitement reflects in his eyes. ‘I could structure the story, rewrite the language. You could redraw the illustrations,’ I return to the beginning, a chill spilling down my spine. ‘We could turn this into a proper book.’