least, when they weren’t getting distracted by each other. Which they were. A lot. Requiring a number of hasty retreats to Kit’s room.
Drew was vaguely conscious that something had sort of changed. He thought he remembered Kit being . . . It was hard to explain, really. More open, somehow? Happier, almost? But it didn’t seem like anything he could pin down, talk about, or fix. And, sometimes, Drew wondered if it was just his imagination.
True to his word, Kit was spending more time with Drew’s friends. He was quiet, but quietly funny, and they liked that, and Drew was glad everyone seemed to be getting along. Kit still tended to be the first to leave things, but true to his word, Drew didn’t make a big thing about it. Even though it still bugged him a bit.
It was fine. Really. It was basically fine.
Until Zombicide.
Maybe Drew was reading too much into stuff, but Sanee seemed to be making much more of an effort to give their regular Tuesday hangouts a clear structure. There’d been the Mortal Kombat Tournament and then an Eye of Argon Reading and then the Using This Damn Fondue Pot Steff Won In A Raffle In Sixth Form evening, which had honestly put Drew off both cheese and chocolate, at least for the foreseeable future. He felt like a dick, because this had sort of been his fault, but he was getting structured-activity fatigue. He was starting to miss the days of just sitting around chilling, even if what they’d mostly been doing while they were chilling was trying to work out what structured activity they’d do next.
This time it was Games Night of the Living Dead. The plan was to drag out all of the zombie-themed board games from Sanee and Steff’s collection. It turned out there were quite a lot of them, especially if you included every game that had a spurious zombie expansion. Drew wore his Plants Versus Zombies T-shirt for the occasion, which Kit had found sufficiently adorable that he wanted to take it off again, and Drew hadn’t really objected, so they’d wound up being kind of late.
Everyone was already settled, helping themselves to Steff’s brain-cakes and immersed in a warm-up hand of Munchkin Zombies. Drew felt weirdly heart-warmed that of all the quick, opening games they could have picked to start the evening, they seemed to have deliberatedly chosen the one he’d be least upset at having missed. They moved on to Give Me the Brain, which was a long-standing favourite. Kit took to it immediately—it made him laugh so much he spent nearly the whole game behind his hand, emerging every now and then to declare, in a surprisingly convincing zombie voice, that he required the brain because he had to count the meat.
From there, they got serious and, after a brief debate, chose Zombicide over Dead of Winter as their main game of the evening. It would have been Drew’s preference anyway because he was in more of a “kill loads of zombies” mood than “get killed by zombies while looking for petrol in an abandoned school” mood, but as it turned out, Dead of Winter wouldn’t have taken six players anyway.
Kit was on his phone while they were unboxing and setting up, which made Drew a bit uncomfortable because it wasn’t great board game etiquette. But at the same time, they didn’t really need him, so it seemed unfair to say anything. Finally they were good to go. Sanee gave a quick rules recap—which Kit at least paid attention to—and dealt out characters and equipment at random.
Drew was less than thrilled to realise that not only was he playing the boring, beardy survivalist whose only ability was that he was slightly better at searching rooms than the rest of the characters, but that his starting gear consisted of two frying pans that he wasn’t even allowed to dual wield. He was trying to be a good sport about it, because there was nothing worse than playing a board game with somebody who’d decided they were screwed from the beginning, but he kind of felt like he was screwed from the beginning. Everybody else would be running around racking up sweet kills with their fire axes and their bonus moves, and he’d be getting further and further behind, desperately searching a toilet for bags of rice.
“Okay, team.” Sanee stood up and started pointing at the board, like a general in an old war movie. “Our plucky band of