Lando Norris X Oscar Piastri
The next morning, I woke to a sound so loud and so sudden that for a few horrible seconds, I forgot where I was.
It wasn’t a sound I’d ever heard before. Not an alarm clock. Not a phone notification. Not a person shouting. It was something mechanical and shrill and inhuman, a noise designed to wake everyone whether they wanted to or not. I buried my face deeper into the pillow and squeezed my eyes shut, willing it to stop. The pillow felt wrong beneath my cheek. Too flat. Too cold. Too unfamiliar. It didn’t smell of anything either. Not really. At home, my pillow had a smell. Not a smell I could ever describe, but one I would have recognised anywhere. It smelled like my room. Like home. Like years of sleeping in the same place and never having to think about it. This pillow smelled of absolutely nothing, and somehow that felt worse than if it had smelled bad.
The silence that followed lasted all of two seconds before reality caught up with me.
The room. The suitcase. My parents. The institution. I opened my eyes.
The cream-coloured walls stared back at me.
For a moment, I just lay there, hoping that if I didn’t move, none of it would be real. But my neck hurt. My back hurt. Everything hurt. I pushed myself up slightly and immediately realised why. At some point during the night, I’d fallen asleep on top of the bed. I hadn’t even pulled back the covers. I was still wearing yesterday’s clothes: the same shirt and the same wide-leg jeans I’d thrown on in a panic after waking up late yesterday morning. Yesterday morning. The thought felt strange. It had only been one day. One day, and yet the version of me who had woken up at home yesterday already felt like somebody else entirely.
I rubbed at my eyes and looked around the room. The suitcase was still open on the bed beside me. The clothes were still folded exactly as my mother had packed them. The wardrobe was still empty. Nothing had changed. Of course it hadn’t. Some part of me had expected to wake up and discover that this had all been a dream. That I’d open my bedroom door and hear my sister downstairs arguing with my parents over breakfast. Instead, I was here.
Three sharp knocks echoed through the room.
Before I had a chance to answer, the door creaked open.
A face appeared around the edge of it.
He looked exactly the same as he had the previous evening. Tired. Unimpressed. Like he’d already had this conversation a thousand times and didn’t expect anything new from the thousand and first.
“Time to get up,” he said.
The word took a second to register.
“What time is it?” I asked. My voice came out hoarse and half asleep.
He said it so quickly and so matter-of-factly that for a moment, I thought I’d heard him wrong.
But Ian was already pushing the door open wider.
A towel flew through the air and landed on my lap.
I stared at the towel. Then at him. Then back at the towel.
For some reason, I’d assumed I’d get to wake up naturally. Or at least lie in bed for a while pretending not to be awake. The idea that somebody else could decide when I got out of bed hadn’t really occurred to me.
“I don’t normally shower at six,” I said.
The answer irritated me more than it should have.
I considered arguing. I considered telling him I wasn’t going. I considered throwing the towel back at him and climbing under the covers. But all three options felt ridiculous the moment I thought about them.
My body immediately reminded me that I had slept sitting at an angle against a wall all night.
I followed Ian out into the corridor.
The lights overhead were painfully bright. The corridor itself seemed quieter than it had the night before, although there were still a few other boys wandering around carrying towels and wash bags. Some looked half asleep. Others looked as though they’d been awake for hours. Nobody spoke. Nobody even looked at me for more than a second.
I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse.
Ian walked ahead without checking whether I was following him. I had the strange feeling that he already knew I would. We turned a corner, then another, and finally stopped outside a pair of double doors.
The smell hit me first. Steam. Soap. Shampoo. Something chemical underneath all of it.
Ian pushed the doors open. I walked through. Then stopped. Actually stopped. The room was enormous.
Not enormous in the way a swimming pool or sports hall was enormous. Enormous because there was nowhere to hide. The room was one large rectangle, tiled from floor to ceiling. Shower heads lined the walls and stretched down the centre of the room in rows. Steam hung in the air. Water splashed against the tiles. Boys stood under the showers. Boys dried themselves off. Boys talked to each other.
There were no cubicles. No curtains. No walls. Nothing.
I looked around again, convinced I’d missed something. I hadn’t. My stomach dropped. I turned slowly towards Ian.
“I have to shower in front of everyone?”
I hated how young I sounded.
Ian didn’t even look surprised by the question.
I looked back at the room.
A group of boys near the far wall were laughing about something. Another stood under a shower with his eyes closed, looking completely unbothered by the fact that twenty other people could see him. Nobody seemed embarrassed. Nobody seemed uncomfortable.
Which somehow made me feel even worse. Because if they weren’t uncomfortable, then that meant this was normal. And if this was normal, then maybe I was the problem.
I gripped the towel tighter. I didn’t move. I couldn’t.
Because standing there, staring into that room, all I could think was that yesterday morning I’d been complaining about waking up late for school.
And now I was trying to figure out how to shower in front of nineteen strangers.
If you’d like, I can continue with Oscar refusing to go in at first and then Lando noticing him and making the situation either better or infinitely worse.
Here’s a version with much longer paragraphs and a slower, more psychological flow, while keeping Lando’s attempt at helping from Oscar’s perspective as both humiliating and strangely effective.
Ian let out a sigh that sounded less annoyed than exhausted, like he’d had this exact conversation hundreds of times before and knew exactly how it ended. He looked at me, then at the shower room, then back at me again.
“You’ve got five minutes,” he said. “After that, you’re getting in whether you want to or not.”
No speech. No reassurance. No pretending he understood. He simply left me standing there with a towel in my hands and twenty shower heads staring back at me.
I sat down on the bench nearest the entrance because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. The towel felt rough in my hands. I kept folding and unfolding the corner of it, trying not to look up. The room was full of noise. Water hitting tiles. Boys talking. Somebody laughing. The sound echoed off every surface, making it impossible to escape. I couldn’t understand how everyone else seemed so comfortable. Nobody was trying to hide. Nobody was standing frozen in the doorway wondering how their life had ended up here. They just walked in. They talked. They showered. They acted as though standing naked in a room with twenty other people was the most normal thing in the world.
The blue towel hanging on the radiator.
My mother banging on the wall because I’d spent too long in the shower and everyone else needed hot water.
The memory hit me so hard that I had to look down at the floor again.
“You’re gonna wear a hole in those tiles if you keep staring at them.”
I closed my eyes. Of course. I knew the voice immediately. I looked up.
Lando was standing a few feet away with a towel draped around his shoulders. His hair was damp, which somehow made it even messier than before. He looked awake. Not just awake. Comfortable. Like he’d been awake for hours. Like this was just another Tuesday.
“What do you want?” I asked.
He considered this for a second.
Then he sat down beside me.
Close enough that I knew he was there, but far enough that it didn’t feel deliberate.
For a while, neither of us spoke. I kept staring at the floor. He kept looking at the shower room.
“I hated this bit,” he said eventually.
Not because it was funny.
Because I didn’t believe him.
“You seem pretty happy here.”
The words came out harsher than I’d intended.
Or maybe exactly as harsh as I’d intended.
He was quiet for a moment.
“You really don’t like me, do you?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
The way he kept doing that. The way he kept saying the thing I didn’t want to answer.
“No,” I said eventually. “I don’t.”
I expected him to get annoyed.
That somehow irritated me more.
“How are you okay with this?”
I gestured towards the shower room. The steam. The voices. The laughter.
“How are you just…” I struggled for the word. “Normal?”
For the first time since I’d met him, Lando didn’t smile.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“When I got here, I sat outside that door for twenty minutes.”
“You don’t seem like someone who’d do that.”
“You’ve known me for about fifteen hours.”
He leaned back against the wall.
I looked at him properly. I tried to picture it. I couldn’t.
This was the boy I’d seen laughing and play fighting and talking to everyone. The boy I’d spent the last day resenting because he looked like he belonged here.
“You don’t seem like someone who cries.”
I didn’t want him to say that.
Because if everyone cried, then that meant I wasn’t special.
It meant I wasn’t the only one.
And for some reason, I hated that more than anything.
“I still don’t want to do it,” I said.
“I’m not going in there.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Instead, he turned to face the shower room.
The room didn’t go silent.
But enough people looked over that I immediately wanted to die.
“Can everyone stop staring at Oscar, please? He’s having a crisis.”
There was a second.Maybe two. Where the entire world stopped. Every person who’d looked over was now looking directly at me.
I felt the blood drain from my face.
One boy looked confused. Another laughed. Someone else rolled their eyes.
Then a voice from the back of the room shouted, “Nobody was looking at him!”
Another boy called out, “Bit self-centred, mate.”
Then, just like that, everyone turned back around.The conversations started again. The water kept running. Nobody looked at me. Not one person. Lando sat back down.
I couldn’t speak. I genuinely couldn’t.
Because somehow, impossibly, he had just created the most humiliating moment of my entire life.
And proven that I’d been wrong. Nobody had been looking at me. Nobody had cared. The worst part was that I hated him for being right.
I hated that he was right.
Not because he’d embarrassed me, although he had. Spectacularly. I hated him because the moment everyone had looked away again, the moment the conversations resumed and the water kept running and the room carried on exactly as it had before, I realised that nobody had actually cared. I’d spent the last ten minutes convinced that twenty strangers were analysing me, judging me, waiting for me to make a fool of myself. They hadn’t been. They’d been thinking about themselves. Their own showers. Their own mornings. Their own lives. I hated that. I hated him. And most of all, I hated that he was the one who’d proved it.
For a few moments, neither of us spoke. Lando didn’t laugh. He didn’t tell me he’d been right. He just sat there beside me as if he’d done nothing particularly unusual. The fact that he wasn’t making fun of me somehow made it worse.
“I hate you,” I muttered eventually.
I looked at him then. Really looked at him. He didn’t seem upset. He didn’t seem offended. He didn’t even seem surprised.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Because you weren’t going to move.”
The answer annoyed me because it was true. I’d have stayed on that bench all morning if someone hadn’t forced me to confront the fact that nobody cared nearly as much as I thought they did.
“I still hate you,” I said.
I stood up before I could change my mind. My legs felt strange. Heavy. Like I’d been sitting there for hours rather than minutes. I gripped the towel so tightly my fingers hurt and started walking towards the showers. Every step felt deliberate. Every step felt like a decision. I was acutely aware of everything around me: the sound of the water hitting the tiles, the steam hanging in the air, the conversations taking place around me. I was waiting for somebody to look at me.
I found an empty shower near the wall and focused on that alone. I didn’t look left. I didn’t look right. I turned the shower on and immediately jumped back when the water came out freezing cold. Then it became boiling hot. Then, eventually, it settled somewhere in the middle. I stepped underneath it and closed my eyes.
I waited for the humiliation to hit.
I washed as quickly as physically possible. Shampoo. Soap. Rinse. Done. My movements were frantic, almost mechanical. I kept my eyes fixed on the cracked white tiles in front of me because looking anywhere else felt impossible. Around me, life continued. People laughed. Someone sang badly. Two boys argued about football. Nobody spoke to me. Nobody even acknowledged I existed.
The realisation should have been comforting.
Instead, it just made me feel stupid.
After what couldn’t have been more than three minutes, I turned the water off and stepped away from the shower. The air felt freezing against my skin. I dried myself as quickly as I could, nearly falling over while trying to put my socks on. Around me, everyone else seemed entirely relaxed. One boy was brushing his teeth while having a conversation. Another was complaining about breakfast. They all looked so normal that it was almost frightening.
“See?” Lando’s voice appeared somewhere behind me.
I pulled my shirt over my head.
He wasn’t laughing anymore.
“You did it, though,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say to that.
I shoved my feet into my trainers, picked up my towel and left before he could say anything else.
The corridor felt warmer than the shower room. Or maybe I was just relieved to be dressed again. Boys were beginning to move towards breakfast in groups, talking quietly, still half asleep. I followed them because there wasn’t anything else to do. My stomach growled loudly enough that I actually looked around to check if anyone had heard it. I hadn’t realised how hungry I was. Or maybe I had and just hadn’t wanted to admit it.
The dining hall looked different in the morning. Less intimidating. Maybe because there was sunlight coming through the windows. Maybe because I’d already survived being there once. I picked up a tray and took whatever was being offered. Toast. Cereal. A banana. Tea. Far too much food for someone who’d insisted multiple times that he wasn’t hungry.
I looked around the room. Groups had already formed. Some people sat together talking. Others sat alone, but they looked like people who wanted to be alone. I scanned the room for an empty table. There. In the corner.
I picked up my tray and started walking towards it.
Lando was sitting in the middle of the room, waving at me with a piece of toast in one hand and grinning like he’d just won something.
For a brief moment, I genuinely considered turning around and sitting with him.
It didn’t feel like a decision I made properly. It just happened. My feet changed direction before my brain fully caught up, and suddenly I was walking across the room instead of away from it. I could feel the weight of it as I moved, the awareness that I was choosing something different, something less safe. Lando watched me the whole time like he already knew what I was going to do.
When I reached the table, I hesitated for half a second before sitting down opposite him. It immediately felt wrong in a way I couldn’t explain, like I’d crossed some invisible line I didn’t understand. Lando didn’t comment on it, just went back to eating his toast like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Morning,” he said casually.
I looked at my tray instead of him.
“You actually ate breakfast this time,” he added.
He nodded like that was obvious.
I didn’t respond. I just picked up my spoon and started eating without really tasting anything, aware of how strange it felt to sit there instead of alone in the corner. Around us, the room carried on exactly the same as before. Conversations, laughter, movement. Nobody stared. Nobody reacted. Nobody cared where I sat.
And somehow, that made sitting with him feel even stranger than being alone would have.
“Gee, wonder why.” I scoffed as I replied to his nonchalant comment.
“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”
I actually found myself trying to hide a smirk as a giggle burst through. It was more like a ‘hmph’ than a laugh, but it made it out there.
Once I composed myself and looked up I saw Lando’s face had lit up as if I’d captured the moon and wrote his name on it.
The banter felt oddly childish, innocent in a weird kind of way. Something that I never imagined I’d let myself do here in a million years. Nevermind a couple hours.
Breakfast finished quicker than I’d expected. I thought we’d have at least an hour, something slow and unhurried, but instead we were herded out after barely half of that, like the building had decided we were done and didn’t care whether we were ready or not. The doors opened and we were pushed out into the yard, and the first thing I thought when I saw it was that it looked like an oversized primary school playground that had been left to rot slightly in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t bad, exactly. Nothing about it screamed wrong or dangerous. It just wasn’t anything. Not exciting, not comforting, not even particularly real in the way places are supposed to feel when you’re in them for the first time.
My nose crinkled before I could stop it as I took it all in. To my right, three boys were crouched in the dirt like they’d been doing it forever, like there was something genuinely important about it. One of them suddenly lifted his hand, triumphant, holding up a clump of mud with a worm wriggling out of it like it was some kind of prize. He looked proud of it, like it meant something. I didn’t understand that at all. On my left, a group of four girls had their hands linked together, spinning in a loose circle while singing something under their breath that sounded old and half-forgotten, completely unconcerned with anything around them. It felt like watching two different worlds existing in the same space, neither of them acknowledging that I was there at all.
Once I’d taken all of that in, I turned my attention forward again, trying to figure out where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do, and immediately regretted it because Lando was standing right in front of me. Far too close. I startled so badly I actually stumbled backwards, my foot catching awkwardly as I let out a sharp, involuntary sound of surprise.
“Jesus Christ! Where’d you come from?”
I said, more shocked than anything else, my heart suddenly doing something irritating in my chest.
“Over there by the swing set,” he said, pointing casually behind him like that explained everything.
Then, like it was the most normal suggestion in the world, he added, “Come play.”
I opened my mouth to refuse, because obviously I was going to refuse, but before I could even get the words out his hand was already around my wrist. His grip wasn’t painful, but it was firm in a way that made it impossible to ignore, his fingers practically wrapping around my entire hand like it belonged there.
“Lando—” I started, but he was already pulling me, dragging me across the yard with this irritating confidence like there was no universe in which I wouldn’t follow.
I stumbled after him, half protesting, half just trying not to fall over, as he led me towards the swings like this was the most obvious thing in the world, and I had absolutely no idea why I was letting it happen.
We sat on the swings in silence. The whole time, we didn’t even look at each other but for some reason, that was enough, our presence seemed to fill each others need for company, nothing too overwhelming but not underwhelming either.
I let my eyes flutter shut as I took in the scent of the garden and presence of Lando, trying to let myself settle into my new life.
I had to give up the idea of home sooner or later. And sooner seemed harder but better.
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