by Varsha Ravi
“It does not matter whether he does or does not,” he said, suddenly tired. “We can only see as far as the reach of our own lifetimes, toward the horizon of our deaths. And his has always been too close for him to see anything at all.”
Tarak let out a ragged sigh, lost and despairing. Viro reached up and put a hand on his, traced the lines of his fingers. He watched him do it, entranced by the movement and saddened by it as well. Finally, he asked, “If I begged, would you stay?”
Viro’s fingers stilled in their movement, suddenly hyper-aware of the way Tarak’s hands shook upon the embroidered fabric of his tunic. As if he couldn’t bear to hold him tighter, as if the mere action would wrench him away.
“Please don’t,” Viro whispered, shutting his eyes so he did not have to see his expression. In the darkness, this was a game, nothing but an elaborate nightmare. “I am too afraid of what I would try to do if you did.”
He blew out a long, slow breath. Viro opened his eyes, still faintly afraid, and found the other boy shifting forward, pulling his hands from his shoulders. They fell to the blankets, and he held them palm up, studying their lifelines. The way they tangled, the way they broke.
“Then let me stay here,” he said, without looking up. “For now, let me stay.”
And though Viro’s breath caught, heart stuttering from one beat to the next, he let him. It was a quiet, wordless farewell—but that was all they had ever had, and so it should not have surprised him that it was how they would part.
20
Lyne
“It’s your birthday,” Kiran said abruptly. Suri turned to look at him from where he was stretched across the couch, head tilted against the arm. He wiggled his feet in her lap.
“Just about,” she said warily, checking the time on the television. A few minutes after midnight. “Is this one of your fancy omniscient god things?”
He held up her phone; in the darkness, she could make out a blinking gray message box. “Dai just texted.”
Suri leaned forward and grabbed it from him, and he let her take it with a faint, sharp smile. He stretched out his arms out behind him, and asked, “Why didn’t you say?”
“Didn’t think it mattered?” she said helplessly, hiding her expression in the shadows. In truth, she had spent the last few days since the sweet fiasco hiding out in her room, emerging only for food and quick trips over to Aza and Dai’s apartment.
But tonight was the season finale of one of the shows they always watched together, and so she had to stay, for the sake of holy routine, and already she felt overwhelmed. It had been so much easier to ignore her feelings when she’d thought she was alone in feeling them.
“Why wouldn’t it?” he returned, sounding genuinely baffled.
Suri had no lies left, and the truth wasn’t an option. She shrugged and played with the edge of the folded blanket draped over the side of the couch. On the screen, someone pushed their friend into a pool, and it moved to a clip of them trash-talking one another.
“Come on,” he said suddenly, taking her hand. She arched an eyebrow, useless in the darkness, but let him tug her to her feet and through the shadowed room. Kiran opened the pantry door, her hand still intertwined with his.
She didn’t pull it away. “What are you looking for?”
“Candles,” he replied cheerfully. He slid out two separate containers, one the size of his palm and then a larger plastic one with a red cover. “And sweets.”
He led her back to the nook and heaved himself up, taking a seat on the edge of the table. Carefully, he pulled off the lid and drew out a golden sweet, soft with butter and heat in his hands. Then he stuck a candle in it, blue as swimming pools, as saltwater taffy.
Suri took it from his outstretched hands. “I thought you could only make one wish? There’s going to be a party at my grandmother’s shop, and she won’t be happy if she learns you stole mine.”
“Who told you that?” He looked at her, aghast, as he leaned forward to light the candle. His pinky finger burned with flame, swirling around the thin white wick and splitting as he pulled back. “You can make as many wishes as you want on your birthday. They are an inexhaustible resource.”
“Really?” she asked, amused despite herself. There was something charming about the phrase. “So I could blow this out, and you could relight it, and I could wish again, and we could repeat it all day?”
“There is a certain refractory period,” he conceded, lips twitching in a smile. “A few minutes, usually. But yes, technically. Do you want to?”
Suri pretended to think about it briefly, but she had already made her mind up. There were only two wishes she wanted to see come true. She shook her head, and cupped the sweet in her laced fingers, regarding the flame. Then she leaned in and blew out the candle, plunging them back into the darkness. Her lips tasted like smoke and sugar.
In the illuminated, contoured shadows of the nook, Kiran reached forward and broke the sweet in half, soft and pliant in their gathered hands. He took one for himself and then lifted it to her lips. She stared at it, faintly bemused, and then took a hesitant, dainty bite.
He raised his eyebrows. “I would’ve thought you’d eat it all in one bite.”
She glared at him, shoving her half of the sweet toward his mouth. He bit into it easily, lips brushing her fingers even as he laughed around the sweet, a muffled, dampened sound in the late night. He chewed and swallowed, eyes fixed on hers, bright as hot coals. They were still holding hands, impossibly.
In the living room, the end credits to the show played. A small window popped up in the corner displaying a preview of the next program—a cooking show where meals had to be made from ingredients all the same color. Today, it was blue.
Suri ate the rest of her sweet, and then he slid off the table, the action bringing him slightly closer. The candle had been blown out, the wish sent off to be granted or forgotten, the sweet eaten. But still, they lingered.
She tilted her head back in a yawn, rocking back on her heels with the force of it. He held out a hand, steadying, mouth quirked to the side in a smile. “You should sleep.”
“I should,” she agreed, unable to think of anything other than her own fatigue and his fingers loosely grasping her shoulder. With great effort, she stepped back toward the living room, toward the dip of space that led into the hallway. She pressed her lips together, unsure, then asked, “Do gods get wishes?”
“We grant them,” he said, moving to stand by the couch. The light of the television shone through him, glassy and pale. “But we don’t get to wish. I suppose we could grant our own, if we desired it enough. Why?”
“No reason,” she said, too quickly. Torn with embarrassment, she slipped down the corridor and shut the door behind her. She exhaled, counting her breaths as she listened to the sirens in the distance, the swell and dip of the traffic. But he never came, and even when she lay down on her bed and turned off her lamp, she didn’t sleep.
The next morning, she rolled out of bed, weary and dry eyed, and shoved herself through the motions robotically. After showering, she shuffled back out to the living room, stretching her arms out as she yawned.
The living room was not as empty as she had assumed it would be. Everyone was in their usual spots, chatting amiably and pausing only when she came in. She stared through them for half a minute, then asked, “Why are you all here so early?”
“It’s eleven,” Aza said, jerking her head at Kiran. “That one didn’t want to wake you.”
The words pierced through her half-asleep haze, and she rubbed at her face self-consciously to avoid looking at him. “You should’ve woken me up.”
“Maybe,” he said, shrugging. “You’re awake now. Your friends have plans for the day.”
She raised her eyebrows, glancing at them. “Do I want to know what that means?”
“We won’t tell you, anyway,” Miya said cheerfully. “It’s a surprise.”
It didn’t end up being as much of a surprise as advertis
ed—they took her out to brunch at the same restaurant they always went to, and she ordered a stack of pancakes that she didn’t quite finish. They were soaked through with sugar syrup and cream, and she’d already saturated her body with sweets all through the past week. Dai and Miya split her leftovers between them, and Kiran poked at other people’s plates, stealing scraps of omelets and stray blueberries.
After, while the others went shopping at an antiques store on Holloway, Ellis went with her to a new action movie they’d been anticipating. She and Ellis had bonded over their mutual enjoyment of the senseless, unrealistic chaos that defined the films when they’d met, doing an icebreaker in Junior Lit. The rest of their friends thought they were coarse and meaningless, so they had a habit of watching late-night screenings alone.
On screen, cars exploded. Fire swung outward, consuming and thoughtless, and drowned people in the blaze. Debris fell from the sky, scattering the ground and killing more people. It was a remarkably morbid movie, but most were.
Without looking away from the screen, Ellis said, “So—”
“If you mention my roommate,” she warned. “If you allude to him, I will crush you like a soda can.”
He grinned, teeth bright against his skin in the darkness of the theater. He didn’t smile often anymore, not since that inexplicable incident in October, and the sight was startling. “That’s all the proof I needed.”
Suri leaned back in her seat and let out a low groan. “How did you even hear?”
“Anybody who’s spent more than five minutes with you two together would be able to figure it out,” he told her, faintly amused. “It’s not exactly rocket science. But Miya does keep me updated.”
“Can we not talk about this right now? I’m actively avoiding thinking about it too closely. And it’s my birthday.”
“It is,” he agreed, and magnanimously changed the subject. “Nineteen, huh?”
Unsurprisingly, she also didn’t want to think about her age. The main character jumped out of an exploding building and onto a nearby rooftop, and her eyes tracked the movement, listless. Nineteen. Nineteen years of her life had gone by, and she didn’t feel like she had achieved anything substantial. She felt a little like she was a bed bug on the surface of the earth, a speck of human that would become a speck of dust.
There was nothing particularly noteworthy about her life, and it didn’t bother her, not usually. But sometimes, she would lie awake at night, wracked with guilt—she had been given all this time, and still she was no closer to avenging her family, and truthfully, she didn’t know if she ever would. She loved Kiran’s stories, but she wasn’t the protagonist of a fairy tale, a rigid path to victory or tragedy set out for her from the very beginning. She was a side character, an extra that left set as soon as possible and spent the rest of the night at home, soaking in the stable mediocrity of her life. Her problems were not meant to be solved—they were an insignificant plot hole, a detail included only to fill pages, if included at all.
She wondered, briefly, fantastically, what it would be like to matter.
Dangerous, probably, she thought, watching a series of oceanside condos topple headfirst into the sea. Aloud, she asked, “Do you ever wish you were a kid again?”
Ellis considered the question, tilting his head. Then he said, “Not really. I didn’t know what I was doing at any given moment.”
She raised her eyebrows. “And that’s changed how?”
“Fuck off,” he said, but his voice was soft in the near-silence of the theater, and the incongruity nearly made her laugh. “Would you go back?”
Would she? She thought about it for a bit, then shook her head as the villain threatened to blow up the entire city. “I like my life, for the most part.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said slyly, and she shoved him, and he fell onto the shoulder of the young mother sitting beside them, and she glared at them, weary, and a few minutes later, they were sitting outside the theater doors, struggling to keep themselves upright.
Slush soaked through her jeans, and her teeth were chattering through the laughs, but still she couldn’t calm herself down. Tears were warm against her cheeks, and she thought they might freeze in the cold winter air. Ellis, almost gasping from laughter, wasn’t much better off. When their friends returned after another fifteen minutes, they found them leaned against the brick façade of the theater, incomprehensible and wet-faced.
Eventually, they pulled themselves into silence, wiping at their faces; they held each other’s gaze for a second before lapsing into raucous, ugly laughter all over again, and the others had to steady them.
“Where are we going?” Suri inquired as they crossed the street, leaned against one of them, tucking her head into the crook of their neck.
Kiran glanced down at her, mouth curved in a distant, unfamiliar smile. Not quite unfamiliar—it had been, once, but she thought she was close to understanding it, felt as if she was on the precipice of a realization that painstakingly circled the borders of his heart. It was a nice heart, bloody and scarred and golden through and through, and she wanted to know it so badly she nearly did. Wishes were strange that way. “It’s almost six. We’re going over to your grandmother’s shop. Are you okay?”
“I think,” she said, wiping at her cheeks. They were cold and only slightly damp, but already she felt a little warmer. “Sorry for cry laughing on you.”
“It’s okay,” he said graciously, and pulled her in closer with his other arm as a group of kids ran past them. She could hear his heartbeat through the searing warmth of his skin; she felt it like a drumbeat, like a song, and when they paused in front of the shop and she disentangled herself from his arms, she felt it still.
“What is it?” he asked, and she realized she was staring.
You have a song in your heart, she wanted to say, wanted to lean forward and press her ear to his chest so she could hear it again. Do you know that?
But she couldn’t form the words. They were not meant for such raw, inelegant confessions. They were not meant for confessions at all.
Her grandmother unlocked the door and let them in, the others oohing and ahhing at all the correct times even though they’d all seen the shop on her birthday before and would likely see it again. Only Kiran took it in with some measure of wonder, reverent in his curiosity.
Every year, on her birthday, her grandmother decorated it with a near ridiculous level of effort. When she’d been younger, she had been embarrassed by the cut paper banners and painted signs. Everyone who stopped by would wish her a happy birthday while they chatted with her grandmother, but she would still pout, sullen, until they cut the cake in the evening and her puerile anger faded in the face of her hunger.
As she’d grown older and let go of that odd, self-conscious shame, she’d grown to enjoy the decorations. She wasn’t above bragging good-naturedly, though sometimes she felt guilty that her grandmother never, ever let her help.
“It’s your party,” she would snap, all bark and no bite. “You can pay me back by doing your chores.”
She was making no effort to hide her pride now, though, talking with Kiran as he gestured at the decorations. Her chest felt tight, looking at them together, looking at everyone. Miya was balancing carved trinkets on her head, Aza was competing with her, and Dai was trying to convince them to stop as Ellis recorded the entire incident on his phone. Her grandmother glanced over, scolding them as Kiran let out a soft, helpless laugh and pressed his fingers to his mouth to stifle it when she glared back at him. Family, she thought, and it felt true and too big to believe, a secret she had stumbled upon and now immediately wanted to bury again. She was afraid if she took it out and held it in her hands, coveted it properly, it would grow wings and learn to disappear.
It didn’t matter if she didn’t matter, not really. As long as she had them, as long as she had this.
When she returned to the present, dizzy and warmed from the inside out, they were all staring at her. Warily, she asked, “Wha
t is it?”
“You’re crying,” Aza said pointedly; she said it like an accusation, like an apology.
“What?” she reached up and wiped at damp cheeks, swallowing a sniff. “I’m not crying.”
Ellis gave a soft snort. “You are.”
Suri folded her arms, a last ditch-effort at saving her dignity. “And I said I’m not—”
“Cake?” Dai interrupted weakly, hands held up as if he meant to intervene.
“Yes,” her grandmother said smoothly, like this was what she had planned all along. “Time for cake-cutting. Take a seat while I bring it downstairs.”
They were all children under her watchful eye, and obediently, they sat in a ring around the wooden table.
Ellis held up his phone. “I still have the video.”
Dai deflated visibly.
Suri’s heart felt like it could hold a song in it, too. Like it could twist itself into something tangled and consonant and carry a melody like words carried stories. It was a heartening thought, and she held it close even as her grandmother descended the steps with the cake, unsteady with two bottles of soda tucked under her arm. Kiran immediately rose and went to help her—despite her irritated, insistent assurances that she was fine carrying them, he slipped the soda bottles out and placed them on the corner of the table, taking the other edge of the cake platter so they could guide it down slowly.
Her grandmother glared over at him, but it held little heat. She had never been good at staying angry with him. He smiled back, amiable, as she stuck nineteen candles into the smooth surface of the frosting. As she began to light the candles, the cream glistened, curving upward in small, accidental tufts.
She finished, gestured for the others to begin singing. Miya started loudly while the rest joined in, jostling her in an attempt at embarrassment. They finished, dramatic and glorious and hers, and she shut her eyes and wished with every beat, every string, of her discordant, uneven heart. And then she leaned forward, the heat against her skin more familiar than breath, and blew the candles out.