Page 40 of A Lab Rat's Guide to Fated Love
“I gave him my numbers and alphabets notebooks so he could just copy the work,” she went on. “And all the while, I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed so much, tears streamed down my face. The poor thing, he thought I was making fun of him and started to leave, but I grabbed his hand and told him I wasn’t laughing at him. I just thought he was funny. Then he started laughing, too.”
Numbers and alphabets?
“How old were you?”
“A little over five, I suppose.”
Five… He was jealous of a five-year-old kid.
“He only stayed at the school for a few months,” Nori added. “And every single day of those months passed with me laughing till my belly hurt. He begged me to stop because it made him laugh, too, and he couldn’t write stuff down when he was laughing. And if the teachers caught us laughing, we’d be given extra pages to write as punishment. I told him I’d stop on one condition, that he sit with me all day, not just during recess. And he did.”
Oh…He knew where her story was going.
“You know why I thought he was funny?” She giggled again. “The boy was missing two of his front teeth. And his nose was always runny. The snot would slowly flow down, and just as it was about to reach his mouth, he’d snort it back up, so it could start its downward journey again. And repeat. He had a neatly folded napkin pinned to his shirt, and I never ever saw him use it. It was so funny and almost—hypnotic—the up-down-up dance of snot all day.
“He brought me chocolates onhisbirthday. I ate them all and made a card for him with a pink glitter heart. I held his hand at the playground, and he got all red and shy and kept looking at his feet. He didn’t come to school after that day, and for years afterwards I felt bad for bullying him into running away. Poor kid. I was too mean, wasn’t I? And the sad part is, I don’t even remember his name—my runny nosed first love.”
“Vir,” Vir said after a long pause, keeping himself firmly planted to where he sat, while fighting the impulse to lean in and cover her still giggling mouth with his.
“What?”
“The boy’s name was Vir,” he replied. “You didn’t make him run away. He’d made you a card, too, but he collapsed on his way to school before he could give it to you. His parents found out about his heart condition and took him away for treatment. He never returned to Shoja after that. Not till now.”
Two bright spots of pink appeared on Nori’s cheeks, as she stared at him with her jaw hung open, before rapidly seeping into the rest of her face to paint it a bright, burning crimson.
Vir pursed his lips to keep himself from laughing while his heart ballooned like a pufferfish in his chest, bloating away happily till it was ready to burst at the seams.
“You—you’re—him?”
“Yes.” Vir downed the rest of his coffee, no longer bothering to hide his grin as it plastered itself smugly across his face. “So…Iwas your first love? Interesting.”
Nori’s face turned an even deeper shade of red and her eyes became cartoonishly round in the matter of a few puffed-up heartbeats. She swore under her breath before abruptly springing from her seat to hurry off towards the cottage.
Vir tossed his paper cup in the bin and followed after her, all the while grinning at the molten bursts of embarrassment shooting off her in the distance.
Nori
It was sometime in the earlyhours of the morning. Nori sat curled in on herself in the semi-darkness, wishing she would just disappear for the next twenty-four hours. She hugged her knees, trying to shrink herself into a ball, smaller and smaller, while Vir slept peacefully on his makeshift mattress-bed a few feet away, his soft, rhythmic breathing the only sound in the otherwise quiet room.
Breathe. In and out. In and out.
She tried matching the cadence of her breaths to Vir’s for a long, agonizing moment before giving up. Careful not to disturb him—the ridiculously light sleeper that he was—she quietly snuck out of the room.
A few minutes later, sitting at the dining table with a cup of strong ginger tea in front of her, she turned her prescription bottle of anti-depressants over in her palm. She’d been weaned off nearly a year ago, but still kept some with her, just in case.For emergencies.
How bad was bad enough to be considered an emergency?
Her knuckles whitened around the orange plastic container while her hands shook with an abrupt surge of rage as it boiled through her without warning.
Why her? It had been years… Why her still?
She wanted to chuck the bottle across the room and storm out. Out where? Where could she even go… away from herself?
Vir
Adoor closed in the distance, andVir’s eyes fluttered open.
He propped himself on an elbow to find Nori’s bed empty. It didn’t even look slept in. He rubbed his eyes before squinting at the sliver of light peeking in through the partly closed door.
