1
Her name is Nico Rudolph and I love her. She loves me as well, and while there have been times when I’ve questioned that, she does. You should know that now because there will be times that you’ll question it as well.
Before I get into all of that, though, I suppose I should tell you who I am. If I’m being honest—and I’m truly trying to be—there isn’t much to tell. Until I met Nico, I had a quiet life. My parents are still together, still love each other in that unreachable, uncontainable way that makes me ache sometimes. And, yeah, OK, my quiet life hasn’t always been quiet. Being the only desi girl in my class isn’t always easy. And the whole I prefer girls thing definitely isn’t easy, even if saying it out loud finally silenced something in me.
Even so, I’ve never felt different. Until I met her, I moved through life without leaving a dent, like the stiff red velvet sofa in my grandparents’ living room that forgets you as soon as you stand up. I am extraordinary only in my ordinariness. I do well at school, but I’m not destined to go to Oxford or Cambridge, or anything. I can’t dance like my mother, or cook like my father, or sing like Nico. I can’t draw or paint or speak any other languages apart from a bit of Hindi. And I hate sports. Hate chasing things or kicking things or aiming things at impossible targets. Hate anything that requires me to run or to wear a shirt with a number on the back.
So I’m not going to cure cancer or change the world in any meaningful, Pulitzer Prize–winning way. And I’m OK with that, especially after what happened to Nico. Trust me, having a quiet life is no bad thing. I’m probably too young to know that, but if there’s one good thing to come out of all of this, it’s that.
I’m lucky. I have a great group of friends who, like my parents, love me with a ferocity—and a constancy—that, now I think about it, kind of ruined me because I thought that’s how everyone would love me. I guess that’s another thing I’m probably too young to know: not everyone can love you in the way that you need to be loved.
Still, I’ve had it pretty easy. Other than being charged with fancying every girl I speak to or the odd casually cruel comment in the corridor at school, I’ve never been bullied. I’ve never had to walk a different way home or complain about period pain so I didn’t have to go to school. Never had to endure more than the usual adolescent tragedies. Fights with friends. Fruitless crushes. Failed exams. Things that felt so much bigger and more impassable until I met Nico and I realized that I didn’t have a thing to worry about.
Except I do, of course. We all do. We all have those things only we know. You never know the secret things that people cry themselves to sleep over. The things they’ll never tell you. The things that make their easy lives not so easy. The things that distract them. Derail them. Stop them from being bold enough to hope that there’s more than this. Even if there’s nothing wrong with this.
That’s who I am, isn’t it?
Who I really am.
Not just the girl in the photographs of birthdays and holidays that line the walls of my house. Not just the star of my parents’ stories, the ones they tell at the end of weddings, after the cake’s been cut and they’ve had too much champagne. Or when a song comes on the radio and they turn to one another and smile, then turn to me and smile a little wider. I’m every mistake I’ve made. Every scar I’ve earned. I’m in the songs I listen to on repeat, in the clothes I’m not brave enough to wear and the sentences I underline in books.
That’s who I am. Not just the me everyone knows—the me who is chronically early for everything and hates kidney beans and overwaters succulents—but I’m all the things I’m too scared to say out loud as well. I’m every hope. Every fear. Every wild thought that makes me weak and woozy with the promise of something else, something beyond me, beyond the borders of photographs and my parents’ stories and this tiny corner of the universe that I tread. I’m more than what people think they know. More than this endless, exhausting feeling of something shifting, trying to make space, but there isn’t enough room.
Mara Malakar. Only child of Vasudeva and Madira. Born in Brighton and still here. Still in the house on Toronto Terrace my parents brought me back to sixteen years ago. Still in the bedroom overlooking the garden, the one my father painted pink before I was born and has been every conceivable color since then.
Mara Malakar, who is bad with numbers and instructions, but always answers her phone. Who reads too many books and loves words. Even if, until now, they’ve been contained to the corners of my notebooks that aren’t too pretty to use. Other people’s words knotted with my own. Lyrics and lines from stories that made me lightheaded with relief that a stranger could know something about me before I did. Scruffy ink-and-paper time capsules of whatever I was feeling, which, I told myself, I didn’t need to feel once I’d written it down.
But I want to feel it this time.
Even though this is all still so very tender and every time I put any weight on those tender parts, I’m reluctant to do it again. And I’m even more reluctant to write it down in case I dilute it somehow because I can’t find the right words to articulate the misery and magic of it all. But I must because I’m terrified that if I don’t, I’ll forget. Memory is fickle, isn’t it? It can fail you when you need it most. It lies to you, convinces you that something happened when it didn’t. It will erase the things that matter, like hearing someone laugh for the first time and knowing it’s a prelude to some great joy to come, and replace it with a tiny, thoughtless comment that returns to you months after you said it, unexpected and uninvited, to make you doubt who you are.
That’s why I need to write this down now. Before I forget. So forgive me if it isn’t perfect. But that’s another thing I’ve learned: things don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be true.
2
I met Nico last June. The day began as every Sunday morning had until then, with me waking up to my friend Michelle snoring gently beside me, swaddled in most of the duvet, and my parents moving around downstairs, laughing and singing along to Joni Mitchell, while my father made pancakes.
It’s one of my favorite traditions: waking up on Sunday mornings to Michelle, Joni Mitchell, and pancakes. Given how many we have now, that’s saying something. But you just do things, don’t you? Then you do them again and again without even realizing it. That’s how they become traditions, I suppose. Tiny pebbles of joy that disturb the monotony of running for the bus every morning and homework on Sunday nights. Joni Mitchell and pancakes. My and Michelle’s birthday. Diwali at our house. Lunar New Year at Michelle’s.
I should say now that Michelle and I are just friends because when you’re into girls and you speak about someone the way I do about her, it’s often mistaken for something more. For some unbearable, unrequited crush that has left me pining and miserable and settling for being her best friend. Nothing could be further from the truth. Michelle is, in every way other than blood, my sister. Our parents were friends before we were born. Before Mara and Michelle there was Mads and Nicole. Mads and Nicole and Vas and James.
We were born four days apart and grew up next door to each other, running in and out of each other’s houses with scrapes on our knees and whatever treasures we’d found at the beach. Fistfuls of shells. Smooth nuggets of candy-colored sea glass. Spiky mermaid’s purses that my father would tell us to check for pearls.
As such, everyone used to refer to us as The Twins, even though we look nothing alike. My parents are Indian and hers are Chinese, so we both have dark hair and eyes, but that’s where the resemblance ends. My eyes are a shade or two lighter than hers and Michelle’s hair is longer—it’s been down to her waist for as long as I can remember—and shampoo-ad smooth, whereas mine is thick and unruly and barely brushes my shoulders.
I don’t even notice it most of the time—how different we are—until we take a photo together. Even as kids, it was obvious, but now we’re sixteen it’s pronounced to the point that the twin thing is almost comical. Everything about Michelle is small. She’s small in stature (if not in voice), with a small, sweet face and small, sweet hands and small, sweet fingernails that she paints the sweetest shade of pink. When she smiles—really smiles—her eyes disappear and when she laughs—really laughs—she snorts. But I’m tall, like my father, and round-hipped and round-faced like my mother. Plus, my skin is much darker than Michelle’s. Mine is the same deep brown as my father’s, whereas Michelle is nearer to her mother’s warm brown that glows in the sunshine.
It’s always been me and Michelle. Michelle and me. We’re always together, so she was with me that morning. The morning I met Nico. We were walking through Brighton train station and I glanced at the clock to see it was 11:11. 11:11 on June 11th. I told myself to make a wish because that had to mean something, and when we walked out, there Nico was, standing on a bench with her guitar, her chin raised to the sun as she sang.
It was nothing, just a Sunday morning in June.
Then it wasn’t nothing.
It was startling.
I hadn’t even met her yet and I already knew that I’d never get over her.
Even now, I can remember how my heart ballooned in my chest as I abandoned Michelle mid-anecdote to join the crowd gathered around Nico. And I remember how the sun picked her out like a spotlight, foiling her jaw-length black hair so it almost looked silver as her hips swayed and her fine fingers plucked at the strings of the guitar. I was aware of Michelle next to me, telling me that she kind of looked like Park E Hyun in Best Mistake, and I guess she does, but I almost don’t want to tell you that because I can’t bear the thought of you picturing her as anyone else but her. Just know that she was beautiful. Delicate. All pale skin and inky eyelashes and this air of easy, enviable nonchalance as she sang up at the sky as though none of us were there.
But most of all, I remember holding my breath as I waited for her to open her eyes. When she finally did and they settled on mine, I saw the corners of her mouth twitch—just for a second—and that was it.
I was undone.
With that, something was suddenly, urgently, different. I didn’t know what it was, whether it was love or lust or some fleeting, devouring infatuation. I just knew it had changed me so thoroughly that I’d look back on that moment one day—that day being today, apparently—and say, That was it. That was when everything changed.
And I was right, wasn’t I?
When everything came back into focus and the world began to take shape again—the gulls bobbing and shrieking over our heads, someone’s perfume, thick and sweet, the number seven bus spitting out another gaggle of fidgety-looking people eager to get their trains—I expected everything to look different. For the sky to be pink or the air to smell of amusement-park donuts and adventure or for the sun to be low enough to touch. But everything looked exactly the same, even though it didn’t feel the same at all.
* * *
Six months later and I wouldn’t say that Nico and I were together, but we weren’t not together, either. We were stuck in some maddening purgatory between the two.
We’d kissed, but never held hands. I knew she was fifteen and a Cancer, but I didn’t know her birthday. I knew she was an only child, like me, but she never talked about her father so I didn’t ask because, I figured, there was a reason she never talked about her father. I knew she lived in Rottingdean, but I didn’t know which school she went to. And I’d never met any of her friends, even though she’d met mine. Not willingly, in fairness. On the few occasions she’d acquiesced, she was sullen and distracted, which confirmed to my friends that she wasn’t right for me and confirmed to me that us hanging out with them wouldn’t become a regular occurrence.
So, that Sunday morning I woke up to Michelle, Joni Mitchell, and pancakes, Nico was still as unfathomable—and unreachable—as when I found her singing outside Brighton station.
By then it was New Year’s Eve, but instead of feeling a fizz of excitement at the promise of a new year, I did what I’d done every morning since I’d met her.
As soon as I opened my eyes, I checked my phone.
I’d fallen asleep with it in my hand, so it took all of a second to discover that I only had a text from May.
“No word from Nico,” Michelle said as she caught me frowning at the screen. She said it with such ease—such certainty—that I refused to give her the satisfaction.
“I’m just reading a text from May.”
Then she frowned as she reached for her phone. “There’s nothing in the group chat.”
“She only texted me.”
“Why only you?” The crease between Michelle’s eyebrows deepened, and then her eyes widened. “No!”
I shook my head with a theatrical sigh.
“Mara, no! She’s not back together with Chesca?”
“They hooked up last night.”
“No!” Michelle slapped my arm.
I made a show of rubbing where she’d hit me. “Um. Ow.”
“But Chesca is a total fuckgirl!”
“No, she isn’t.”
“She is!” Michelle shrieked, looking at me like I’d lost it.
“She’s not. She just isn’t out yet, so she’s still processing.”
That made Michelle back down.
“Well,” she huffed, “that’s no excuse to treat May like shit.”
That was true.
“If you ghost me,” Michelle warned, “you’d better stay dead.”
I know I was defending her, but Chesca was awful to May. They’d met in the queue for a gig and things were super intense for a few weeks, and then May didn’t hear from her again. Not until she met someone else. It was as though Chesca knew because she unblocked her and sent a Hello, stranger text.
Then they started things up again and the same thing happened.
Over and over for a year.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
“That explains why she only told you,” Michelle said as she scrolled through her phone.
Copyright © 2024 by Tanya Byrne
