Edge Of Seventeen

1. The Breakfast

A/N : When I wrote Those Bonafide Teens, the only thing in my head was that whoever read it, had to feel light hearted after completing it (kind of like, after you finish watching some super chill, feel good content). No excessive melodrama, no diabolical stuff, no violence. Just fun. I really hope you get to experience just that in this one too ☺️

Even if you haven't read Those Bonafide Teens, you can still go ahead with this one, since it contains the gist of the first part anyway.

Enjoy! ❤️

It's not that I don't like conversations. I love them. Especially if it's with my two best friends and about a very good looking guy. Or Taylor Swift. Or how life is such a gigantic stinking mess.

But I get terrified if I'm facing a random conversation when I bump into someone somewhere and I happen to know them.

That's why when I saw our landlady Mrs Kashyap at Tashan's, the all day dining restaurant outside our housing society, I stuffed a two hundred rupee note into Tashan uncle's hand, grabbed my breakfast tray of masala oats and chocolate milk and darted away to a table as far from Mrs Kashyap as possible.

I stashed a straw which stood out like a sticky middle finger into my glass of chocolate milk and began to sip, hoping Mrs Kashyap wouldn't notice me.

Tashan's was the happy place for all the people in Glenn housing society in Borivali East, Mumbai. It had been only a week since mom and I had moved there.

The price at Tashan's was reasonable, the food tasted good and an upset stomach after eating at Tashan's was unheard of. Which meant the entire society thronged there whenever they couldn't or didn't want to cook.

I watched people flitting in and out of the restaurant for or after a satisfying breakfast as I leisurely devoured my oats. There was a good half an hour left before my school bus arrived.

I was still slightly apprehensive about the whole 'new house' thing but otherwise the society was great. At least, whatever little I knew of it.

They had all the features of an urban twenty first century housing society - a beautiful park, basketball court, indoor swimming pool, gym, you name it.

Moving to this society meant I was also really far away from my two best friends.

Our old house in Bandra was just a stone's throw away from the apartment complex that Riya Dixit and Mishti Kanwal both lived in.

And the fact that I was now almost twenty kilometres away from them, while those two were still just one wing apart and could go to each others' houses whenever they wanted, was killing me.

Unlike me, Mom never had any trouble with making friends. She was very outgoing and already knew many people in the society. I guess most teachers and professors are like that. You can't stand infront of people and talk and teach all day, everyday if you're shy.

Mom knew this and was eager for me to make friends in the society too. Mainly, because of guilt because her job was the reason we had moved.

She had tried to make me befriend the kids downstairs but they were all much younger than me and it hadn't worked.

As I started my breakfast, in order to not look conspicuously alone at my table, I digged out the Biology textbook from my backpack and kept it open infront of me but didn't bother to look at it.

Inspite of me not really knowing anyone, life in the Glenn society had been sophisticated and smooth.

Nothing had gone wrong so far.