Tricks for a Heart [mlm]

Chapter 3

After my teen years bid goodbye, I found myself to be in a trio again. This one's sort of strange because I'm basically a third wheeler. However, Elena and I met first when we did our degree together ... Shafiq came later to swoop her in his charms and became the third member of the group.

"Jerks!" Elena says, snapping me out of my state of daze. As we head out to the reunion, I find myself recounting the past out loud. Apparently, I just finished running my mouth about the infamous physical fight I had with Ikhwan Khairudin to the two of them, when I thought about it in my head. The panic rushes down my spine just as I remember that Elena is driving Shafiq and me to the diner where the reunion will take place. The people from the past will materialize in flesh.

I'm sitting at the back in the middle seat hunching forward, while Elena's on the wheel and Shafiq riding shotgun with a Switch in his hand.

"Poor baby!" Elena mutters, referring to me. "If I were there, I'd call bullshit to all those boys!" She halts the car a little too abruptly to slow down at a red light; she just got her license about two weeks ago but insists on driving. I'm not sure if we'd ever make it to the destination in one piece whenever she drives, but neither Shafiq nor me want to discourage her. Well, if we end up in a crash, I'd just take it as a sign that I'm rescued from going to this reunion.

"The brake ..." Shafiq says nonchalantly, being hyper-focused on Animal Crossing.

"Where were you, babe?" She turns to Shafiq. "You should've saved him."

"I was minding my own business as usual," he replies.

"Straight men," Elena and I say in unison. The synchronisation always makes the three of us laugh.

"Fiq didn't lie, though," I say. "I never really saw him in school, either. You were almost a ghost to me."

"Almost," Shafiq laughs.

"Well, you were kind of cute, being the Head Boy and shit. I dig head boys."

"Adam," Shafiq groans, and that entertains me every single time.

"I had a feeling that you didn't really fuck with your school pals, you know that?" Elena says to Shafiq as she nervously moves the car again. "You'd Facetime our classmates from uni all the time, but not once you did that with the boys. I thought Adam said you were in the rugby team for the whole five years!"

"I was," Shafiq responds. "Well, my uni buddies rock, though. I love some of the rugby boys as well, but a lot of them were actually assholes. Rather than being party poopers, I just chose to shut up, if you know what I mean. Which isn't right ... I know."

"Exactly," Elena says.

"Anyway, Zawawi's a fucking dickhead for calling you those names, Adam," Shafiq says, although he already heard me babble about this story for a million times. "And ironically, Ikhwan put up that long-ass Facebook post a few months after he enrolled in his uni."

Ikhwan had several online meltdowns right after school, which came in a form of spiritual, pseudo-optimistic ramblings on Facebook, especially since he didn't get the scholarship to pursue his studies in Egypt. But one post particularly stood out, uploaded a few months after he enrolled in a local Islamic university somewhere in the city. He basically came out of the closet and implored his Facebook friends to pray for the emergence of the "right path" that he was dying to seek for. He even had paragraphs of him praying that God would make him wake up straight the next morning.

I remember that day clearly; it was the first semester of freshman year, and I got called out by Professor Kim for not focusing on the lecture. I had my eyes straight to his phone because I was about to decide whether or not to reach out to Ikhwan at that moment. Elena, who was next to me, had ended up feeling defensive and lied that my mother was texting me about "emergency matters." She'd always been my mother bear.