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34 - Last

 okay guys here we go

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34 - Last

Maya Sumedh

Within a week, we were back in Delhi.

 We left Chennai two days after Diwali, close to the end of October. Luke and Sam had school the very next day. The weather was bitterly cold, one of the coldest winters Delhi had ever experienced, according to the news, and was bound to get colder as the year drew to a close. Ma got out the black woollen school blazers for Luke and Sam from the storage. They smelt like mothballs but they were warmest things ever. I borrowed one of theirs everyday when they got back in the afternoon and cocooned myself in it, snuffling around in the thick woollen socks my grandmother knitted for me three years ago. Luke would come back with his nose pink from the cold and his blue eyes sparkling. Clearly he was enjoying the weather more than I was. He looked oddly in place when I saw him like that, the cold complementing the blue of his eyes, his pale skin, pale hair. I, on the other hand, preferred the summer, the heat, and the vigour. Things slowed down when it got cold, it left more time for thinking, for feeling sad. To put it simply, I hated the winter, this one more so.

 We had just a month left. A few days soon after we were back I’d gone into Luke’s room to fetch a book I’d left there. As I retrieved it from his table, under his history textbook I saw a plane ticket for an eleven AM flight from Delhi to Springfield on Sunday, December fifteenth. I stared at it for a while, resisting the urge to hide it somewhere no one would find it. Then I took my book, went back to my room, locked myself in the bathroom and breathed. The tightness in my throat refused to vanish.

 I never let him see me like that. I made sure of it.

 He was normal, kept busy by school and other things. I had nothing to do except sit around at home waiting for our SAT results. It was a painful few weeks.

 On November 2nd, we learned that we both scored 2300.

 To celebrate, Ma and Dad said they would treat us to dinner. When I asked where we’d go, they said it was a surprise. For a brief few days we were happy, happy with that number on the screen, because it added to the shreds of hope we were collecting that we could be together after all the months we’d spend apart. When the dinner rolled around, I realized we’d pulled up in front of Salt and Battery. I felt a little sick, seeing the familiar nautical umbrellas and wooden deck again. For everyone else, I put on a happy expression throughout the evening. Luke genuinely liked the place. When we got home, I went to my room, hugged a pillow to my chest, and deleted Zayn’s number from my phone.

 Sam and Luke’s last exams of the year came and went. Luke averaged at ninety percent, Sam at ninety four. Luke played a bit role of a lost American tourist in a school production called “Destination Delhi”, written and produced by their grade. I went to watch it. He had to wear Crocs, Bermuda shorts and t-shirt, a camera slung around his neck, and he had only two lines. His first was, “Have you seen my girlfriend? She’s about five-seven, dark curly hair, brown eyes, nose piercing?” – at which point at least nine people flashed me grins, including the head scriptwriter of the play. His second was, “Okay, thanks.”

 When the vacation started, words like “farewell party” started floating around, either in the house or on Facebook. Luke stopped putting his clothes for wash and started the process of accumulating his belongings from the various places they’d scattered around our house. His t-shirts vanished from my wardrobe. His boxers were no longer kept in piles in the linen room. I never saw his jeans hanging next to mine on the clothesline anymore. Slowly, evidence of his stay with us condensed into a large, black suitcase. He got calls from AISE, confirming his date of departure, how he was returning home, how his stay had been.