"I think you should stop being so mean to me, Zahed."
"Why would I ever do that?"
Aryan grins, a bright, wicked thing.
"Because I kiss you like this."
•
Mira Zahed and Aryan Shankar are at war.
When her best friend and his cousin decide to fall in...
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♥ ♥ ♥
MY CHILDHOOD HOME SITS on a slope, tumbling down the hills in stretching acres. This is the house I grew up in. I had my fifth grade birthday party out on the lawn and I'd pushed Dima in the pool when he didn't want play with me that day because he didn't want to cheat on his first ever imaginary girlfriend named Stella, leading to a sopping wet Dima to stand beside a beaming little Mira as she blew out the candles. Needless to say, Stella and Dima didn't last long.
Unlike Stella though, Kajal was real and I had since grown past bratty Emira Fakhoury.
There used to be a tree, sitting just east of the swimming pool. My father planted it when he bought the house and it lived on this strip of land longer than I did, longer than he had too.
He said that the tree had come from his mother's garden in a homeland he hadn't stepped foot back in since he'd left.
When he left my home, the tree stayed.
It was an old olive tree and it died about two years ago, after having been uprooted from somewhere off the Sinai Peninsula just to sit in a rich man's garden in Calabasas. It had outlived Emira Fakhoury though.
I glance between my phone and the empty space the tree used to stand, gazing out at the California late sunset as it colours the sky hyacinth purple and rosy pink.
I'd texted Dima three times since dropping Aryan off at Kappa Kappa Alpha.
I stare at my phone again. No reply.
I know how the world works, of course. I'm not a fool.
Things change and people change and trees grow and they die and homelands shift across oceans and fathers disappoint you so much that you take your mother's surname. Scientifically speaking, we sat on a spinning ball of dust and hope, so yes. It is inevitable of us to move.
And I know too that you aren't supposed to make homelands out of people. If there is one I learnt from my father, it's that home can shift right from under your feet until you have nothing left of it but a single old olive tree. But I've done that to Dima anyway.
I wonder if trees feel it when their roots are pulled out.
Because every time Kajal laughs, I feel a tug in my chest telling me I need to find a new home.
A sigh tears past my lips and I'm bounding away from the window overlooking the darkening yard, tossing my phone frustratedly onto the couch. I don't even wait to see if it lands true before dipping into the kitchen.
