WHOSE BONES IS YOUR SKELETON BUILT WITH?

            The bell chimes. I look up purely out of instinct and continue to stare out of everything but. I'm too weak to fight impulse, and much less yearning, so I don't distract myself when Miles steps through the door. He's wearing my Spice Girls t-shirt. I'm still wearing his grey sleeveless one.

Miles doesn't pretend to be in the need of rice or Powerade and for our simultaneous presence at Barua's to be a Hollywood-worthy event of serendipity like I would. He walks right to me and smiles over the magazine rack.

He sticks to his promise. He's not going to make it easy for me.

To spite me, my ribcage eases up. The fluidity of my voice shocks me. 'Are you stalkin me?'

Miles doesn't berate me for my egocentrism as he did last time. 'Summat like.' With a shrug, he moves on from the confession before it can land. 'Has Justin Timberlake ruined your day yet?'

This is the question that defeats even my fatigue and I breathe a laugh. I glance at M Magazine in my lap. 'Three times.'

Reflecting my grin, Miles circles the rack to join me in the narrow aisle between them. He sits on the shop floor beside me and pulls out a copy of Seventeen because it's what's at arm's reach. Flopping it over to read the back, he peers at it with pursed lips. 

'Why d'you like these? They're so... American.' He says it like an insult, which it is.

'Sometimes they have fun quizzes.'

Without prompt, I forget Britney Spears and flip through to the end of the magazine where a quiz indeed waits. The few questions written into tilted hearts are connected with dotted lines that have the options written along them.

'Who's Your Summer Love?' I read and pick it up to show him the general layout of the page with a grin on my face. 'Okay, first question. I crush on guys who are: shy and sweet or outgoing and fun.'

'Most people are both depend–' He lifts his hands in surrender as I send him a glare. 'Okay. Outgoing and fun.'

He doesn't even think. Miles goes along with it as if filling in quizzes in teen magazines is an activity he does often or at least one that warrants the same respect as the personality test required for a job application or a medical history sheet you complete on a clipboard in the hospital waiting room.

My hold slackens on the magazine as our eyes meet. I could do this forever. You know I could do this forever, right? ...Could you?

I bite down a smile to be able to read the next question. 'It's totally sweet when a guy either laughs at my jokes or makes me laugh.'

'Both, obviously.'

'That's not an option, you have to pick one.'

'Fine. Er...' Miles returns Seventeen to the rack to extend his thinking time by three seconds. 'Makes me laugh, I s'pose.'

'Wow. That's emasculatin.'

He rolls his eyes and I laugh and he laughs and I forget to breathe.

I snap back to the quiz, not out of nerves or denial — because it's much too late for either now — but unadulterated fear. I don't look up for the rest of the questions, as if following the dotted lines between hearts is a maze to navigate and losing track would be fatal.

When we reach the end, I finally look at him, deadpan. 'You're in love with Zac Efron.'

'How'd they know?'

The agarwood scent of him rises to my head. Or maybe it's the glue from the magazine spines. Either way, the edges of my mind where the strictest self-imposed authorities reside become hazy, the sensation right before being devoured by sleep when everything makes me laugh.

And I do. I bend over as it pours out of me. Miles leans into the rack as he joins in. The noise alerts Mr Barua out of the backroom with a tingle of the beaded door curtain. His gaze spotlights the crumpled M Magazine on my lap.

'I have told you this is not a library–' He cuts himself off at the sight of Miles on the floor beside me.

Though Mr Barua knows only the currently-visible fraction of the entirety which exists between us, he realises he's impeaching on something and returns to the back room, muttering to himself in Bengali.

We exchange stifled grins.

There are places that escape reality. Airports at night, motorways at three am, schools during summer. The bus stop when it rains, Summer when a train passes, the narrow aisles of Barua's Market, Living Life by Kathy McCarthy. Places where I can be with Miles and Miles can be with me without either of us having to consider what waits in the rest of time and space.

I can exist in his eyes too. The irises are as dark as the richest earth, as the bedrock which supports all the world's forests and oceans upon it, dark as the universe itself, the cradle of life: the most vital of God's creations.

My gaze trails to his lips. Unchewed, they're sheened with his coconut lip butter, the taste of which resurfaces from the well of my memory as potent as the moment we kissed. How have seventeen days already passed?

'We can kiss if you like.'

Heat flushes to my cheeks at his chipper tone but I don't snap my gaze away. Another three seconds pass with me staring before I find his eyes. They're still fixated on my lips. Mine are so rough they'd probably chafe his and he still wants to kiss me?

His gaze flicks up, meets mine, and he grins. I laugh, only to realise how breathless I am. Neither of us makes so much as a half-hearted attempt to disguise our desire nor to act on it.

Miles shuffles back to straighten his posture and look directly at me, suddenly serious in a manner beyond his years. Business-like, almost diplomatic. 'I'm sorry. I should've defended you.'

Does he honestly think I care anymore? School may have ended less than three weeks ago but it might as well be a decade if not an entirely different lifetime. It's not like I expected some teen movie speech and closure with my bullies. I'm perfectly satisfied never thinking about them again.

'It's calm.'

'It's not.' A statement: there's no point trying to convince him otherwise. He's not going to make excuses for himself and he doesn't want me to do so on his behalf, a frustration I'm more than familiar with.

So I nod. 'I forgive you.'

He smiles.

Stretching his legs out so his trainers lodge against the rack in front of us, Miles scans the magazines. 'I went to Sacramento once. One of my aunts lives there. It's dead flat, but people drove around in SUVs as if they had to struggle up a mountain on a daily basis.'

The abrupt change in topic should startle me but all I do is shut the M Magazine in my lap. 'Figurative mountains maybe.'

'So wouldn't a figurative Jeep Wrangler be enough, like?' His eyes are unfocused on the covers. 'Americans are strange.' He declares this with such an air of live-and-let-live advocacy that I can't help but giggle.

Biting down my grin, I thumb the corner of the magazine. 'The only problem with Americans is that they don't understand the difference between a fantasy and an ambition. You can insert yourself into films or advertisements for cheap entertainment, but it becomes an issue when you try to achieve it for real, innit. American Dream? Yeah right. When has that ever happened?

'It's by definition impossible for everyone, cause if everyone did somehow manage to work enough to become a millionaire, it'd stop meanin anythin. If everybody's rich then nobody is. Cause money's relative to inflation and the cost of livin n all that. Millionaires would just be the new working class. It's a bizzare paradox between sellin this idea that everyone can "make it" whilst simultaneously buildin up a system that relies on hierarchy to function.

'But then... I dunno if I'm actually any better. You know how car or perfume commercials are always so bizarre? They'll have some white woman ridin a horse on a beach, and it's not even sellin the perfume cause you can't smell it, they're sellin that image. I'm bare terrified of horses nor do I like the beach. But I see it in an ad and for a second, I almost fall for it. Why? And even if I did enjoy those things, how have they brainwashed me into thinkin that I'd be more successful in realising them by buyin a perfume than spendin a tenth of the price on a train ticket to Hastings and actually goin to the beach?

'Does anybody actually enjoy the ocean? It's terrifyin. You dare open your eyes for a second underwater, and it blinds you. And waves are so unnecessary. Sure, it looks nice on the telly. Is everyone just pretendin to enjoy it cause they wanna be like the people in perfume commercials?'

I realise I'm waving my hands all over the place only when I stop talking and latch onto the magazine. Scratching the corner of my jaw, I attempt a shrug to pass off my unsolicited ramble as a joke. I don't know where that came from, I don't normally do that, I've never thought about this before. Sorry.

I catch Miles in my periphery, fixated on me. Simultaneously a gentle and hungry stare.

With a grin, his head falls back against the magazines at an angle that can't possibly be comfortable, that I can't help but desire to replicate, like the postures in paintings of lounging white people that try so hard to convince you they're relaxed but how could they be when they're being watched so intimately?

He bites down his smile to whisper. 'I wish I could live in your mind just for a day.'

'You do... All the time.'

The things I would do to be watched by him so intimately and to be able to pretend I am relaxed as it occurs, for him to pick apart every detail and to find beauty, and more importantly, purpose, in each of them, and for me to be willingly naked in the most figurative sense.

I want him to know. I don't want to confuse him.

I almost crave to go back to when we were nothing but unfortunate neighbours — no, worse. I crave for him to hate me, to be disgusted by the mere sight of me and buy black-out blinds to his window so that he never has to suffer it, to feel sick whenever I dare to cross his mind. And I'll tell him then. Because then his opinion of me is of no consequence and then he couldn't possibly be more revolted than he already was. I'd have nothing to lose.

Here, now... I have everything to lose.

If I was white and could thus be the desired subject of a painting who lounged and bathed and read, and if he was white and could visit art galleries without being reminded of his otherness, would he fancy me even then? I'd like to think he would, at the very least on an aesthetic level. I'd crave for my grotesqueness to be a pleasure to his senses.

As if he knows the depravity of my thoughts, his smile turns to a smirk. He's mocking me for being so pathetically needy for him.

'As a casual acquaintance?'

'Somethin like.'

Miles doesn't demand more from my admission. I was wrong. It's not mockery in his smirk, it's an appreciation of the comedy that he became aware of before I did: I know that he knows that I know. And we both know this.

Our mutual longing sits between us in clear sight, a polka-dotted elephant, and it's ridiculous that we peer around it to continue a conversation when we could just ask it to move. As if it's a relative neither of us likes who shows up to our tea party despite all our efforts to plan it on a date it wouldn't be able to attend, we offer it every drink and treat at the table to keep it preoccupied and us safe from having to endure its irksome questions and miserable politics. Your mug is empty, I'll pour you some more. And ignore any protest.

The only thing that prevents us from leaving together is my fear. He should hate me for this.

Unless he's afraid too. And he's pathetically needy too. And that's what's funny.

Maybe it's not about race but about class. And maybe it's not about class but arrogance. Maybe intimate observation is monopolised by those with enough hubris to think they possess anything to be observed intimately. Am I self-centred? Maybe that's the problem.

We sit on the floor of Barua's Market for hours until, around five, it becomes too crowded to retain sanctity and we leave, both of us alone, together.

Our hands brush as we walk back in silence. I count to myself: il m'aime un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, à la folie, pas du tout, even though we're centuries past nervous wondering. And right before we have to part ways, he hooks his pinkie with mine. A promise: I'll see you tomorrow.

But I linger on the pavement, no man's land. 'D'you want your jumper back?' I gesture at my bedroom window over my shoulder. 'I can get it.' I glance down at his grey sleeveless tee I'm wearing. I should return it too.

'Keep it.' He means both of them and neither. He means his ribcage, his heart, his spine. Keep it. It looks better on you and I never used it much anyway.

            Iya and Baba sit on the sofa when I shuffle into the living room. Fatigue is evident in the puffy undersides of their eyes and though Iya rubs his head, her fingers forget themselves at his temples several times. It takes a moment for them to recognise my presence.

'You look happy.'

Baba jinxes it. No sooner have the words left him before I'm sobbing.

The transition is so sudden that the news reporter completes two sentences about an explosion in Islamabad as I simply stand at the edge of the rug, crying with no restraint, before arms envelop me into a hug. Iya's scent of cocoa butter and zozoma flowers only powers the flood of tears and I bury myself into her shoulder.

She pulls me to the sofa and they allow me to lie across their laps as if I'm still five, which makes me cry more. I don't want to talk about it and I'm grateful they understand this and don't ask. They watch the weekend news. Iya holds the crown of my head to remind me that they'll turn it off if I want and Baba massages my tummy as if my worst ailment is a stomach ache.

The jumping back and forth from bliss to pain is the most exhausting part. A perverse twist to rapid-cycling, this one worse because unlike my bipolar, "cancer of the mind", this is entirely my fault. At the same time, I know I would rather take this than the numbness of last week. The cliché is painful: be careful what you wish for.

By the time the weather report comes on, my tears have stopped. Sniffing, I sit up. 'I'm gonna... go shower.'

Out of fear that I'll lose sense of time and waste litres of water again, I pick up my cell and grab the battery from under the dresser. I'll put on an alarm for twenty minutes.

It takes a moment after it's powered for the notifications to pop up on the start screen, now sixty-two unread messages, twenty-seven calls, and ten voicemails. Don't. Don't. Don't—

I drop onto my bed and unlock the screen. Sonia and Dal attempted to reach me too, but I open the texts from Miles to read through the forty-five of them. The oldest is from June nineteenth: Goodnight. See you tomorrow then.

The next seven are variations of asking where I am or informing me where he is. Am I on my way? He's taking the bus now but he's sure I can still make it on bike if I hurry. Then: Are you still asleep? Sonia's pretty upset you didn't come but I'm going to lunch at hers and her mum said you can come too. Next: Please come.

His faith in me stays intact until the evening when his tone becomes frustrated at the fact that I didn't show up or at the least phone Sonia to apologise. He's been texting me all day and would appreciate an answer.

I choke from his anger but when he starts to plead fifteen messages later, new tears rush out of my eyes to blur the letters. Once I've started, I can't stop, and I keep reading even if I have to wipe my eyes between each.

I'm sorry if I freaked you out. We can pretend it never happened.

The kiss and that, I mean. We can go back to friends or whatever.

Your dad said you're sleeping when I came over. Hope you're OK.

Look, I'm sorry for my texts before. I swear I'm not cross or owt. Please let me know you're OK.

Please answer.

Ziri?

My stomach twists. Even in texts, his hurt is unavoidable to the point I'm surprised blood doesn't seep from the cracks of my cell and drip onto my face as a testament to what I've done to him. I cleaved through his ribcage. I tore it apart.

What do I think I'm doing? I just string him along but never commit? He's hurt. My fault. I hurt him. I'm hurting him. He deserves better than me. How can I sit here and say I care about him at the same time as I stab needles into the nerves between his spinal disks? I don't get to have it both ways.