tassel

"WHY ARE YOU STARING AT MY LIPS?" I ask Arashi, who's looking at them with a soft expression spread on his face. It makes me feel faintly awkward.

"I thought they were bleeding," he says, removing his gaze at once. I immediately roll my tongue over them. I don't taste any blood. "I thought they were bleeding," he says again. "They're not."

I roll my tongue over once more, just in case. It's not a secret that I have dry lips. Dad's always forced me to carry a baby case of Vaseline lip balm with me wherever I go, but I keep forgetting I have it, because I don't use it until my lips look like they're going to crack open. 

I take it out from the front of my bag and apply a finger-coat. When I'm done, I offer it to Arashi. He shakes his hands in refusal, still not directly looking at me.

"Is your finger okay?" he asks me, looking concerned suddenly. 

I stare at him, confused. "Yeah, why?"

"You have a lump on your finger," he says, telling me it's on my middle finger by showing his.

"Oh this," I laugh. "It's just a side-effect of the way I hold my pencil. It appeared when I was in fifth grade or something. Mom took me to the doctor and she explained that it's because I place my grip too hard. Nothing serious."

"Oh," he says, understandingly, and then we turn back to the quiet environment like before. He rests himself on the bark of the tree, taking help of his good hand. "How do you do this?" he asks then, pointing to the first question on his paper. His Chemistry teacher, Mr. Irwin, had once again given them the same assignment as us AP students. I truly feel for him this time, because I myself am stuck on only the fifth question.

I show Arashi my sheet. He stares at it for almost a whole minute until he finally says, "I don't get it."

I nod understandingly. "Okay, which part?"

"Every part," he answers. "From where did you get this formula?"

"In class. Didn't Mr. Irwin teach this today to you guys?" I ask.

Arashi squints hard, looking at the paper. "Did he?"

He takes my sheet and copies the formula onto his. Laughing, I say, "It's fine. You know it now."

I go back to finishing my work. Since it's hard, Letterhead's only prepared ten questions. They're mostly problem based and have quite large calculations, so Arashi's phone lies on the ground with the calculator open on it. I've been the only one to use it until now.

Arashi makes it obvious that his head is not in this right now. He focuses his vision on a spot on the grass, spacing off. Tracing it, I realize he's looking at a dandelion barely holding onto its puffballs. It kind of amazes me too, because there's a pretty strong breeze blowing. 

He rattles the pencil in between his fingers. The breezes suddenly grows speedy, plucking out every last puffball present on the dandelion. I look at the naked flower, and then at Arashi. His eyes suddenly look like they're glazed with honey. He stops playing with his pencil and writes something on his plaster with it.

It was shocking to see him come to school with a fractured hand and bandaged head. The first explanation that came into my mind: car accident. But when he clarified that he slipped on a pamphlet and fell out of his window, I was beyond shocked. You're joking, I told him thrice. No, I'm not, he answered thrice.

Arashi could've died.

Every time I think about it, all my actions stop for a moment. Losing a friend like that is something I don't want to experience. Ever.

I can't even imagine what his Dad went through. First his mother, and then nearly him - the amount of pain inflicted in such a short span of time is insane.

Although I'm grateful his father is acting sensibly now, I can't help but feel a little salty about what happened before. From what I've heard from Arashi, I've realized that his father couldn't cope up with his mother's death at first. He isolated himself completely for a whole week, not realizing it resulted in his son being isolated for a whole week too. At a time when Arashi needed to fill the gap with something, all he found around him was emptiness. And before he could've figured out any other way, they shifted to Lexington just because his father had an impulse.

I kind of understand now why Arashi gives me mixed feelings every time he talks about his Mom. It's because he has mixed feelings. Everything happened so fast for him, he never got the chance to let everything sink in, much less let it out.

I take a look at what he's written on his plaster. We'll be fine. We'll be fine. We'll be fine, all under each other. The light grey makes the words barely visible.

I don't know what Arashi's thinking of, but I know it's not anything happy. I decide that it's a good time for me to interrupt his line of thoughts. Taking a simple approach, I ask him how to do the fifth question, hoping to solve it together. But I'm shocked when I see he's already started working on the seventh one. 

"How did you do the fifth one?" I ask him.

"I didn't," he answers. "I just felt like doing the seventh question so i started doing it. But I'm not really getting it."

"Okay," I say. "Let's solve the fifth one first, and then we'll do the seventh one."

He nods and checks the question. Tilting his head, he starts mumbling something. After some time, he replies. "I think it's A."

"How?" I ask.

"My gut says so. It just looks fated," he says, staring at the question intently.

"Fated?" I laugh. "You think an answer is fated to a question?"

His eyes drift back to where he was staring before. "Isn't it?"

I laugh again, but I slowly realize Arashi isn't really talking about this particular question. There's something bothering him; I've never seen his fingers fidget this much before. I'm not sure if I should ask him if he's fine, because I'm not sure if it isn't my mind over-analyzing things.

"Not in this case," is all I say. 

☀ ☀ ☀

So I'm typing this out after having a panic attack. The last two days have probably been the most tense few hours of my life.

Wattpad somehow logged me out of this account, and I was not able to log back in. It kept saying I was giving the wrong password. Which I probably was lol

So I went to the forgot password link, and they then sent a verification code to the e-mail this is account is linked to. Now, I thought this account was linked to my second e-mail. I searched for their message over there, but there was nothing. I kept refreshing the page. But no message came from Wattpad.

Then I decided to check out my first and third e-mail ID. There was nothing there too.

And then I started to panic because I didn't remember having any other e-mail ID.

I kept refreshing the page again and again. I even checked it after a whole day, because sometimes it takes almost 24 hrs for an e-mail to come from Wattpad. And after waiting, there still was nothing.

I panicked. I made Wattpad send like 50 e-mails. They were sending it, and it was going somewhere, but I didn't know where.

So I racked up my brain trying to remember which e-mail ID this account is linked to. And a few minutes ago, I remembered I made this account with the help of an e-mail ID I made 5 years ago. But I didn't remember my password for it.

Note that the laptop I'm currently using has only my other 3 accounts set in. The fourth one was never used here, so it didn't show up by default. Therefore I completely forgot it existed. How I made this account with that e-mail is beyond my memory.

Luckily, the recovery e-mail for that e-mail is my first e-mail ID (lol) . So I went there, changed the password of my 5 year old ID, then found the Wattpad recovery passcodes, and then changed the password for this account.

And then I cried. You guys cannot imagine how relieved I am. I thought I'd lose all my ideas, everything I'd stored here. My mother threw away the things I wrote on paper, so this place was my secret salvation. I thought I lost that too. I've never been so scared about anything in my life. 

So kids, never forget the password to your account because you don't know what it might lead to.

Lots of Omega 3 fatty acids for memory,

Genesee

:) 

<3