forget-me-nots
3 years, 2 months before

The rain that beats down on Dev's windows blurs the city's darkened silhouette. The sky is grey, and his tiny room is lit by the synthetic sunlight of his little desk lamp.

In front of him, his illegibly scrawled homework on the efficacy of complementary therapies lies discarded in favor of his laptop. This is a common ritual. He tells himself he'll finish it in the morning.

The light of his laptop casts two flickering reflections in each lens of his new glasses. He's only been wearing them for three months now, and they spend most of their time stuffed in a little case. Dev hates the way they fog up above his tea and leave little imprints on his nose. He'd honestly rather have a seeing eye dog than wear these giant abominations, but Rebecca likes them so he's been wearing them more frequently these days.

His chat window flashes.

hey dickhead

It's Alice. Rolling his eyes, Dev idly types back, hey alice, how's freedom?

Her new profile picture was taken last week on the day of her graduation. She's grinning ear to ear, her arms flung around some new friends that he doesn't know. It feels weird that she's got this whole other life of her own, filled with new people and new music and new private jokes.

CRAP, she replies. what are jobs?? how do I get one? employ me please

That's something he hasn't been considering much. He's got a whole other year of his course, and it's a vocational degree anyway.

I'll pay you to finish my pharmacy work, he tells her eventually.

Her reply mostly consists of tiny emoticons spewing violently. Then she puts, how's rebecca dude are you married yet

More than wishing that Alice would learn to use punctuation, he wishes she'd stop making fun of Rebecca. It's not that Alice doesn't like Rebecca – they've met a couple times when Alice came up to Leeds to visit – but Dev gets the feeling that their mutual civility towards one another is built more upon politeness than affability.

Alice has always been an advocate of taking a bunch of test-drives before settling on one model too early, and she's been giving Dev constant crap about his two-year relationship. It's nothing he hasn't already heard from his flatmates, mostly backed up by similar car analogies.

shut up alice, she's doing fine.

He waits a few seconds, but Alice has disconnected.

Dev sighs and scrolls idly down his feed. His eyes glaze over as he takes in information he quasi-cares about. His sister has been to a party...John Chang has bought a pig...Whoever Denise Warburton is has changed her profile picture...

Then he stops.

There is a picture of Clara.

ok dev how's the mortgage going?? did you save up for the pressure cooker you've always dreamed of with rebecca

He ignores Alice's message to click on Clara's picture with the precision of a surgeon, avoiding hitting 'like'. She's the most dormant person on social media he's ever known, and this isn't even her post. It's a photo of her, tagged by some boy named Marcus Walker.

Clara's wearing a purple dress, and she's sitting down on a picnic rug surrounded by forget-me-nots. She's laughing, and her eyes are on the photographer instead of the camera. The photo's location is marked as 'Edgecastle, UK'.

Dev types, remember clara?

eugh... is all Alice says.

she's in england!!

Again, Alice disconnects, so Dev uses this as an opportunity to click Marcus's profile. He's a friendly-looking boy in a denim jacket and army boots. Dev doesn't scroll too far down his page, but from what he can see, Marcus studied in Edinburgh. There's no mention of Moscow.

All of a sudden, Dev finds himself being jealous of some guy he's never even met.

ew, Alice replies eventually. idk mate, just leave her be.

For all of Alice's disdain about Rebecca, nothing quite matches the weariness she harbours against Clara. Since her move to Moscow, Clara's messages to Dev became increasingly less and less frequent, eventually petering out into complete silence. It's a silence that's lasted three years, and Dev's never found much of an excuse to break it.

The first year was the hardest. It was spent mostly questioning why one of his best friends just completely cut him out of her life. Of course, there was also the insane amount of time spent imagining any possible reasoning she could have for this. Did she find some newer, more interesting friends who spoke Russian and read Tolstoy? Did she give up technology to live in a hermit commune? Did she die?

After the initial blow, the rest was fine. She was in his life for such a short period of time that she became easy to forget. Occasionally he hears a song or sees a film that reminds him of her, but only in the same way that the smell of new carpet reminds him of high school. It's immaterial. 

There is another noise from his computer. Alice has sent an extra message. It reads, it's been 3 years, stop wanting to check up on people who don't want to check up on you, idiot

She's right, of course. But in those pixels, shaped exactly like his old friend Clara, he can't help substituting those forget-me-nots with daisies. And then all of a sudden he's back in the fields behind her parents' house and he's just finished high school and everything feels good and he doesn't miss anybody. 

But he's been told more than enough times by his other friends that absence of communication with someone just makes your brain twist them into some nostalgic, idealised form of themselves, so he knows he's being stupid.

Suddenly, there is a click and his door opens. Dev slams his laptop shut and swivels round in his chair, doing his best to look like he wasn't mourning over his past like a geriatric veteran.

"Rebecca!" he grins.

She snakes through his door, wrestling to carry around five plastic shopping bags. She closes the door behind her with her foot and says, "I brought snacks."

"Five bags' worth?" He smiles up at her as she sits down on his bed.

"Five bags' worth of chips and popcorn," she corrects.

Dev can't fight his grin. "The lobster and opera cake of the common man," he compliments.

She chuckles. "Shush, we can have lobster and opera cake when we're earning above minimum wage."

"If that ever happens."

"Ah, sure it'll happen," she promises, digging into the bag and fishing out a warm bag of chips. "When you're a pharmacist living in a fancy mansion, joining cults, wearing silk bathrobes and hunting people for sport."

"Your perception of how much money a pharmacist makes is optimistic but wildly off base."

Rebecca cracks a grin. "I thought it'd be my perception of rich people's lifestyles that you'd correct me on."

"Nah, you pretty much nailed it."

Her shoulders shake with laughter, and she tosses him a parcel of chips.

"I like the glasses," she grins, perching herself against his desk as he unwraps his little parcel. "They make you look sophisticated."

She says that about him a lot: sophisticated. It makes him feel older – different, even.

"I feel like I should've gone for smaller frames," he says. "These ones make me look like a computer engineer from the seventies."

"The best aesthetic," she compliments. "Note that down, you can use it in your costume for George's party."

"Bespectacled man?"

"No, slutty computer engineer," she says, trying her best to keep a straight face.

Dev grimaces. "That's far too specific to preface with 'slutty'." Then he pauses thoughtfully. "I'll go as a slutty computer engineer if you go as a slutty enterostomal therapist."

"A slutty what?"

"It's a surgeon that deals with stomas, like colostomies or urostomies."

"Hot," laughs Rebecca. 

"A more accurate adjective would be 'warm', oweing to the fecal incontinence."

A loud groan of disgust escapes from Rebecca, but it's quickly swallowed up by laughter. The two of them are too busy chortling that they haven't realised that the rain has stopped. The room smells of hot, salty food, and there's an air of happiness undercutting the lamp's harsh light. Like a wisp of cigarette smoke in a gale, Clara is forgotten.