poppies

4 years, 10 months before

Dev knocks sharply on Clara's door, clutching a bouquet of poppies. It's the cheapest thing they have the shop, but he thinks it's a decent gesture. All things considered.

When the door finally opens, it's Clara, and her eyes are wet and her nose is red. She's drowning in a giant jumper, and stuffed under her arm is a bag of popcorn. When she sees him, she smiles.

"Poppies?" she sniffles.

"They seemed platonic enough," Dev admits.

She smiles at him, though her chest is still shaky from crying. "Is this so we can make opium?" she asks, pushing the joke through her brittle voice.

"Sure. Let's start a post-breakup opium den."

She snorts and swings the door open, and he steps inside.

The Monroes' house smells strongly of vanilla potpourri, and Dev always feels the need to take smaller breaths when he first steps in, just to acclimatise. He slips off his shoes and leaves them at the door. Usually Clara tells him there's no need – although there is a need (he's been raised in an Indian household where shoes are not allowed indoors) but this time she doesn't.

"Hi, Dev!" calls Clara's mum, who insists on being called Susan. She's in the kitchen, trying to feed their dog. "Did you come to cheer Clara up?"

"Hey Susan," he replies. "Yeah, if that's possible."

"We're making an opium den, mum," Clara sniffs. "Dev brought poppies."

Susan laughs loudly and declares, "You're such a sweetheart, Dev!"

As Dev follows Clara upstairs to her room, he is yet again surprised by how lenient white parents seem to be.

When she opens the door, Dev's eyebrows shoot up. Clara's room is rarely tidy, but today it's as if a tornado hit a war zone. There are crumpled-up tissues strewn about on every surface (the bin is full), and clothes and blankets form a colourful ocean on her carpet.

"Shut up," she mutters, catching his face and dragging him in. She rests the poppies on her desk. "I'll get a vase for them later," she tells him, flopping onto her bed.

Dev sweeps some pizza crumbs off her chair and makes himself as comfortable as he can. There's something sticky on the armrest. He wishes he had some hand sanitizer or – upon further inspection – some bleach. The place is disgusting.

"Clara," he whines. "Why are you living in a vortex of misery?"

"Why are any of us living in a vortex of anything?" she retorts, seizing a blanket.

"Clara, stop trying to distract me with existentialism," he moans, slightly distracted by existentialism. "Please purge your room."

She groans. "I don't have to purge my room, I'm sad, I can live in a disgusting hell if I want to."

"There's snotty tissues everywhere; it's like a minefield of bacteria."

"Good," she grumbles, rummaging her hand in her bag of popcorn. "That way if Sean tries to come in he'll die."

This seems a little extreme, but Dev lets her have it. "I'm not telling you to get over your breakup, I'm just suggesting you tidy up. I'll help – but I'm not touching the tissues," he warns.

"I can't just do things. I'm supposed to mope and eat garbage and burden you with my misery," she explains sagely. "I don't have it in me to do actual productive stuff, that's not how this works. The most productive thing I've done all weekend is buying a pity plant."

Dev glances at her windowsill. A small army of houseplants has accumulated, and some of their tubers are spilling off into her radiator.

"Yeah," she adds sadly. "Once you start it's kind of hard to stop."

Dev stares at her, sitting in a little whirlpool of junk food and bad hygiene. "Clara," he sighs. "That's not how it works at all."

"It is," she insists, her words muffled from the fistful of popcorn in her mouth. "You get hit by a car, sure you try and get up again, but only after months of being fed through a tube and crapping in bedpans."

"Are you being fed through a tube and crapping in bedpans?" Dev deadpans.

For a worrying second, Clara pauses. Then she says, "Well, no. But I am figuratively. Because this feels like being hit in the chest a truck."

"It's interesting you should say that," Dev pipes up, his eyes widening. "I just watched a really interesting documentary –"

Clara groans.

"– about something called 'hysterical strength'. It's where people are in a disastrous situation," he says, acting it out with wild hand gestures. "Like they've been hit by a car or something."

"Make it a truck and I'm listening."

"Fine," he says quickly. "Whatever. Basically they're in a situation where they're about to die, and suddenly the urgency of the situation gives them a short fit of superhuman strength. And they can lift a truck."

Clara says nothing. For a second she sits there, letting Dev's weird piece of physical theatre sink in. Then she says, "Are you saying I can lift a truck?"

"I'm saying you may feel terrible now, but even though it seems impossible you're going to get over this because you have to, to keep going."

She says slowly, "Huh. Is this a real thing?"

"No, of course not," he dismisses. "It's just adrenaline or excited delirium. But the sentiment still holds."

She hums, unconvinced, and returns her attention to her bag of popcorn.

"Look, Clara," he says, not wanting to lose the momentum he's caught. "People leave. But that's not your fault. If he's not into you then that's him failing to meet your basic criteria."

"Are you calling me basic?" she jokes, but she's smiling now. Then she pats the bed next to her. When Dev just pulls a face, she sighs and kicks the tissues and empty crisp packets off the duvet.

Dev relents, rolling his eyes, and he flops onto the bed like a lanky seal. He pulls himself into a sitting position, and Clara rests her head on his shoulder.

"You know," he says, "I can always get one of my aunties to set you up with a rebound. They love matchmaking. It's like, all they do."

"'One of my aunties'? How many aunts do you have?"

"I have four aunts," he specifies. "But 'aunties' just refers to an assortment of Indian women I'm not biologically related to."

Clara nods. "Okay. I'm down. But he has to be smart and funny, and like dogs, and wear glasses." Then she adds, counting these mandatory new traits on her fingers, "And care about the environment. And not think that books are always better than movies, because there are some exceptions."

"Like what?" Dev asks.

She shrugs. "Cloud Atlas...Forrest Gump..." She rolls her eyes as if she's trying to find examples in the corner of her ceiling. "Fight Club, Mrs Doubtfire...The Godfather..." She trails off, running out of films. "Probably more."

"Controversial," states Dev.

She laughs, and Dev can feel her grin against his shoulder. He puts his arm tentatively around her, and she burrows into the hug.

"Thanks for coming round," she says. "I know you're busy."

"I'm not that busy," he lies.

She closes her eyes. "How's that girl? Bethany?"

Dev laughs and pulls a face. "We're talking about your breakup –"

"No, I need gossip," she whines. "It's medicine. I thrive off it."

This is completely true. Dev rolls his eyes, trying to decide what level of information he wants to reveal. It feels mean to brag about his boring love life when Clara has just been unceremoniously dumped by her idiot boyfriend, but he does want to talk about Bethany.

"I don't know if I'm into her so much," he admits, and Clara gasps. "We only met her like a week ago anyway, it's fine."

"What the hell, Dev? I think she'd have said yes if you asked her out."

"Yeah but she's not funny," he says vaguely.

"People don't need to be funny!" Clara protests. "She's pretty and she's nice enough."

He hums noncommittally. "Anyway, do you know who Tracy Flynn is, she goes to my school?"

Clara's mouth drops open. "You're into Tracy Flynn?"

"Why, is she horrible?"

"No," she says, dragging it out like a lie. "But I mean, I know this guy who's dated her, and from what he says she's...you know, some stuff. I mean, not to shame her for her choices," Clara says quickly. "I just don't know if you'd be into that."

"Into what?" Dev pesters.

"You know," Clara says nebulously. "Two guys. DP." She looks up at him for a reaction, grinning.

Dev pulls a face. "Decimal place?" Then he realises, and his mouth opens with an, "Oh!"

Clara's laugh is so violent the bed shakes, and she rolls off it onto the floor, still cackling.

"Shut up," Dev groans, hiding his face in his hands. "Oh my god, you didn't even – you were vague! I've been doing stats problems all day, for all I knew you could've meant maths!"

"Maths?" she manages, out of breath from laughing.

Dev seizes a pillow and chucks it down at her, though she rolls to dodge it. "Well you should've been explicit," he disputes. "Instead of being all coy like some sort of 1930s debutante!"

"I mentioned two guys! What did you think I meant, a study group?"

"Stop laughing, go back to being heartbroken," he declares, flopping back in the bed so he's lying on his back. He kicks a stray wrapper out of the way. "I'm leaving. Goodbye forever."

"My stomach hurts," she says, her voice shaking with laughter.

"That's a symptom of diverticulitis and gastroenteritis," he grumbles.

There is a sudden thump. Clara has hurled the pillow back at Dev, and it's landed hard on his legs.

"It's a symptom of laughing too hard at your naïveté," she adds.

"Ew," he says. "I can just hear you pronouncing it with that little 'i' with two dots."

"You know it, boy."

Dev laughs, and his chest relaxes into a contented stillness. He stares up at Clara's ceiling, where a tiny cluster of blue glow-in-the-dark stars have been pasted.

It's odd, thinking back to when they'd first met, to imagine he'd be lying in her room consoling her about her breakup. Admittedly, the 'lying in her bed' part would probably have caught his attention back when he had those confusing feelings all those months ago, although he'd probably have imagined something at least a little more alluring. But Dev thinks that this is better. At least at this point in their lives, this is what he needs – this is what both of them need. Just friendship. Just comfortable, reassuring, friendship. And it's nice.