Page 57 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

is your blood as red as this?

I.

(NO)

YOU ALWAYS SAID, Myrna Semyonova, that we weren’t right for each other. And it
always made my heart sink when you said that, but my answer was always:
You’re wrong. I’ll show you. I’ll show you. I’ve got something that other lovers

would give a great deal to possess: a perfect memory of the very first time I saw
you. I was fifteen, and my handsome, laconic eighteen-year-old brother burned
brightest among my heroes. I followed him everywhere—well, he sometimes
managed to escape me, but most of the time he didn’t make too much of an
effort. That’s Arjun’s gift; never trying too hard, always doing just enough.
Somehow he knew how to be with people, when to make eye contact and when

to gaze thoughtfully into the distance, how to prove that you’re paying attention
to what you’re being told. It was Jyoti’s breaking up with him that improved his
people skills. For three years Jyoti had been warning him and warning him about
his tendency not to listen to her, or to anyone. Don’t you ever think that one day
you might miss something really important, Arjun, she’d say. Something that
someone can only say one time? He tried to focus. Well, he claimed that he was
trying, but he still tuned out. If Jyoti was talking, then he’d gaze adoringly at her

but not hear a word, and with everyone else he’d just fall silent and then insert a
generic comment into the space left for him to speak in. God knows where his
mind used to go.
One day Jyoti met up with him at the café down the road for a make-or-break
conversation. She had a favor to ask him, she said, and if he didn’t at least

consider doing it then there was no point in their being together. Jyoti, you have
my full attention, he said immediately. Tell me—I’m listening. Fifteen minutes