Page 60 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

it?) and when Joe said that he’d been trying to talk to you but you just sat there

reading your book, I searched all the harder.
“What kind of person brings a book to a party,” Arjun said expressionlessly,
without looking at me, but he gave a little nod that I interpreted as a suggestion
that I seek this girl out.
“What’s her name?” I asked. Joe told me. I found you half buried in a
beanbag, pretending to read that dense textbook that takes all the fun out of
puppeteering, the one your father swears by—Brambani’s War Between the

Fingers and the Thumb. Curse stuffy old Brambani. Maybe his lessons are easier
to digest when filtered through stubbornly unshed tears. You had a string of fairy
lights wrapped around your neck. I sort of understood how that would be
comforting, the lights around your neck. Sometimes I dream I’m falling, and it’s
not so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I’m sick of

it, but then a noose stops me short and I think, well, at least I’m not falling
anymore. Clearly I hadn’t arrived in your life a moment too soon. You looked at
me, and this is how I saw you, when first I saw you: I saw your eyes like flint
arrows, and your chin set against the world, and I saw the curve of your lips,
which is so beautiful that it’s almost illusory—your eyes freeze a person, but
then the flickering flame of your mouth beckons.
Thank God Joe was so uncharacteristically panicky and stupid that evening. I

discovered that I could talk to you in natural, complete sentences. It was simple:
If I talked to you, perhaps you would kiss me. And I had to have a kiss from you:
To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of
me . . .

—

AS FOR WHAT you saw of me—I think you saw a kid in a gray dress gawping at
you like you were the meaning of life. You immediately began talking to me as
if I were a child at your knee. You told me about how stories come to our aid in
times of need. You’d recently been on a flight from Prague, you told me, and the
plane had gone through a terrifyingly long tunnel of turbulence up there in the
clouds. “Everyone on the plane was freaking out, except the girl beside me,” you
said. “She was just reading her book—maybe a little bit faster than usual, but

otherwise untroubled. I said to her: ‘Have you noticed that we might be about to
crash?’ And she said: ‘Yes I did notice that actually, which makes it even more
important for me to know how this ends.’”