I met Nico last June. The day began as every Sunday morning had until then, with me waking up to my friend Michelle snoring gently beside me, swaddled in most of the duvet, and my parents moving around downstairs, laughing and singing along to Joni Mitchell, while my father made pancakes.
It’s one of my favorite traditions: waking up on Sunday mornings to Michelle, Joni Mitchell, and pancakes. Given how many we have now, that’s saying something. But you just do things, don’t you? Then you do them again and again without even realizing it. That’s how they become traditions, I suppose. Tiny pebbles of joy that disturb the monotony of running for the bus every morning and homework on Sunday nights. Joni Mitchell and pancakes. My and Michelle’s birthday. Diwali at our house. Lunar New Year at Michelle’s.
I should say now that Michelle and I are just friends because when you’re into girls and you speak about someone the way I do about her, it’s often mistaken for something more. For some unbearable, unrequited crush that has left me pining and miserable and settling for being her best friend. Nothing could be further from the truth. Michelle is, in every way other than blood, my sister. Our parents were friends before we were born. Before Mara and Michelle there was Mads and Nicole. Mads and Nicole and Vas and James.
We were born four days apart and grew up next door to each other, running in and out of each other’s houses with scrapes on our knees and whatever treasures we’d found at the beach. Fistfuls of shells. Smooth nuggets of candy-colored sea glass. Spiky mermaid’s purses that my father would tell us to check for pearls.
As such, everyone used to refer to us as The Twins, even though we look nothing alike. My parents are Indian and hers are Chinese, so we both have dark hair and eyes, but that’s where the resemblance ends. My eyes are a shade or two lighter than hers and Michelle’s hair is longer—it’s been down to her waist for as long as I can remember—and shampoo-ad smooth, whereas mine is thick and unruly and barely brushes my shoulders.
I don’t even notice it most of the time—how different we are—until we take a photo together. Even as kids, it was obvious, but now we’re sixteen it’s pronounced to the point that the twin thing is almost comical. Everything about Michelle is small. She’s small in stature (if not in voice), with a small, sweet face and small, sweet hands and small, sweet fingernails that she paints the sweetest shade of pink. When she smiles—really smiles—her eyes disappear and when she laughs—really laughs—she snorts. But I’m tall, like my father, and round-hipped and round-faced like my mother. Plus, my skin is much darker than Michelle’s. Mine is the same deep brown as my father’s, whereas Michelle is nearer to her mother’s warm brown that glows in the sunshine.
It’s always been me and Michelle. Michelle and me. We’re always together, so she was with me that morning. The morning I met Nico. We were walking through Brighton train station and I glanced at the clock to see it was 11:11. 11:11 on June 11th. I told myself to make a wish because that had to mean something, and when we walked out, there Nico was, standing on a bench with her guitar, her chin raised to the sun as she sang.
It was nothing, just a Sunday morning in June.
Then it wasn’t nothing.
It was startling.
I hadn’t even met her yet and I already knew that I’d never get over her.
Even now, I can remember how my heart ballooned in my chest as I abandoned Michelle mid-anecdote to join the crowd gathered around Nico. And I remember how the sun picked her out like a spotlight, foiling her jaw-length black hair so it almost looked silver as her hips swayed and her fine fingers plucked at the strings of the guitar. I was aware of Michelle next to me, telling me that she kind of looked like Park E Hyun in Best Mistake, and I guess she does, but I almost don’t want to tell you that because I can’t bear the thought of you picturing her as anyone else but her. Just know that she was beautiful. Delicate. All pale skin and inky eyelashes and this air of easy, enviable nonchalance as she sang up at the sky as though none of us were there.
But most of all, I remember holding my breath as I waited for her to open her eyes. When she finally did and they settled on mine, I saw the corners of her mouth twitch—just for a second—and that was it.
I was undone.
With that, something was suddenly, urgently, different. I didn’t know what it was, whether it was love or lust or some fleeting, devouring infatuation. I just knew it had changed me so thoroughly that I’d look back on that moment one day—that day being today, apparently—and say, That was it. That was when everything changed.
And I was right, wasn’t I?
When everything came back into focus and the world began to take shape again—the gulls bobbing and shrieking over our heads, someone’s perfume, thick and sweet, the number seven bus spitting out another gaggle of fidgety-looking people eager to get their trains—I expected everything to look different. For the sky to be pink or the air to smell of amusement-park donuts and adventure or for the sun to be low enough to touch. But everything looked exactly the same, even though it didn’t feel the same at all.
Six months later and I wouldn’t say that Nico and I were together, but we weren’t not together, either. We were stuck in some maddening purgatory between the two.
We’d kissed, but never held hands. I knew she was fifteen and a Cancer, but I didn’t know her birthday. I knew she was an only child, like me, but she never talked about her father so I didn’t ask because, I figured, there was a reason she never talked about her father. I knew she lived in Rottingdean, but I didn’t know which school she went to. And I’d never met any of her friends, even though she’d met mine. Not willingly, in fairness. On the few occasions she’d acquiesced, she was sullen and distracted, which confirmed to my friends that she wasn’t right for me and confirmed to me that us hanging out with them wouldn’t become a regular occurrence.
So, that Sunday morning I woke up to Michelle, Joni Mitchell, and pancakes, Nico was still as unfathomable—and unreachable—as when I found her singing outside Brighton station.
By then it was New Year’s Eve, but instead of feeling a fizz of excitement at the promise of a new year, I did what I’d done every morning since I’d met her.
As soon as I opened my eyes, I checked my phone.
I’d fallen asleep with it in my hand, so it took all of a second to discover that I only had a text from May.
“No word from Nico,” Michelle said as she caught me frowning at the screen. She said it with such ease—such certainty—that I refused to give her the satisfaction.
“I’m just reading a text from May.”
Then she frowned as she reached for her phone. “There’s nothing in the group chat.”
“She only texted me.”
“Why only you?” The crease between Michelle’s eyebrows deepened, and then her eyes widened. “No!”
I shook my head with a theatrical sigh.
“Mara, no! She’s not back together with Chesca?”
“They hooked up last night.”
“No!” Michelle slapped my arm.
I made a show of rubbing where she’d hit me. “Um. Ow.”
“But Chesca is a total fuckgirl!”
“No, she isn’t.”
“She is!” Michelle shrieked, looking at me like I’d lost it.
“She’s not. She just isn’t out yet, so she’s still processing.”
That made Michelle back down.
“Well,” she huffed, “that’s no excuse to treat May like shit.”
That was true.
“If you ghost me,” Michelle warned, “you’d better stay dead.”
I know I was defending her, but Chesca was awful to May. They’d met in the queue for a gig and things were super intense for a few weeks, and then May didn’t hear from her again. Not until she met someone else. It was as though Chesca knew because she unblocked her and sent a Hello, stranger text.
Then they started things up again and the same thing happened.
Over and over for a year.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
“That explains why she only told you,” Michelle said as she scrolled through her phone.
I knew it was a dig about Nico, but I still took the bait. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She ignored me, sitting up and fussing over the duvet so she didn’t have to meet my glare.
I shouldn’t have, but I pushed it. “Why would she only tell me? Because I’m into girls as well?”
I could tell that Michelle was going to say something else but she thought better of it.
“Because you’re a hopeless romantic, Mara. Of course you’d want May to give her another chance.”
That stung, but it swiftly solidified into something sharper.
Something with purpose.
“Well, I’m sorry that we can’t all have the perfect relationship like you and Lewis, Michelle.”
As soon as each word snapped off my tongue I regretted it, but at least she looked at me again.
“I don’t have the perfect relationship, Mara. I have the relationship I deserve.”
It sounded so easy when she said it like that.
“Mara, I’m just saying—”
“What are you saying, Michelle?” I interrupted, shooting for sarcastic, but landing on surly.
“I’m saying that you’ll never get this time back. It sucks that we can’t finish high school together, but Stringer doesn’t do A-Levels so we have to split up.”
“We should have all gone to the same school.”
“Mara, we tried, but me, you, and Erin got into BHASVIC, and Louise and May got into Varndean. What can we do?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “I know.”
“So when we go back on Tuesday, that’s it. We only have five months until exams start. This is the last time all of us will be together.”
“I know,” I said again, more tightly this time because I did know. I was acutely aware that after years of our GCSEs being on our tail, they were suddenly right there, behind us, lights flashing and horn blaring.
It’s all we’d talked about.
And all we tried not to talk about.
These are our days, May kept telling us.
I was aware of each one ticking past, but I still didn’t feel what I was supposed to be feeling.
“Do you, Mara? Because it’ll never be like it is now. We’ll keep in touch, but it won’t be the same.”
“Why are you yelling at me?”
“I’m not yelling,” she yelled. She exhaled sharply through her nose, then lowered her voice. “I’m just saying, you’ll never get this time back. Don’t waste it worrying about her.”
I love Michelle, but I wish I was allowed half the patience she expects in return. Wait. I shouldn’t have said that. That isn’t fair. She was worried about me, wasn’t she? So, maybe it wasn’t so much what she was saying, rather how she was saying it. But that’s the trouble with being as close as we are.
Michelle would never speak to Erin, Louise, or May the way she spoke to me.
If you didn’t know her—or us—you’d be forgiven for dismissing her as having an icy heart. I know better, of course. She’s not my sister, but I still hold her in the same regard in that I can say whatever I please about her, but I would fight anyone who says a bad word about her. So, yes, Michelle is frustratingly forthright and immovably logical, but she also listens—really listens—and has the courage and humility to concede when she’s wrong. Even if, as she’d say if she were here now, that has never been necessary.
So when Michelle doesn’t care about something, she lets it go; but if she doesn’t, that’s how you know she really cares. And she really cares about me because she wouldn’t let it go.
“I mean, you don’t even know her, Mara.”
That stung as well, but when it passed, it only made me more defiant.
“I do know her, Michelle.”
It came out sharper than I intended.
Usually I would have softened it with a joke, but I didn’t want to soften it.
I wanted her to hear.
To believe me.
But the truth is: Michelle was right.
I didn’t know Nico.
Back then I thought I did, but I didn’t.
Not really.
Nico had this way of talking that made me stand a little straighter. Smile a little brighter. Try a little harder. She’d talk and talk and talk, but she never said anything. Nothing real, anyway. She talked about the gigs she wanted to go to and the tattoos she wanted to get. She wouldn’t let me get a word in, then talk over me if I did, interrupt me, interrupt herself, go in another direction, then back again. But the next day, she’d leave me on read and it was as though she’d said too much, so she wouldn’t say anything for weeks.
Then I’d walk out of school to find her waiting for me and I’d be so relieved to see her again, but she’d be brooding and unreachable, the skin under her eyes bruised with some unspoken agony she obviously didn’t want to talk about as she sat there, picking at her nail polish.
Her disinterest provoked the opposite response in me, and I’d try to bring her back, telling her story after story. How our parents found out they were pregnant with Michelle and me on the same day. How I was born two days early and Michelle was born two days late, in the car park of Gala Bingo because she couldn’t wait. How we got chicken pox at the same time. How I broke my arm jumping off the climbing frame at Queens Park when we were seven because Michelle promised to catch me but didn’t. About the shoebox of postcards and photographs under my bed. All those places we’d been before Michelle’s parents had to close their travel agency. India when we were one. Thailand when we were two. Sri Lanka when we were three. Bali when we were four. Morocco when we were five.
It pains me sometimes, how I’ve seen the world and I don’t remember. But I still told Nico the stories as though I did. The blue and white of the Hotel Riad al Madina, where Jimi Hendrix stayed when he was in Essaouira. The blue and yellow of Jardin Majorelle. How the color of the Hawa Mahal changes from pink to red to gold when the sun sets. How the coconuts in Sri Lanka are bright orange.
I sit cross-legged on my bedroom floor sometimes, staring at Michelle and me, standing side by side in matching bathing suits, our little feet touching the earth of some out-of-reach place I’d never know I’d been to if I wasn’t holding a photograph.
Nico didn’t have any stories, though.
None that she’d told me, anyway.
She only ever spoke about sometime.
Someday.
Always tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
What she was going to do. What she was going to see. Who she was going to be. How she wanted to go study music at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and wanted to see the Northern Lights in Reykjavík and the puffins in St. Kilda. Wanted to sleep under the stars, somewhere wild and open. Wanted to do everything.
All of it.
She spoke of her plans with the same fondness I told my stories, except she was nostalgic for a life she hadn’t started living yet.
“I do know her,” I told Michelle again.
But she rolled her eyes because despite spending six months lying to her—lying and smiling and making excuses—what little she did know about Nico was enough to convince her that wasn’t true at all.
That’s the thing with Michelle: she has this horrible habit of only ever seeing things as they actually are.
Whereas I gild them until they become something they never actually were.
It’s funny because if you didn’t know us, you’d say that me and Michelle were completely incompatible. Me with my onion-skin feelings and her with that knife of a tongue. I’d been thinking about it a lot—long before any of this happened, before Nico—about how everything I’d done and seen and laughed about or mourned over was with Michelle. I don’t know if I’ve ever eaten anything without her trying it first. I don’t know if I’m actually scared of spiders, or if I’m only scared of them because she is. Do I even like the music I listen to? Or do I like it because it reminds me of dancing around Michelle’s room in sheet masks?
And even when we don’t agree, do I really disagree or am I just being contrary? Did I go one way because she went the other? Did I want to cut my hair, or did I do it because hers is long? When I paint my nails red, is it because she paints hers pink? Or when I read Nora Ephron is it because she loves Taylor Jenkins Reid?
I’ve always said that our lives overlap, but the truth is, I was beginning to question where Michelle ended and I began. If I’d ever be able to unpick which parts of me are mine, not ours.
When I went back to my phone, pretending to be absorbed by a video of a dog singing along to “I Will Survive,” Michelle changed tack. “What would you say to me if Lewis treated me the way Nico treats you?”
I told myself to keep smiling. “I’d say that if he makes you happy—”
She cut me off with a snort because that was bullshit and we both knew it.
But back then, I really thought I was happy.
Or I could be.
It was the could be that made all the other stuff worth it.
“I know you’ve just come out, Mara, but that doesn’t mean you have to settle for the first girl you meet.”
I finally looked up from my phone. “I’m not settling, Michelle.”
“This is Brighton. You can throw a Birkenstock and hit someone else into girls.”
I tilted my head at her. “Nice.”
“I’m just saying.” She shrugged sheepishly.
“Nico isn’t Chesca,” I told her, but I hated the way my voice sounded all high and shaky.
Michelle ignored that and went back to scrolling, so I said it again.
“She isn’t. It’s not the same thing.”
I remember how hot my cheeks were, how each breath was suddenly sharper. It’s funny because I always thought that when I felt that strongly for someone, it would be soft. Delicate. I had no idea it would be so fierce.
So feral.
Like I had no control over it.
“There’s no point having this conversation if you’re not going to listen, Mara.”
“I am listening.”
But I wasn’t because, looking back on it now, we shouldn’t have even needed to have the conversation.
This is what should have happened: I met a girl, and she mucked me around, so I walked away.
But like I said, these things are rarely simple.
All I know is that the first three months were perfect, but then summer was over and by the time we went back to school, something had changed. The space between texts went from minutes to hours to days to nothing at all.
At first, I thought it was me; that I was trying to force it, turn a summer romance into a relationship. But then Nico would demand to see me, and when I arrived, she’d be waiting for me with an aimless, dangerous energy that I didn’t know whether to run to or away from. We’d have a dizzying few weeks where we saw each other every day. We’d talk and kiss and make plans I was sure she’d keep this time and I’d go home, my hair warm with sunshine and the smell of grass between my fingers from the daisy chains we’d made and worn like crowns.
But then it would happen again.
If you’d asked me back then why I persisted, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Looking back on it now, I guess I wasn’t holding on to the relationship we had—if you can even call it a relationship—I was holding on to what it could be.
The promise of it.
The promise of the next call, the next adventure.
The promise of a promise.
I know now that you can survive on hope alone.
But then, what is love if not the triumph of hope over logic?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I loved Nico.
Not yet anyway.
It was the not yet that kept me going, though.
Kept me trying.
Kept me daydreaming about what it would be like after not yet. If it would be like it is in all those books I’d read. Not just bewildering and breathless, but steady. Easy. I wouldn’t have to stop myself before I kissed her on the cheek when we greeted one another and I could hold her hand while we walked. We’d swap books and share ice creams and maybe—someday—there would be two toothbrushes in a bathroom somewhere.
“This isn’t how it should be, you know? This isn’t romantic,” Michelle told me.
Just like she did the first time Nico disappeared, then messaged me a week later like nothing happened. I was thrilled—and relieved—to hear from her again, but Michelle didn’t berate me. Instead, she told me that I read too many books. I didn’t know that was a bad thing, but she said that all those stories had made me think love was hard won. Dramatic. Something to fight for. Something you fail at until you finally succeed. A mystery to be solved with tenacity and intuition. You think romance is about aching and pining and wandering the moors in search of your lost Heathcliff, she’d told me when I asked if it was too soon to reply to Nico.
I’d told her it wasn’t like that, but thinking about it now, I guess Nico made my quiet life not so quiet. Until I met her, I had no idea how quiet it was. How small. But each time I saw her I felt my world grow a little bigger—a little louder—and I couldn’t go back.
I didn’t fit there anymore.
So, yeah, I was miserable when she disappeared, but then I’d hear my phone buzz and feel a spark of hope when I reached for it. Nine times out of ten it wouldn’t be her, but that tenth time it would be and I’d be so faint with relief it made the waiting worth it because it felt so good to know that Nico was still thinking about me.
That I hadn’t been forgotten.
Reading that back, it sounds pathetic, but there’s nothing worse than being forgotten, is there? I think I’d rather be hated than forgotten because at least hate speaks of the absence—the loss—of affection and betrays some emotion, as tender and tired as it may be. But to be forgotten? That implies there’s nothing left. Or there was nothing there to begin with.
How terrible to be thought of one moment and not the next.
How cruel to be thinking about someone and know that they never think of you at all.
“Mara, it shouldn’t be this hard,” Michelle told me, and when my gaze dipped to my phone she snatched it out of my hand. I gasped as she said, “You haven’t heard from her for a week. Again.”
“It’s Christmas,” I reminded her. “She’s probably been busy with family and stuff.”
“Exactly! It’s Christmas and she couldn’t even send you a text?”
“She messaged me on Christmas morning,” I lied, then panicked when I remembered that Michelle had my phone in her hand, bracing myself, sure that she’d arch an eyebrow at me and say, Let’s check, shall we?
And she did arch an eyebrow at me, but she said, “Mara, it shouldn’t be this hard.”
I felt something in my chest begin to bow then, like a shelf under the weight of too many books, because maybe she was right. Maybe it was time to tuck Nico into the shoebox under my bed with all the postcards and photographs, more out of reach than any of them.
But defeat is a difficult thing to surrender to when you haven’t even been given a chance to fight.
“I hear what you’re saying, Michelle, but…” I started to say, then trailed off when I heard my phone buzz in her hand and she glanced down at it.
“What?” I asked when she groaned and handed it back to me.
I assumed it was another message from May, gushing about how much Chesca had changed.
How it would be different this time.
But it was Nico.
morning sunshine xx
miss you
need to see your face
what you doing today
I tried to be nonchalant, but I’m pretty sure I was swooning with relief.
When I looked up at Michelle again, I probably shouldn’t have smirked, but you had to give it to Nico.
Her timing was impeccable.