“Morning, Malakars!” Nico sang as she swept into the café on Sunday morning. She was obviously feeling better, her eyes clear and her cheeks flushed as she skipped over to the counter in the black embroidered kaftan she’d bought the week before. And she was wearing makeup. Not much, but I noted the sweep of black eyeliner and how much pinker her lips were when she smiled and exposed the slight gap between her front teeth.
“Morning, Nico,” my mother said before I could as my father emerged from the pantry.
“Nico!” he cheered, holding up the bag of coffee beans he was carrying. “Do you want a latte?”
“No!” I pointed at him, then turned to do the same to her. “No coffee. You’re detoxing, remember?”
“Don’t I know it.” She stuck her tongue out. “It feels like The Great Purge will never end.”
When she crossed her arms, I noticed the sharp lines of her collarbones poking through her kaftan and I remember asking myself how much the loose fabric was hiding. I knew that Nico had lost weight in those months I hadn’t seen her, but it had become more pronounced.
Still, she seemed full of energy as she clapped her hands and announced, “I brought you a present!”
My mother didn’t even try to be cool about it. “I love presents!”
Nico reached into the pink-and-red Feminist Bookshop tote bag hanging from her shoulder and pulled out a dark wooden picture frame. When Nico handed it to my mother, she squealed.
“Oh my God!”
“My mum made it,” Nico said with a clumsy smile.
“I love it!” She turned the frame to show my father and I saw it was a needlepoint of a steaming cup of coffee that said, MALAKAR’S. HOME OF THE EXTRA HOT LATTE, which made my father howl.
“I love it!” my mother told her again as she twisted around and took the photo of Michelle and me as three-year-olds, sitting side by side on the counter, off the wall and replaced it with Nico’s needlepoint.
“Nice,” I said when she tossed the frame on the side by the order book.
“Oh.” Nico raised her finger at me, then reached into her tote bag again. “And I got this for you, Mara.”
“Me?” I was so thrilled that I let out a small chuckle as she produced a book.
“Oh my God,” I said under my breath.
The Price of Salt.
It was as though my heart had tripped on a paving slab and when it started again, twice as fast, I heard Michelle telling me it didn’t mean anything.
It was just a book.
But it’s a sapphic classic.
“Have you read it?” I heard her ask as I stared at the cover, my hands trembling.
It doesn’t mean anything, I heard Michelle tell me again.
“It’s my favorite book,” she told me when I made myself look up, her pupils suddenly twice the size.
But before I could tell her that it was mine as well, a customer appeared at my side.
“Are your mangoes local?” they asked, peering at the Danishes.
My mother didn’t flinch. “Of course. I picked them this morning at East Brighton Park.”
I hadn’t been to the Booth Museum since we went there on a school trip when we were eight. With Ms. Fisher, funnily enough, who had to tell Louise to stop daring us to touch the yellowing skeletons while Michelle told us what each one was. It was just as bizarre as I remembered. Gloriously Victorian, stacked floor to ceiling with glass cases featuring dioramas of stuffed birds and animals in various unnaturally natural poses.
The butterflies were still my favorite, I discovered. When we were eight, Michelle had refused to go near them even though they were long dead, saying that butterflies couldn’t be trusted because they were just moths with better outfits. Nico loved them, though, her kaftan floating as she drifted from case to case, pointing to some that were as pale as the pages of an old book, while others seemed to exist in sheer defiance of them, their wings shimmering with splashes of Brighton blue and egg-yolk yellow and glowing, gaudy lime green.
“Do you need to get back?” she asked, her eyes bright with something as we left the Booth. “I’m not distracting you, am I? I know your GCSEs start soon, so you probably need to study, right?”
“You’re not distracting me,” I told her, even though she was.
Distracting me in the most delightfully corrupting way.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. I was in the library all day yesterday, so my parents made me promise to take today off. Dad’s worried my head is going to explode. Which, after trying to perfect quadratic formulas, is entirely possible.”
“OK.” She shivered with excitement. “What do you want to do?”
“Shall we walk?”
“Let’s walk.”
So we walked.
Walked with the sort of urgency that only a sunny Sunday when you have nowhere else to be allows. It’s funny, because from the moment I walked out of Brighton station and found her, I’d always been achingly aware of the space between us. Not just the days—or weeks—when I hadn’t heard from her, but how near I let myself get to her, constantly calculating the difference between enough and too much to make sure I got it just right.
But the new Nico had no regard for personal space. It wasn’t like before when she’d walk stiffly beside me, so quickly that I had to gallop to keep up. Now she was everywhere at once. Skipping and cackling as she asked question after question. Our knuckles would catch and our hips would graze, only for a second, but it would be enough to make me weak. To make my legs unsteady and my heart marvel at the wonder of her.
That afternoon was punctuated by each of those swift, startling collisions, and each time they happened, it reignited something in me that made me want to break my promise to Michelle to be careful. To not get carried away. Because with each step, I watched Nico grow a little stronger. A little brighter. So bright that I told myself not to stand too close to her, like I was soaking up her light, or something.
I could see a new Nico taking shape right in front of me.
A Nico who laughed and twirled and pointed to things as though she was seeing them for the first time.
Thinking about it now, she was, wasn’t she?
She was seeing everything for the first time.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and when she spotted a mural ahead and ran over to see it, I stopped and watched her. Her sure, straight back. The rise and fall of her curls. The flutter of her kaftan. But then she noticed that I was no longer by her side and stopped, waiting for me to catch up, then smiled at me when I did, and I remember how it made my heart sing at knowing that she’d registered my absence. She slipped her arm around my shoulders and took a photo of us in front of the mural, her cheek so close to mine that I could feel the heat of her. And I remember telling myself to memorize it as I closed my eyes and inhaled so deeply, I was sure I’d inhaled the sun. This ball of heat in my chest that burned everything away until it felt like we’d finally made it out of the shallows and into the open water, our future rolling from our feet, as far and as deep as the sea they’d pulled her out of five months before.
I wonder if she felt it too?
I think she might have because then she asked what I had planned for the summer. Asked if I wanted to go with her to the Brighton Book Festival and Pride and to see some band I’d never heard of who were playing the Dome at the end of August. And I didn’t know what to say. The old Nico wouldn’t commit to two Saturdays in a row, let alone a gig in three months’ time. Not that we’d even been to a gig before that instore at Resident. She’d tell me about them the next day or want to meet up beforehand. We’d grab a coffee and kiss for a while until she checked her phone, then say she had to go.
Thinking about it now, I guess I was just someone to waste time with.
Someone to keep her company until it was time for her to do what she actually wanted to do.
But the new Nico wanted to be with me. Before, we’d just walk around, her talking and me hurt and burning for her to feel something that never came. But now she talked to me, rather than at me. She even asked about boring stuff, like school. She wanted to know how my revision was going and when my exams were so she could make a note of them and send positive energy. I teased her about that, of course, and she laughed—wild and bright—saying that the months of kale and reiki had finally rubbed off on her.
Oh, it was perfect. Nico was perfect. So happy. So light. So excited about everything as we sat cross-legged on the grass beneath the shadow of the Pavilion, making daisy chains. Even the afternoon was perfect. The first fine day of the year, the sun high and bright, crowning the tops of our heads.
It’s always my favorite day of the year when, from nowhere, you feel spring tip into summer. The year before—before I met Nico, before any of this—Michelle, Louise, Erin, May, and I had sat on the beach, drinking bubble tea, and I remember telling myself to enjoy it because soon the tourists would be there, discovering our secret places. Then everything would be loud and strange and there’d be no room for us as they took up all the tables at the café and their towels claimed our favorite spots on the beach so they became their favorite spots on the beach. Until September when they left with pockets full of pebbles and Brighton was ours again.
That afternoon, I told myself the same thing.
To enjoy it.
I should have known what Nico was planning, though, when we eventually ended up outside Nando’s.
“No,” I told her sternly, shaking my head. “Look how sick you were last weekend after one latte.”
But she was already heading inside, and when I followed, she smiled sweetly at me.
“I’ll go easy, I promise,” she said, pointing at the chili poster. “Lemon and herb.”
And I know—I know—I should have tried harder to stop her, but she looked so happy as someone led us to a table. A table that I knew from experience was her favorite, because it was by the sauces.
So I let her order her lemon and herb chicken and watched as she devoured it, then waited for her to have a Proustian rush. And she did—sort of—as she swooned and said, “I could eat this every day.”
But that was it as we talked and she tried all the sauces. I don’t know how she did it, but she got it all out of me. Everything. Things I hadn’t even said out loud before. Like how scared I was that everything would change when we’d done our GCSEs. How I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go away for uni. How I worried it was weird that I wanted to stay at home when everyone else couldn’t wait to leave.
It was as though with each question, she was searching for a loose thread until she found it, then tugged.
Let me lead her through my life until I’d told her everything.
Every fear.
Every hope.
Every secret.
Looking back on it now, I wonder if she kept it all.
Stored it somewhere.
My memories where hers should be.
When I was done, she looked at me with a slow smile and said, “I told my therapist about you.”
My heart thundered because no sentence that begins with I told my therapist about you ends well.
“My therapist says I’m trying too hard.” She twirled her straw in her glass of Fanta. “She says I’m so focused on trying to remember who I used to be that I’m never just here, you know? In the present.”
I get that, I thought as I recalled how May tells me that I’m always thinking, never just being.
“My therapist says I need to be more present. So I told her what you said.”
My heart hiccuped. “What I said?”
“Yeah. When we promised to be exactly who we are right now because there’s nothing wrong with who we are.” Nico stopped to take a deep breath, then exhaled. “So, I need to tell you something, Mara. But it’s really hard, so you’re going to have to give me a second, OK? Because you’re literally my only friend and I’m scared that once I tell you this, things are going to be weird between us and I don’t want that because this is the safest I’ve felt since they hauled me out of the sea. But I need to talk to someone, OK?”
“OK,” I said when she stopped to suck in a breath.
And I don’t know how, because it felt like a trapdoor had opened beneath me and I was falling.
Falling and falling.
“I don’t know how else to say this, Mara, so I’m just going to say it, OK?”
“OK,” I said again, but all I could think was Don’t say it.
Don’t tell me that you know.
Don’t tell me that you know that I’ve been lying to you.
But she didn’t.
She said, “I realized something when I was reading The Price of Salt, which is why I gave it to you.”
I was so sure that she knew that it derailed me for a moment and I blinked at her, my lips parted.
“I realized…” She trailed off, her cheeks going from pink to red. “You know?”
I just continued to stare at her.
Nico looked confused. “Have you read The Price of Salt?”
I nodded.
“So you know what it’s about?”
I nodded again.
I watched her eyebrows rise as she waited for me to catch up. “It’s about…”
She paused so I could finish the sentence.
“You like girls!” I gasped, then covered my mouth with my hand.
I didn’t mean to yell it like that.
Not while we were in a packed Nando’s on a Sunday afternoon.
I’d forgotten that we were until a dozen heads turned to glance our way.
I took my hand away from my mouth to press it to my forehead. “Shit. Sorry.” I cringed, my whole face burning when everyone around us went back to their conversations. “Did I just out you in Nando’s?”
I was mortified, but Nico just laughed. “Like I care what they think. I care what you think, though.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “Like I said, I don’t want things to be weird between us, Mara. I couldn’t bear it.”
I had to choose my next words very carefully, I knew, the burden of it pinning me to the chair as the words jostled for space in my mouth, repositioning themselves as I thought about what she really needed to hear.
“Things won’t be weird, I promise. Nothing’s changed.”
I saw her relax then. She looked up at the ceiling as she let go of a long breath, and when I saw her eyelids stuttering in the fluorescent light, I felt my heart flickering on and off in my chest like a light bulb.
On.
Off.
On.
Off.
On.
Off.
Then she looked down at me again with a loose smile. “I’m glad I told you, Mara.”
“I’m glad you felt able to tell me. Even if I yelled it out for everyone in Nando’s to hear.”
The back of my neck stung, but she just laughed again, her dark curls trembling in time with my heart as she looked me in the eye again. “And you promise that things aren’t weird now?”
I drew a cross over my chest with the tip of my finger. I don’t think she believed me, though, so I said, “I had a similar reaction to reading The Price of Salt.”
“Yeah?” she said, her eyes wide, and she looked so relieved it made my heart ache.
“So you like girls.” She pointed at me, her cheeks red again.
“Yeah.”
Then she pointed at herself. “And I like girls.”
“Yeah.”
When I nodded, she nodded back. “That’s very interesting.”
“It certainly falls within the category of interesting.”
She looked at me for a beat longer than was comfortable, the corners of her mouth twitching.
“Can I ask”—she leaned in—“how did you know that you, you know?”
“Prefer girls?” I laughed and I heard how silly it sounded. How nervous. “I didn’t.”
Nico frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I won’t lie and say part of me always knew, but I did know I didn’t feel what I was supposed to, you know? Then I read The Price of Salt and it articulated something I wasn’t able to put into words yet. It made me feel what I was supposed to feel, but didn’t, when I read the books and watched the films my friends loved.”
Nico nodded.
“I don’t know.” I stopped to take a gulp of Fanta because I needed a second before I said, “I guess something changed after that. Something in me settled. Went quiet.”
Nico nodded again.
“Michelle was the first to notice it, of course.” I wiped a smear of lipstick from the lip of my glass with the pad of my thumb. “How every few months, I’d make a new friend and become obsessed with them. There was Jo Ferne in Year Eight, who I used to swap books with. We’d leave notes between the pages that said stuff like Is this creepy or romantic? and Bella shouldn’t be with either of them. She should be with Alice.”
Nico almost choked on a chip. “Oh my God.” She coughed, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Is this when I confess to rereading the Twilight books I found hidden at the back of my wardrobe?”
The old Nico read Twilight? I was about to shriek.
Luckily, before I could, she said, “Bella should have absolutely been with Alice, not Edward.”
I raised my glass to her as if to say, Right? and she laughed as I said, “Then there was Francesca Tate, who had super-shiny blonde hair and wore headbands and cute little pink cardigans, which isn’t my thing at all, but I met her handing out flyers in Churchill Square and made Michelle and our parents go to her church.”
Nico leaned back and stared at me. “Church?”
“I know,” I said, still appalled with myself. “It lasted until Francesca told me that Tipping the Velvet was ungodly because it was about ‘lesbians’ and tried to get me to sign up for a ten-week Alpha Course.”
Nico had to cover her mouth before she spat her Macho Peas on me.
“I’m sorry!” She shook her head when she’d recovered, but I could tell that she wasn’t at all.
“Then there was Cat at Meowko. That was the summer I was addicted to bubble tea. Then there was Rachel Roland. She was the opposite of Francesca with her smudged eyeliner and cigarettes.”
She kind of looked like you, I thought, but made myself take another sip of Fanta.
“And who was after Rachel Roland?” Nico asked eagerly.
You, I almost said as I felt myself melting under the heat of her gaze.
“No one,” I lied. “I tried to stop doing it after Michelle pointed out that it was a pattern.”
And it was. I’d meet someone, fall endlessly, senselessly in love with them, but do nothing about it and be heartbroken— and astonished—when nothing came of it. Then I’d mourn for weeks. Weep and wallow and lie on the floor listening to Back to Black by Amy Winehouse on repeat. Until I met someone else and did it all again.
Rinse.
Lather.
Repeat.
“What did Michelle say when she pointed it out?” Nico asked. “Did she ask you outright?”
“Sort of. It started with May, actually,” I said, recalling that afternoon last Easter, a few months before I met Nico. “May had just got back from seeing her family in Greece and we all went to Five Guys.”
“Which is how all special moments should be marked.”
“Not Nando’s?”
“It wasn’t that special.”
“True. It’s not like one of us was getting married, or something.”
“Laugh now, Malakar, but we’re having our wedding reception here and I don’t want to hear a word about it.”
I was so flustered by the our that it felt like that trapdoor had opened and I was falling again.
But Nico didn’t notice as she reached for another chip. “So you were at Five Guys?”
“Yeah.” I nodded, then waited a second or two to catch my breath. “We were at Five Guys, and when we asked May how Greece was, she told us that she’d spent the entire time ‘chilling’ with someone called Amy. She just said it, I guess I’m pan. Then she sipped her milkshake and nicked one of my Cajun fries.”
It was so easy.
So effortlessly, reassuringly easy.
“Were you surprised?” Nico asked.
“Yeah, but only because she’d never shown any interest in girls.”
“Was anyone weird about it?”
“That was the only weird thing, how not weird it was. No one made a crude quip and Louise didn’t ask May if she fancied her and, when we went to Beyond Retro afterward, May and Erin shared a dressing room, like they always did. It was like nothing had happened. Like May had told us her favorite color, or something.”
“That’s nice.” Nico smiled to herself. “That’s how it should be.”
“That’s what Michelle said. She said it was bullshit. She said if she didn’t have to come out as straight, then you shouldn’t have to come out as anything else. You should be allowed to just be.” I chuckled to myself. “Trouble is, I thought she was using the royal you, but then she reached over and squeezed my arm and told me that it was OK, that I didn’t need to do what May had just done if I didn’t want to, and I almost fell off the bed.”
“So Michelle knew before you did?”
“She knows everything before I do. She pointed out the friend-crush thing and that I didn’t just think Zendaya was cool and I liked more than Billie Eilish’s style. I mean, I hadn’t liked a guy for two years.”
“Who was it?” Nico asked with a wolfish smile.
“Timothée Chalamet,” I admitted, but then I thought about it. “Although, with hindsight, I think that may have been more of a Call Me by Your Name thing rather than a Timothée Chalamet thing.”
“I love that film.” She sighed, then said, “So, that’s when you knew you were into girls?”
“I guess.” I shrugged. “But I had no idea that you could know something like that without it being, you know, confirmed. I’d never been with a girl, had I? But, as Michelle pointed out, she never needed to be with a boy to know she liked them and no one questioned that.”
Nico thought about that, then peered at me from under her eyelashes. “Do your parents know?”
“It’s spooky, because the following Saturday we were at my cousin Eshma’s wedding. Mum and I were watching the first dance when my aunty Turvi passed our table, saying that would be me one day, and I must have looked as horrified as I felt, because Mum leaned in and told me that I didn’t have to have that, if I didn’t want it. She said that she’d fought the good fight for forty years so I could have whatever I wanted.”
I blinked and shook my head. “But the strange thing was, that’s what I was thinking about while I was watching Eshma and Aakash. Not that I didn’t want that, but whether I could have it if I was into girls. The Sangeet. The Mehndi party. The saris. A spotlight as ‘Moh Moh Ke Dhaage’ played. Would anyone cry? Would anyone turn up? I don’t even know if I want those things, but I at least want the option, you know?”
Nico nodded. “So what did you say to your mum?”
“I wanted to say something, but we were at a family wedding. Talk about time and place. I couldn’t say anything with my aunties hovering and Dad heading back to our table with another plate of jalebi. So, I lost my nerve,” I confessed with a defeated sigh. “I mean, I’d only just said it out loud to Michelle the weekend before, hadn’t I? So I didn’t know if I was ready to say it to my mother yet.”
Nico nodded again.
“So, I brushed it off, said that I didn’t know what I wanted. But Mum said, I think you know what you want and it’s OK. You can have whatever you want with whomever you want.”
When I summoned the courage to look up again, Nico’s eyes were huge. “She knew?”
“She knew.”
“Did Michelle tell her?”
“No way. She would never.”
“So how did she know, then?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “She just knew.”
“How did it feel?”
“Like I suddenly fit, you know? Like the universe shifted out of the way to make space for me.”
Nico’s chin shivered, her eyes wet. “I want to feel that.”
“You will,” I promised, and I didn’t even think about it as I reached across the table for her hand.
It was the first time I’d touched her since we’d found each other again. Touched her on purpose, anyway. Our hips hadn’t grazed while we walked. My cheek hadn’t accidentally skimmed hers while we took that photo in front of the mural.
No, this time it was deliberate.
Intentional.
Expected and unexpected, all at once.
If this was a film, then that would have been the moment it all came back to her and she remembered.
But this isn’t a film, so she just squeezed my hand and asked, “What if I never feel that?”
“You will.”
When she smiled, I felt a ping in my chest, like a coiled spring, bounding forward.
“Thank you, Mara. I really needed to hear that.”
I nodded, holding her hand a little tighter.
“I knew you’d understand. It’s so weird. I’ve only known you for, like, three weeks, but I feel like I’ve known you a really long time.” Her brow creased as she tilted her head. “Are you sure we’ve never met before?”
I didn’t want to lie, but I had to, so I shook my head.
“Maybe in another life, then,” she said with a smile so tender, it made my heart snap in two.