Page 20 of A Lab Rat’s Guide to Fated Love

Ten

The Snot-Nosed Boy

Vir

N ori slowly relaxed around Vir as days wove into weeks, and weeks gave way to the end of a year and the beginning of a new one.

Their daily walks continued, full of conversation once again.

The two strolled the hills together every late afternoon without a set route in mind, often exploring new pathways and alleys in the process.

“I used to live here with my grandparents a long time ago,” Nori told him when they stopped for tea at a roadside stall one day. “Mom and dad traveled a lot for work when I was young, and they left me here. Easily the best couple of years of my life.”

Vir passed her a steaming paper cup of dark spiced tea before taking his coffee from the old man behind the counter. As they walked to a nearby bench, he sensed a subtle, wistful shift in her emotions .

“You know what?” she said, a lopsided smile playing on her lips. “I met my first love here, too.” And just like that, the shift wasn’t as subtle anymore.

Her insides bubbled with joy. All because of her memories of a silly teenage crush.

That made her happy. But anytime he showed her the slightest bit of platonic affection, she’d recoil from him as if he’d offended her and three generations of her ancestors.

First love, my ass.

“I was the quiet new kid at school,” Nori continued, oblivious to Vir’s thoughts or the mental eye rolls his brain kept performing, feeling each fresh wave of her nostalgic joy.

“Soon after, this other new kid arrived. He was even quieter and sat at the very back of the classroom. He wouldn’t talk to anyone and ate by himself at recess.

The homeroom teacher asked me to help him catch up with the classwork—I was a smart kid. In case you didn’t know.”

“Of course you were.” Vir chuckled. He didn’t want to know about her dumb first love. But he did want to keep listening to her talk.

“So, next recess, the boy came to me with his stack of notebooks. He was so tiny… like a little rat, barely reaching my shoulders. And when I fully turned to look at his face, I…” Nori giggled, her shoulders bouncing in tandem with her laugh. “I completely lost it.”

She was giggling .

Vir had never heard her giggle before. It was the second most beautiful sound he’d ever heard, intoxicating almost, a close competitor to her contagious brand of laughter.

And it made him the most jealous he’d ever been in the history of his own existence, his insides churning raw. She was giggling for the boy.

God dammit.

“I gave him my numbers and alphabets notebooks so he could just copy the work,” she went on.

“And all the while, I couldn’t stop laughing.

I laughed so much, tears streamed down my face.

The poor thing, he thought I was making fun of him and started to leave, but I grabbed his hand and told him I wasn’t laughing at him.

I just thought he was funny. Then he started laughing, too. ”

Numbers and alphabets?

“How old were you? ”

“A little over five, I suppose.”

Five… He was jealous of a five-year-old kid.

“He only stayed at the school for a few months,” Nori added.

“And every single day of those months passed with me laughing till my belly hurt. He begged me to stop because it made him laugh, too, and he couldn’t write stuff down when he was laughing.

And if the teachers caught us laughing, we’d be given extra pages to write as punishment.

I told him I’d stop on one condition, that he sit with me all day, not just during recess. And he did.”

Oh… He knew where her story was going.

“You know why I thought he was funny?” She giggled again.

“The boy was missing two of his front teeth. And his nose was always runny. The snot would slowly flow down, and just as it was about to reach his mouth, he’d snort it back up, so it could start its downward journey again.

And repeat. He had a neatly folded napkin pinned to his shirt, and I never ever saw him use it.

It was so funny and almost—hypnotic—the up-down-up dance of snot all day.

“He brought me chocolates on his birthday. I ate them all and made a card for him with a pink glitter heart. I held his hand at the playground, and he got all red and shy and kept looking at his feet. He didn’t come to school after that day, and for years afterwards I felt bad for bullying him into running away.

Poor kid. I was too mean, wasn’t I? And the sad part is, I don’t even remember his name—my runny nosed first love. ”

“Vir,” Vir said after a long pause, keeping himself firmly planted to where he sat, while fighting the impulse to lean in and cover her still giggling mouth with his.

“What?”

“The boy’s name was Vir,” he replied. “You didn’t make him run away.

He’d made you a card, too, but he collapsed on his way to school before he could give it to you.

His parents found out about his heart condition and took him away for treatment.

He never returned to Shoja after that. Not till now. ”

Two bright spots of pink appeared on Nori’s cheeks, as she stared at him with her jaw hung open, before rapidly seeping into the rest of her face to paint it a bright, burning crimson .

Vir pursed his lips to keep himself from laughing while his heart ballooned like a pufferfish in his chest, bloating away happily till it was ready to burst at the seams.

“You—you’re— him ?”

“Yes.” Vir downed the rest of his coffee, no longer bothering to hide his grin as it plastered itself smugly across his face. “So… I was your first love? Interesting.”

Nori’s face turned an even deeper shade of red and her eyes became cartoonishly round in the matter of a few puffed-up heartbeats. She swore under her breath before abruptly springing from her seat to hurry off towards the cottage.

Vir tossed his paper cup in the bin and followed after her, all the while grinning at the molten bursts of embarrassment shooting off her in the distance.

Nori

I t was sometime in the early hours of the morning.

Nori sat curled in on herself in the semi-darkness, wishing she would just disappear for the next twenty-four hours.

She hugged her knees, trying to shrink herself into a ball, smaller and smaller, while Vir slept peacefully on his makeshift mattress-bed a few feet away, his soft, rhythmic breathing the only sound in the otherwise quiet room.

Breathe. In and out. In and out.

She tried matching the cadence of her breaths to Vir’s for a long, agonizing moment before giving up. Careful not to disturb him—the ridiculously light sleeper that he was—she quietly snuck out of the room.

A few minutes later, sitting at the dining table with a cup of strong ginger tea in front of her, she turned her prescription bottle of anti-depressants over in her palm. She’d been weaned off nearly a year ago, but still kept some with her, just in case. For emergencies.

How bad was bad enough to be considered an emergency?

Her knuckles whitened around the orange plastic container while her hands shook with an abrupt surge of rage as it boiled through her without warning .

Why her? It had been years… Why her still?

She wanted to chuck the bottle across the room and storm out. Out where? Where could she even go… away from herself?

Vir

A door closed in the distance, and Vir’s eyes fluttered open.

He propped himself on an elbow to find Nori’s bed empty. It didn’t even look slept in. He rubbed his eyes before squinting at the sliver of light peeking in through the partly closed door.

“Nori?” he asked. No answer.

He waited for a few heartbeats, then rose and walked out.

“Nori?”

The lights were on in the kitchen, but Nori wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the study either or anywhere else inside the house, even though he could feel her in the vicinity.

What bothered him was the weight of a certain darkness about her. The same sticky darkness he’d sometimes gotten a hint of underneath all her other layers of emotions. It was… dominant now, somehow. And terrifying.

Grabbing both their jackets from where they lay draped over the back of the couch, he headed for the front door when a flash of bright orange caught his eye.

He reached for the small plastic container sitting in the middle of the dining table—a full prescription bottle of antidepressants with Nori’s name on it.

As he placed it back, his hand brushed against the full cup of tea also on the table. It was still warm, untouched.

He hurried out the door to find Nori perched on one of the white wrought iron chairs in the garden, arms wrapped around her knees and face tilted upwards towards a partial moon that hung in the clearest night sky he’d witnessed in months.

“Nori?” he spoke softly as he reached her, watching his breath form foggy spirals in front of his face .

He took her jacket and draped it over her shoulders like a shawl. And as he did, Nori slowly turned her head to the side. Her expressionless eyes stared blankly at him for a long moment.

“Vir.” She blinked. “Right.”

There wasn’t anything particularly out of place about her.

Yet, everything felt wrong . He fought the impulse to grab her by her shoulders and shake her out of it.

Whatever it was—the heavy, all engulfing feeling that seemed to want to trap him in quicksand, immobilized and apathetic.

And that was only what he felt from her second-hand.

He couldn’t imagine what it was doing to her.

But why? What had changed so drastically in the last few hours?

Vir pulled a chair beside hers and took a seat, swearing under his breath at how cold the metal was. Like sticking his rear on a slab of ice. He suppressed the shivers running up his spine and folded his legs under him to sit with her in silence.