Noticing: Amanda POV

Recess is–sorry—break is over, before i can wink. He has corrected me like fify times since i last said 'recess'.

Cool silence has overtaken the hallways again, like a cloud of warm fog. The place is a small barrack, with hefty seniors pacing the length and breadth of each class, slim pale cane-sticks are clutched like weapons of mass destruction. You could smell the burning energy radiating from their hosts; the unfortunate juniors whose classes they occupy. Fear and anxiety, so thick it drank the air. A hostage situation will look better.

"So i've been wondering, what's the meaning of your middle name."

"Yara?"

"Yes."

"It means little butterfly." That's what Mom called me. I remember her say it, with a smooth practiced ease that rolled off her tongue. Even i can't pronounce it like that.

Chideziri tests it repeatedly until it sounds like 'gala'. 

"It's yara," I say "not gala." I doubt my parents wanted me named after a sausage roll.

He chuckles and raises his arms in surrender.

"Is it an English name?" he's so tall he has to look down at me.

"No, its Persian"

A quizzical frown films his face.

"Just when i think i'm one step away from figuring you out, boom!, it blows up in my face."

It's mid September, and it's cold outside, but my insides are hot, the way it always is any time someone asks a mom-related question.

"My mom is an Algerian, a french-algerian." I almost said my mom was, but i'm not ready to do that. I'm not ready to hear an " i'm sorry." from him just yet, i'm not sure i will ever be.

He's squints at me with narrowed eyes and then takes my face with both hands.

His hands are warm, and softer than a boy's hands have the right to be. Mine are flat, and fleshless with pale long fingers. Mom used to cut my fingernails, before she left, chaffing short with the clean precision  of a surgeon.

I remember her fingers now, when she held my hands, or tried to brush down my crazy mane. They were lean and pale like mine, but where she was a beacon of yellow starlight—deep, golden and rich, i was brown, with undertones of light reds.

He tilts my face to a side, and then another. 

"Apart from your hair, you really, really look Nigerian. When they said  you were a half-caste i found it hard to believe."

"Half-caste?" 

I despise that word.

 Mild irritation bubbled beneath my throat, and i knew that i was about to say something neither of us would appreciate.

I reined it in, before i could cause an damage.

"What does half caste mean," i say "just define it."

"Someone whose parents are of different races, i think."

"Okay, so what do you call a person whose parents are of the same race."

He stopped abruptly, his eyes suddenly unsure.

"Full-caste?" He offered, bashful and shame-faced.

I couldn't help it, i laughed.

It's good to have someone to talk to again, even if that person doesn't know 'half-caste' is offensive, even if he's a boy i just meet a week ago. I don't want this to stop. I dont want "us" to stop. 

A part of me is paranoid, afraid we'll just wake up tomorrow morning and be back to "hi's" and "hey's", and our face-tilting and eye-locking vibe will be lost. It's that part of me that makes him write his phone number at the back of my Econs note in bowed script letters.

It's that same silent persona that refuses to tell him about my poems, that part that said i liked cooking when i can't boil an egg right.

It's that same version of me that watches from the sidelines, the part that has said i-told-you-so so many times, it's now cliche. That quiet profile that is painfully aware of the fact that anyone that comes too close to me dies.

We were sparks of light, dancing, twirling, brightly, in perfect symphonic twists of alchemy.

We were something in between flames of fire and the ashes of a smoke.

Something in between infatuation and obsession, in between Juliet's  romeo and Luscious' cookie.

We were deranged, we were worthy of all the love we had.

Who ever said teenagers can't know true love didn't see us.

You should have seen us, my friend. 

You should have seen us.

# True and teen—Amanda.