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Pollux deflates. “I harbor no ill emotions toward you.”
Zahra grins. “Yet.”
Amusement tips his lips. “If that’s your goal, you just got farther from it.”
Gripping my arm, Zahra turns my back on Pollux and Andromeda, then whispers, “Your soulmate isn’t half bad. Why aren’t you in love with him yet?”
The dubstep tune my heartbeat adopts does not fall within my usual music tastes. “I don’t think love is that simple?”
“Sure it is. With a soulmate bond, it’s supposed to be instant. Instalove tropes for everyone. Kiss, kiss, fall in love.”
I glance back at Pollux, who has snuggled his chin over Andromeda’s shoulder while she shows him a picture in her book. For someone made of fear, he’s so…soft. If I barely know who I am, how am I supposed to know what love feels like?
Emotions are strange and foreign. Inconvenient.
If I can’t control them, it’s better not to bother feeling them at all.
But, naturally, it is thoughts like those that have led me to where I am today.
“You okay?” Zahra whispers.
I smile. “I think you play too many dating sims.”
She recoils, slapping a hand to her heart. “Well, why don’t you just take my real, two hundred dollar ice blue katana and eviscerate me?” She pokes me in the cheek, then the forehead, then the nose. “Where’s the unfriend button?”
I swat her hand away. “Well, if there’s nothing else, I suppose I’ll pick you up later for movie night. I have a particularly enchanting frog pattern at home that requires my attention.”
“Excuse you. I love frogs. Tell me about it.” Zahra folds her arms.
The weight of wanting to go home, dodge my parents, and sit on the floor with my tatting hook until I have at least fifteen tiny round frogs filled with pouches of sand crushes me. I don’t even want to eat dinner, even though I’m hungry. Sometimes, on particularly draining days, I skip having dinner just because I don’t have the energy to navigate continuing to pretend that I’m okay, and I’m stable, and I’m super duper happy and grateful.
My parents mean the world to me.
They’ve done everything right.
They’d be there if I could find the words to express how not okay I’m feeling…
But…how? How exactly am I supposed to do that when too many of the details making me less than “okay” are insane?
“The frogs are tiny and round,” I offer as though I don’t want to scream and cry and curl up in a tiny round ball. “I’d like to make one in every pastel shade of the rainbow.” To pass out as Christmas gifts to the children. As though they will not immediately be used as frog snowballs in a grand school-wide battle.
My delusion impresses me regularly.
“Fascinating,” Zahra says. “Don’t stop there. You need a black, gray, and white one, too.”
She is absolutely not wrong.
“What are you going to do with them when you’re done?”
Hold them close for emotional support. “I’ll give some to Chai, as toys.” And the rest to the kids, as surprise gifts, which I cannot say with one of the kids present.
Zahra’s grin turns evil. “You devious monster.” Twisting, she says, “Pollux. Chai.”
Pollux blinks and pulls his attention up off Andromeda’s book. “Pardon?”
“Why did you give Kass a kitten at the Halloween party last month?”
Heat warms his cheeks, but instead of explaining how it’s a faerie proposal ritual, he says, “That was the first available moment I found to give it to her.”
