a stranger, like I’d stumbled across worlds and now I was here, out of breath and off balance.
“There’s no girlfriend,” I said. In the face of my confusion, I fell back on the truth.
Vivek lifted his chin, mild triumph flashing in his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Does it feel good to not lie anymore?”
I frowned. There was an undercurrent in his voice that I didn’t like. “Are you angry with me?” I asked him. He huffed and looked away, walking to the bed and sitting on it, his bare feet against the patterned carpet.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Vivek threw his hands up and let them fall against the sheets. “Fuck. Yes.” He looked at me and his eyes were holes in his face. “I’m angry with you because you abandoned me, you know? You just . . . threw me away.”
I flashed on Vivek, sitting on the landing of the boys’ quarters, teary and apologetic as I walked away. “We were children,” I said, the words weak.
My cousin laughed. “We haven’t been children in a long time. I didn’t hear pim from you after the village. I thought you would reach out after that.”
The room was heavy and silent. He wasn’t making any accusations, not yet, but I could feel them anyway, like pinpricks against my skin. “I didn’t mean to just disappear,” I said, but then my voice trailed off.
“Well, it felt like you didn’t want to see me. I thought maybe you were disgusted.”
“Vivek . . .”
“You sounded disgusted by me.” A corner of his mouth twisted. “Trust me, I know what that sounds like coming from you. I’ve heard it before.” The way I’d looked at him after the incident with Elizabeth: he was right, I’d been disgusted then, but only because I had lost Elizabeth.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “It wasn’t your fault, what happened at the boys’ quarters. You couldn’t control what was going on with you.”
“That sorry is late,” Vivek replied. “I don’t need it anymore. I know it wasn’t my fault.”
He sighed and looked at me. “Why did you come here? What do you want?”
Now I was ashamed. I hadn’t come to see if he was okay; I’d come because I needed him, and it was only now dawning on me how incredibly selfish that was. “I’m an idiot,” I said out loud. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have come here.” I began to turn away, but Vivek stood up.
“Wait, wait. I didn’t say that. Seriously, I want to know. Why did you come?”
I didn’t turn back to him. It was easier to tell the story if I wasn’t looking at him, if I was looking at the wall and the window, the trees outside it. “It’s stupid,” I said, and was horrified to feel tears sharp behind my eyes. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Osita.” Vivek’s voice was a ruler, flat and hard. “Tell me.”
So I told him, my voice unstable and small: About the small, dark club I’d been in the previous weekend, the young university student who leaned in to kiss me in a smoky corner, and the way I allowed it, allowed him even though anyone could look and see us; allowed his tongue to push into my mouth, even kissing him back before I came to my senses and pushed him away and left. About how he tried to talk to me about it the next day, bright-faced and eager, how panicked I felt because I didn’t know what he thought I could give him, what world he thought we lived in where it was safe to do something like that. About how I lied when he brought it up, claiming I couldn’t remember what happened, blaming it on whatever we’d been drinking. About the way his face collapsed in hurt and a fresh aloneness.
“You were the only person I could tell,” I said to Vivek, looking down at my hands. “So I came here.”
He was silent for a moment. “Why did you need to tell anyone?” he asked, finally. “Why didn’t you just keep it a secret? Isn’t that what everyone does?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it again because I didn’t know how to explain it—the thing that the kiss had exhumed in me, the way it was loud, the way it wouldn’t be quiet. I had to do something, to give it room to unfurl, and Vivek was the only place I felt safe.
“So that’s why you came here?” he continued. “Are you ashamed? You don’t want