Oh, don’t mind me!” I crowed into the twilight from the middle of the street, waving at one of our neighborhood Vietnamese uncles to go on by.
He rolled through in his Corolla, glancing at me, perplexed, as I dropped down into peak “Asian squat” and adjusted my camera on the asphalt. My dad would disown me if he saw me like this, but sacrifices had to be made for the one shot that would rule them all! One didn’t just pop into the world as an amazing photographer, ya know? One had to scrape up cameras and touch dirty ground and ignore the screaming ache searing up their legs from squatting.
This was golden hour.
There was this magical, ethereal, and itty-bitty time frame during the late weeks of October in Austin when the setting sun blessed us mere mortals with golden skies like halos. Towering red maple trees in full, autumnal fashion lined my street. Way back in the day, the subdivision had been required to include certain trees in everyone’s yards for this very effect. Those early homeowners may not have seen the spectacular end result, but bless the HOA’s aggressive insistence for once.
I squinted toward the setting sun as the sky blossomed into shades of enigmatic reds, creamsicle oranges, and lush pinks, then positioned the camera to face the shimmering tunnel of fall maples. They boasted their own array of colors in thick clusters of crimson-and-gold painted strokes, standing tall, branches wide as if saying, “Put aside your pumpkin spice and behold the most majestic element of this glorious season.”
A breeze sent the leaves shuddering right as I clicked. Ugh! A blur. I had only a few shots—if a strong enough breeze swept through, the entire canopy would fall.
All right. Let’s try again.
I repositioned the camera, checked, stood, and stepped back. Way back so that there wasn’t a single pixel of my shadow in the photo.
I used the remote-control feature on my app to take a few shots from afar. I’d checked this angle for weeks and knew this was the best spot, but my brain sent my legs walking farther and farther away just to make sure no unwanted shadows warped the shot.
I was so busy triple-guessing the angle that I hadn’t registered the sound of distant, squealing tires from the main road. A car swerved onto our street with a screech; the driver clearly hadn’t known the turn was coming.
I lurched forward to grab the camera.
A crunch echoed on the heels of the car’s screeching stop.
“No!” I screamed.
I skidded to a halt, taking in the massacre of my most beloved possession. I clamped a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming, my body racked with tremors.
I yelled, “Back up! Back your car up!”
I fixed my gaze on the black, boxy camera under the car. The tire had only partially crushed the camera, so maybe it wasn’t totally obliterated.
But as the car eased back, the tire fully rose off the camera, and the camera jerked. The sound it made resembled the final grunt of an actor hamming up their death scene. But it was still a death. The camera was a goner.
Tears welled up in my eyes as panic surged through me.
No, no, no!
The driver opened the door and jumped out, stopping to my right, their shadow falling over my form hunched in mourning. I glanced at the scuffs on their kicks and the too-long jeans hems that curled over the lips of their shoes.
“Oh my god. Nikki, are you all right?” a familiar, semi-deep voice asked.
Of course it had to be him. My neighbor and former best friend. But better Yash than my parents.
“Where’s the other half of my lens?” I asked instead of responding, searching the street and under his car on my hands and knees. The missing
piece had vanished.
Yash searched, too, but reappeared with nothing to show for it. “I’m sorry, I don’t see it.”
Had it been catapulted into a tree? Had it knocked out a bird on its way into someone’s yard? We searched for twenty minutes, as far away as three houses down in each direction and on both sides of the street. “There’s no way that giant part of a lens could just disappear.”
I mean, what in the world! Had it disintegrated? I hadn’t even seen it go anywhere. One minute it was attached to my camera, beautiful and whole; and the next minute, half of it had totally vanished into thin air!
I fell on my haunches in front of the demolished camera, muttering, “Dude, you Thanosed my lens.”
I gathered everything I could find, picking up shards from the lens and eyeing the cracked screen and its noticeable missing wedge. The main component of the camera was warped.
I rose to my feet, exclaiming, “What have you done?”
Yash startled, his mouth ajar and his eyes huge as they fell to the disaster in my hands. “It’s OK! It’s OK!”
“No. Dude, it is not OK. My parents are going to end me.”
“It’s just—”
My words came out rushed and hot as I interjected, “Don’t even say it’s just a camera. You know it’s not! You know it’s my everything, and that it costs a lot of money. You know my dad worked overtime to buy it for me because all I’ve ever asked for was a camera so I can get better at photography and get an internship. You know I begged my parents for two years for this camera, and I promised on my life to take care of it.”
“I wasn’t going to say any of that!” He reached out as if he were about to hug me but stopped because he remembered we weren’t exactly on the best speaking terms. “Of course I know how important this camera is to you. I was going to say it’s just going to end badly for me, not you. Look, I’ll explain to your parents that it’s my fault. I’ll pay for it.”
“With what money? Yard work doesn’t pay that well. And don’t ask your parents, because sure, they’ll pay for it if it makes me feel better, but then it’s going to be this weird thing between our parents. It’s already weird enough between them after . . .” I stopped myself, my chest heaving as I tried my hardest to keep my anxiety under control.
Yash watched me. His flushed cheeks drained into pallor. Stoicism had replaced his panic.
“Who told you it was OK to speed down the street?” I spat, blinking away this stupid, blurry vision.
“I wasn’t speeding,” he contested, his voice shaky.
“Didn’t you see me running or the camera?”
“I saw you in the corner of my eye as someone far enough from the path of my car. I didn’t see the camera.”
I grunted.
“Let me help,” he pleaded. “Our parents won’t find out. I have money.”
My eyebrows shot up. “You have eight hundred dollars just lying around?”
He sucked in a breath, as if he didn’t know the camera was expensive AF. He knew because I’d lain beside him on his bedroom floor while scrolling through various cameras on multiple sites looking for deals and grunted over how many hours my dad would have to work to afford one.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.” Groaning, I spun on my heels and marched toward the house, cradling the distorted remains of the camera against me as I would a beloved, injured pet. The jagged edges scratched my arms and caught on my shirt, but I didn’t care.
I refused to look over my shoulder at the boy I’d left standing in the middle of the street and bit into my lower lip. Once, a long time ago, I would’ve run to him first for anything. He’d been my best friend, the person who snuck out of the house at midnight so we could ride bikes to Taco Bell in the days before either of us had a car. The guy who carried my backpack on his chest, his own backpack on his back, when I was struggling to hold my science project while walking to school. He was the one I’d cried to when some jerk messed with me. Not because I felt bad because of said jerk, but because I’d gotten detention for calling him out in front of the entire student body.
Had this been pre-best friend breakup, Yash and I would’ve hovered over the broken evidence and come up with a plan not only to hide this from my parents but also to replace the camera. Somehow. Even if it meant Yash moonlighting as a grocery stocker with me.
Unfortunately, there was no “us” and therefore, no plan.
I snuck into the house and trotted up the steps to my room so my parents wouldn’t turn the hallway corner and catch me. I dumped the broken pieces onto my bed and flicked a few of the smaller ones, contemplating whether they could possibly fit back together. Could I find someone who knew how to repair cameras when parts of it had been crushed like a bug?
Probably not.
I was irrevocably screwed. I’d not only broken a camera, but I’d broken a promise to my parents to take care of that camera. They’d always said they could trust me because I kept my word and never (OK, hardly ever) got into trouble. If they didn’t view me as responsible enough to care for an item, how were they ever going to let me go off to the internship of my dreams? Out of state. In Washington, DC, of all places!
National Geographic was, ironically and devastatingly, a photography internship. My dreams shattered as I tried to piece the sordid mess on my bed back together like a warped jigsaw puzzle. I needed a camera to get that one, spectacular, better-than-the-rest shot that would land the internship; not to mention, I was pretty sure they’d want me to, ya know, have my own camera at said photography internship.
I bit my nail. How fast could I make eight hundred dollars? Also, how fast could I get a job? And again, how to do it all without my parents knowing?
It wasn’t until my fingers were cramping from trying to fit the broken pieces back together that the tears, skillfully held at bay, began streaming down my face. I struggled to contain my sobs as my entire postgraduation summer plans were swept away, the same way those maple leaves would be once the first big wind came through.
“Are you OK?” a quiet voice asked from behind me as my shoulders convulsed.
I startled and turned, trying my best to hide the camera wreckage beneath a throw. I quickly wiped my tears and explained, “Just some jerk outside. Never let a guy make you cry, OK?”
Lilly, my eleven-year-old sister, nodded solemnly as she pushed back her curls. Then she tilted her chin and asked, “Want me to beat him up?”
I cracked a smile. “No. That’s OK. Also, you shouldn’t be fighting.”
“Yeah, and boys shouldn’t make you cry,” she affirmed. “Remember how I got detention? That kid in my class who kept pulling my hair and my teacher only scolded him? He kept doing it. So, one day I just yanked his hair back and asked how he liked it. He cried. I got detention, but I dunno why. He didn’t get detention. And anyway, I only pulled as hard as he did, and I only did it once. He says stupid stuff like girls are weak, but he’s the one who cried. Anyway. I can pull his hair if you want. Whoever made you cry just now. Extra. Hard.”
I laughed. “Ruthless girl.”
She smiled. “Was it Yash? I don’t really want to make him cry.”
“Even if he made me cry?”
She rubbed her arm and leaned against the doorframe. “I like Yash. He brings me extra Taco Bell sauce packets.”
“Oh my lord. If that’s all it takes for a boy to get on your good side, then Yash will always be there. His entire car is filled with sauce packets,” I said, recalling all those late nights when we upgraded from bikes to a car for Taco Bell runs. There wasn’t a single place in
his car that wasn’t stashing sauce packets. Open his glove compartment, the console, the pockets behind the front seats, the change thingie. Packets. Everywhere.
“You know?” I’d said to him once. “You can actually buy bottles of Taco Bell sauce at the grocery store.”
“But then what sort of Indian would I be?” he’d joked.
“I’m OK,” I told Lilly. “Thanks for checking.”
“Well, Mummie wanted me to get you. She’s all excited,” she said, her voice pitching higher, but then she rolled her eyes. It was probably something along the lines of them volunteering us for a festival play or offering us to work kitchen duty during said festival. There was nothing worse than having to work during something fun.
“Ah, OK. Be right down,” I told her. I waited for her to leave before I hurried to put every last bit of the camera into a shoebox.
I pushed the shoebox to the back of my closet, dried my face, and took a few breaths. As I walked past my bed, my phone screen lit up with a text. It was probably from my other BFF—or only BFF now—Tamara.
But it wasn’t a message from her. It was from Yash.
He hadn’t texted me in months, not since our falling out. See, I’d made some new friends—which was short-lived in hindsight—who’d talked me into sneaking into clubs. I knew my parents weren’t going to let me go.
Yash had seen me sneaking out one time and had gotten on my case when I kept doing it. I’d gotten pissed, because who was he to tell me what to do? But he’d argued to the end of the world that he wasn’t telling me what to do, but that maybe I should reconsider it if it was going to jeopardize my freedom and maybe even my internship. And that real friends would tell friends if they were concerned. I’d raised my voice and he’d raised his, per usual, and we got into our typical loudness that turned worse and worse. We’d never fought like that.
Well, one day when Lilly was at her friend’s house and my parents had gone out to eat, Yash and I had a big fight. My parents had come home early, and because my mom hadn’t been feeling well, they’d been quiet. They’d heard me, loud and clear, tell Yash off about my right to go clubbing if I wanted.
I’d never been more terrified in my life than when I saw my parents come around the corner of the hallway. They’d asked me to repeat what I’d just said. When I’d frozen up from shock, they asked Yash. And Yash, with that sorrowful look in his eyes, told them. Granted, I’d ratted myself out first, but in the moment and out of panic, I told them that Yash was the one who’d dinged their car. A secret I promised to keep. And boy, had his sorrowful look turned so fast. He’d gotten upset with me for that.
So, yeah. Our fight had me seeing red because maybe I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. I’d been so pissed at him all summer that it had become natural. And awkward. Especially when my parents sided with Yash. Everything felt like a betrayal, and it still hurt.
Against my better judgement, I swiped to read his text.
Yash: I’m sorry about earlier. Can we talk?
Left. On. Read.
Chapter 2
Lilly was sitting on the couch playing on her tablet, her knees pulled to her chest as she slumped against the cushions. Man, how did she get so much stuff? Our parents didn’t get me a tablet for the longest time, and when they did it was because school required it. The fact that I had a cell phone was a miracle and a half. And that was only so my parents could get a hold of me whenever they wanted to.
“Did you get the shot?” Papa asked with so much hope it made my insides churn.
“No,” I said, feeling defeated and somewhat terrified. He always asked about my photography, so it wasn’t as if he wouldn’t find out soon. But “chicken” wasn’t a strong enough word to describe how scared I was to let him down, to possibly have him decide I wasn’t ready for a two-month internship away from home.
“Ah, that’s OK. There’s always tomorrow!” I added, and helped put away the leftovers from dinner, which I’d devoured earlier so I could rush out the door for the golden hour shot.
Thirty minutes ago, I’d planned to come back for these leftovers. Now? Not so much. My stomach couldn’t handle the guilt. As much as I loved cheese enchiladas, looking at the leftovers was making me queasy.
“Come. Come!” Mummie exclaimed, taking my wrist and gently tugging me toward the living room.
Both parents beamed with joy, but their unparalleled bliss could literally be over getting us new school clothes.
I plopped down next to Lilly and spotted the box that read “Diwali” behind the couch. Oh! Of course! No wonder they were excited. It was time to put up Diwali decorations.
“Are we still doing decorations and cooking?” I asked. “Since we’re going to Dubai this year for celebrations?”
“Of course, beta!” Papa replied as he ripped opened the box, sending the masking tape flying. Out of the four of us, he was the most into decorating for festivals. He was already pulling out string lights and silk marigold garlands. “Let’s start tonight!”
Mummie giggled as Lilly tossed aside her tablet and squealed, “Yay! Papa, I want to decide where the lights go!”
“OK!” He beamed up at me even while Lilly fell to the floor in front of the box.
Papa had me smiling in no time. “Oh, Sveta, can you make some cha?” he implored Mummie with big ole puppy dog eyes.
She waved him off, laughing. “Cha! At this hour!”
“What this hour? You know I can sleep after coffee, even. It’s festive! The weather is getting chilly, Diwali will be upon us, and we’re doing something as a family. Please, love of my life?”
It didn’t take long for me to get caught up in his excitement. While Mummie made cha with fresh mint, I pulled a container of homemade, nutty sweets out of the fridge because of course Mummie and I had started making mithai for the season.
In the glow of the lamplight, set low so we could get all cozy, everyone drank a cup of cha, snacked on sweets (call it dessert!), and giddily unraveled a million garlands intertwined with other decor. Not to outdo Christmas, but we had a box for tinsel and sparkly orbs; a box for rangoli essentials; a box for garlands and another for lights; and a box of red and gold Diwali cards, diya holders, and candles. Mummie had snagged them in India, where they were super cheap and available in a variety of styles and colors. The sheer amount would last us forever.
I took lots of pics on my phone to capture the memories.
As color filled up the room, Papa sat back to sip cha and commented, “You’re going to be off to college next year.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Don’t miss me too much.”
His eyes misted a little and I pouted. “Don’t cry, Papa!” Mummie playfully hit his arm. “Hah. If you cry, I’m going to cry. Then Nikki will start crying and the neighbors will think something horrible has happened.”
“Yeah, Papa,” Lilly chimed. “You said this was good. Why are you crying? We’ll have more space.”
“Hey!” I teased.
“She’s just joking,” Papa said. “We’re not going to touch your room. But this is our last Diwali together for a long time, perhaps.”
“I can come home, you know.”
“Not during college. You need to make all your classes and exams,” he contested. “High school granted some days away, but college is not that simple.”
I sighed, not wanting to accept the truth even as I said, “We’ll have
to wait until Thanksgiving and then winter break, I guess.”
Which truly sucked. We didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas, although we took advantage of the holidays to spend time with family. I would be missing Diwali with my family for the first time. ...
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