Never had she thought that would bother her, but it did. She wasn't an outcast in her own family: she had only made herself feel that way, planting those assumptions in her gut and letting them blossom and bloom like an unwanted vine that had snaked its way into her brain to change the way she thought.
Love had trumped fear. That much was true; that much she knew without having to second-guess herself anymore. Now it seemed ridiculous that she had ever doubted that her aunt loved her, that she had ever feared spending time with the only family she had left, perhaps the only family she would ever have at all. Being around them had sparked something in her too, as though she had discovered a new side of herself that she had never bothered to look for before: as much as she had been a daughter and a sister, she was a cousin and a niece, and now those words meant just as much as each other.
Kneading her stomach with the heel of her hand, Ishaana rolled back onto her front and let out a sigh that sent a couple of her papers fluttering off her bed. They silently floated to the ground, settling on the carpet without a sound, and she made no move to get them. The topic was dry and uninteresting, not one she had any intention of answering an exam question on, and she stared at the sheet of paper as it lay there out of reach. Only one year left. It seemed impossible that her degree was two thirds done, almost, and that thought only added to the unease in her stomach.
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After hours of silence, the house was filled with a burst of sound when Priya jogged up the stairs with heavy feet, singing her herself before she threw open her sister's door with a grin on her face. The sound of Sunita's humming floated up from downstairs, amusing herself as she set about working on supper for later. Saffiya almost always made her own way home, having worked up enough of her mother's trust not to require a lift home from college each day.
It was quarter past four on the dot when Ishaana looked up at her sister. It took a moment for her bleary eyes to adjust, having fallen asleep upside down on her bed around an hour ago, and a frown of confusion dominated her features for a second or two. She never napped in the day, not unless she was ill, and that only confirmed her fear that she was going down with something. Ishaana could deal with almost anything, but illness wasn't something she coped with well so she prayed that she had eaten something bad yesterday, that her system would be purged within a day.
"Hey, sleepy butt," Priya said. "Since when did you nap in the middle of the day? You ok?"
"Yup," Ishaana said. "Just feeling a bit gross." That felt like the best way to describe it: she was feeling a little gross, and the best cure seemed to be to indulge in that, slobbing out on her bed with her laptop playing episode after episode on Netflix with her occasional input to confirm that she was still watching.
"You're not sick, are you?" Priya asked, automatically reversing towards the door with a look fo horror on her face, and Ishaana shook her head.
"Nope. I'm fine. Just a bit under the weather," she said, trying to make herself look as convincingly well as possible for her sister, who crept closer to the bed once more.
