KIND EYES.

the start

     Kamala and I took the bus into town that morning, it rained hard. She drew a heart on the steamy window and rubbed it out again. I made a comment about hygiene and how she touched the condensation of everyone's breath in that room. And her response was to try and touch me with that very hand. Kamala ordered an americano, and I got a hot chocolate. She tutted when she heard me ask for cream, something about how childish it was.

The barista smiled at her, he was around the same age as us and was cute, to me anyway. Kamala just rolled her eyes and told me she hated boys who looked like that. Whatever that meant. We both sat in our usual seats when I pulled out my mac book, and she pulled out her wired notebook and pen. Both of us were in our third year of university, I studied English and Kamala studied art history. She was completely aware of how much she hated education, and the thought of paying 9k a year to an institution built on racism. But if there was something Kamala hated more than the system; it was her parents. Watching her do a degree like art history seemed like a kick in the teeth but they were grateful she even made it to university. I thought Kamala was good at drawing, she was always sketching even when she wasn't paying attention, she managed to create masterpieces.

Twenty minutes into our study session, I had reread a paragraph about Oscar Wilde five times without absorbing any information when Kamala let out a sigh. A deep thoughtful one as she stared out the window, watching the rainfall. "You're not going anywhere this summer are you, Val?"

I looked down at her empty page and immediately felt better about myself. "I never do."

"My grandmother died," she said promptly as if reading a line from a book.

I blinked rapidly. "When?"

"This morning." She didn't seem fazed by the news one bit. Expressionless, she turned to me and propped a hand under her chin.

"I'm sorry about that."

"I'm not. She left us the villa."

The way she had emphasized us felt very inclusive of me. "The one in Italy?" I had only known about it because it was where Kamala spent every other summer when her parents were going through the motions of yet another conversation about divorce. They didn't want Kamala to damage her chances at a happy childhood, she would argue that they did the exact opposite.

"I say us, she left it to me."

"Oh." Was all I could say, any excitement would've felt inappropriate since there was a death in question, and Kamala had been close to her grandmother whether she liked to point it out or not. She thought sadness to be just a hinderance in her programming, so she got rid of it altogether. You would rarely see her sad, mostly because Kamala always loved being in control of what she could do and how she could feel. "Are you going to miss her?"

"Probably," she said, staring out at the window, the rain still falling heavily. "After graduation I'm going to live there a bit, do you want to come?"

I blinked at the proposition; I had never left the country before mostly because my parents didn't believe in the catharsis of a holiday. They spouted words like we worked so hard to get here and now you want to leave? However, I was just sure they did it to avoid having to pay for it. Kamala was always travelling. Once she told me that if she stayed in one place for too long she would probably die. Girls like us weren't made for cold dreary wet cities like London. We'd lived here most of our life though, and she'd always been more restless than I was. I thought it was because I had accepted my fate a long time ago. At some point we planned to run away, but I didn't have the guts and Kamala thought she'd miss her dog too much. "I don't know," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know that's all."

"It's a yes or no question, Val, and don't say you have to ask your Mum."

It was exactly what I was going to say. "I mean I do."

"You're twenty."

"I have to ask her." I shook my head, shutting my macbook because there was no point in trying to do work at this point. Once we opened conversation, we couldn't fool ourselves into doing any studying.

"What if she says no?" For Kamala life was so simple, she didn't think about the grey, she was black or white. Everything in between didn't concern her and she didn't wish for it to. I had envied her for the most part. I had first met Kamala Roy when we were twelve years old. During our first ICT lesson together, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, I have no fucking idea what's going on. It made me laugh, and I let her copy from my screen. We had lunch together that day, and every day after that. She got into fights a lot, mostly for talking too much and I spent most of my time cleaning up her sloppy bloodied nose in the girl's toilets. Once we swapped white shirts so her parents wouldn't ask questions when she got home. As we got older, she got less violent or so people liked to think, I thought she just swapped one vice for another. I shrugged, sipping my hot chocolate, which was cold and bitter, most of the powder had collected at the bottom of the cup, it took everything in me not to spit it right out. "Wait no fuck it. I'm not going to take no as an answer." Her brown eyes locked with mine as she leaned forward and squeezed my hand so tightly that I thought my veins were going to pop. "You need to do this for yourself. It's not healthy for a girl to be afraid of her mother."

"I'm not scared." I felt more childish trying to defend myself.

"She can't exactly stop you."

"Well."
"You won't have to pay for anything."

"I'll see." The topic of my mother made me uncomfortable in ways people felt uncomfortable talking about money or sexually transmitted diseases. A cocktail of shame and frustration. The conversation always pertained several questions that I never had the answer to and nothing ever good came out of it.

Kamala brushed it away pretty quickly, before she returned to talking about a documentary, she'd watched about how Mozart had been white washed. With every turn of her story, she mentioned how much she disliked white people and I'd say the same nodding attentively, not adding much else to the conversation. I was good at listening. It was what she liked best about me.