Priya Moves Away: the full story
Part One · Priya Moves Away
The boxes came on Monday, flat as pancakes, and Priya's dad folded them into shapes and taped the bottoms with a loud rrrrip. By Wednesday her whole room was a room of boxes, and Leila, next door, had not said a word about it. BOOKS, said one. SOCKS, said another. Her bed was the only thing in there that was still a bed.
Next door, Leila was sitting on the fence between their yards, and Priya climbed up beside her. The fence had one loose board that wobbled, and they had sat on it every evening since they were five. When the streetlights came on, they counted the lit windows on Maple Street, and Leila always said the number first.
On the last night, even the beds were gone, and Priya's sleeping bag lay on the floor of her empty room. After dinner she went out the back door. Leila was already on the fence with two clementines and a flashlight, and she did not turn the flashlight on.
They peeled the clementines without talking. Leila tried to get her peel off in one long curl, the way she always did, but it broke, so she tried again. Down the street a dog barked and a screen door banged, and then a window came on, yellow and small.
Nobody counted it. "You go first," said Leila. "No, you," said Priya. So nobody went first, and the windows came on by themselves, one and then two and then too many to count. "It won't be the same windows," said Leila. "I know," said Priya.
The truck was loud, and the new town was a long way off. When they got there, the new house smelled like paint and somebody else's soup, and Priya's room was a box with a window in it. Her dad had written PRIYA'S ROOM on a piece of tape and stuck it to the door, as if she might forget which one it was.
On Monday a teacher showed her a desk by the window. Everyone else knew where to sit and where to line up and which door stuck. At lunch Priya found the end of a table and ate half her sandwich. The other half she wrapped back up, because her throat felt too small for it.
That night she called Leila, and Leila picked up on the first ring. They said hi. Then they said hi again. Leila said, "So, um," and Priya said, "Yeah." It was the longest phone call with the least in it that Priya had ever had. When it ended, she held the phone for a while.
The new yard had a fence too. It was gray and tall and leaned to the left. Priya looked at it for a long time. Then she put one foot on the lowest rail, and then the other, and pulled herself up, the way she had a thousand times. The top was narrow, and it did not wobble at all.
From up there she could see the backs of eight houses, and the sky was going from orange to blue. A window came on, yellow and small. Then another. Priya opened her mouth to say the number, but there was no one to say it to, so she closed it again. A third window came on.
Something scraped on the other side of the fence. Two hands gripped the top, and then a head with a lot of black curls came up. A girl pulled herself onto the rail and sat a little way down from Priya. She had a bag of pretzels. "Oh," she said. "Nobody ever sits there. The old people didn't climb."
"I'm Dev," she said. "It's Devika, but nobody has time for that. Don't fall. It's higher on my side." She held out the bag, and Priya took a pretzel that was salty and very loud in her mouth. They both looked at the windows, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.
Then Dev said, "Are you counting something?" Priya looked at the windows. There were eleven lit, and more coming. "Not yet," she said. A twelfth came on. "Twelve," said Priya, and her voice came out small and a little rusty, like a door that has not been opened in a while. "Thirteen," said Dev. "By the tree." Priya looked. She had missed that one.