What Priya Said

She came to find him on Thursday after school. Not the group, just Jonah, catching up with him on the path between the science block and the gates when everyone else had already gone ahead.

"Can I talk to you?" she said.

"Sure," Jonah said. He kept walking. She walked beside him.

"You have been watching me," she said. Not an accusation. Just a fact, stated plainly.

"I have been--"

"It is all right," she said. "I would too. If I were you."

Jonah stopped walking. She stopped too. They were at the school gates, people streaming past them, and she was looking at him with the steady patient expression he had seen at the photograph moment and he thought: here it is. Whatever this is, here it is.

"What happened on the holiday?" he said.

She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke her voice was careful in a way it had not been before, less polished, less like someone reciting.

"Something happened," she said. "I do not have words for it. I came back different and I know I came back different and I have been trying very hard to be exactly as I was because I do not want to lose this." She looked at the path. "I do not want to lose you and Suki and Felix. I did not want to come back and have everyone see that something had changed."

Jonah looked at her. Her face was not performing now. It was just a face, twelve years old, looking slightly tired.

"Different how?" he said.

"I do not know how to explain it," she said. "There was a place. We went somewhere we should not have gone. And I felt something there, like something went into me or something came out of me, I cannot say which. And since then everything is slightly." She stopped. "Off. Slightly off. Like looking at a familiar room through glass. I can see it perfectly but I cannot quite feel it the way I used to."

Jonah was quiet. Around them the last students filtered through the gates.

"The tin box," he said. "You did not know what was in it."

"I knew it existed," she said. "I knew where it was. I could not remember the contents. Some things came back wrong like that." She looked at him. "Most things are right. It is just the things that were only ever felt and not seen. The inside of things."

"The photograph," Jonah said. "You were watching me watch you."

"I knew it was a test," she said. "I was not angry. I would have done the same." A pause. "Am I passing? Is that a terrible question? Am I close enough to right that you can still be my friend?"

Jonah thought about this for a long moment. He thought about the Priya who had cried on her last day in year five. He thought about whatever had happened on a holiday nobody was supposed to take. He thought about the inside of things.

"I do not know what you are," he said. "I do not mean that badly. I genuinely do not know."

"Neither do I," she said. "Not entirely."

They stood at the school gates in the quiet after everyone else had gone.

"Tell Suki," Jonah said eventually. "Tell her what you told me. Let her decide for herself."

Priya nodded. "And Felix?"

"Felix already decided," Jonah said. "He decided the first day. You did not need to pass any tests for Felix."

Something moved across her face. Something that was either relief or the memory of what relief had once felt like. He was not sure which. He was not sure, he thought, that it mattered.

He started walking. After a moment she walked beside him. Her footsteps on the pavement sounded exactly like footsteps. Her shadow on the ground stretched the right way in the afternoon light. Everything about her was exactly right, all the outside things, all the things that could be observed and measured and copied.

He did not have an answer to what she was. He thought he might never have one. He thought that was the part he would have to learn to live with, which was not easy, but was perhaps, he thought slowly, not impossible.

They walked down the street together in the autumn afternoon. The inside of things, she had said. Some things came back wrong like that.

He walked home slowly that evening. He thought about what she had said. Something went into me or something came out of me. Like looking at a familiar room through glass.

He thought about the inside of things. The photograph test had worked because the inside of the tin box was something Priya had never seen from the outside. You could know a box existed and know where it was hidden and still not know what someone had placed inside it in the dark.

He thought about what parts of a person were inside things. What you could copy from the outside and what you could not.

He thought about that all the way home.

***The End***