KINGSMAN

VI

"I THOUGHT YOU'D NEVER ANSWER," HER MOTHER GREETED HER.

Sylvi tried not to let the sly eyes of Samuel Webb get to her as she listened to her mother speak. "Well, you got me. What's wrong?" It was strange for Lorraine to call her when it wasn't any usual time. Something had to be wrong.

"Nothing's wrong. Can't a mother just call her daughter?" No, Sylvi wanted to say, not your kind of mother. "Are you going to visit home soon? Your dad's been calling the house, but since he doesn't have your number..."

Sylvi sighed and turned away from Samuel to bring the phone closer to her ear. Her father, Syed, wasn't terrible. She didn't hate him. They just didn't know each other and that made it extremely difficult and uncomfortable to hold any sort of conversation. There'd been a time when they'd been close and she'd felt less her, but there was no going back to that.

"No," she said finally, "but I can. If you need me." She paused. "Do you?"

"Oh no, no. I don't need you. You're at that fancy school, you have much better things to do. I'm just asking because he wants to talk, and I want him to stop calling my house sounding dejected when he hears my voice and not yours. Are you still doing Latin, by the way? He asked."

Sylvi sighed. "Yeah, yeah I'm still in the class." She knew what he probably meant by it even if he didn't. 

When she'd first gotten into Edgewood, her father had been ecstatic and even more so when he learned about its expansive language selection. He'd wanted her to pick Arabic, Mandarin, Biblical Hebrew, just something different. And she'd turned around and chosen Latin- because it was comfortable, because it was an undead language and the school didn't offer Greek. It'd ruined countless evenings ever since then. The guilt, the questioning, it was always the guilt and questioning parents brought. Even if they didn't realize it.

When she was younger and unimaginably impressionable, she'd spoken Bengali in fragments, understood more than she spoke. That still held true though it'd deteriorated over the years. After the split, her parents still lived in the same house and she still felt less her even though that person began to slip into the cracks left behind by the strange density that was present in her house.

 When he'd left, Lorraine still tried to preserve that part of her, attempting to speak her broken, stilted pidgin at home. Until she'd stopped because she didn't know enough to continue and wasn't replenishing her vocabulary as she was using it. Or celebrating Pohela Boishakh and calling Syed to wish him a happy new year. Her mother would drop her off and Sylvi would spend the day with him, winding through the park and stopping to buy pitha before they went to his house to try making bhaja ilish and she would steal green chillies and those were always the best days. Sometimes, Lorraine stayed and they'd make flower chains and hang them everywhere. Until they stopped because she was working more and didn't have time. She used to call her father everyday and speak of anything and everything, prattle and running around the house with the phone in hand, showing him the changes made to their lives through the crackling video-call and she'd love to hear him laugh about the crooked chair steadied by a library book she'd forgotten to return or the crack in the wall her mother had covered with a rug and then called it art. Nowadays, the most "cultural exposure" she got was takeout from the Indian restaurant two blocks away. 

But yes, she was still taking Latin.

Sylvi stood and grabbed her bag. She didn't bother to say goodbye to Samuel before walking down the length of the aisle and pushing open the door. She stepped onto a rain-slicked street. Drizzle poured down on her. The sky shifted from bruised blue to sick grey. She still had April and the promise she'd failed to keep.