BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 20

MONDAY
24 SEPTEMBER, 1990
DORIAN

               You're biting your lip, grinning at some joke I've not processed. Isaiah is lying on the grass, holding his torso up with his elbows and laughing into his coursework. As much as I tell myself not to, I stare at the indents his teeth leave on the plump skin. I want to bite your lip. I want you to bite mine. I want to see the indents replicated on my skin, your gap visible in the markings.

I have to turn away to shove my thoughts back on the right track. 'Does it bother you?'

'Does what bother me?' Isaiah asks without looking up from his reading log.

'That I'm always daydreaming?'

'No.'

'Does it bother you when I ramble on about things you don't care about?'

'I reckon I'd've told you by now if it did.' When I don't reciprocate his amusement, Isaiah softens to sincerity. 'It doesn't bother me.'

I squint at the horizon. September has remained uncharacteristically dry and though only a streak of clouds pales the sky, there's a peripheral chill in the air that promises a cold October. From next week, we'll spend our breaks and free periods in the library instead of the school grounds. I pluck a yellowed aspen leaf from the grass and try to half it perfectly along its stem. It tears in an asymmetric quarter instead.

'Is it weird I don't make eye contact when we talk?'

'Yeah.' The scrape of his pen doesn't pause as he speaks. 'Ain't nun wrong with it, though.'

I pick my headphone cord from my chest and loop it around my fingers to tie a knot, then another within it and another within that. The plastic headband digs into my neck. 'Do you think anyone would marry me?' I tug the cord and it unravels.

'I'd marry you.'

I turn to him. His hand has frozen mid-sentence though his head remains bowed over his notebook, shielding his expression from me. Did his shoulders cinch or am I imagining it?

'I'm serious.'

'Me too.'

'Well, do you think anyone else would marry me?'

He finally looks up. Lying on the grass while I sit, he has to crane his neck to do so. There's a glimmer in his eyes, an intensity he has diluted until today that makes my cheeks burn (do you want to bite my lip?). It's shrouded by something different and he shrugs. 'Yeah, I think people would marry you... What's with the questions?'

I return to the horizon. 'Elijah says I'm weird and that girls won't like it.'

'Who cares?' Isaiah still clings to his joking manner but there's a splinter in his tone.

I knot my headphone cord until there's none left and I get to undo the loops again. 'Well, it's that I'm eighteen soon and my mum will want me to get married. Elijah says if I don't find someone on my own, she'll choose for me.'

Isaiah's laugh rattles in his throat. 'That's mental.'

'It's not that uncommon.'

In a strange rotation, my embarrassment of my own family, which should have me concurring his position with thrice the fervour, turns instead to a prickling frustration that masks him the villain.

I jab at the ground, digging a hole in the grass. 'What's it matter to you, anyway?'

'Cause you're my best friend and I ain't want you to be miserable for the rest of your life.'