Yours, Raven

One

* Glossary *

Nu - mom
Ishor - God

One
• • •

A little courage. A little courage.

Sending a mental praying to God for strength and courage, Raven tiptoed towards the pile of backpacks; a neat, red letter shaking in her hand. With every single step she got closer to the brownish-red couch where Elliot's gang had dumped their backpacks, she felt her temperature rise. Raven thought with the way her body was heating up now, she was sure to get fever by evening.

"You can do it, Raves!" her best friend, Darrin Hongsha, flashed an encouraging smile from the kitchen door, speaking in English.

Raven's alert eyes darted up the stairs towards Elliot's room, listening to make sure the boys were still inside, busy doing their things, whatever that may be. When she saw the door shut and heard them still being noisy up there, she nodded to herself.

Okay. Great. They aren't leaving yet.

With one more step forward, she looked back at Darrin again, seeking support and motivation, to convince and make herself believe that she wasn't doing something stupid. Darrin gave her a confident thumbs-up. Before taking decision to finally get into action, they had calculated the probabilities for weeks. And this morning, they were able to round up their research and come to the conclusion that Raven held 'a pretty good chance'.

One - Nicholas cared about her as much as her brother, Elliot, did. That must mean something, right? He always treated her relatively extra nice compared to all the nice treatments she got from the rest of her brother's friends, who would usually forget she existed. Simply put, Nicholas was very very nice to her.

Two - Nicholas had no girlfriend as far as they knew. He was always at their house with his group.

Three - Well, she was still thinking about this one.

Raven tiptoed forward, eyes glued on a black Adidas backpack that had a soccer ball key-chain dangling from the zip. Once she grabbed it, she felt thousand tons of anxiety settle on her shoulders, lungs, heart, arms as if gravity had suddenly intensified on her spot. It was becoming impossible for her to move a muscle and her breath suddenly stopped mid-way in her throat. For a second or two, she stood like a stone in the middle of the room, staring down at the backpack she was holding in her hand. And with the way the anxiety was choking her up now, Raven was sure she would die any second.

She had finally taken hold of Nicholas' backpack but, as reality quickly set in, all courage she had accumulated dissipated in the matter of seconds and all that week's plotting and planning and tarot readings suddenly seemed to be of no help.

Nonononono. I can't do this.

Raven dropped the backpack and whirled back towards Darrin.

"What are you doing?! This is your last chance!" Darrin panicked, whispering, eyes round and alarmed at the onset of a failed mission.

At the sight of Darrin's panicky expression and the fact that this could truly be her last chance, Raven immediately spun back on her heels, took hold of the soccer key-chain, zipped open Nicholas' backpack with a newfound courage and threw the letter inside it. Then, quickly zipping up the pouch, she came rushing back to Darrin with her hands pressed against her wildly thumping heart. Darrin received her in her arms with a hearty laugh.

Elliot and his gang had graduated college a few weeks ago in June. Soon they'd be moving away to the big cities. Elliot, in the absence of a specific aim or goal, had decided to pursue master's degree. While Nicholas, he had cracked the Combined Defense Services (CDS) exam for Indian Military. Two weeks ago, he'd returned from Allahabad after all the hilarious tests and interviews he had to go through.