Truly Madly Deeply

Chapter 3

One week later.

I flumped on my bed, my back facing my mattress as I looked up at the ceiling fan while holding the phone to my ear.

"Zoe, we should start on the past paper by 3 p.m. We don't have a lot of time and we need to cover a crazy amount of syllabus." I pressed the bridge of my nose while I rolled over in bed until my stomach was against the mattress instead and I was looking straight ahead at my reflection that I could see on my dressing table. "Yeah, let's start with the latest past papers and go backwards to like 2013? Sounds good?"

Zoya agreed to my preposition and so we hanged up, hyping each other that we could do this and we got this. The moment I hung up, I flipped upon my laptop and switched it on while I got up from my bed and tied my hair in a ponytail. I sat back on my bed, crossing my legs while placing my laptop in front of me and turned on Facebook because Zoya had said that she had sent me links to the past papers. The moment I logged in, I heard multiple ding sounds indicating messages.

Just how many links did she send? It's not like we can cover all of them. Our motivation will probably end before the papers ever could. Our seniors had told us that in order to ace CIEs we needed to practice as many past papers as we could because questions with the same concept usually repeated itself and we really needed all the advice we could get cause frankly, we had screwed our mock exams and the future was looking as dark as the circles under my eyes.

I clicked on the messenger but to my surprise, Zoya had only sent me one message, the rest of the messages were coming from an outbox indicating someone had requested to talk to me, someone who wasn't my friend. That was something that did not happen normally but then again, I used to get those cheap messages from the weirdoes who would throw in some poetry about how my face reminded them of the sun setting and something equally disturbing. Eventually, I had to take off my display picture because my brothers suddenly had an over protective streak and didn't want any creeps coming after me hence, I had a display of a Quranic surah that I absolutely adored. The one that gave me a lot of peace. It went like 'Verily with the Remembrance of Allah, do hearts find rest.'

I couldn't emphasize on how important and accurate this surah was. I always found peace when I did dhikr or performed Salah. There was this oddly relaxing feeling in my heart as if a missing void had been filled and I loved it. I felt as if it was just me with my Lord and He could hear all my silent pleas of help and gratefulness.

Anyway, I clicked open the outbox expecting some comical poetry about how some random stranger's admiration of me was associated with flowers and rainbows. However, what I did not expect was a rather brief and to-the-point kind of message in perfect grammatical English. All it said was,

'Misha Yousaf, be mine.' I almost scoffed at the message and decided to stalk whoever had sent me this. The profile ID said Ibraheem Narejo. The bio below said that he lived in Karachi. I carefully pressed on his display picture, making sure not to accidentally like or share his picture or send a request.

In the display picture was a man most probably in his early twenties. He had a side profile so I really couldn't tell what he looked like, he was sporting a carefully shaped beard but I could tell he fell in the handsome category. 

Carrying on with my stalking, I pressed on his cover photo and saw that he was standing in front of multiple cars ranging from Range rovers and Audis. I sighed internally as I thought 'boys and their ways of showing off' I mean talk about being subtle. I tried to go through his profile but there really wasn't much to see except him showing off branded outfits, cars and there were some videos of him shooting with captions like 'hunting with the boys'. I hardly doubt that they were able to hunt down a single bird that day but oh well, if he wanted to boast he should go right ahead. Does it concern me? Not at all.

The man looked oddly familiar but I really couldn't remember anyone like him so I decided to ignore him message all together and looked at the clock. 2:57?! That escalated quickly. I quickly closed the tab that opened to this man's account and deleted the message like I deleted every other message I used to get. No point pondering over this, I had past papers to solve. I pressed on the link Zoya sent and waited for it to download while I grabbed myself a packet of Cheetos and a tin of Iced Coffee. My survival system during exams.

As expected, Zoya texted me at exactly 3 so that we could start. We were WhatsApp calling side by side to explain any concepts we didn't understand to each other. When it was 4, we decided to take a break, I decided to pray Asr and we were to resume at 4:30.

I was praying for A*s and As when suddenly my laptop made the same ding sound as before. I ignored it as I continued to make dua and then eventually got up as I folded my prayer matt and placed it on a nearby chair before settling back in my seat on the bed. I still had ten minutes before we started again so I looked to see what the sound was about.

Again, there was an outbox message notification. Sighing, I clicked on it and saw that Ibraheem Narejo had sent me yet another message in perfect English. It was refreshing to see someone type proper English given that English was not our first language and a lot of people in our country were not fluent speakers or writers of it.

'Do not ignore me, Misha.' Again, I ignored it when I was pretty sure that this guy knew I had read his message since it said read or delivered or whatever you call it. I was about to mute this guy when yet another message dropped into outbox.

'Ignoring me will result in consequences. Do not make this mistake.' He could take his consequences and mistakes up his ass. I knew that was my que to block this guy and that is exactly what I did.