“I’m grieved,” I said. “For what?” she asked, still looking toward me yet not quite at me. “For ignoring you. For everything,” I said. “You deedn’t need to be my boyfriend.” She looked so beautiful, her big eyes blinking quick, her cheeks delicate and round, and still the roundness could just remind me of Rosy’s thin face and her high cheekbones. However, I could live with it—and, at any rate, I needed to. “You might have recently been my friend,” she said. “I know. I screwed up. I’m heartbroken.” “Don’t forgive that poop chute,” Kittu cried from inside the room.
“I forgive you.” Kiara smiled and embraced me, her hands tight around the little of my back. I folded my arms over her shoulders and smelled violets in her hair. “I don’t forgive you,” Kittu said, appearing in the entryway. Also, despite the fact that Kittu and I were not very much acquainted, she felt agreeable enough to knee me in the balls. She smiled at that point, and as I folded into a bow, Kittu said, “Presently I forgive you.” Kiara and I went for a stroll to the lake—sans Kittu—and we talked. We talked—about Rosy and about the previous month, about how she needed to miss me and miss Rosy, while I just needed to miss Rosy (which was adequately genuine). I came clean with her as a lot of as possible, from the firecrackers to the Pelham Police Department and the white tulips. “I cherished her,” I said, and Kiara said she adored her, as well, and I said, “I know, yet that is the reason. I adored her, and after she died I was unable to think about anything else. It felt, like, dishonest. Like cheating.” “That is not a valid justification,” she said. “I know,” I replied. She snickered delicately. “All things considered, great at that point. However long you know.” I realized I wasn’t going to eradicate that outrage, yet we were talking. As dimness spread that evening, the frogs croaked and a couple of recently restored insects hummed about grounds, and the four of us—Tanu, Kiara, the Colonel, and I—strolled through the virus dark light of a full moon to the Smoking Hole. “Hello, Colonel, for what reason do you call eet the Smoking Hole?” Kiara inquired. “Eet’s, like, a passage.” “It’s like fishing opening,” the Colonel said. “Like, if we fished, we’d fish here. Yet, we smoke. I don’t have the foggiest idea. I think Rosy named it.” The Colonel hauled a cigarette out of his pack and tossed it into the water. “What the heck?” I inquired. “For her,” he said. I half smiled and took cues from him, throwing in my very own cigarette. I gave Tanu and Kiara cigarettes, and they followed after accordingly. The smokes bobbed and moved in the stream for a couple of seconds, and afterward they skimmed far away. I was not religious, but rather I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering. In China, the Old Man had advised us, there are days held for grave cleaning, where you make gifts to the dead. What’s more, I imagined that Rosy would need a smoke, thus I couldn’t help suspecting that the Colonel had started an incredible ritual. The Colonel spit into the stream and ended the silence. “Interesting thing, talking to apparitions,” he said. “You can’t tell if you’re making up their answers or if they are truly talking to you.” “I say we make a list,” Tanu said, steering clear of introspective talk. “What kind of verification do we have of suicide?” The Colonel pulled out his omnipresent journal. “She never hit the brakes,” I said, and the Colonel began scribbling. Also, she was outrageously upset about something, in spite of the fact that she’d been terribly upset without committing suicide often previously. We considered that perhaps the blossoms were some sort of memorial to herself—like a burial service plan or something. However, that didn’t appear to be exceptionally Rosy to us.