Nightfall ✓

Chapter 26

• chapter twenty-six • 

They stayed with us for hardly a week. The people just below us had decided to move out, and Zack and Ash immediately rented the place and moved in. Even though I wanted them to stay with us, I knew it was not sensible because ours was a one-room apartment, and for one week they had been sleeping either on the sofa-cum-bed in the store-room or on the couches.

Zack had even managed to get his hands on a cheap second-hand car, which he proudly displayed to the world by parking it outside the building, on the road. The cops had to tell him to take it somewhere else lest they should tow it away.

I had a chat with Sharon, while Lemonade was in the bedroom, writing something in the thick, pretty brown diary with yellow pages that I'd got for him. I told her that I had started my course at NYU the day before. I had tried so hard to look for her, but she was nowhere to be found. She was saying that she was in second year now, but for whatever reason I was so sleepy and tired that I barely heard her.

And then I had a weird, queasy feeling in my stomach. My throat was tight, and my mouth started tasting horribly bitter. My vision blurred. I left our chat midway and ran to the bathroom, and vomited. My head felt light, like I'd lost a kilo of my brain. My stomach felt raw. Closing the lid of the toilet seat, I sat down on it. Liam came in. "What's wrong?" He gave me a bottle of water. 

I drank some. "I don't know. Must've been something I ate. Maybe the milk was bad. I should've smelled it." I stood up, and it felt like all the blood rushed to my head at once. The room was spinning. I sat back down.

"Hazelnut?" Liam must've said, but I couldn't be sure. I was underwater, and everything I heard seemed to be muffled, as if the sound had got lost in the ocean. I felt someone shaking me. "Hazel!"

My head snapped up. "Yeah?"

"What is it?"

"I don't know. I'm just dizzy, I guess."

"Do you want to sleep?"

"Mm. I've been tired since morning."

He carried me to the bed and tucked me in. I heard him telling Sharon that I would call her back later, then he settled down next to me.

"Sorry I disturbed you," I mumbled. "You were writing something."

"Reading, actually." He kissed my forehead.

"Oh. Reading what?"

"Just random facts. Like, when hippos are upset, their sweat turns red. And I read about Pinocchio's Paradox. If Pinocchio says, 'My nose will grow now,' this will cause a paradox. Pinocchio's nose grows when he tells a lie, so if he said 'my nose will grow now', and if his nose does grow that would mean he wasn't lying, but if he wasn't lying, his nose wouldn't grow. If his nose doesn't grow, then his statement would be a lie, so his nose would grow. But then the statement wouldn't be a lie...so his nose wouldn't grow... get it?"

"Yeah," I said. "Lemonade... I want to... say something."

"Hmm?"

"Um... we... we didn't use protection." I blushed.

He kept on looking at me, not getting where I was going.

"And I have been... tired since morning. Yesterday, too, I was tired. I even vomited today."

Slowly realisation dawned on his face. His eyes widened. His lips parted slightly. "You're saying that..."

"...that I could be pregnant." There. I'd finally said it. I smiled. A silence hung in the air. I'd been suspecting this for days now, right from the moment when I noticed my increased need to urinate.