Priya Comes Back

The group had been three all summer. Jonah, Suki, and Felix, the same three who had been friends since year four, the same three who sat together at lunch and walked to school together on Tuesdays and Thursdays and had a group chat called The Usual that had been going for two years.

Then September came and so did Priya.

Priya had moved away in year five, which everyone remembered because she had cried on her last day and so had Suki, and then she had moved back over the summer, which nobody had expected, into the same house she had left because her family had rented it out and now come back.

Suki was the first to see her. She texted the group chat before the first day of term: Priya is back!! She just waved at me from her garden!!!

Jonah had replied: wait actually?? That is brilliant

Felix had replied: cool

Felix's replies were always short. That was normal.

What was not normal, Jonah thought on the first day of term, was Priya.

She looked like Priya. Same dark hair, same height, same face. She smiled when she saw them outside the school gates and the smile was right, it reached her eyes the way Priya's smile always had. She said hello to each of them by name and she remembered things, she remembered that Suki had a cat called Biscuit and that Felix supported the wrong football team and that Jonah had broken his arm in year four falling out of a tree.

All of this was correct. All of this was exactly what you would expect from Priya after two years away.

Jonah could not explain what was wrong. He just knew, in the way you sometimes know things before you can say why, that something was.

He watched her at lunch on Monday. She ate the same things Priya had always eaten, avoided the things Priya had always avoided. She knew which teachers she liked and which ones she did not. She knew the words to the song that had been playing at the leaving party in year five and she hummed it once, absently, while they were walking to maths, which was such a perfectly Priya thing to do that Jonah nearly talked himself out of the feeling entirely.

He kept this to himself for a week. He watched. He paid attention. He listened to the way she laughed and the things she said and he tried to locate the wrongness more precisely, to pin it down, to turn it from a feeling into a fact.

On Friday he stayed behind after school while the others went ahead and stood in the empty corridor for a moment trying to work out how to say it.

He could not work out how to say it. So he went home and said nothing and hoped it would go away.

It did not go away.