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Skipping school comes easy to him now that he's sixteen, easier than it ever was when he was thirteen and still working himself into knots over the thought of a phone call home, still small enough that the world beyond the school gates felt too large to walk into on his own two feet. Three years have sanded most of that down, the anxiety offset by sheer repetition until Zayd can walk out through the gates with his bag strap slung over one shoulder and his shirt already coming untucked before he's cleared the building from his peripheral vision, the tie following the shirt into the bag by the time he's rounded the corner and put the school behind him.
He's taller now, broader through the shoulders, which he's still maladroitly adjusting to. There's an uncanny lag between the body he inhabits and the body he pictures when he thinks of himself, his self-image running behind the mirror and hasn't aligned with the jawline that's begun to emerge from the softness or the way his hands have grown large enough to look like they belong to a person who could, conceivably, do damage with them, and it's strange how easily the world adjusts its expectations once a body begins resembling the shape of a young man—how the security guards at the mall no longer track his movement through the aisles with their eyes, how the cashiers at the convenience store have stopped asking him if his parents know where he is, how the aunties at the market who used to cluck their tongues and steer him by the shoulder back in the direction of school now let him pass without comment—as if the additional inches and the wider frame have conferred upon him a legitimacy to be. The teachers who used to loom over him have begun, in return, to look through him instead, whether out of exhaustion or because they've collectively arrived at a silent consensus that he's a lost cause and the energy spent on retrieving him would be better redirected toward students who still possess the decency to pretend they care. He's never bothered to work out which, because it amounts to the identical thing in the end, which is that Zayd walks out and nobody follows.
His feet carry him down toward the town without any real plan for what he'll do once he gets there. He opts for the karaoke place off the main road first, where he slouches in the booth and tolerates the wailing of whichever uncle's commandeered the mic in the next room over, the off-key vibrato bleeding through the thin partition walls in a continuous cheerful assault; and then the snooker hall with its horrid green lamps casting everything in the colour of things seen through old glass, where he leans against the wall with his hands in his pockets and watches other people play and doesn't offer to join, content to listen to the murmured arithmetic of players calling their shots; and then the cinema, where he pays for a ticket to a b-rated horror film he's never heard of and finds a seat near the back and sleeps through most of it; and lastly the mamak, where he nurses his teh o peng kurang manis, stirring the beverage lazily with the straw until the ice has melted and the tea's more water than anything else.
Quenched, and with the eventide arriving in gloaming washes of red saffron and cinnabar and burnt sienna tipping into the deep indigo of a sky forgetting the sun, the colours bleeding into one another, Zayd heads back—though the direction his feet choose is an ingrained calibration that has nothing to do with obligation, because he doesn't turn toward the house where his adoptive father will be scowling and scolding him, where the surrounding carries the residual tension of a disapproval so constant it's become indistinguishable from the walls themselves, where he'd had, somewhere around thirteen, the clarifying realisation that trying to be a good boy is a form of offering yourself up for a thing you never consented to, a surrender of the self into hands that have never once earned the submission they demand, and he stopped doing that, would never do that again—walking toward the bungalow that sits in the opposite direction from all of it, tucked away at the end of a road he could walk in his sleep by now, has walked in his sleep, more or less, on the nights when his own head's been too tumultuous to be kind to him on the journey, the route encoded in him at a depth that precedes thought.
Zayd hoists himself up and over the gate and lands soft on the other side. He ducks around to the flank of the house where the curtains are drawn against the night, stopping at the window.
The orange lamplight permeates through the thin cotton in a diffuse glow, lacking the brightness to illuminate much and yet possessing an ability to settle the stockpile of tiredness from the long empty day off Zayd's shoulders in the manner it only ever lifts here, at this window, with the prospect of Bahamin on the other side of it. The whole of him is relaxing before he's even lifted a hand to the pane, his spine softening from the rigid posture he carries through the rest of the world. The latch on this side has been broken for years, the metal mechanism corroded into uselessness by monsoon seasons' worth of rain and humidity, and Bahamin has never called anyone to fix it or wedged a stick through the gap to secure it from within, and Zayd selfishly chooses to read this sustained negligence as an invitation for Zayd, or as close to one as Bahamin will ever put into words, a permission granted through inaction that Zayd has accepted with a gratitude he'd never be able to voice without it sounding like more than it should; he pries the pane open, slides them through the gap in the grille where the bars are spaced just wide enough to admit his wrists and forearms, and eases the curtain aside.
"Min!" Zayd whisper-hisses through the gap.
Inside, on his bed by the near wall, Bahamin looks up from the book he's reading.
"Min, ada mee mamak balai bomba!"
Bahamin closes the book with a slow, put-upon patience, pressing it shut with one finger still tucked inside to mark his page, and Zayd presses his advantage through the gap in the curtain with a whispered "Min, cepatlah, nanti sejuk tak sedap," and then, when Bahamin only rolls his eyes and swings his legs over the side of the bed in the beginning of getting up, Zayd resumes with a wheedling "Min, ada nescafe ais!" that earns him a sharp finger pressed to Bahamin's own lips and a look meant to communicate the full weight of the sleeping household and his parent's light-sleeping tendencies and the general inadvisability of being caught at this window at this hour, though Zayd can see the corner of Bahamin's mouth pulling despite itself.
Zayd drops back down from the window and makes his way around to the patch of green at the back of the house, the grass cool and a little damp underfoot from the afternoon's earlier shower of rain. He pulls the small rolled-up mat from where it lives tucked behind the outdoor tap, stiff from its permanent residence in the open air, and spreads it out across the grass before dropping into a cross-legged sprawl at one side, tipping his head back to look up at the slice of sky the tree above him is willing to show him through the shifting lattice of its leaves, the stars visible in fragments between the foliage, appearing and disappearing as the breeze moves the branches in an arrhythmic sway. It's the closest he's come all day to sitting inside his own body without wanting to climb out of it, the closest he's come in much longer than that to a stillness that doesn't feel like it's about to curdle into restlessness or tip over into the emptiness that eats at him from the inside when he's left alone with it too long, and he lets his eyes fall shut and simply breathes, lets the night air fill his lungs with the green, rain-washed coolness of it.
A bowl is tapped lightly against the crown of his head, and Zayd grins.
He reaches up to accept the bowl, propping the nescafe ais bungkus against the inside of it where it'll stay upright while Bahamin lowers himself down beside him with the plate and a pair of cutlery, and transfers the mee across. Zayd sets the bowl down within Bahamin's reach and watches as Bahamin eats, taking his usual small mouthfuls and chewing them. He lets Bahamin have the first stretch of it undisturbed because there's a private pleasure in the watching, in being the reason a plate of noodles ended up on this mat under this tree at this hour, in being the person who went out into the world and brought back food and carried it here and laid it before Bahamin like an offering he'll never declare an offering, in the domesticity of it that neither of them would ever admit, this bizarre, contained life they've assembled out of nights and shared meals. The night moves around them, and by the time Bahamin nudges the plate across the mat toward him, Zayd's had forgotten what the anaesthetising drift of a day had felt like before he arrived here, ceased into irrelevance against the fact of Bahamin beside him.
"Kau ponteng sekolah lagi?"
Zayd groans an affirmative around the last mouthful of noodles.
Bahamin sighs. He wipes the grease from the corner of Zayd's mouth with a tissue, and once the wiping is done, presses the tissue firmly against Zayd's mouth.
"Oi—sakit lah, Min!"
"Padan muka. Kau bergaduh kat sekolah tu tak sakit pula?"
"Aku dah tak buat lah benda-benda tu."
"Macam mana nak bergaduh kat sekolah, pergi sekolah pun tak."
Zayd snickers at that, because it's fair, and because Bahamin delivering fairness in that tone is one of the more comfortable experiences available to him. He steals Bahamin's nescafe ais, and then dips his hand into his pocket and produces the box of cigarettes and the lighter.
The lighter gives him a moment's pause, because the lighter is the one Bahamin had hurled at his chest last year, and Zayd had kept, has carried it in his pocket every day since, has refilled the fluid twice and replaced the flint once, because he kept it not in spite of that but because of it.
It had been at the playground near the back of his neighbourhood, the old one with the swings that still worked and the slide that didn't, the paint on the metal frame blistered and flaked away by years of equatorial sun. Zayd had been sitting on one of the swings with a cigarette pinched between two fingers, carrying about his person the crackling hostility of a boy that most people had the good sense to read from ten paces and steer around. Most people had read the unwelcoming blankness he wore over his face like a visor and had made the sensible, self-preserving calculation that what was happening on that swing was none of their concern.
Bahamin, for some reason, hadn't.
Zayd had heard him before he'd seen him, the scuff of slippers on the packed dirt path that ran along the playground's perimeter, and he'd known who it was without lifting his head. Zayd still doesn't know how Bahamin had known where he'd be, has never asked, suspects the answer falls under the meticulously maintained box of 'Zayd' that Bahamin keeps in his head like how he keeps boxes of other people. Regardless, Bahamin had come to find him—had made the decision to leave his own house and walk through the neighbourhood and follow the internal compass pointed him toward Zayd—and had walked up to the swings and stood in front of him with a countenance that Zayd had initially read as disapproval, which Zayd had been prepared for, had an entire arsenal of deflections ready to deploy, the shrug and the sneer and the dismissive exhalation of smoke and the performative indifference he'd spent years perfecting.
It had turned out to be a countenance his arsenal hadn't been built to handle.
Because the disapproval had rearranged itself on Bahamin's face into a form Zayd hadn't been able to understand at fifteen and can only partially name now, a year on, with the benefit of hindsight and the additional context of having spent his days since then returning to that look again and again in his memory. It had been a countenance of hurt and fear, a rawness that Bahamin's composure, usually impervious to Zayd's provocations, had failed to conceal in time, and seeing it there on Bahamin's face, had done a thing to Zayd's chest that all the cigarette smoke in the world couldn't have replicated, a sharp contraction behind his ribs that he'd had no framework for interpreting and had therefore done what he always did with feelings he couldn't categorise, which was ignore them and hope they'd disappear on their own.
Budak sekolah tak boleh merokok.
Bahamin had reached out and pulled the cigarette from between Zayd's fingers, and had crouched down there in the dirt in front of the swing, pressing the cigarette out against the ground. And then Bahamin had looked at Zayd's shirt pocket where the box of cigarettes was visible, the rectangular outline of it pressed against Zayd's chest, and had held out his hand.
Zayd had understood, that he was being asked and not told, that the open hand was a request and not a demand, and that this distinction mattered to Bahamin in a way it hadn't mattered to anyone else who'd ever tried to take things from Zayd. He had looked at the outstretched hand and looked at Bahamin's face, at the countenance that was still sitting there unresolved, and had taken the box out and put it in Bahamin's hand along with the lighter, because arguing with Bahamin when Bahamin looked like that was a thing Zayd wasn't capable of, had never been capable of, would likely never develop the capacity for no matter how many years he spent cultivating his talent for pushing back against everyone else—this knowledge that Bahamin could ask Zayd for almost anything, and Zayd would give it over without understanding why.
And then Zayd had said—because he'd been fifteen and the thing about being fifteen is that you are filled with a malicious anger and a misplaced judgement, brim-full with a nasty bile that you rashly aim at the closest person, the one standing in front of you with an open hand—
Eleh, Min, kau bukannya kisah pasal aku pun.
The silence that followed had been different from Bahamin's usual silences, different from the companionable ones, the contemplative ones, the ones that meant Bahamin was reading, the ones that meant Bahamin was upset and processing, the ones that meant Bahamin was choosing his words with the lapidary care of a person who believes language should be deployed with sincerity or not at all. This silence had belonged to none of those categories, had occupied a space Zayd hadn't known existed in Bahamin's repertoire, a silence that was less an absence of speech and more a discernible shattering of composure; and Zayd had seen Bahamin's eyes do a thing he'd never seen them do before, a wet brightness that rose and was blinked back in a convulsive motion, a betrayal that Zayd suspected Bahamin himself hadn't been aware of, hadn't felt it happen, the same way you don't feel a cut until you see the blood.
Bahamin had said, in a quivering voice, pitched much higher than his usual register:
Aku sentiasa kisahkan kau!
Bahamin had thrown the box and the lighter at Zayd's chest, hard enough that Zayd felt the impact through his shirt, had turned and walked away across the playground without looking back. And Zayd had sat on the swing with the box and the lighter in his lap and the lonely playground yawning around him in the fading light, the chains of the swing creaking in the breeze that had picked up from the east, and had stayed there for a long time after the sound of Bahamin's footsteps had faded into the distance and the evening had darkened to the deep, unreadable black of a sky that offered him no guidance, had stayed there with the weight of what he'd said heavy in his chest alongside the weight of what had been said back.
"Bagi satu."
Zayd recovers from his pause and raises a brow.
"Bukan ke 'budak sekolah tak boleh merokok'?"
Bahamin looks at him.
"Aku bukan budak sekolah."
Although Bahamin had said it in that deadpanned manner of his, that flat, matter-of-fact tone, Zayd feels a crack in the sentence, because—
What boy who has voluntarily dropped out of school at twelve has a Biology textbook at sixteen, its spine cracked and softened from the number of times it's been laid flat and pored over in the lamplight of that small bedroom, pencilled soft with notes in neat, tidy handwriting? What boy who has renounced the classroom would spend his own money, money that Zayd knows is scarce, that arrives in irregular amounts from odd jobs and errands a sixteen-year-old shouldn't have to know the market rate for, on Physics exercise books from the second-hand shop in town, and work through them page by page? Who, of all the boys Zayd has ever known, in that horrible school of his and outside of it, would love learning—the labour and the frustration that precedes the gratification of comprehension—more than Bahamin?
Zayd knows what Bahamin would've been, given a world that had let him keep the things that had belonged to him, given a world that hadn't stripped away his education and his future and his right to sit in a classroom among his peers and raise his hand and be called upon, and the knowing is a wound that Zayd carries on Bahamin's behalf because Bahamin won't carry it for himself, because Bahamin has transmuted his own grief into ferocious autodidacticism that refuses to let the loss be total. He knows it because he's watched Bahamin explain a chemical reaction to the neighbourhood cat with more passion than most of Zayd's teachers have ever managed to bring to a room full of students they're being paid to educate, the cat meowing with its eyes half-closed in feline indifference while Bahamin gestured at the air and drew molecular structures with his finger and spoke about electron transfer. He's watched Bahamin puzzle out a Maths problem on the back of an envelope with the intensity other boys reserve for football scores and video game rankings. He's watched Bahamin light up over a Faraday cage diagram in a borrowed magazine with a radiance so luminous that Zayd, who has never lit up over a diagram in his life and cannot fathom the internal experience of a person who does, had found himself staring at Bahamin's face instead of the page, had found the miracle less in the diagram and more in the boy looking at it, in the sheer incandescent aliveness of a mind encountering a thing it loves and being, for that brief moment, unselfconsciously happy.
Bahamin would've been the crème de la crème.
Bahamin would've been the boy the teachers told could go far, the boy they'd have pointed to in staffroom conversations as proof that the profession was worth the exhaustion, whose name would've been read out at assemblies with a pride borrowed from his achievements, whose papers would've been passed around as examples of what rigour and perseverance look like, whose future would've been laid out ahead of him with every door propped open and a zephyr coming through each one, carrying with it the scent of universities and scholarships and laboratories and a life commensurate with the size of his mind. Instead Bahamin is sixteen and has been out of school for four years, and the distance between what he is and what he should have been allowed to become is a chasm that Zayd doesn't have the language to describe and doesn't have the power to bridge, and the rage he feels about it is a directionless thing.
Zayd places a cigarette between his lips, lighting it by flicking the wheel of the lighter—Bahamin's lighter, his lighter, theirs in a manner a thing becomes shared through the violence of its giving—and takes a measured drag off it before he passes it across.
Bahamin stares at the cigarette between Zayd's fingers, and Zayd sees the hesitation in his face, the almost imperceptible shift in his expression of a boy standing at the edge of a line he hasn't crossed before and hasn't quite yet decided how to feel about the crossing of, the slight tightening at the corners of his mouth that could be apprehension or could be anticipation.
Then Bahamin takes it from Zayd and places it between his lips at a similar angle to the one Zayd had held it at, and holds it there, the smoke curling up past the scar on his cheek.
"Hisap lah. Nama pun hisap rokok."
Bahamin cuts a glare at Zayd from the corners of his eyes. He draws in through the filter and gets it wrong, gets it too deep and too fast, and the smoke catches him across the back of his throat and he doubles forward, coughing hard into his elbow, his shoulders shaking, his eyes watering over until the lashes clump together and the tears track two lines down his cheeks.
Zayd laughs, and the laugh is warm and carries within it none of the mockery it might have carried if it was meant for anyone else. He plucks the cigarette back out of Bahamin's fingers before he can drop it, and thumps him twice between the shoulder blades with his palm.
Bahamin clears his throat, straightening back up out of the fold he'd doubled into, wiping at his watering eyes and blinking the residual sting away. He holds his hand back out for the cigarette with an obstinate set to his jaw, and Zayd's mouth curls as he passes the cigarette back.
Zayd watches as Bahamin tries again, drawing the smoke in a shallow sip and holding it in his mouth before letting it out in a cautious stream that dissipates into the small space between them. Bahamin's shoulders lower a fraction on the exhale, and Zayd asks, quiet, because the garden is quiet and the hour is quiet and he's doing his best to not ruin this, "So, Min—verdict?"
Bahamin considers the cigarette between his fingers.
"... Pahit."
"Memang pahit."
Bahamin passes the cigarette back across. They sit there like that for a while, trading the cigarette back and forth between them.
"Yid… Lepas ni kau nak buat apa?"
"Balik rumah orang tua aku ah kot. Mandi."
"Bukan lah. Maksud aku, lepas ni. Lepas ni, kau nak buat apa?"
Zayd glances at Bahamin, understanding the unsubtle implication of the question, understanding that Bahamin is asking about the future, the uncharted stretch of years that other boys their age have been progressively filling in for themselves with plans and conscientious ambitions and the whole forward-facing machinery of a life being assembled with intention, while Zayd's been busy pretending the drawing board doesn't exist. He also understands why Bahamin's asking—Bahamin's a person who sees the horizon whether he wants to or not, whose enormous mind can't help but run out ahead of the present tense, taking stock of what's likely to be waiting there, and Bahamin has been watching Zayd fritter his days away, and the worry has finally, on this mat, under this tree, found its way to the surface.
The trouble is that Zayd doesn't have an answer. Not one that would satisfy Bahamin and not one that would satisfy himself either, and the not-having-one is a thing he's spent the last several years trying to ignore, the same way he ignores the leak in the ceiling above his bed at his adoptive father's house, by behaving as if it isn't there, by moving his head to the left when he lies down so the drip doesn't land on his forehead, by refusing to look up and acknowledge the stain spreading across the plaster, that will, one day, bring the whole thing down on him.
The future is a ceiling stain.
The future is a drip Zayd keeps dodging.
The future is the thing Zayd can't look at directly because it would require him to confront the corrosive shame that he has done nothing to prepare for it and has no idea how to begin.
"Aku tak tahu," Zayd says at last. He takes his time with it because he's telling the truth, and because he doesn't want to lie to Bahamin about this, has never lied to Bahamin about much of anything, his body has independently decided that this is the one person before whom dishonesty is a physical impossibility. Zayd shrugs, taking his last inhale off the cigarette and stubbing the dwindling ember against the ground beside the mat, observing the chiaroscuro die under his thumb. "Kerja ah kot mana-mana. Kedai Uncle Yap ke?" He snorts, trailing off into deflective humour. "Tolong angkat guni beras, susun barang, tahan juga gaji seminggu untuk beli rokok. Atau jadi tukang basuh pinggan kat mamak balai bomba ke—boleh makan free."
Bahamin doesn't laugh.
He doesn't do the eye-roll he does when Zayd's being ridiculous, doesn't do the small huff of breath through his nose that counts, in Bahamin's restrained vocabulary of amusement, as a concession to comedy, doesn't do anything except look at Zayd with a steadiness that strips the joke of its protective covering and leaves the thing underneath it exposed. There's a miniscule unhappy pull at Bahamin's mouth that Zayd notices straight away, and the unhappy pull tells him that the joke hasn't landed, that it was never going to land, that Bahamin has heard through the deflection to the bleak, resigned thing living underneath it and is choosing, with that look, to acknowledge the thing and not the joke, which is the most Bahamin thing Bahamin could've done and is also, for Zayd, the most disarming, because it means he can't prevaricate.
Zayd diverts his gaze down. He waits for what Bahamin's going to say next, because Bahamin always has been the one who carries their conversations forward when Zayd stalls out.
"Ayid, kereta apa yang kau suka tu?"
Zayd looks up.
"Yang kau pernah tunjuk kat aku dulu—hmm…" Bahamin tilts his head, doing the thing he does when he's performing the act of trying to remember a detail he hasn't forgotten, a pantomime of forgetfulness clearly designed to give Zayd the pleasure of correcting him, "Mercedes?"
Zayd perks despite himself, straightens up out of his slump, his spine realigning and his shoulders squaring off and the defeated hunch of his posture unwinding. "BMW!" he says, and the correction comes out with a warmth to it he can't quite mask, an involuntary, ardent lift in his voice that he'd be embarrassed by if anyone other than Bahamin was listening. "BMW, Min."
His grin widens, and he shifts to face Bahamin more squarely, drawing one knee up to rest his elbow on, because talking about the car is a thing that requires the use of his hands. "BMW E31 850CSi. Two-door coupé. Headlights dia—flip-up, Min! Lebih kurang macam 1987 Chevrolet Corvette C4 atau 1984 Ferrari Testarossa! Kau tekan butang, lepas tu headlamp dia keluar dari bonet macam mata!" He mimes it with his hand, hinging his fingers upward at the knuckles, and he can feel the boyishness of himself in the gesticulation, can feel the years falling away from him until what's sitting on this mat is less a sixteen-year-old with a truancy record and more the child he used to be before the world got its hands on him, bright-eyed and eager.
"Body dia cantik gila, Min! Takde grille besar-besar macam kereta sekarang and the engine—Min, V12! S70B56, kalau kau nak the engine code. Around three hundred and seventy-five, three hundred and eighty horsepower, torque dia 550 Newton-metre at four thousand rpm. From zero to a hundred dalam enam saat! Diorang limit top speed at 250 kilometre sejam electronically, sebab kalau tak limit, dia boleh pergi lagi laju! Gila, kan?"
He can hear himself getting faster, the words tripping over each other in his rush to fit them all in, each sentence an obsessive fixation and encyclopaedic retention he's never had any practical use for. "Lepas tu, Min—six-speed manual, tu yang rare. Sebab kalau nak CSi trim, yang keluar dengan six-speed, dia memang takde yang auto, which means semua E31 850CSi yang keluar daripada Dingolfing, keluar dengan clutch pedal and a stick. Dan BMW cuma buat 1,510 biji E31 850CSi sepanjang production run, lepas tu takde dah. Memang limited edition nak mampus—" and Zayd runs out of breath on the tail end of it, his lungs heaving due to the fact that he's been running on a single continuous exhale, and in the small silence that follows, the awareness creeps in—that he's been talking for long and that Bahamin has said nothing back the whole while; Bahamin has only listened, as though the act of listening to Zayd talk about a car that neither of them will ever see in person, let alone sit inside, is its own worthwhile occupation and not a courtesy Bahamin's merely enduring until Zayd, in due course, exhausts himself.
"E31 tu dream car aku tapi...—Mimpi je lah."
"Kenapa nak biarkan dia cuma mimpi?"
"Hm?"
"Kenapa nak biarkan dia cuma mimpi bila kau boleh jadikan dia realiti?"
Zayd opens his mouth and closes it again, because Bahamin had asked the question without rhetoric and persuasion, and what Bahamin believes is apparently this—that Zayd, who skips school three days out of five and has been doing so for two years and has no clear plan for the next two after that, is capable of making a dream car into a real car. "Kau boleh pergi sekolah balik, belajar rajin-rajin," Bahamin continues, his voice remaining perfectly leveled within its usual register, refusing to drop into the soft, manipulative tones of coaxing or harden with the strain of wanting to be taken seriously. "Score semua exam kau, lepas tu kau boleh pergi universiti." He pauses, allowing the weight of the trajectory to hang, and Zayd watches him turn his gaze outward toward the dark garden sprawling beyond the edge of the woven mat, at the tree and the sky it's obscuring. "Kau boleh jalan-jalan, tengok dunia, jumpa orang yang kau tak pernah jumpa, jelajah tempat yang kau tak pernah bayangkan." Another pause, and in the pause Zayd can discern that Bahamin has been revolving these thoughts in his mind for longer than tonight, that these aren't words being organised in real time by a racing intellect, but words that have been waiting, for months, for years perhaps, stored in a place Bahamin keeps for the things he isn't sure he has the right to say, and has only now found fit to lay them out.
Bahamin turns back, and looks at Zayd.
The lamplight from the window crowns him in trembling aureole.
Bahamin's expression is the most serious Zayd has seen it since that day at the old playground, and it's also the most hopeful, a hope that Zayd can see has been built painstakingly, a hope that Bahamin has been tending with devotion and discipline and the refusal to let it die despite every piece of evidence the world has offered him that hope, for boys like them, is a luxury the circumstances don't support—and the hope isn't for himself, Zayd realises, the hope has never been for himself, has always been aimed outward, at Zayd, as though Bahamin has taken the capacity for believing in a future that he can no longer build for himself and redirected it, poured it into the vessel of Zayd's life, and is now sitting here in the dark asking Zayd to carry it forward because Bahamin can't, because the doors that are still open for Zayd—school, university, the world beyond this town—are doors that closed for Bahamin four years ago, and the grief of that closure is crystal in his voice, in the breath he takes before the last line that is:
"Kau boleh tinggalkan tempat sial ni."
The word is kau, not kita, and the future Bahamin has envisioned is a solitary one, a map with a single set of footprints escaping the circumference of Kuala Makar while Bahamin remains behind as if his presence is legally bound to this anathematised soil by default.
Zayd hates it.
He loathes the terrifying ease with which Bahamin can compose a vibrant, grandiose tomorrow that omits his own existence while populating the expanse with Zayd's triumphs. He despises how Bahamin can picture Zayd flourishing in a different city while refusing to grant himself the smallest fraction of happiness. It feels deeply cruel that the one person who possesses a flawless understanding of Zayd's mind, the sole person who defends Zayd's mediocre potential, is also the individual who is most skilled at erasing his own needs from the ambit of hope. It's as though the act of wishing for Zayd and the act of wishing for himself are two opposing currents that Bahamin has decided can never be allowed to flow within the channel of the same river.
"Kalau aku tinggalkan tempat sial ni, kau nak ikut aku?"
Bahamin lowers his gaze, and there's an answer in that small surrender of the eyes, an answer that Zayd receives with a clarity he wishes he could refuse.
Zayd reaches behind his own frame, his fingers seeking out the coarse, faded texture of the forgotten canvas backpack lying discarded in the grass beside him, and he drags the weight of it closer by its worn strap until he can pull the zipper wide and retrieve the crumpled white uniform shirt from the depths where he'd hastily stuffed it earlier that morning. He shakes the fabric open, and he leans across to drape the cloth across the slope of Bahamin's shoulders.
"...Yid?"
Zayd pretends he doesn't hear the tentative utterance of his own name. He pours the whole of his focus into the shirt, his fingertips tracing the warmth at the inside of Bahamin's wrist before he guides one arm into the waiting opening of the sleeve. Bahamin yields to the motion, permitting himself to be manoeuvred with an unprotesting trust that reveals a rare willingness to be tended to, a vulnerability that stays distinct from any willingness to be actively helped, an intimacy that Bahamin extends to almost no one else alive, and which Zayd has spent enough years receiving to recognise as no slight or insignificant concession. The second sleeve follows just as easily, and the uniform shirt settles fully across Bahamin's frame, sagging around the ridge of his shoulders, and yet it appears natural resting there, as though the garment had merely been biding its time for the arrival of the human context that would lend it meaning.
Zayd begins fastening the buttons.
He starts the process from the very bottom, a choice that grants his hands a plausible excuse to linger against the fabric and forces his eyes to stay safely cast downward, held far from the searching scrutiny of Bahamin's face, while he struggles silently to gather his own composure back into his hands. His fingertips refuse to keep a steady grip, slipping more than once against the plastic of the buttons before they slide through the stubborn resistance of the buttonholes.
Zayd knows that this changes nothing.
Both of them will still be delivered back to the predetermined lives that lie waiting for them come morning, once this patch of grass and this transient hour have run themselves out. Zayd holds no capacity within himself to rewrite their harsh histories; he can't undo the gradual damage of the years that shaped their outlooks, can't scrub clean the stains of the bloody reality the two of them are bound to, can't gather up the broken state of their yestertime and mend them.
Even so, he continues.
His fingers climb higher, drawing the shirt closed across the plane of Bahamin's chest, and Zayd reaches for the tie and loops it around Bahamin's neck, coaxing it upward until it rests beneath the collar. He straightens the knot, smooths the collar, brushes phantom creases from the front of the shirt, and adjusts the sit of the fabric where it gathers at the shoulders.
When he finally lets his hands fall away, Zayd leans back.
They look at each other.
Bahamin sits before him in white, and Zayd can't stop the thing his own mind insists on doing, which is slipping backward into a stretch of years that never once existed.
He imagines Bahamin walking beside him through the school gates, grumbling under his breath about Zayd stealing half of his breakfast before the two of them have even reached the corridor. He imagines them dragging their reluctant feet toward assembly, exchanging bored sidelong glances that carry entire conversations. He imagines classrooms thick with afternoon heat, exercise books spread open across desks pushed together, Bahamin bent over the pages as he explains chemical equations that dissolve into meaningless symbols the moment Zayd tries to hold them, while Zayd taps his pen against the edge of the table in unhelpful frustration.
He imagines the canteen at lunch, the well-worn argument over whose turn it is to stand in the queue, the easy theft and trade of food from each other's plates. He imagines sports day beneath a punishing sun, Bahamin running and Zayd complaining his way through every single event only to cheer himself hoarse each time Bahamin crosses a finish line a full stride ahead of everyone else. He imagines examination results handed back in tense, paper-shuffling silence, Bahamin's marked in the high nineties as they always would be, and the quiet, uncomplicated warmth Zayd would've carried on his behalf, a warmth he'll now never once have the occasion to feel, filed away with all the other feelings that belong to a boy who never got to exist.
He imagines all of it, the grain and texture of a shared school life the two of them were never permitted to live, those quotidian mornings and eminently immemorable afternoons that would've amasssed, unnoticed, into the tremendous and irreplaceable fact of having grown up alongside each other. And the imagining carries a weight that can't be retroactively constructed or conjured into being no matter how faithfully Zayd fastens a shirt, because a life isn't a garment, and he can't dress Bahamin in years that were stolen from the both of them. The uniform can be put on in a matter of minutes. The childhood it stands for can't ever be.
He lifts his hand, and he traces his fingers over the nametag stitched above Bahamin's chest, where his own name sits embroidered in dark thread, small and neat and permanent. Beneath the pad of his finger the raised letters spell out a version of the two of them that don't exist.
“Kau nak warna apa?”
“Warna?”
"E31 aku—kau nak warna apa, Min?"
Bahamin blinks at the unexpected shift in the conversation. He takes Zayd's hand, the one still resting over the nametag stitched above his chest, and to Zayd's faint surprise it's trembling yet, the tremor having outlasted every reasonable excuse for it, and Bahamin folds his fingers around it and draws it down to the warmth where their knees have met in the dim night.
"... Kau nak aku pilihkan warna dream car kau?"
Zayd turns his hand upward beneath the pressure of Bahamin's, opening his palm to receive it in its entirety, and then closing his fingers around it. "Hm."
He waits, and he doesn't lay the reasoning bare between them, because to speak it plainly would be to probe into the wound that the gesture is meant to bind, to profess aloud a hurt they've both agreed to leave unspoken, and he'd far sooner let the offering do its slow and gentle work in the dark than watch Bahamin flinch away from being seen so nakedly, by one of the few people left in his life who still bothers to look. He doesn't say that if Bahamin thinks too little of himself to imagine a future worth reaching toward, if he's been taught across the long and unkind years that dreaming is a privilege parcelled out only to other, softer, more deserving boys, then he can hand the dreaming over to Zayd intact and unspent and trust with his whole heart that it won't be squandered, because Zayd will carry both their dreams and see the two of them realised together. He'll get the car, and it'll wear the colour Bahamin chooses now, tonight.
"Merah."
"Merah?"
"Masa kita kecil dulu, kau suka merah."
Red.
Red is a hue resembling banked ferocity of a submerged heat refusing to extinguish itself even after the primary fire that ignited its core has gone cold, a shade signifying sheer insistence and an unappeased appetite for life. Red is the vivid scarlet of the cheap plastic slippers Zayd had worn through the very soles at seven years old, weeping tears when the seams split apart, and it is the shade of the cheap shaved ice he and Bahamin had eagerly shared out of a chipped bowl with two plastic spoons because their combined coins could only secure for one, the artificial syrup staining both their mouths with the lurid, temporary crimson of felicity. Red remains the raw, weeping scrape of a young knee brought down against tarmac, while Bahamin crouched beside him, blowing softly across the wound. Red is faded kites dancing overhead during school holidays. Red is weathered playground equipment burning. Red is the last streaks of daylight stretching while both of them delayed going home, inventing excuse after excuse.
Red fills those years.
Zayd had forgotten, or perhaps it's truer to say that he had buried those memories until they could no longer find their way back without guidance, but—Bahamin remembers them all. Among every hardship, Bahamin had held onto the boy Zayd used to be, treasuring the red thread of Zayd's childhood self as a priceless memento through the depredation of their youth.
"Kau ingat, Min?"
"Aku sentiasa kisahkan kau."
Zayd tightens his hold over Bahamin's hand, until their knuckles press painfully together, until every bone and tendon strains beneath the force of his grip, as though enough physical pressure might effectively regulate him against the immense surge of emotion threatening to fracture his sanity from within. He has believed his survival belonged solely to his own grim determination, convincing his stubborn heart that every difficult morning conquered and every unbearable night endured stood as indisputable proof of his isolated resilience, yet the illusion crumbles now under staggering hypotheticals: Where would his drifting life have anchored if Bahamin had chosen, even once, to stop reaching for him? What version of his history would have unfolded if Bahamin’s boundless patience had worn thin? In what dark corner of Kuala Makar would he be rotting right now if those grounding hands of Bahamin had closed into distant fists and turned away, leaving him to navigate his failures without a witness? Which of his self-destructive impulses would've claimed him if Bahamin wasn't here? What pathetic creature would inhabit his clothes today if Bahamin hadn't poured, in perpetuity, an unearned belief into the vacant vessel of his existence? How much more broken would Zayd be? How much lonelier?
"Mimpi tu—kau sanggup tunggu aku jadikan realiti?"
Bahamin's mouth lifts into a smile, a genuine expression that finally reaches the tired lines around his eyes and warms them from within. He twines their hands, their fingers locking.
"Apa lagi yang aku nak buat, Yid?"
And that casual confession—delivered with an effortless simplicity, as if the act of waiting through the passing years for Zayd to find his footing was the most patent, fundamental occupation in the world—thoroughly dismantles Zayd's remaining defenses. He silently binds himself to an unspoken vow that he'll return through those school gates the moment morning arrives, pledging to sit through tedious hours, to confront the daunting equations and essays, because the future has stopped being a vague, grey wall, transforming instead into a scarlet machine tearing down a distant road and his best friend Bahamin waiting for him at the end.