Work Text:
Krishna Sol Mohan-Abbot was having the worst day of her life.
First, Miss Luna from biology accused her of copying her friend Bella’s homework, which could not be further from the truth, because, well, Kris’ parents were both doctors. She’d known what the patella was since she was five years-old. Just because Bella and Kris had the same idea for a project didn’t mean that they cheated on each other. They were best friends, and best friends sometimes shared the same brain. Right?
Second, she got her period in the middle of PE. She’d been cramping the whole week but her schedule that she meticulously tracked told her that she wouldn’t get it for another week. Turned out her body was sabotaging her, because during a relay race, Arvind pointed at her shorts and said, “Hey, I think you got injured or something. You’re… bleeding.”
Well, fuck.
She turned red as a tomato and sprinted to the bathroom, only to find the third reason why her day sucked; the stall she was in was out of toilet paper.
“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK,” she screamed in the bathroom, her voice echoing off the tiles.
Her phone was nowhere near her as she had left it in her locker, she was in a bathroom with a bloodied pair of shorts, she didn’t have any toilet paper, and this was officially the worst day of her life.
Worse than when her younger brother Ryan stole her Anastasia eyeshadow palette three years ago to turn it into coloring for his slime.
If her mother Samira were here, she’d tell Kris to breathe. Her mother was an amazing doctor, a cardiologist whose had her name plastered in every major hospital in the East Coast, the calmest person Kris knew.
Samira’s advise usually irked her, but what else could Kris possibly do now? Without a choice, she followed the breathing technique that had been embedded in her since she scraped her knee at the age of five.
Four in, hold for seven, exhale for eight. Rinse and repeat until her heartbeat calmed down.
Good.
Then Samira would tell her to assess the situation, test the waters. Was it safe? She was alone in the bathroom, so relatively, yes. She listened to outside, it was fourth period so everyone was in class. It was quiet. If she wobbled outside to check for a different stall for toilet paper and grabbed a tampon from a machine… she could, right? No one would see her in this state.
She waited for ten seconds before actioning anything. Still quiet, good.
Carefully, she peeked her head out from her stall to see if there was anyone, and the coast was still clear. Wobbling to the tampon dispenser, she twisted the knob to find it… empty. Fuck. Fourth reason now.
That was fine, she just needed… toilet paper. She made her way to the next stall and aha, a full toilet paper dispenser. She did what most girls had done at least once in their lives, and just… bundle it up most undignified origami project of her life. She’d done it before, once at a summer camp before asking one from Bella, and it worked for roughly forty-five minutes, which was long enough to survive the rest of the period and get to her locker where she kept an emergency tampon in a ziplock bag like a responsible adult, because, again, doctor parents.
“Okay,” she murmured to herself, “this should hold until I can change.”
She took off her hoodie and tied it around her waist as a cover, leaving her in only her tank top, and she was going to get carded by Mr. Cromwell for a ‘dress-code violation’ but honestly she didn’t care anymore. She could out-debate Cromwell anytime, especially when it came to women’s bodily functions.
PE was forgotten now, hopefully Miss Lynch saw her panic run to the bathroom, or Arvind could have told her about Kris’ ‘injuries’, so she made her way through the empty hallway to the locker, where she found the fifth reason, the nail in the coffin, the creme de la creme of her very unfortunate bad day; her boyfriend, Arthur Campbell, who was tonguing her best friend, Bella.
“What the fuck,” she said, stunned in the middle of the hallway.
“I’m gonna kill that kid,” Kris’ father, Jack muttered while cutting watermelons in the kitchen. “Cheating? At school? On my daughter? Do kids these days not know the art of subtlety anymore?” The sound of knife against the board was loud, the crunch crunch crunch of every chop.
Kris didn’t remember walking home after seeing Arthur and Bella together. All she knew was she had walked home from school in tank top and shorts, hoodie wrapped around her waist, and an hour later she was in her Mom’s arms sobbing into her very expensive blouse that Kris had planned to steal.
Now, she was in the kitchen with her parents. Her brother Ryan was at his after school robotics club so there was to aggravating noise of a fourteen year old boy in the house, and Kris was grateful for that.
Jack was still aggressively cutting watermelons—plural—because they’d bought the mini sugar ones at the farmer’s market and one baby watermelon wasn’t enough for this crisis.
“Jack, baby, slow down,” Samira said as she came around the counter, placing her hand gently on Jack’s back. “You’re going to lose a finger if you keep cutting it like that.”
Jack ignored Samira and kept cutting. “Sweetheart you know I’ve been cutting watermelons since before you were born.” This was true, her parents’ age gap was not a secret or some untouched topic, her father Jack was twenty years older than her mother. “These hands,” Jack said, raising one hand and wriggling his fingers, “have performed cricothyrotomies in the back of a Humvee. I think I can handle itty bitty watermelons.”
Samira tsk softly and reached around him to steady the cutting board while her other hand laid flat on his back between the shoulder blades. “Jack, the Humvee did not have a cutting board sliding off the counter out of sheer force of your knife,” Samira said gently. At that, her father’s shoulders dropped, his whole body seemed to relax at her touch.
Jack tilted his head and puckered up his lips for a kiss and Samira gave it. “Okay, baby, I’ll slow down,” Kris heard her father murmur against Samira’s lips.
Kris watched it and felt… yearning. Her parents had a language that bypassed words entirely, just a simple touch could make each other recalibrate and suddenly their problems were gone. Poof.
But also, gross. How dare they be romantic while her heart was in a million pieces?!
“You guys are gross,” Kris muttered, nose still red from crying, her face a mess. “Please do not perform happiness in front of your very sad and heartbroken daughter.”
Samira turned around to face her, leaning on the counter next to Jack who had resumed cutting watermelons in a much slower pace now. “What, we’re not allowed to kiss now?”
“Yep. Romance is banned. No more happiness. Love is a scam and you guys are gonna wake up one day and get a divorce, because again, love is a fu—” she stopped mid-word when Samira raised her brows, “—fudging scam, and it’s not real, and no one is actually in love, and I’m going to be a child of divorce, and you guys will give me double Christmas presents, double Diwali gifts, and you guys are going to let me go to whatever college I want to make up for the trauma.”
Kris was being dramatic. She knew it, but she didn’t care. Love was a scam. A week ago Arthur had given her a necklace with a locket with their pictures in it. He’d said, very cheesily, “It’s so that you can have me close to your heart whenever wherever, babe.” She’d giggled and kissed his whole face after he gave it to her, and she’d journaled about it like a clown because what else was a sixteen year old girl supposed to do when your boyfriend said something like that?
A clown she had become, because mere hours ago she’d walked in on said boyfriend trying to swallow her best friend since fourth grade. Her BEST FRIEND. Love was a scam, both romantically and platonically.
“You done?” Samira asked.
“Never. I have more to say.”
“Take a breath first, sunshine.”
“I DON’T—” she took a breath, “I don’t want to take a breath. I want to be dramatic, and angry, and I want you guys to validate me!”
“We are, baby,” Jack said, his back to her because he was still cutting watermelons. “We’re listening to you, yes, okay, love is a scam, and Arthur Campbell is dead to this family.”
“Thank you, Daddy.”
“He’s not dead to this family,” Samira corrected. “He’s… a sixteen year old who made a bad choice.”
“Amma,” Kris whined, “how could you say that? He made me believe in love and he took it away and now love is a scam and you guys are going to get divorced because love is not real!”
Jack cut the last mini watermelon into cubes and then went to the pantry without being asked. He came back with the Tajin and a lime. That was the other thing about her father: he remembered everything. Every comfort, every preference, every small ritual that made his people feel better. Kris had been eating watermelon with Tajin and lime since she could chew solid food, because it was her mother’s craving when she was pregnant with her. The story she’d heard a hundred times: how her father drove to Chinatown at midnight in October because her mother wanted to taste sunshine, and the watermelon was the wrong color, and her mother cried, and her father invented the right flavor of sunshine with chili and citrus instead of giving up.
Her middle name was Sol. Sun. Because she was the sunshine baby, the craving that started it all.
The Tajin version had become a Mohan-Abbot household cure-all. Bad day at school, watermelon. Stomach bug, watermelon. Ryan’s first heartbreak when he was twelve and the girl from swim team said she liked someone else, watermelon.
Once, when she was ten, she’d joked to her mother that the Mohan-Abbot family was single-handedly keeping the Mexican grocer around the corner afloat based on the amount of Tajin and limes they’d been buying.
He sprinkled the Tajin, squeezed the lime over the cubes, and slid the plate across the counter to her.
“Eat,” he said.
Kris made a face. The watermelon was not going to make her feel better, if anything, it made her feel worse. She wanted someone to love her to the point of invention, the way her father had for her mother.
Sensing the reluctance, Samira broke away from Jack and grabbed a jug of lassi from the fridge, poured into a glass in front of Kris. The condensation already forming around the crystal and Kris’ hand went to it, needing something to fidget with.
“Ammu,” Samira said as she sat down on the stool next to Kris. Jack remained on the other side of the counter, arms crossed, eyes still pissed. “Eat, it’ll make you feel better.”
“You guys are dumb.” Kris exclaimed. At that, Jack straightened and leaned forward on the counter, bracing both hands on the counter.
“Hey,” her father said, “I understand you’re hurt, bug, but that’s not very nice.”
“You—” she said, hanging her head in same. “I’m sorry. I just—I can’t believe Bella did that,” she said to the plate.” “Like, Arthur sucks. He’s a dumb boy, whatever. But Bella’s my— my best friend.”
“I know baby,” her mother murmured, comforting her by stroking Kris’ wavy hair. The hair she’d inherited from Samira. “That’s what hurts more, the betrayal from your best friend.”
“She helped me pick up my dress for my first date, Amma!” Kris turned around and looked at her mother. “The blue one with the—with the—”
“—bow around the chest, yeah I remember. I was ready to get my scalpel out when he picked you up.” Jack interrupted.
Samira gave her husband a look that said not the place and time. Jack put his hands up, swallowing back whatever snark he had at the tip of his tongue.
“Anyway,” Kris said, shrugging. Her hand had found a watermelon cube and she pressed her thumb onto it, the juice ran across her knuckles. “They’re dead to me. Dead.”
“That’s our little tyrant,” Jack said to Kris, letting his daughter wallow in the spiral. Then he picked up a cube of watermelon, squeezed a lime wedge to it, dipped it in Tajin, and held it out across the counter to Samira. “Here, sweetheart, try these ones. This batch is sweeter.”
Samira leaned forward and ate the cube from his fingers, lips brushing his thumb, and Kris watched her father’s expression changed from pissed-off-dad into something softer. Something that definitely absolutely had no business being in this kitchen right now.
“Mm,” Samira hummed as she chewed, “you’re right, honey. It’s sweeter. Did you get it from the Earl’s?”
“Nah,” Jack said, already prepping another cube for Samira. “They didn’t have any, so I went to the farm on Rout 4. Worth the detour, right?”
“Route 4? Jack baby that’s a forty minute detour.”
“It’s worth it, no? My babies get to enjoy sweet watermelon.”
Another bite of watermelon, another touch of Samira’s lips against Jack’s fingers, another huff of exasperated breath from Kris that her parents had seemed to ignore. Kris watched this exchange with mixture of profound disgust and sudden, stinging envy.
“You’re freaking kidding me,” Kris said.
Both parents looked at her.
“Can you two not do... that... while my life is actively decomposing?” Kris asked, gesturing with a sticky, juice-stained hand between the two of them.
“I am sitting right here,” Kris continued, gesturing at herself. “In this kitchen. With mascara running down my face. My boyfriend, who I caught tonguing my best friend three hours ago, is probably out there living his best life, and you two are feeding each other watermelon off your fingers like you’re in a Bollywood movie.”
Jack didn’t look guilty; he just popped the next lime-coated watermelon cube into his own mouth.
“Honey, life goes on. Assholes dump you, local farmers grow good produce. It’s the circle of life, and I was just feeding your mother a piece of fruit, bug.”
“You fed it to her, Daddy. Off your hand. She ate it off your thumb. That’s not just sharing fruit, that’s like… foreplay.”
“Krishna Sol,” Samira warned gently. She reached across the marble and grabbed a paper towel, gently wiping the sticky red juice from Kris’s knuckles. “He’s right about one thing, baby. He is an asshole. You deserve someone who looks at you the way...” she trailed off, glancing up at Jack, whose eyes had softened all over again for Samira.
“Great, perfect, do not finish that sentence,” Kris groaned, burying her face in her hands.
Jack tilted his head and walked around the counter, placing himself behind Samira. Instinctively, she leaned back on her husband as his free hand wrapped around Samira’s hip, his thumb rubbing the bare skin under her mother’s blouse. This was something that happened all the time, them fitting into each other, and usually Kris would swoon and thought it was the cutest thing, but right now, Kris just thought it was so so yuck and tacky.
“Bug,” Jack started, “you know we love you, right?”
“Love’s a scam, Daddy. You might think you love me but you don’t. You love me out of obligation.”
At that, Jack’s thumb stopped moving on Samira’s hip. That was the tell. Jack Mohan-Abbot was a man who needed to by in physical contact with his wife; counter, couch, car, grocery store checkout line, regardless of where they were, Jack needed the touch. So when his thumb stopped moving and tightened ever so slightly around her mother’s waist, Kris knew she might have gone too far.
“I didn’t mean that,” Kris blurted out immediately, all snark gone. She was using her apologetic voice, the one she used when she’d accidentally messed up. Which was just now. “I know you guys love me, I’m just—” she struggled to find her words. Being vulnerable was so hard, despite growing in a house full of love. “I’m just being dramatic. I’m sorry.”
“Honey, you are being dramatic,” Samira gently agreed, “you are our little tyrant, we know how you can be. But… some part of you did think so, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t—”
“Kris, talk to us, bug.” This time it was Jack.
Kris opened her mouth to say another joke, lighten up the mood. Something that would steer the conversation back to safe territory where she could be funny and wounded and sixteen without having to say anything that actually mattered. But the joke wouldn’t come.
“I just…” she started again, voice cracking for the millionth time today. “I look at you guys and I… I love that you guys love each other. I know what love is supposed to look like because you guys are so disgustingly in love and I’ve been watching it my whole life.” She stopped to swallow a lump in her throat. “And then I get Arthur and I thought ‘oh maybe this is it!’, like he gave me a locket! He said I’m the only girl he’ll ever want and then he’s got his tongue down Bella’s throat, and—”
She breathed, feeling the sadness turn into anger.
“Bella! We had our first period together! I told her everything, the fights, the—the make outs—” Jack coughed, looking uncomfortable, “—and I thought she was my ride or die! How could someone do that? That’s like, worse than what Arthur did. Arthur’s just a stupid dumb horny,” Another cough from Jack, “teenage boy with acne. Bella’s my best friend. Was my best friend. And if my own best friend betrayed me like that, what if I can’t get what you guys have?”
Samira’s hand was on her hair again, stroking tenderly. “Aw honey—”
“Amma, you line up Daddy’s pills every single morning without fail, and that’s like, so hard because there’s just so much,” Kris interrupted. She wasn’t done, she was going to say all of it, because if she stopped now she’d shove it back down and never bring it up again and she’d spend the next decade wondering. “Cholesterol, blood pressure, vitamin D, the white one for his leg. Same order, same paper towel, next to his coffee. I came downstairs once at like five-thirty and you were standing there in your robe doing it and I went back upstairs because it felt—it felt too private to interrupt.”
Samira’s hand paused on her hair. She hadn’t known Kris had seen that.
“And Daddy,” Kris turned to look at her father, who was still standing behind Samira’s stool, “you rub Amma’s feet every single night even though your hands—” She caught herself. She wasn’t supposed to know about the arthritis. She knew her parents were keeping it from her, but Kris was nothing if not observant, her parent’s daughter through and through. She’d watched the way he struggled with jars, the way he flexed his fingers under the table when he thought nobody was paying attention. “Even though you’re tired,” she finished, which wasn’t what she meant and they all knew it.
Jack pressed his lips together but didn’t correct her.
“And you go to the cardiologist and the orthopedist and the therapist and you go to every single one, Daddy, even though you hate it, because you told me once on the porch that you needed to stick around for a long time.” She was crying now, properly, mascara and snot and the full indignity, but she couldn’t stop talking. “And Amma packs your lunch in the blue tiffin every day, and you always send back a photo of the empty container because you know she worries, and I know all of this because I’ve been watching you two my entire life and I just—”
Her breath ran out.
“I want that,” she said, small. “And I’m scared I won’t get it.”
“Oh baby, come here,” Samira said.
Jack and Samira both stood up and enveloped Kris in a hug right there in the kitchen. Kris’s face went into her mother’s shoulder and Samira held the back of her head, fingers in her hair, chin resting on top, while her father was behind her, his arms encircling them both.
“Kris,” Samira said at last, her chin still resting on her daughter’s head. “I almost broke up with your father before we got married.”
Kris pulled back, her face blotchy and ruined. “You what?”
“Mmhm, we were… long distance, three years, New Jersey and Pittsburgh. I was doing my fellowship. By the end of year three I was convinced it was never going to work, that I was being naive, and I decided to end it.” Samira reached for a napkin and wiped the mascara track off Kris’s cheek. “So I sent him a text, asking him to call me when he had a moment.”
“What kind of text?”
“Uh… a vague one. The kind where you’re too much of a coward to break up over the phone, so you schedule the phone call to do it.”
“Amma. That is the most passive-aggressive thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I know baby, I’m not perfect, thank you. Your father didn’t give me the chance to follow through.” She glanced up at Jack. “You want to tell her?”
Jack squeezed Kris’s shoulder once and came to lean on the counter, breaking away from the hug. “I read the text and I knew what it meant. I knew because I know your mother, even via text. Three years, I’d learnt that every punctuation had a meaning. And I decided that if she was going to end us, she was going to do it to my face,” he said with a shrug.
“So what did you do?”
“I drove six hours to New Jersey in January. Negative four degrees, mind you. Got down on one knee on her doorstep.” He tapped his prosthetic against the base of the counter. “This knee. Your mother focused too much on the kneeling that she didn’t even register the ring.”
“You were kneeling on a prosthetic on icy concrete, Jack. If you’d fallen I would have had to stabilize the man proposing to me.”
“But you said yes.”
“You showed up with a sapphire ring in cold January, what was I going to say?”
“You could have said no. That was your whole plan, sweetheart. You were going to break up with me.”
“And it would have been the worst decision of my life,” Samira said with a smile. “That’s my point, tyrant. I was thirty-two years old, your age plus sixteen, and I almost threw away the best thing that ever happened to me because I was scared and tired and convinced it couldn’t work. I was wrong.”
“But you had Daddy,” Kris said. “He showed up for you. What if nobody shows up for me? Like, what if Daddy just gave up?”
“Sol,” Jack chided. “I couldn’t give up. It was never an option, losing your mother. When we were pregnant with you, your mother cried because the watermelon was the wrong color and instead of being frustrated I went to the pantry and found the Tajin, because making her happy mattered more than making sense.” He uncrossed his arms, one hand on Kris’ now.
“The person who deserves you, Kris, is going to see you cry over the wrong color watermelon at midnight and go find the Tajin. And if Arthur Campbell couldn’t even look at you when he ended it, he was never going to be the one standing in the kitchen at midnight. That’s not your loss. That’s his, because you’re the greatest thing we ever made. All those crazy pregnancy cravings, the crying, my obsession with your mother’s—” Samira cleared her throat at what Jack was thinking, “—mother’s happiness, it all resulted in you, and you best believe you will find someone. A man who loves you. But baby, you’re still young, you still have a lifetime.”
“Or a woman,” Kris muttered.
“Or a woman, yes. Whoever you choose, we will support.”
Kris looked down at the plate. She picked up a cube, chili-dusted, lime-wet, and ate it. The burn, then the sour, then the sweet mixing with everything, the flavor her father had invented for her mother in a different kitchen, years before Kris existed, because he loved a woman who wanted to taste sunshine and he refused to let the wrong color stop him.
Her free hand went to the locket at her throat. Arthur’s locket. Their faces in it, side by side, from the photo booth at the county fair in August. He’d won her a stuffed elephant first and she’d carried it for the rest of the night tucked under her arm while he held her other hand. That had been real, she thought. It had been real for her, even if it hadn’t been real for him, and she was allowed to grieve something real even if it wasn’t permanent.
She unclasped the locket and set it on the counter. It looked small there. Smaller than it had felt on her neck for.
“I hate when you guys make sense,” she said, already grabbing another cube.
“Noted, baby.”
“I reserve the right to call love a scam for the rest of the weekend. Minimum.”
“Sure, bug.”
Kris ate another cube, all snarkiness and drama gone. Samira was smiling at her and Jack was watching Samira smile, and Kris watched them and let the thought settle into a place that didn’t hurt: fine. Maybe not a scam. Maybe just rare. Maybe just worth the wait.
Besides, she was only sixteen. Her marks were extraordinary, she’d visited colleges and they all seemed to like her, and she had other friends than Bella. She was, ultimately, going to be fine. If she was going to end up with someone, she’d much rather end up with a guy at Harvard, not… whatever Arthur Campbell was.
They sat there in the kitchen for a while until the front door opened. Ryan was home from his robotics club. Kris braced herself for a shitty comment from her brother, but was instead greeted by a little screen that he gave her.
“What’s this?” Kris asked.
“Amma texted that you’re feeling down,” Ryan replied, shrugging casually. “So I made this. If you press the button right there,” he said, gesturing to the small button on the side of the screen, “something should happen. Try it out.”
Kris pressed the button and the screen lit up in green. A message played across it: our genes are too good to cry over basic boys, stinky.
That made her laugh. She looked from the scrolling green text to her brother, who was already shifting his weight and looking anywhere but at her, trying desperately to play it cool.
Without a word, she slid off her stool and threw her arms around him.
Ryan stiffened for a split second—unprompted physical affection wasn’t exactly in their usual sibling playbook—before awkwardly returning the gesture, giving her a clumsy, one-armed pat on the back.
“You’re such a massive nerd,” Kris mumbled into his shoulder, squeezing him a little tighter.
“Yeah, well,” Ryan grumbled. “Don’t get snot on my hoodie. It’s the only clean one I have.”
Kris pulled back, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, a genuine smile finally breaking through. “Thank you. Even if you are a brat.”
“Anytime, stinky,” he said. He peered over her shoulder, his eyes landing on the plate resting on the counter. “Wait. Are you guys eating the spicy watermelon?”
“We are,” Jack said, an amused smile playing on his lips as he watched them.
Ryan reached out to grab a piece, but Kris playfully swatted his hand away, sliding the plate closer to herself. “Back off. This is my official heartbreak fruit. Make your own.”
“Rude,” Ryan muttered, though he was smiling as he dropped his bag on the floor and went to wash his hands at the sink.
Samira leaned her head against Jack’s arm, a soft, contented sigh escaping her as they watched their kids bicker over the snacks.
Kris popped another piece of watermelon into her mouth, looking around at her family, the perfect mix of sour and sweet lingering on her tongue.
Arthur Campbell who?