The Promise Locker

Jai was the best person in Class 4 to sit next to, and that is not a small thing to be.

He noticed when you were quiet. He shared everything he had, straight away, without being asked — including food he actually wanted. He tapped the desk twice with two fingers before he started any piece of work, every time, without seeming to know he was doing it. They sat at the third desk from the window, the one with a crack across the lid that you could get a coin into.

When Renu’s grandmother was in hospital in August, Jai asked about her every morning for eleven days. He asked properly. He waited for the answer.

Renu kept her pencil case in order. Pens on the left, pencils on the right, the eraser wedged in the middle so nothing rolled about when she walked.

Jai also made promises.

“I’ll bring the bird book tomorrow,” he said, in the second week of term. “The big green one, with the photographs. There’s an egg in a nest with a small coin next to it, so you can see how small.” It lived on the shelf over his bed, he said.

Renu said yes please.

He did not bring the bird book on Tuesday. His bag came in with a water bottle, a tiffin, one shoe for football and no book in it at all. He did not bring it on Wednesday either.

On Thursday he said, “Oh — the book.” He hit his own forehead with his palm. He looked so genuinely sorry about it that Renu ended up saying it was completely fine, twice.

He never brought the bird book.

In September he said he would come on Saturday, to help paint the board for the science table. He meant it. He worked out the time. He asked what colours, and he said he would bring his own brush, the good flat one.

On Saturday, Renu painted the board on the kitchen floor with her mother, on top of two old newspapers. There was a tin of blue, a tin of white, a jar of water going grey, and one brush between the two of them. It took four hours. Her mother was not annoyed, but she did say “hmm” once, at about the third hour, over the blue.

In October he borrowed her pen. The good one. The blue one that wrote thin. He said he would give it back after lunch.

He gave it back in November, from the bottom of his bag, with no cap on it and a crack down the side.

Here is the thing Renu could not work out.

Jai was not a liar. She had watched him for a whole term, and she knew what a lie looked like. A lie has a small pause in front of it, like a step you have to take. Jai had no pause. When he said he would bring the bird book, his whole face believed it.

The book just never got into the bag. That was all. Something happened between his mouth and Tuesday morning.

For a while it made her angry in a way she did not enjoy. Walking to school, past the shut shops and the wall and the man setting out his cart, she would decide that today she would say something. Then she would get to the desk, and Jai would have saved her the seat by the window. He would be halfway through a story about his uncle’s dog. And she would not say it.

In December, at that desk, with the fan going and chalk dust on the board, she worked something out. It was not the thing she had been trying to work out.

She stopped waiting for the pen.

She put a second pen in her pencil case. A cheap one, out of a pack of ten, the see-through kind. She left it in there and told nobody. On Monday, when Jai turned round and said he had lost his again, she handed it over without looking up from her sum.

He gave it back on Friday, chewed flat at the top, out of the same bag with the same broken zip.

She put it back in the case anyway.

Because the rest of it was all still true. He still noticed when she was quiet. He still asked about her grandmother in January, months later, when everybody else had stopped asking. And at sports day, when Renu came last but one on the grass track in her old shoes, she did not want to talk about it. Jai walked beside her all the way to the gate and said nothing at all. The whole way. Jai.

So now there are two pens in the pencil case.

One of them is hers.

She has never once used the other one.