The summer before everything changed smelled like mango skins and diesel. In our town, the fruit trucks rolled in every Saturday, rattling over potholes, leaving a trail of sweetness that clung to the air even after the vendors packed up. I was seventeen and certain that life would start somewhere else—after graduation, after I found a bigger city, after I reinvented myself into a girl who didn't blush every time she was complimented at the hair braiding stall.
Back then, I kept a list on the back page of my biology notebook titled Things I Will Become. It included: a journalist who wore black turtlenecks, someone who said, "Let me call my agent," and a person who didn't cry at airport goodbyes. None of it mentioned love. Love, I decided, was for the people who had time to be distracted. I was busy not missing my father, who left when I was ten and never did come back, and busy pretending my mother's laughter was loud because she was happy, not because she needed the world to believe she didn't mind doing everything alone.
On the first Saturday of that summer, Mom sent me to the market with a canvas bag and a warning about bargaining hard. The sun was a polished coin in the sky, the heat already sticking my blouse to my skin. I cut through the lot behind the barber shop, past the wall with a faded mural of a bird that used to look like freedom but now looked tired. The mango trucks were there—men shouting, scales tipping, the smack of fruit into crates. I moved through the brightness, bartering, counting change twice, feeling like a capable version of myself.
And then I heard it: a laugh, low and unhurried, cutting clean through the noise. I turned without meaning to. He was half in shadow under the tailgate of a truck, sleeves rolled, a smudge of orange flesh on his wrist. He was handing a little boy a mango with the gravity of a ceremony. When the boy ran off, he looked up. Our eyes caught. The moment was nothing and everything—two strangers pulled into the same small frame of the morning.
"Need help?" he called, nodding at my bag like it might break my shoulder.
"I'm fine," I said, too quickly. "I have a system."
He smiled like he understood systems and how they fail. "Alright, System Girl."
I should have walked away then, but he wiped his wrist with the hem of his shirt, and the slight, unshowy movement felt like a confession: I am ordinary, not trying to impress you. Ordinary was dangerous. Ordinary was where all the tenderness hid.
He ended up behind me at the scale. The vendor, old enough to be our collective grandfather, was notorious for slipping rotten fruit into the middle of every bag. As I counted out change, the vendor tried to tuck a bruised mango at the bottom. Without looking, the boy behind me said, "Uncle, not that one. She's new to cheating."
The vendor side-eyed him, then swapped it for a better one, huffing. I should've been annoyed at being rescued. Instead, annoyance arrived dressed as gratitude and sat down quietly.
"Thanks," I muttered when we stepped aside.
He wiped his hands again. "Lucas."
"Amara."
He repeated it, slower, as if he was measuring the syllables. "You always carry your life in one bag?"
"Two, usually," I said before I could stop myself. "But I'm cutting down."
He grinned, and I could see then that nothing about him was dramatic. No movie-star cheekbones, no tragic eyes. Just steady, patient features and a mouth that seemed undecided about joy, as if he'd learned not to expect it and was surprised whenever it arrived. I realized with a slight shock that I wanted to see that mouth decide.
He picked up a mango, tossed it once, and caught it. "You ever eat one right here?" he asked. "No slicing, no ceremony. Just teeth and courage."
"Courage?" I snorted. "For fruit?"
"For sweetness," he said. "It stains."
I should have told him I had places to be. Instead, I let him lead me to the shade of the wall with the faded bird. He pressed the mango into my hand and showed me where to bite so the juice wouldn't run down my wrists. I failed immediately. The first mouthful burst across my tongue and down my chin; I tried to catch it with the back of my hand and left a sun-colored streak like war paint.
Lucas didn't laugh, exactly. He did something better: he swallowed his own laughter like an accomplice and lifted the edge of his shirt—clean cotton, soft from many washes—and offered it like a handkerchief. I hesitated. Then I pressed it to my face, and for the first time I smelled him: soap and fruit and the faint trace of engine oil.
"You live around here?" he asked.
"Since forever," I said. "You?"
"Moved last month," he said. "My uncle runs the trucks. I'm working till school starts."
"What school?"
"Anywhere that's not here," he said, but he said it kindly, like he didn't need to insult the place to tell the truth about longing.
We finished the mango in companionable silence, both sticky, both pretending not to notice. When I handed his shirt back, the stain was a bright apology. He looked at it, then at me. "Now we're legally friends," he said. "There's paperwork, but this counts."
I rolled my eyes. "I don't make friends with boys who interfere with my bargaining."
"Then I'll only interfere with your stains."
He walked me to the corner. We didn't exchange numbers. We didn't promise anything. We just made a shape in the heat, two people who'd been separate and were now, inexplicably, a little less alone. When I got home, my mother glanced at my face, at my mouth, and said, "Your lipstick is ambitious today."
"It's mango," I said, and she laughed. Then she looked at me a second too long, the way mothers do when they smell a change in the weather.
After that, Lucas was everywhere the town was. He was at the community center fixing a chessboard with one missing rook, at the field where the kids played football with a ball held together by duct tape, at the hardware shop asking for drills they didn't carry, and making do with what they did. He never arrived loudly. He never left dramatically. He was just there, and then my days bent subtly around the idea that he might be.
We met properly a week later in the library, where I sometimes hid from myself. The air inside was cool and smelled like paperbacks that had survived other people's summers. I was at a corner table with my biology notebook open to Things I Will Become when a shadow fell across the page. I looked up and found him holding three books: a poetry collection, a manual for minor engine repair, and a dog-eared atlas.
"You have range," I said.
"I'm trying to be interesting." He put the books down. "Also, your list is upside down."
I flipped the notebook shut, heat creeping up my neck. "You're not supposed to read things that aren't for you."
"That's how I read poetry," he said with a shrug. "Also atlases."
He sat across from me without asking and started tracing a road on the atlas with his fingertip. "Where would you go first?" he asked.
"Someplace with trains," I said. "I trust anything that runs on a timetable and leaves the platform whether you're ready or not."
He smiled at that. "My mother loved trains," he said, and the word loved held a past tense I did not ask about. "She said they're honest. Planes lie—they make you think you're above everything."
We traded truths like that for an hour, small coins across a table. He told me about the uncle whose house he lived in, and how they were stitching together something like a family. I told him about how quiet could get loud in our apartment at night, like an orchestra tuning just below the threshold of hearing. We didn't touch, not even once. But when he leaned in to point at a city I'd never heard of, his shoulder was close enough that I felt the ghost of a warmth that wasn't mine yet.
That night, I added a line to my list and then crossed it out. It said: someone who isn't afraid of stains.
Days blurred the way good days do. We found small rituals. On Wednesdays, he'd leave a folded note inside an atlas—coordinates to a street corner or the best bench under the bougainvillea near the post office. On Fridays, I smuggled him the cheap butter cookies the librarian swore she didn't allow, and he broke them in half and gave me the bigger half without making a point of it. When I showed him the mural of the bird up close, he studied the cracks like an art restorer and said, "You know, if we trace the outline with chalk—white for the wings, blue for the sky—you could see what it meant to be before it got tired."
"Before it got tired," I repeated, and something in me recognized the ache of that.
We didn't talk about love. We spoke about bus schedules, the best time to catch mangoes at a discount, and the ability of certain songs to make the town look cinematic for precisely 3 minutes and 27 seconds. We kept our sentences practical, as if nouns could save us from verbs. But there were moments—small, almost nothing—when the air tilted.
Once, it rained hard and suddenly, the kind of rain that soaks you immediately and makes strangers intimate by necessity. We sprinted under the overhang of the pharmacy and stood shoulder to shoulder, watching the road turn into a shallow river. He shook water from his hair and looked at me with an expression I still don't have a name for. I reached up to flick a leaf from his eyebrow. The movement was nothing. But it was also a promise I didn't know how to keep.
"Amara," he said, testing my name again, like a word you want to memorize correctly. "You ever get the feeling you're going to remember something while it's happening?"
"All the time," I said. "Mostly when I'm trying not to."
We didn't kiss then. We didn't even take each other's hands. The rain eased; the world resumed. We walked to the corner and said goodbye like it meant tomorrow, because then, it did.
Before we were us, we were two people who thought the future was a door you opened by pushing hard enough. Before we were us, I believed the heart was a muscle you trained to behave. Before we were us, he believed in leaving before anything could be taken from him.
If I had known what was coming—the sharp turns, the long silences, the ache that teaches you your own edges—I would still have stood with him under that rain. I would still have taken the mango that stained my mouth and made me laugh at myself. I would still have walked away that first day without numbers, because some stories need to find their own way back.
This is where ours began: not with fireworks, not with declarations, but with sweetness that didn't ask permission and a boy who offered the clean edge of his shirt like a bridge. We were not yet. We were people who didn't know the world would ever belong to us. But if I listen closely to that summer—the wheels on gravel, my mother's humming in the kitchen, the rustle of atlas pages—I can hear it forming, soft as a breath behind a closed door.
Before we were us, we were becoming.