The Space Between Us

Ishita was fourteen, an eighth grader who lived on the first floor of her house. The ground floor belonged to her parents’ good friends, who lived with their two children, Aditi and Aditya. Their families had known each other for years, which meant Ishita and Aditya had technically known each other for years, too. Technically, because knowing someone’s name, class, and birthday was very different from actually knowing them.

Ishita was an introvert, at least around people she wasn’t comfortable with. Around her friends, however, she could talk for hours without running out of things to say. She was a little careless, loved taking credit for her achievements, and had an extraordinary talent for overthinking the smallest things. A simple glance could occupy her mind for an entire evening, and a two-word conversation could become the subject of an elaborate analysis that her friends had absolutely no patience for.

Aditya was her favourite subject of over thinking.

He was in Class Twelve, three years older than her, having skipped a grade. He was quiet, reserved, and rarely smiled around people he didn’t know well. From Ishita’s perspective, he was the perfect combination of everything she found attractive: his hair, his eyes, his voice, and especially his smile. Whenever she saw him laughing with his friends, she would find herself staring for a second longer than she should have before quickly looking away. He had the kind of face that made people notice him, and apparently, the entire twelfth grade had noticed him already.

Ishita, on the other hand, had noticed him long before she realized that other people had, too.

She knew almost nothing about him. She didn’t know what made him happy, what annoyed him, what he worried about, or whether he was even remotely similar to the person she imagined him to be. She had heard things about him from her friends who knew people in Class Twelve, and every new piece of information somehow made her more curious. In her head, he looked like the sort of person who might be a red flag, but perhaps, just perhaps, he was actually a green one.

Of course, this was an impressive conclusion to reach about someone with whom she exchanged approximately three sentences a year.

They went to the same school and travelled on the same school bus. Their conversations were usually limited to, “Ishita, please save me a seat,” or the occasional “Thank you.” Sometimes, they didn’t even exchange those. Their families’ friendship brought them into the same spaces, but somehow, it never brought them any closer.

Then there was Raksha Bandhan.

The previous year, Aditya’s mother had asked Ishita to tie him a rakhi. It wasn’t something Ishita had planned, and by the time she found herself standing in front of him with the rakhi in her hand, she was so nervous that her fingers were trembling. She tied it anyway, smiling awkwardly while trying not to look at him too much.

Ever since then, a small, unreasonable voice in her head had insisted that Aditya must see her as a little sister.

She hated that thought.

She knew she had no right to expect anything from him. They weren’t close enough to call each other friends, let alone anything more. Still, if she could have chosen, she would have liked to be someone he could talk to. Someone he recognised in a crowded room. Someone whose presence meant a little more to him than simply being the girl who lived upstairs.

She even called him “Aditya bhaiya” sometimes, mostly out of habit and partly because it was easier than explaining the strange contradiction in her head. She wanted him to be her friend, at the very least. Anything beyond that was a distant dream she tried not to entertain for too long.

One evening, she attended Aditi’s engagement with her family. The house was full of relatives, music, laughter, and people dressed in their finest clothes. Aditya looked handsome, naturally, because Ishita had apparently decided that being objective was no longer one of her responsibilities. However, she noticed something else, too. He seemed uncomfortable in his formal shoes, shifting his weight from one foot to another whenever he thought nobody was watching.

It was such a small thing that anyone else might have missed it.

Ishita didn’t.

After they returned home, she found a Band-Aid and quietly left it near the entrance downstairs, where Aditya would be able to find it. She didn’t attach a note, didn’t tell Aditi, and, for once in her life, didn’t tell a single friend about what she’d done. She simply went upstairs and pretended that she hadn’t spent the next twenty minutes wondering whether he would find it.

That night, she opened her diary and wrote, “I left him a Band-Aid today. It was such a tiny thing, but I hope he finds it. I wonder if he’ll ever know it was me.”

She didn’t know if he had found it.

She never asked.

Around the same time, she found his Pinterest profile. She followed him from an account that didn’t reveal her identity, and because Pinterest let her follow people without waiting for them to accept a request, she could quietly keep up with the things he saved and the ideas he liked. She didn’t use his profile to contact him or disturb his privacy; she simply liked the comfort of being able to admire his interests from a distance without revealing who she was.

She knew it was silly. She knew she was constructing a whole story from scraps of information. Yet it was difficult to stop when every little thing about him felt interesting.

Then came the bus incident.

One morning, the bus was unusually crowded, and there were no empty seats left. Ishita ended up sitting beside Aditya at the very back. She tried to behave normally, which, unfortunately, meant becoming painfully aware of every movement she made. She stared out of the window, adjusted her bag twice, and pretended to be deeply interested in the passing buildings.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed him fiddling with his fingers.

Was he nervous? Was he uncomfortable? Was he simply bored?

Before she could settle on an answer, she noticed her friend sitting in the seat ahead of them. Her friend kept turning around, looking between the two of them with a mischievous smile that Ishita knew all too well.

And then Ishita panicked.

The moment they got off the bus, she deliberately spoke loudly enough for Aditya to hear. “Honestly, I consider Aditya bhaiya my own brother. I even tied him a rakhi, remember?”

Her friend stared at her.

Ishita kept talking, adding unnecessary details and laughing as if she had just made the most ordinary statement in the world. Inside, however, she wanted to disappear. She had said the exact opposite of what she felt, and she had done it only because she was afraid that someone might discover the truth.

She didn’t look back to see Aditya’s reaction.

For the next few days, she replayed the incident repeatedly, criticising herself for being dramatic and wishing she could somehow rewind time. But time, unfortunately, had never been particularly cooperative with Ishita.

A few days later, Aditya came upstairs to ask for a printout. Ishita had a printer at home, and he occasionally needed it for schoolwork. Usually, these visits were uneventful. He would hand her the document, she would print it, and he would leave with a brief “Thanks.”

Unfortunately, that day Ishita was wearing what she privately considered her worst outfit: an old, mismatched combination she’d thrown on without thinking. The moment she realised Aditya was standing there, she became painfully conscious of every part of it. Of course, she was embarrassed. She wished she could disappear, change clothes, and restart the entire afternoon—but he was already there, waiting for his printout.

That day, though, something was different.

He was smiling.

Not the small, polite smile people gave out of courtesy, but a genuine one that softened his entire face. Ishita had seen him smile with his friends before, but she couldn’t remember seeing him smile quite like that around her. For one terrifying second, her mind began inventing possibilities.

Maybe he was happy to see her. Maybe he had something to say. Maybe—

“Thank you, Ishita.”

He said her name.

It was such a ridiculously ordinary thing, and yet she carried those three words around in her head for the rest of the day. He had called her by her name, smiled at her, and thanked her properly. Surely, it meant something?

Then came the reality check.

Perhaps he was simply being polite. Perhaps he was in a good mood. Perhaps he really did think of her as a younger sister.

Ishita accepted the printout episode as another tiny memory to add to her ever-growing collection of moments that probably meant nothing.

What she didn’t know was that Aditya had noticed more than she thought.

He had noticed the Band-Aid outside his house, though he hadn’t been entirely sure who had left it. He had noticed how quiet Ishita became whenever he was around, despite hearing her talk endlessly with her friends. He had noticed that she sometimes looked at him and then immediately looked away, as if she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t have.

And he remembered the bus conversation.

He had heard her call him her brother. He had even heard the part about the rakhi. For some reason, the declaration had sounded strangely deliberate, as though she were trying to convince someone of something.

He had wondered about it for longer than he cared to admit.

But Aditya wasn’t the kind of person who went around asking questions about things he didn’t understand. He preferred to keep his thoughts to himself, and so he did what he always did: he stayed quiet.

Until one afternoon, a few weeks later, Ishita found herself standing near the school bus, looking for an empty seat.

There was one beside Aditya.

She hesitated.

Before she could decide whether sitting there would be embarrassing, he moved his bag off the seat.

“Here,” he said. “You can sit.”

She sat down, trying to keep her expression neutral. For a few minutes, neither of them spoke. The silence felt different from their usual silence, though. It wasn’t uncomfortable exactly; it was simply unfamiliar.

Then Aditya turned towards her.

“Can I ask you something?”

Ishita’s heart seemed to forget its job for a second. “Yeah?”

“That day, when you were telling your friend that I’m like your brother...” He paused, looking slightly awkward. “Did you really mean it?”

Every thought in Ishita’s head disappeared at once.

She could have lied. It would have been easy to laugh and say yes, to continue pretending that nothing about him mattered to her. It would have been safe.

Instead, she looked down at her hands.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I mean, I respect you. It’s just... I said it because my friend kept teasing me. I didn’t want her to think anything.”

Aditya nodded slowly, as if that explained something he had been trying to figure out.

“Oh.”

The bus moved over a speed breaker, and Ishita took the opportunity to stare very seriously out of the window. She had just admitted that she didn’t mean what she had said, which was already enough embarrassment to last her a lifetime.

Then he spoke again.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t really think of you as my sister.”

She turned towards him so quickly that he almost laughed.

“You don’t?”

“No.” He looked away, a faint smile appearing on his face. “You’re just Ishita.”

Just Ishita.

She wasn’t sure why those two words made her feel so happy. Perhaps because, for the first time, she wasn’t being placed into a relationship she hadn’t chosen for herself. She was simply being seen as who she was.

“And,” he added after a moment, “I was wondering if we could talk more. We live in the same house, practically, and I barely know anything about you.”

Ishita stared at him.

The boy she had spent months imagining conversations with was asking her to have one in real life.

“Sure,” she managed to say, trying very hard not to smile too much. “I mean, yeah. Of course.”

He smiled again, and she looked out of the window before her expression could betray her.

After that day, things didn’t magically become perfect. Aditya still had his own friends, schoolwork, and responsibilities, while Ishita had her own life, classes, and endless conversations with her friends. They didn’t suddenly start talking for hours every day. Sometimes their conversations were awkward, and sometimes one of them ran out of things to say.

But they began to talk.

He started asking her about her day. She learned that he wasn’t as mysterious as she had imagined; he was simply quiet until he felt comfortable with someone. He learned that Ishita could talk endlessly about the most random things, that she overthought practically everything, and that she was much kinder than she liked to let people believe.

They disagreed sometimes. They laughed at silly things. They discovered that the person in front of them was much more interesting than the version they had each created in their heads.

And Ishita slowly learned something important: liking someone from a distance was easy because she could fill every silence with her own imagination. Getting to know them was different. It meant accepting that they were real people, with flaws, habits, and thoughts she couldn’t predict.

She was glad she had given herself the chance to know the real Aditya.

Even as they grew more comfortable around each other, Ishita still had feelings she couldn’t quite say aloud. So she began writing a novel about him. She changed little details and gave the characters different names, but the heart of the story came from her own thoughts: the tiny moments she treasured, the things she wished she could tell him, and the way an ordinary smile could stay with her all day. Writing became her way of expressing everything she couldn’t manage to say to his face.

She kept the novel anonymous. She wanted Aditya to read it someday, but she wasn’t ready for him to know who had written it. She shared it under a pen name, hoping the story might reach him without exposing her identity.

Some time later, the novel found its way to Aditya. He started reading it out of curiosity, then kept going because the feelings in it seemed strangely familiar. The writer described small gestures, awkward silences, a crowded bus, and a thoughtful little act involving a Band-Aid. The details were changed, but the emotions felt real—and the way the narrator noticed everything reminded him unmistakably of Ishita.

He didn’t confront her immediately. Instead, he read the novel again, thinking about the girl who always looked away when he caught her staring and who sometimes tried far too hard to sound casual around him. The writer might have been anonymous, but Aditya was beginning to suspect that he knew her better than she realised.

A few months later, as the school year began drawing to a close, Aditya had an important decision to make. Class Twelve was almost over, and soon he would be preparing for the next chapter of his life. Ishita knew that things would change. Their school bus journeys, the casual conversations, and the familiar sight of him downstairs might not last forever.

One evening, they sat on the steps outside their houses, talking about school and the future. Ishita listened as he spoke about his plans, occasionally interrupting with questions. When he finished, she looked at him and said, “You’ll still talk to me after school ends, right?”

Aditya raised an eyebrow. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“People get busy.”

“Then I’ll be busy and still talk to you.” He smiled. “Is that a satisfactory answer?”

She laughed. “Maybe.”

There was a brief silence before he spoke again.

“Ishita, can I tell you something?”

She nodded.

“I think I started noticing you when you left that Band-Aid outside the house.”

Her mouth fell open.

“You knew about that?”

“I guessed,” he said with a chuckle. “I wasn’t sure until later.”

She covered her face with her hands. “Please tell me you don’t know anything else.”

“Actually, I think I know who wrote that anonymous novel.”

Ishita froze. “What?”

“The story—the bus, the Band-Aid, the way the girl notices things everyone else misses. You changed the names and some details, but it sounded like you. I recognised your way of thinking.”

Ishita’s face went warm. She had imagined him reading the novel, but she had never imagined him figuring it out.

“You weren’t supposed to know,” she admitted.

“I know. I think you wanted me to understand the feelings without knowing who they came from.” He paused. “I read it all the way through. It felt honest.”

“I really thought the pen name would keep me anonymous,” she murmured.

“Almost,” he said, smiling.

“ADITYA!”

He laughed, and she had to admit that hearing him laugh at something she had said was even better than watching him smile from across a room.

Then his expression softened.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to figure everything out right now,” he said. “I like talking to you. I want us to stay close, even after I leave school. And I’d like to see where this friendship goes, if you want that too.”

For once, Ishita didn’t overthink her answer.

“I do.”

He nodded, smiling. “Good.”

It wasn’t a dramatic confession beneath the stars. There were no promises about forever, no sudden declarations that changed everything overnight. There were simply two people who had spent far too long guessing what the other was thinking, finally choosing to speak honestly.

And, for Ishita, that was more than enough.

The next morning, she climbed onto the school bus and found Aditya sitting near the back. He looked up when he saw her and moved his bag from the seat beside him.

“Saved you a seat,” he said.

She smiled as she sat down.

“I thought you were supposed to ask me to save one for you.”

“Well, today I’m returning the favour.”

She laughed, settling into the seat beside him. Outside, the familiar streets passed by, and the bus carried them towards another ordinary school day.

Only now, the boy sitting beside her wasn’t a perfect stranger with a perfect smile and a hundred unanswered questions.

He was Aditya.

The boy who had noticed a Band-Aid. The boy who had made room for her on a crowded bus. The boy who had chosen to know her, one small conversation at a time.

Ishita still liked his smile, his hair, his eyes, and his voice. Some things, after all, didn’t change.

But she no longer had to imagine an entire future with someone she barely knew.

For the first time, she had the chance to discover what might happen next.

And when Aditya turned towards her and asked, “So, Ishita, what are we talking about today?” she smiled.

“Anything,” she said. “We’ve got a whole bus ride.”

And this time, neither of them looked away.