[15: Instruments]

Meera woke to a deluge of messages. Sama was up before her, again, and she obviously didn’t have anything she had to be doing right now, so she wrote messages instead. A dozen “send me a message when you wake up” sorts of messages, full of smiley faces and misspelled words, then a few asking what she was eating for breakfast, and then a couple “Are you there?!”

Meera groaned and finally replied. “I’m here. Just woke up.”

The Saturday sunshine shone through the window and she dragged herself out of bed. 

She checked the bedroom and study for Uncle Ram, but he wasn’t around, so she made herself breakfast in a moment of blissful silence, punctuated only a little too often by messages from Sama. Sama had taken to noticing tiny details about what was going on around her, and then announcing them to anyone who would listen, which at this moment meant typing them out on her mobile’s keypad and sending them off to her sister.

“I want to go out today. Cherrie says I can go out on my own if I want to now. Meet me?”

At least she managed to fit questions into a single message now, instead of leaving them strung among a dozen messages with pieces missing.

“Sure. Want to go walk in the park?”

They met at Cherrie’s house, since Sama didn’t know the busses yet. The park wasn’t far.

Sama kept noticing every detail out loud. 

“Look at those people!”

“Look at his hat!”

“Look at how she doesn’t lift one leg as high when she runs. Maybe she hurt it.”

Meera was exhausted just listening to her. 

“I wish I had paper and pencils. I could draw instead of just noticing.”

“You don’t have any?”

“Cherrie says I shouldn’t spend so much time drawing so she took them away.”

“That’s horrible!” That explained a lot, Meera thought. 

Sama shrugged and went back to noticing things out loud.

“Let’s walk to the druggist at the end of the park. I think they have sketchbooks there, and we can get lunch.”

“Can we?!” Sama sounded positively relieved.

The druggist did have sketchbooks, and Meera paid for one and a handful of pencils, and two sandwiches. They sat in the park, and while Meera tore the wrapper off of her sandwich, Sama had already torn into the package of pencils and was sketching furiously.

“Don’t forget to eat!”

Sama opened the sandwich but didn’t actually take a bite as she kept drawing.