Winter ebbed into spring, and the outside world reached my house primarily through my mother’s oversize ears. At dinners, she reported on nonsense. Jay Bhatt’s father had flown up to Ithaca to scold him when he announced he was quitting the math racket to become a film major: “Used to be sooo-so good at calculus and now failing midterms and all.” (“Raghu, this yogurt isn’t bad, just scrape out that greenish bit . . .”) Fourteen-year-old Reema Misra: fair-skinned as a Caucasian, almond-eyed, who had, my mother said, citing no source for her omniscience, “gone round talking about all the boys she practices kissing—tell me,” she demanded of Prachi and me, “is that how all you people are talking?” (“Coconut chutney. Ajji’s recipe. Everyone eat, don’t go wasting.”) Aleem Khan’s oldest sister, Tasneem: hospitalized for alcohol poisoning in Chapel Hill. “What shame that mother must be feeling.” (“Nice mango pickle. Neeraj. Pickle, take.”) Even successes got their due: “That Shruti Patel is smart, I’ll give her that, but her mother won’t leave me alone, asking all kinds of questions every time I see her about Prachi, what SAT studying we—she—did . . .” (“Take less rice, Prachi, who needs such a mountain?”)
And then, one day: “You know what I’m hearing about Anjali Dayal?”
I stiffened. It was early March, and my pattern of attendance at the Dayals’ remained roughly the same: covert visits, private, intimate, cherished.
“Ramya, don’t gossip so much.” My father intervening, a rarity.
“What did you hear?” I asked. I shoved my mouth full of green beans and accidentally bit on a chili. Coughing subsided, eyes watering, I waited, expectant.
“Just some very . . .” My mother eyed my father as if to decide whether or not she wanted to cross him. “White woman behavior.”
My father was eating one bean at a time and examining the ring of flowers patterning his ceramic plate as though he had never before seen these dishes.
“Which Indian people talk divorce-this divorce-that, is all I’m saying,” she muttered.
“Ashmita Pandey’s aunt is divorced,” Prachi said primly.
“Pah. That fellow was a wife beater, very sad.” My mother waved her hand in the air. “Some such cases, yes, they happen. But not this desperate housewife wants to run off into the sunset business, that and all is very strange, you ask me.”
“Last year Anita said they were, like, really close to moving to California.”
When Prachi’s eyes landed on me curiously, I felt hot.
“There’s one woman at my office,” my mother said, poised above the dal ladle, too enraptured in her story to interrogate me. Her mangalsutra swayed from her neck, that gold chain signifying her status as sturdily married. I thought of all that was invested in that necklace, of the artisan who had made it, shaping it to be a blessing conferred upon the wedding, and of all the signifiers of domestic security that had agglomerated upon it through my parents’ long union. I imagined Anjali Auntie unclasping it and coiling it onto her tongue.
“Katherine,” my mother continued. “American lady. Says she’s a Christian-only but she’s lived with three men. Meets them at bars. Can’t keep one around. Then asks me so sweetly so innocently if I had one arranged marriage like she should feel so sad for me.”
“Anita won MTI southeast,” Prachi put in disconsolately. “She’ll be prepping for nationals now.”
My sister was eternally gloomy these days, having had her early application to Duke deferred; she’d been hanging in limbo since winter, and was terrified the definitive rejection was coming in a matter of weeks. Prachi now made a habit of tallying up other brown girls’ victories in her own personal loss column: Anita had a shot at MTI nationals; Imrana Ansari, one of Prachi’s frenemies from the dance team, had won a national essay-writing competition. Worst was Gita Menon, the former Scripps National Spelling Bee runner-up from Northview High School, who had gotten her Duke acceptance in December, taking the one slot Prachi was sure had been hers.
“Aloo,” my father said, reaching for the mushy potatoes.
“Let Anita Dayal prance about. Nothing to be jealous. We are very proud of you,” my mother said.
Preparation for the national pageant—to be held in New Jersey in April—was, as Prachi surmised, keeping Anita busy. Plus, this spring, she was playing tennis and tutoring English as a second language, while also finally turning the chicken biscuit sales into Habitat for Humanity houses. All this kept her late at school and brought her inside the perimeter on weekends.
Sometimes I held the hoops I’d taken from her nightstand in my palm. I wondered what they—she—would taste like. If I could smelt down her powers and mysteries and take them as my own. But for now, I stowed the earrings in my wallet, behind my learner’s permit, where they would remain for a long time.
Students on the honors track met with the college counselor once at the start of their sophomore spring. I plodded over to Mrs. Latimer’s office on the ground floor of Okefenokee High School one morning and sat in the hallway, waiting for her to finish another meeting.
I found myself staring at a bulletin board covered with photographs of OHS alumni holding up T-shirts displaying their collegiate futures: Wake Forest and Vanderbilt and UNC; sometimes Dartmouth or Caltech or Yale. The rest of the school was papered with pep rally banners and bake sale flyers; kids chewed gum and made out and bartered cigarettes and Ritalin. But here, in the nonsense-free honors corridors, there was a different currency. A currency that meant the unlikeliest people were rich, as I remembered when I saw who was now pushing open Mrs. Latimer’s door. Shruti Patel stopped in her tracks to see me outside.
“Oh, Neil!” she said, in that scratchy voice. “I always forget you’re an honors kid.”
“What a compliment, Shroots,” I said.
She plonked down next to me. “Mrs. Latimer is making some important phone calls on my behalf right now, so you’re going to have to wait a little bit. There are a lot of people who might want to have me around for the summer. What are you doing?”
Shruti wouldn’t speak to Juhi or Isha or Kartik or even Manu this way. It was me she felt comfortable poking at, and while normally I wouldn’t deprive her of this rare social joy, I was irritable that day. It was the end of a lemonade cycle, and I’d been trudging through precalculus homework feeling laconic and woolly.
“A debate institute,” I said evenly. “In East Lansing.”
She tugged one of her springy locks of hair. Her eyes crossed as she watched it bounce.
“I wish I had a track like you,” she said. “I have to be creative about my summers. Mrs. Latimer’s calling up this Congresswoman—” I tried to close my eyes and ignore Shruti as she painted pictures of her possible opportunities: bustling around Washington, D.C., chasing a House member, or being flown to Hong Kong to participate in a youth entrepreneurship summit, or immersing in a program for math geniuses at Stanford, and she was pretty sure Stanford was practically on the beach, so she’d be solving integrals in the sand. “But I heard from Mia Ahmed that people have tons of fun at debate camp, too.”
“Institute,” I said through gritted teeth, as though that sounded better.
“Mia says there’s this place in Michigan that’ll deep fry a burrito, an Oreo, anything you want. And a shop for dollar pizza. She got drunk in East Lansing last summer. She says there are hobos you can just ask to buy you alcohol. But promise you won’t, Neil, okay? Don’t get drunk in East Lansing all summer, right when you were getting to be so smart—”
“Neil Narayan?” Mrs. Latimer, a graying woman with an air of brutal capability, stepped into the hallway. “Oh, Shruti, you’re still here? I’ll get back to you about Hong Kong. I couldn’t reach that alum.”
Mrs. Latimer spent a few minutes reviewing my file with an air of unfamiliarity. I gathered that she’d heard of Shruti before her meeting—most teachers had—but that I’d flown under her radar. Without looking up from my transcript, she suggested I begin to define myself.
“Not according to what you think a college wants to hear, understand,” she insisted. “But according to where you see yourself in, say, ten years. So. Any idea? Where you see yourself?”
I said I guessed I could see myself in California. I’d been to the Bay Area once, on vacation, when we visited my uncle Gopi and aunt Sandhya in Fremont. I’d loved San Francisco—the way the gray fog met the gray water, the way the Golden Gate emerged from the sienna mountains. I saw myself roaming amid the pastel homes crowded against one another like uneven smiles, or reading in a bay window with a view of the Pacific. (“You want to live here?” my father had chuckled, noticing the pull the city exerted over me. “You better get rich. Those houses on the water, they’re millions-millions.”)
“California,” Mrs. Latimer repeated. “Well, geography is a start. But how about your interests? What are you passionate about?”
“I’m a debater.”
“That’s your passion?”
Neeraj, you’re supposed to imagine!
“Sure,” I said.
“A debater. So, you’re interested in, say, politics? Law?”
I mumbled a few more sures, and then she began sculpting the fib into a plan—I should consider doing voter registration drives, tackle a column in the school paper, found a chapter of the Young Republicans or Democrats. I should sit for the AP Government exam, though the class wasn’t offered at our school—“Are you friends with Ms. Patel out there?” Mrs. Latimer asked. “She self-studied for the exam last year. Perhaps she could tutor you.”
By the time the meeting ended, I’d become a committed Young Democrat, at least on paper. Though I spent my days throwing around the language of policy and politics, I practiced agility more than advocacy: in one round, I played the neoconservative defender of American imperial policy in Afghanistan; in the next, I argued for diplomacy with rogue states. Sometimes Wendi let me draw on the kritik research I’d done last summer, to argue, for instance, that capitalism was the true cause of the fossil fuel crisis. Sometimes I enjoyed how debate made my mind work. But it was the win I craved, the look of sympathy the judge gave the other team before announcing our victory. What it took to get there was not passion, but lemonade.
What I did love, discreetly—and what I never thought to tell Mrs. Latimer—was history. My AP European History teacher, Mr. Bakes, was a compact, white-haired man, a former lawyer with a Tennessee drawl and a shuffle step who liked to pull me into his classroom when he spotted me in the hallways and ask for my help putting up or taking down the timeline for each unit. (I was, at last, tall enough to be of assistance to a smaller person, having hit a growth spurt over winter.) I think Mr. Bakes may have been waging a private war against Mrs. Latimer, for he never asked what my plans for the future were; instead, he batted around the past with me. He praised my essays—the one where I wrote about the scientific revolution as one of the great optimistic epochs, and the one arguing against the great man theory of history re: Napoleon. But I’d never heard of any alumnus of Hammond Creek going on to study history. Why putter around in the dead past when the future of our community required such ruthless attention?
This was why it so rankled when Shruti Patel turned around at the end of AP Euro to announce that she had been accepted to the Hong Kong entrepreneurship boot camp and to a four-day conference for young leaders in San Diego (which really was on the beach), with scholarships for both. I could conceive of East Lansing, by contrast, only as an oversize parking garage.
I kept thinking about Prachi, pacing the kitchen all Christmas break, fuming as my mother chased her with a bowl of sesame oil, attempting to administer a calming Ayurvedic head massage. “Duke’s already got an Atlanta suburban brown girl who wants to be a businesswoman!” Prachi howled. “They won’t want me! Gita Menon! Gita fu—sorry, Amma, Gita fudging Menon!”
Shruti fudging Patel. A tiny, radical part of me had started to believe, over the course of the Lemonade Period, that one day I might be good enough to be in the kinds of rooms Anita had always planned to be in—the rooms Shruti had begun to unlock. But Shruti fudging Patel—who would want me when they had her?
“Jealous?” Shruti smirked. She did that curl-tugging thing again, and it infuriated me to see the lock bounce on her forehead. Her small marble eyes, which were too wide for her face and set too close together, bore into me shrewdly. I felt violated by the intensity of her attention.
“Not a bit,” I said, but minutes later I was kicking my locker after class. Fewer heads turned than you’d expect; in the honors hallway, people were always kicking things upon the distribution of grades.
Manu passed while I was examining the metal to see if I’d made a dent. “Chemistry?”
“Shruti,” I said.
“Did you apply for her summer stuff, too?” he said gloomily.
I shook my head. “I didn’t know—I had no idea you could do stuff like Hong Kong.”
“Have you talked to Mia?” Manu lowered his voice. “Be careful in East Lansing.”
Then he sighed and went to find Kartik, whose locker was in the normie hallway, with the white kids. He’d joined the lacrosse team that spring as its water boy, and claimed he would list the sport on his college application, therefore standing apart from other Asian applicants. I wasn’t seeing much of Kartik this year. The lemonade provided sharper focus, made me willing to ignore things—and people—that did not seem immediately useful. But I was afraid of wasting all this gold, spending it by kicking a locker instead of becoming something already.
Get it together, I thought furiously at myself. I was still failing to see my future, the way Shruti seemed so capable of doing, the way I presumed Anita must be able to, the way I knew Prachi could. How could it be that Shruti believed in her future self enough to survive the fact of her unpopularity, her date running away from her at last year’s Spring Fling just as mine had, the mocking in basements, the birthday party for which her parents had to issue invitations? Was it because she trusted a future Shruti was waiting, the girl just ahead of her in a relay race, to take the baton and bolt to Hong Kong, and college, and a better life? I lacked such certainty.
“We need more of Shruti’s,” I told Anita and her mother. Another Friday in the kitchen, Anita fresh from tennis.
Anjali Auntie shook her head. “We’ve taken a lot from her already. Two—”
“Three times,” Anita interrupted. I smelled the tang of her unwashed sweat.
“What’s the problem? You’re concerned she’ll notice stuff is missing?”
“That,” Anita’s mother said, lowering her nose to sniff a pot of chana masala. “But also, that we don’t want to overdo it. Poor girl, leave her something.”
“She’s got everything,” I sighed.
Anjali Auntie gave me an odd look, brief, full of some knowledge she might have shared, but that I missed. “There’s no shortage of others.” She turned to her daughter. “Anita, why do you insist on stewing in your own stink like this? You think Neil likes to smell you?”
I blushed.
“Upstairs, shower, please. You have a lot of homework?”
“Just AP US,” Anita said. “It’s a joke.”
“How are they filling up a school year with only American history? Neil has a millennium of Europe to study and this girl has just two hundred years of this strange country.”
Anita and I went on in our renewed way, passing more of those afternoons, brewing the lemonade ourselves. She was letting me back in, illuminating the black space that had spooled between us. Her mother was increasingly out, inside the perimeter and around the other suburbs for what I assumed was a combination of legitimate work and acquisitions. On the occasions that she was home, Anita’s mother was often on the phone, upstairs, padding around, speaking in an urgent voice as we made the lemonade in the basement.
Anita had once been on jobs with her mother, but now she was never brought along. And months into our routine, I was growing impatient with this division of labor. I felt like a lazy, fat lion, remaining at home while the lioness hunted. I pictured myself tearing through the Bhatts’ mansion for Jay’s old coins or chains. Flipping Leela Matthews’s mattress upside down, seeking the lucky gold pinky ring she wore on test days. Most of all, Shruti. I pictured ripping her room apart. Absconding with all that gave her power. Those weirdly set eyes dimming. These impulses swelled in my vision, red and blinding, for minutes at a time before subsiding. Like war rage. Like bloodlust.
“How’s your dad?” I asked Anita one day in the basement. I opened the fridge and pulled out the lemons.
“He’s trying to get us to come to California.”
“In the middle of high school?”
“He thinks the family’s been split up for too long.”
Anita pointed at the drawer where they kept the glassware, indicating I should pull out the pitcher. A sudden dizziness swirled behind my forehead. The thought of the Dayal women departing when they had just begun to remake my world was too much to conceive of. And the lemonade—the loss of the lemonade. It crossed my mind, not for the first time, that I should not rely on these women for my lifeblood.
“We won’t go,” Anita said firmly. “She wouldn’t want to. My dad is not nice to her.” This came more softly.
“Would they—would they get divorced?”
Anita shook her head. “Do you know any divorced Indians? Other than Ashmita’s aunt.”
She didn’t wait for me to answer, just poured flux. I stepped back so she could lift the blowtorch. It was almost as big as her whole torso, but she wielded it confidently. When she recited the string of foreign phrases, I listened, more carefully than I had in the past. I tried to hear them reverberate in my mind, with enough intensity that they would etch themselves there.
“Were they a . . . ?” I groped for the phrases my mother used to categorize other people’s marriages. “A love match?”
Anita laughed with a nasty maturity. “They weren’t arranged,” she said. “Not by their parents. But I don’t think my mother ever really loved him. He doesn’t even seem like he likes her. That sounds sad, doesn’t it?”
I said I didn’t know. I had never thought of my own parents as in love like in movies, but it didn’t make me sad.
“It feels sad to me,” she said. “But maybe that love stuff is just American shit.”
And then I was sad, at Anita’s cynicism. I had not realized before then that I was a romantic, but I saw how Anita seemed more engaged with a kind of crude sensate reality. She was perhaps more correct about the world. But I have, constitutionally and inevitably, always preferred the blur of mystery to the assuredness of empirical facts.
Upstairs, Anjali Auntie’s footsteps came even and rhythmic. The contours of her life were inconceivable from where we stood. Love was a subtle want, to be known by more discerning minds.
I was not explicitly planning anything. No great heist in the works, no Big Idea. I was just going about my life, head down, earning A’s, taking direction from Wendi Zhao. It was Shruti who presented herself to me. In the hallway, after history. She asked me, leaning with a practiced nonchalance against my slightly dented locker, blinking those marble eyes, and I said yes, and when I went home, I IM’d her—shr00tzinb00ts09—saying that on the evening of the Spring Fling dance I would like to pick her up from her house, skip all the picture parties. It was meant to sound intimate.
I ignored Prachi’s raised eyebrows when I asked her to drop me off at Shruti’s before heading to her own party. In the driveway of Shruti’s house, Prachi said, “This is . . . nice of you.”
That weekend, Anita was in coaching sessions with the pageant expert her mother had hired in advance of nationals. I’d told her nothing about Shruti or the dance. Anita seemed to have forgotten the old rhythms of Okefenokee High School.
I’d met Shruti’s parents and ten-year-old sister at parties, but never been subjected to them the way I was in her living room that night. I tapped my foot and smacked my dry mouth, looking at the mantelpiece, where the Patels kept a single black-and-white image of two people in sari and kurta staring out at the camera, stiff and unsmiling.
“My parents, wedding day,” her mother said, following my gaze. The sister, squeezed between the mom and dad, wore a smocked dress that made her look four years younger. Her hair was in pigtails. Her mouth hung slack as she stared at me, this weird, foreign creature, a boy.
“Neeraj,” Mrs. Patel said. “Why this dancing needs dates and all?”
“It’s an American thing, Auntie. It doesn’t mean dating, dating, like . . .”
I thought I might be sick.
The father interrupted, waving his hand to dismiss his wife’s questions so furiously that he nearly elbowed his small daughter in the face: “Have you taken SAT?” He pronounced the test not as ess-ay-tee but as the past tense of sit.
“Uh, not yet,” I said. “I guess I’ll study for it next year.”
“I’m only taking it next year, too!” squeaked the girl. Her fobby accent surprised me.
“You are?”
The mother clarified. “There is one camp, Neeraj, see, they take only very talented students, you have to have taken SAT”—once more, sat—“in sixth grade only. You did not go for this?” She looked terribly concerned, if not for me then for my parents, who clearly had missed some memos on the opportunities available to aspiring geniuses. “Right now, Hema, she studying for spelling bee, you did not do that either?” Shruti’s mother spoke each s and sh sibilantly, like a steaming kettle requesting attention.
Then, like some blessing from above, my “date” arrived in the living room, wearing a pink dress that made her look like a Publix bakery cupcake, tulle around the hips and frightful tissue-paper-like flower blooms on the shoulders. Her hair had been straightened. It seemed like it might have taken hours to get it as flat as it now hung, which was depressing because it looked like an ironed squirrel’s tail, tamed but twitching. She had smeared something over her acne scars. Her mouth was switching rapidly between a contorted smile and an expression of terror, like one of those tragicomic dramatic masks. Her chickeny legs—long and skinny, unevenly shaved—stretched into high silver heels, on which she wobbled.
Her parents were not waiting for her with a camera, not waiting for me to put a corsage on their daughter’s wrist—I had not brought one, anyway. There were no protocols for what happened when Shruti Patel was actually taken on a date. (Last year, she had met Manu at the dance.) Protocols would have made it easier—a churlish Southern father with a shotgun, threatening me. I conjured other scripts from television, from white culture, and wished to belong to any of them. Instead I stood as she took a shaky step onto the hardwood from the carpeted stairs. And I saw that in her ears were two large pearl studs. Around her neck was a silver chain with another pearl pendant. Probably not even real pearls.
She was not wearing a single piece of gold. I had miscalculated.
I said I needed to use the bathroom. Before anyone could point me to a room on the main floor, I was marching up those stairs, which smelled like cat, though there was no cat in the house. I pushed open one door and found myself in a child’s room full of stuffed animals. They piled high on the bed: a twin set of bright pink teddy bears wearing bowties, a lavender elephant, a bulge-eyed green frog. I had gotten the little sister’s room. I went back to the hallway and opened the other door to find a pale yellow bedroom housing shelves and shelves of porcelain dolls. The duvet looked like someone had vomited doily. There was no difference between age ten and age fifteen in this house. I was at a loss.
I heard Shruti’s voice downstairs saying, “I’ll tell him, Mummy,” and “ouch,” and “I’ll take them off, hang on,” and the sound of bare feet climbing the stairs, and Shruti, watching me standing at the fork of her hallway, the doors to both bedrooms wide open.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to go. I guess I knew . . . it wasn’t fair to ask you.”
“Oh, god, no,” I said. “I just . . .” My hands were raised. I was still reaching for both doorknobs. “Which room’s yours? Dolls or stuffed animals?”
She didn’t blush. “Dolls,” she said. So, my gut had been wrong. So perhaps I couldn’t find my way to her jewelry box on my own.
“Show me around,” I said.
“Really?”
“I want to see where the magic happens. Where you beat me at all the tests.”
Giggle. “Not recently.” She gulped. “I’m sorry I said I forget you’re an honors kid. It wasn’t true. I don’t. Um. Forget.”
“I’m not as stupid as I seem, Shroots.”
“I never thought you were stupid,” she said.
I was hot. Sweaty. I had to keep talking or I’d wuss out. “Can I see? Unless your parents have some kind of rule about me being up here.”
Shruti laughed, and her ironed hair tried to join in, crinkling awkwardly but too murdered to really engage, and she said, “They wouldn’t think to make rules about . . . boys.” She seemed more embarrassed to pronounce the last word, to acknowledge what I was, than to find me lurking in her space.
There were many white dolls and one Native American one with a long braid and face paint, whom Shruti said she thought she best resembled, and whom she had christened Kalyani—the name she always wished she had been given.
I took each doll as she proffered them, even rocked one a bit. I stepped closer to Shruti when she opened her closet, and she shouted down to her mother, “Coming, Mummy,” and then began to giggle.
“Wait. Can I see your jewelry?” I whispered.
“Hey, Neil,” she said. “Are you, um, gay?” She blinked those uncannily set eyes several times, and I realized what could happen: the next time she was cornered, mocked, she could say this to everyone; you needed a way to reroute the cruelty when it descended on you.
“Fuck no,” I said, and the panic drove me to do something else: I put my lips on her mouth, which was slick with something sticky. I withdrew. I had done it wrong. I thought of my one prior kiss at camp last summer—it had been rough, and too wet, doglike. I had overcompensated this time, with reticence. I said, “Still think that?”
Her face grew pink. The second time, she lifted the back of her hand to her mouth, wiping away whatever lip gloss remained, and leaned into me. It was neither dry nor slobbery. If I concentrated, I could forget who she was.
She pulled back. I was supposed to say something. What had I said to the camp girl before, or after? You’re hot, I’d muttered.
“You’re smart,” I said. “You’re really, really smart.”
The wrong choice, for now she was going in again, and then I felt her hand on my wrist, guiding me to her pink cupcake breast, and I felt it—the first breast I’d ever touched, and I was repulsed. I stopped. In her expression I saw confusion—Is this . . . isn’t this . . . what people do? She had overestimated my experience and tried to catch up by stealing second base. Her mother’s voice came again, and she shouted back, “Hang on, Mummy.”
I moved quickly toward her closet and reached for a pink box on her shelf, next to the row of floral blouses with flappy collars. I opened it. I knew I was right this time, because the heat of the room was guiding me to the box, and when I saw the thin chain, I said, “That’s gold?”
She nodded.
“Can I keep it?”
“My mom would be so mad, I lost this ring she gave me—”
I leaned in again, cutting her off—a fourth time. When I withdrew, she nodded. The wondering expression—Is this what people do? There was still suspicion in her face, but it was combined with stupefaction, and most of all, ignorance. I needed to bookend the scene, to make her certain that what she had just given me made sense according to the transactions of boys and girls our age, that it was some sort of love token. I went in one final time. I told myself it was good practice.
I pulled back, my tongue wet with hers—she’d gone very French that time. And there Shruti Patel stood in her room full of dolls, all of their bead eyes on us, all of the eyes of her childhood watching her as she took a great step toward what she thought was adulthood.
That I abandoned Shruti for Manu and Kartik and Aleem and Jack and Abel at the dance; that I ignored her studiously for the week thereafter; that I managed to move my assigned seat in Euro from the place by the window, next to her, to the back chalkboard, telling Mr. Bakes (not untruthfully) that I was suffering migraines and couldn’t handle the light; that I ignored, too, the hoots about Spring Fling, until they subsided into a consensus that I had gone with her out of kindness . . . all this caused the incident to abate with dangerous ease.
I had thought originally that I would need to have some sort of conversation with Shruti, explaining the merits of friendship over romance at this stage in our lives, but on the first day I saw her after the dance, kneeling by her locker, her eyes narrowed to suspicious ovals, and all I could mutter was a hi. I shuffled past. She seemed unsurprised. Normal reality had subsumed her once more. She only cast a few injured looks at me across the history classroom before stubbornly turning back to her notebook. I heard her speaking to Mr. Bakes after class about some must-read books on Hong Kong. I’d become just a silly incident in her past.
Wendi Zhao commented on my glum mood over the following weeks: “Kid, don’t fuck up when I need you most.” She’d been wait-listed at Harvard, and the coaches had suggested that if they could tout a nationals win, she might be shifted to the “Z-list,” meaning she would be offered a chance to take a gap year and enroll the following fall.
My family noticed as well. I was dull at dinners, dampening the celebratory mood—for despite all the heartache and cursing of Gita Menon over the past few months, Prachi had in the end received her glorious fat envelope in the mail. My father, never a drinker, had made a toast with his water glass several nights in a row, while my mother’s eyes welled up, and I hmmed a congratulations gamely through a mouthful of saaru.
Passing my room to get to the attic after one of those toasting dinners, my father paused. “You can do what Prachi did, too,” he said.
I thought I’d heard him wrong. “What?”
“We are feeling like our decision to come here makes sense, with you two doing so well.”
I almost wished for him to revert to his old suspicions.
I had, if you counted it out, what I needed to not fuck up debate nationals. I took a regular dose from our competitors—Soumya Sen, and one of Anita’s Bobcat classmates whose earring and anklet she had nabbed from the PE locker room, just for me. But I had come to understand that brewing the perfect lemonade was not a matter of taking luck or specific talents from another person and drinking those down. I needed whatever it was that had caused Shruti Patel to so effectively move on when I had done to her worse than what Anita had done to me the previous year. I needed her belief, her faith, and the thing that ignited both in her. I needed something to get me through tomorrow and tomorrow, tomorrow—when I would finally, finally be able to begin the process of becoming a real person.
A few days before she left for New Jersey, Anita’s instant messenger avatar reappeared online for the first time in months. She must have unblocked me, at long last. I found the conversation in adulthood, archived in my old email. I can’t remember what I felt like during or after the chat. It is like one of those artifacts of history I studied later as a graduate student—the thing the people experiencing it missed, the thing that might have changed the rest. When we handle such artifacts, we condescend about how ignorant the denizens of the past are. But we forget that the past is a blind, groping place.
neil_is_indian: sup
anibun91: guess whos gonna be in new jersey this weekend
neil_is_indian: uh u?
anibun91: other than me!!
neil_is_indian: ur mom ba doom chha
anibun91: *sigh* sam
neil_is_indian: o shit
anibun91: im like:OOO
anibun91: hes visiting his cousin or something
anibun91: who goes to rutgers
anibun 91: n then his parents r gonna take him to see princeton lol w/e
anibun91: not that he could get into princeton (!)
neil_is_indian: thats rando
anibun91: ok ya
anibun91: but then when i mentioned the pageant he was like o maybe ill come
anibun91: (!?!!?!!?!?!?!!?!?! whaaaaat)
neil_is_indian: the brown ppl will trample him
neil_is_indian: “one of these is not like the others”
neil_is_indian: “kill outsider”
anibun91: im so embarrassed
neil_is_indian: no ur not
anibun91: what do u mean of course i am
neil_is_indian: ur gonna win its gonna be fine
neil_is_indian: & he likes u even if he is an asshole
anibun91: who says hes an asshole?
neil_is_indian: u did?
anibun91: w/e no he isnt
anibun91: but actually im like so sick of this pageant and all the fobs
anibun91: and sick of being only
anibun91: like
anibun91: pretty for a brown girl
anibun91: hey u still there
anibun91: ??
neil_is_indian: ya sorry @ debate
neil_is_indian: wendi on my ass
anibun91: oooooooooh
neil_is_indian: not like that shes anal
neil_is_indian: also not like that
anibun91: w/e u have yellow fever
neil_is_indian: ???????
anibun91: melanie, wendi, lol
neil_is_indian: theyr both twinkies and im a coconut so nothing counts
anibun91: um literally ur screen name
neil_is_indian: its IRONIC
neil_is_indian: g2g
anibun91: ok bai
neil_is_indian: good luck
neil_is_indian: this weekend
neil_is_indian: w the pageant i mean
anibun91: i might not like him
anibun91: like im not totally sure now?
neil_is_indian: sam?
anibun91: ya
neil_is_indian: who do u like then
anibun91: who says i *have* to like someone?
neil_is_indian: okok
anibun91: now i g2g
neil_is_indian: actually wait
neil_is_indian: can i talk to u about smthg
neil_is_indian: kinda important
anibun91 has signed off
The weekend Anita and her mother were in New Jersey—which was also the weekend before debate nationals—I let myself into the Dayals’ house early on Saturday morning using the key beneath the watering can.
In the basement, I set about performing the routine I had been memorizing for months.
Shruti’s chain piled into itself in the basin. Was this how the forty-niners felt—sweaty, exhausted, sick with themselves, having left behind all that was familiar for this gleaming element? Flux, sloshing. Goggles, the rest of the ill-lit basement obscured through the plastic.
I started to recite the string of foreign phrases—Asya swarnasya kantihi shaktir gnyanam casmabhihi praapyataam—but I stumbled. I started again. I watched the gold almost throbbing in the basin, like it was daring me to take it. “Fuck,” I muttered. Then I clamped my hands over my mouth, afraid for a moment that I’d polluted the enchantment with my cursing. I took a great heaving breath, began again, and got through it that time . . . and at last, there was the liquid, my shot of gold, the same as it had always looked at the end of this process and yet completely different—because this time it was all mine.
The lemonade: I pumped all the juice I could out of the fruit, feeling the thing release in my palm, a muscle spasming pleasurably at my touch. I picked up a string of lemon pulp with my pinky and felt its pucker on the inside of my mouth—headily, I thought, This life contains more than I know. And at last the gold falling into the lemonade, the sigh in the pitcher, the muffled rush of the carbonation forming, the columns of bubbles like the light falling from the disco ball at the Spring Fling dance. Then I drank, calling upon the focus Anita had taught me months earlier, and I tasted Shruti Patel.
She tasted unlike the others, distinct from the baby bangles and coins and pendants and teardrop earrings and men’s Om chains that I had been consuming for months.
Because she was not sweet.
Perhaps I had done something wrong with the proportions. Or perhaps—I now think—I had not successfully masked the bitterness, the murk, the complications.
Afterward, I cleaned vigorously. I poured the extra lemonade into one of the vials Anita’s mother kept above the basement fridge. I put it in my backpack, wrapping it in gym socks. I went for a three-mile jog—the run had nothing to do with Shruti, who could not run a mile to save her life; that was me, converting her into all I wanted to be.
That night I watched Anita earn her crown as Miss Teen India USA, and when my parents came into the living room to see me tuned in to Zee TV, they raised their eyebrows and said, “Really, watching that?” and I said, “She’s not so bad,” and they sat, too, and my mother rolled her eyes when Anita launched into her charity speech—battered women, again. She had at last been to Queens; the Dayal women had stopped in at the shelter before heading to New Jersey, delivering soaps and lotions and cosmetic products. Anita told an anecdote of a Bangladeshi woman beaten by her husband, left homeless, turned to prostitution, because “we do what we must to survive, and there was nowhere for her to go, no safe place and no home for her in this foreign country.”
It was Prachi who answered the phone Sunday night. I don’t know who began the telephone tree, which aunties’ voices carried the news from the Patels’ house to ours. At eleven, my sister came into my room and asked me to put away the heavy Dell laptop on which I was typing frantically. I had a grand idea to premiere at nationals, a plan related to fusion energy. I was a diviner; my computer light in my dark room was the light of the gold in the rock—
Prachi, wearing Blue Devils blue, sat on my bed, took the laptop, and told me the news.
She repeated it; she did not know if I had heard. I was reduced to rabbity, muscular reactions. My cheek convulsed. I bit my lip and tasted blood, which smacks somehow of metal.
I looked out my window, past the stinking spring Bradford pear on the Walthams’ lawn. Anita’s house remained dark. The Dayals had not yet returned from New Jersey. Perhaps they were barreling north from Hartsfield-Jackson in their brown Toyota. For a wild moment I wished that they would crash, be plowed into by some drunk or insane Atlanta driver, so they would never know what I’d done.
At some point that night, Prachi left, and at some point that night, my parents said things, useless things. When I was finally alone, it was perhaps one in the morning, and the night outside was still, the suburbs grotesquely undisturbed. I rummaged through my bag for the remaining vial of lemonade. I removed the stopper and brought it to my nose. I tipped the rest into my mouth and gagged; I ran to the bathroom, stuck two fingers down my throat, and watched a membranous fluid splatter into the toilet bowl. Nothing sparkled, nothing bubbled, nothing betrayed a hint of magic.
I don’t know what method she chose. I only know they found her on Sunday morning. She must have done it Saturday night. I have always pictured it happening in the closet, the one she opened when I asked to see her jewelry. I imagine it with rope. I see her placing her feet onto a step stool. Her brown lids closed. Watched by her many dolls’ eyes, which were as alive as hers, for she had already given up, for the life had been taken from her a few hours earlier, in a basement, by a boy who believed he was shaking away pay dirt. The purple blooming around her throat, in the place where a necklace would have hung.