“Yeah,” Isha called as Anita and Shruti made their egress. “Anita, enjoy the food—I mean, you must be so at home, eating this stuff.”
Aleem turned to me. “You hear my middle sister didn’t get into any schools?”
“None?” Manu gasped.
“What’s she going to do?” I had a vision of Shaira packing up the Khans’ station wagon and zooming west, a female Muslim Sal Paradise （I’d recently read—and treasured—On the Road）。 What if she just went . . . anywhere? Sought out the mad people? “She could do anything.”
“She’s applying again. More safety schools. This time she’s writing her essay on 9/11.”
“Why are you all so gay for college?” Kartik fiddled with the video game controller. School didn’t come easily to him. So, soon enough, we let him redirect the conversation to one of those teenage-boy brain trusts: “You know the secret to getting any in high school?”
We asked him to enlighten us.
“Avoid the Indian girls.”
“Why?” Manu said.
“They’re afraid of dicks. Every one of them. That’s what my brother says.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said.
“Three reasons to not fuck with Indian girls,” Kartik continued. “One: they’re afraid of dicks. Two: they’re hairy, like, gorilla hairy. Three: they bleed a lot.”
“What do you mean bleed a lot?” I said.
“I mean it’s a biological fact that they have the thickest—what’s it called—the thing that breaks when chicks get reamed for the first time.”
“The hymen,” Manu said professorially.
“Right, they’ve got the thickest in the world, so blood everywhere.” He emitted an explosive, diarrheic noise, making fireworks with his hands, puffing cheeks out, spewing air.
“Who’s that girl you debate with?” Aleem asked me. “Wendi Zhao? She’s kind of hot.”
Kartik leaned against the mirror. “Wendi Plow,” he said. Then he added, in case we didn’t get it: “I’d plow Wendi Zhao, all I’m saying.”
“Dude,” Manu said, turning to me, and I cringed, because he was about to do that thing—the male version of that thing Shruti did—where he deepened his voice and tried to access the patois of our generation. “Dude, I bet Anita totally likes you, though.”
“What did I just say?” Kartik moaned.
* * *
? ? ?
Eventually I got hungry and excused myself. I passed, on the way out of the basement, the sixty-inch television, on which home videos of Meena and Jay streamed. Currently, a little Jay was holding up a piece of construction paper to the camera. It featured a stick figure standing atop a mountain of green rectangles—dollar bills. Below, written in red marker, with a few letters facing adorably in the wrong direction: when i grow up, i want to be . . . rich!
I reached the buffet table in the Bhatts’ emptied three-car garage. Anita’s mother was there, reaching one of her slender arms up to a wire shelf to grab something. I ached to be tall enough that I could reach a shelf she could not. On the table were chaat fixings and mango lassi in a sweaty glass jug and yellow fluffy dhokla and a pile of mini cheese pizzas, in concession to the littler kids’ whitewashed diets.
“Neil!” she said. “Ani’s just gone home. She wasn’t feeling well.”
“Gone home with who?” You couldn’t walk back to our neighborhood from this side of Hammond Creek; you could hardly walk anywhere in Hammond Creek.
“Shruti’s parents decided to leave, so they took her.”
“She gets tired,” I said, thinking of that windup key in Anita’s back slowing, threatening the vigor of her public persona. These days I couldn’t imagine who she was in private, what she dreamt of or loved.
“You haven’t been coming by,” Anjali Auntie said airily. “Are you sick of my food?”
“It’s been busy.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Anita might like some company soon. She’s been busy, too. Here, you want to come help? I lost my best set of extra hands.”
I joined her behind the buffet table and began piling up napkins from the package she had pulled from the shelf. People had mostly come through for their first round of food already, so though the dishes were hot and everything was still laid out, our corner of the party was quiet. From inside, high-pitched Hindi music sounded, and I knew some auntie would try to get everyone to dance and some uncle would give a speech about Meena’s and Jay’s futures and then the party would end and we, the non-Meenas and non-Jays, would go home to begin our summers of striving to become Jays and not Meenas. I would be spending my break up to my ears in debate research and, at my father’s behest, suffering through supplemental Kumon math courses. Thinking about this made me want to linger in the garage, to postpone the coming months.