But this summer was cold with reality. I’d been grounded, due to my public display of impertinence in telling my parents I preferred not to attend the Nagarajans’ party. I was banned from Kartik’s, the only place I could play video games, and allowed to go only to the Kumon math center and to the library—the latter when accompanied by my debate partner, the acidic Wendi Zhao, who oversaw my work and berated me for my mediocrity. In the evenings, I was to sit in my room, doing my reading and math. If I wanted proof that summer had descended on Georgia, I had only to open my window. The insects were out, katydids and cicadas and flashing lightning bugs, little green constellations.
“Don’t you have assigned reading?” my mother said when I complained.
“The thing is, The Great Gatsby is a really short book,” I pointed out.
My father shouted from the bathroom, over a trumpeting fart: “In our schools, you never got hundred percent in anything!” He flushed. In the kitchen, hands washed, he continued: “Sixty percent was considered very good! You should jolly well never be done!”
I suspected that I had become a casualty of Prachi’s Spring Fling misbehavior. But my sister, the perpetrator herself, was allowed to roam free due to her pageant activities. It seemed immensely unfair. Perhaps my parents feared my descent into averageness more than they feared Prachi’s tumbles into vice. They trusted Prachi. My sister telegraphed her ambitions in the Duke poster on her wall and the Duke T-shirt she tugged on whenever she had a test, for good luck. She had a dream to lose. Me? I had no college poster, no talisman.
On the first evening of my imprisonment, I grabbed the upstairs cordless in hopes of calling Kartik to arrange a covert video game rendezvous. But my mother was already on the phone.
I heard Mrs. Bhatt’s voice on the other end of the line saying, “And that Anjali Dayal!”
“How would she go do something like that?”
“Why, mujhe toh pata nahi, but Ramya, I saw her going into my bedroom during Manav’s toast, and I waited, soch rahi hoon ki, maybe she just needs to use the bathroom—”
“She should have been using the powder room! Who enters the master bathroom like that—”
“But just wait, I sent Meena in, usko maine bola, ‘Meena, go see if Anjali Auntie needs something, or if she’s looking for me,’ so Meena went into my bedroom.”
“And?”
“Toh, that woman is just standing in my closet!”
“That’s what Meena said?”
“Yaaah, yah! Not only that, looking at all my clothes, my jewelry!”
“She opened your jewelry cabinet?”
“I had left it open, I remembered later, because I kept trying to choose, which earrings—”
“Itnaa nice-nice earrings.”
“And also I kept trying to get Jay to wear the gold Om his daadi gave him, but these boys won’t wear necklaces, saying ‘Mummy, I look like a girl,’ and then people started ringing the doorbell and I never shut it all up . . . anyway, strange behavior—”
My mother tutted. “She’s jealous, Beena. She goes to all these parties-schmarties as catering, no husband in sight, and you’re always wearing those niiice saris and stoles and—”
“Skinny-mini gold digger shouldn’t need my saris.”
“Gold digger? Kya matlab?”
“Ramya—you know. All these kids listening to that song these days, you must keep up with them or you will lose them. Get down, girl, it goes, some such thing. Anyway, my cousin Rakesh was Pranesh Dayal’s senior at IIT Bombay. He only told me. She went round with all the boys. Then chose Pranesh because people said he’s the class topper, going to make lots of money, going to America and whatnot.”
“Hanh—” my mother paused. “Thought I heard something on the line.” （I muted the phone.） “Lekin, back there marriage can be a little transactional, na? Gold digger, bahut American way to think about it, Beena.”
I heard footsteps coming up the stairs; my mother liked to pace around the house, complementing gossip with exercise, so I returned the cordless to its cradle and rushed back to my bedroom to stare out at the Dayals’， beginning a pattern that would define the summer. I ran through hypotheses as time rolled by, as I squinted through the heat and fireflies and the low glimmering of the suburban streetlights. Did the Dayal women need money—money to be garnered from Prachi’s necklace, or something in Mrs. Bhatt’s closet? Was a divorce pending? Was Pranesh Uncle not funding the fancy-schmancy school? Or was something else altogether setting in?