All this I remembered, and mourned, at the sight of those girl shoulders. Whatever was entering Anita through that open hinge was obliterating the child I had known.
She turned, squinted, spied me.
“Oh, hi, Neil!” she called, in a voice that was, miraculously, the inheritor of the voice that had once said, You’re supposed to imagine! All the life that had gone into imagining the landscape outside our shared house now went to . . . what? The Harvard pennant above her bed? “Were you waiting for me?”
I stood, still in the shadows, and kicked the Walthams’ bush/cheney sign behind me.
“No,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “I just needed some air.”
“All well, Neil? They missed you at Shruti’s,” her mother said, hoisting a bag out of the car. I made a sort of muted noise of assent, confirming I was alive, if not well. Anjali Auntie squinted at me doubtfully.
“Ani,” she said, before making for the door. “You’re going to work on that dance piece tonight? Before you sleep?”
“I said I would,” she said tersely. Her mother went inside, leaving me alone with Anita. “It’s for regionals,” she said, though I hadn’t asked. “The talent part. It’s stupid.”
“Congrats, I guess,” I said, lifting my hands over my head in the shape of a lumpy tiara.
“How’s Prachi?” she said. “I really thought she did great.”
I felt my voice deepening artificially as I snapped: “They’re saying she was robbed.”
Anita looked startled for a moment. Then she smiled. “Shruti really missed you today,” she said. “She’s just too excited to see you in the fall. She’s getting her braces off.” She smacked her lips.
“Have you ever even been to Queens?” I’d googled it after the pageant and learned it was in New York. “Or did you just make up all that charity stuff?”
Her face set back into the practiced public calm she’d displayed at the pageant, and it now occurred to me that perhaps her outer self had smothered her inner life. This thought frightened me only for a moment, before it morphed into envy.
“Some of us have goals. Some of us work hard,” she said, turning away.
Anita was almost at her doorstep, in the unlit part of the driveway; the shadows consumed her, and I did not know how far away from me she’d gone, which made everything more urgent. I felt I had just moments to call out to her, to beg one final time that she bring me along wherever she was going: “Anita,” I said, barely above a whisper. “Wait—please—can you talk a minute?”
I thought I made out the beginning of a reply, but it was only the croak of a cicada, and then the shudder of a firefly, and then the Dayals’ front door thumped shut.
* * *
? ? ?
I sweated through a strange dream: Ramesh Uncle and I were aboard a ship making for America. I never saw my own face, or his—we were ghostly bodies with splotches of light for heads. We kept pacing the ship deck as the ocean sprayed our faces, and I kept saying, How will we know when we get there? and he said, There’s a big statue, and when we berthed at the California coastline, an enormous oxidized bronze Anita loomed, one hand high in the air, holding not a torch but, instead, a very large tiara.
I woke around two. I could not imagine lying still through the night. I tiptoed downstairs and stepped outside, barefoot, making my way to the Dayals’ front lawn. I stood a moment and considered the facade of that strange house, the mustard yellow and the lively red door, and I thought it was time for me to break something.
I lifted the watering can behind the azalea bush. The key was missing. So I edged around back and found, next to the cement path, a stone. I gripped it in both hands as I approached the basement, where Anita and her mother had been the night I left my knife in the kitchen. I had the sense that some boundary between my dream and my waking life had not yet fully shut.
The bottom square of glass on the basement door window shattered quickly, and I didn’t think about the shards protruding when I pushed my arm through and undid the lock, making use of the digital dexterity I had been developing in hopes of one day removing a girl’s bra. I dropped the rock on the earth outside. No alarm. The only sound was the house itself: the ambient noise of the air-conditioning, the hum of a refrigerator.
Last I’d been in this basement, it was unfinished, with boxes piled up by the water heater. Now, though. The first thing I thought was mad scientist. Three long tables, the kind Anita’s mother might have used while catering, were covered with white plastic tablecloths. A mess of tools was laid out. A large stone basin. A blowtorch. Tongs. A juicer. （I thought of the buzzing I had heard the last time I was here.） A huge plastic jar of sugar. I looked down to see a trickle of blood dripping from my elbow to my wrist. I pressed my shirt to it.