“Okay,” Anita’s mother said, shaking something off.
* * *
? ? ?
That night set in motion the rhythms of my sophomore fall. I woke with a headache the morning after and at breakfast admitted I did not feel well—“pounding brain,” I mumbled into my Toaster Strudel—which caused my mother to suspect, yet again, that I had been drinking.
My father had his own theory: “You are socially withdrawn,” he said. I blinked dimly. “That is one of the symptoms of marijuana usage.”
Prachi was invited to give testimony on my behalf. “Mom, I don’t know anyone on the planet who’d give Neil alcohol or drugs. You don’t understand how big a dork he is.”
“Chee-chee,” my mother said. “I think drugs are for dorks.”
When we crossed paths upstairs later, Prachi stopped me. Her eyes fell on my Band-Aid. “You’re not a cutter or something now, are you?” she said.
I shook my head.
“Don’t get all emo this year. It’s only tenth grade—too early for that shit, okay?”
The too much–ness of that initial lemonade took days to fade—I walked around high, restless, practicing the focus Anita had taught me in order to channel what I’d downed. I even started going on runs.
Once school began, I was a new Neil, a Neil containing a mysterious balance of stability and energy. I found myself willing to work harder; I did not want to waste the lemonade. Math and science came more easily, and my abysmal Kumon grades were forgotten. I was buoyant in history class, and my blue books came back to me with ninety-nines, circled and underlined. Shruti’s, next to me, still hung comfortably in the nineties, but often a few points lower than mine. She hid them after the first time I leaned over and said, “I win.”
Anita’s mother doled out new doses of lemonade every few weeks, usually on Fridays, to precede a weekend of homework or a debate tournament. We consumed Shruti’s in pipette drips; a taste of her lemonade could set me up for a solid week of focused studying. Before a big math exam, Anjali Auntie gave me some from Jay Bhatt, former state math Olympiad champion. With each sip, I got better at concentrating—You’re supposed to imagine! Imagine yourself making use of all you took.
I followed Wendi Zhao’s directions flawlessly at the first tournament of the year, in Dallas, and shocked everyone by earning an individual award on top of our team semifinals finish. （“You might be more than just my tool, Neil,” Wendi said begrudgingly as we helped the school chaperone unload the rental car at the airport.）
I leveraged this first success with my parents, negotiating the right to attend driver’s ed before school twice a week. The teacher, Mr. Hudson, a pruny old man who had once been white but whose veins were so prominent beneath his skin that today he resembled something more like a bruise, had been at Okefenokee since “before the out-of-towners”—us. “Y’all all have this thing in your culture, don’t you?” he’d begin, while I was trying to circle the Chick-fil-A parking lot. He would unravel a list of anthropological observations on each minority: the Indian male’s plentiful chest hair and accompanying pungent scent, the composition of the Chinese stomach that allowed for consuming unlikely animals, the Koreans and the satanic rituals he believed to be secretly afoot in their churches. “There was a Nigerian kid here a long while ago,” he said once, sighing. “Tall. Unforchernately, he couldn’t play football for you-know-what.”
I began to spend time at Anita’s once or twice a week, the way I used to when I let myself in to raid the fridge. I’d finish homework and debate practice, then hitch a ride from school back to our cul-de-sac. Prachi was busy with her activities—charity clubs, the dance team, and （I had an inkling） Hudson Long. My parents worked late. So I was managing to hang around the Dayals’ without accounting to anybody about my reasons for being there.
Often, I’d land at their house before Anita’s carpool dropped her home. Her school was almost an hour’s drive away through miserable Atlanta traffic, which meant I spent a lot of time that fall with Anjali Auntie. On the occasions Anita was around, she treated me like her assigned partner on a mandatory school project. The spark of connection that had seemed to revive between us on the night of my breakin had dissipated. I wondered if she regretted letting me in, or if she could sense my want, if it disgusted her.
One early fall afternoon, I was alone in the Dayal kitchen, considering the warm burst of the Japanese maple on the front lawn, when Anita’s carpool arrived. She dropped her new lime green, monogrammed, L.L.Bean backpack in the foyer and looked surprised to find me at the counter, eating as usual—this time her mother’s spicy phodnichi poli. Anjali Auntie was in the bedroom, taking a phone call; the door was firmly shut.