“Do you want me to go?” I leaned against the counter, about six feet from her.
“No,” she said. Her eyes narrowed, perhaps out of exhaustion, but I read annoyance.
“I feel like you’re mad at me. And I don’t get what I did—”
“I’m fucking beat. I’m fucking hungry.” It was not a reply. “Is there food?” A silly question; there was always food at the Dayals’。 She edged to the fridge and pulled out a neon orange Gatorade. “I’m up every day at five,” she said, addressing the vegetable crisper. “Do you know that? My mom wants me to do volunteer fundraising for Habitat for Humanity, because being a Habitat officer as a junior means you can be a Service Prefect as a senior, and every Service Prefect for the last five years has gone to an Ivy League or at least Vanderbilt, so I’m doing that, which means I have to be at Chick-fil-A at six thirty to help buy the chicken biscuits we sell for, like, six bucks each. Oh, and I’ve started eating meat at school, you know, because I couldn’t live on their slimy white-person okra or iceberg lettuce, but even then I can’t eat a chicken biscuit even though I’m standing over them for, like, an hour, because if one of the girls on the cross-country team sees you eating a chicken biscuit she’ll give you this look, you know, just to make sure you know they’ve noticed you have an ass and they don’t—I mean not you, I mean I have an ass. I have to size up on the cross-country shorts; everyone else double-rolls them. And Mary Claire Turner, the other day ‘Baby Got Back’ came on the radio on the bus, and she goes, ‘Is this your anthem, Anita?’ Oh, and on Fridays, I have to do the whole biscuit thing alone, because the other service kids are in Friday Morning Fellowship, praying or singing or whatever, and sometimes I think about going in there, doing the whole parade and accepting Jesus Christ because the only Asian girl they don’t hate is the one who wears this huge cross—well, her boobs are huge, too, and anyway I think she’s only half-Asian. I—I miss sleep.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that Anita might not be popular at her new school; I’d imagined her transitioning laterally from her position at OHS. （It also didn’t seem the time to inform her that there were boobs guys and butt guys, and unfortunately she had enrolled at a boobs guys’ school, but that there were plenty of butt guys out there still.） As I processed, I realized I’d waited too long, and her confession, or expulsion, hung limply in the air, unanswered.
“Uh.” I glanced impotently around the kitchen before trying what Anjali Auntie did in the face of tension. “Do you want masala chai? Your mom taught me how to make it.”
A small, relieved smile spread on Anita’s face as she nodded. I was proud to see myself knowing her so well, giving her what she needed—the chance to release, but also to reclaim her composure.
“With ginger?” she said.
“Sure,” I said. I took out the milk and Anita grabbed the spices from above the sink and began slicing the root. I set about boiling the liquid, covering it with the hairy dark leaves.
“What’s new for you at school?” she asked as we watched the chai burble, as though she’d said nothing at all about her own life.
“I don’t suck anymore.”
“You never sucked. You’re just a little lazy.”
“I still sleep.”
“You always slept.” Her mouth twitched. “Too much.” She reached to switch off the stove as the chai foamed over the lip of the saucepan. Her thumb brushed the hot steel and she yelped. Before my self-consciousness could kick in, I pressed my own cool hand around hers. She let it stay there.
In that instant she almost seemed to flicker back to life. For a brief flash, she was there, looking back at me.
Her mother’s door opened. We split apart, and as the touch broke, I knew I would lose whatever had just happened in the unreal minutes before; Anita would pretend she’d admitted nothing of her life, and I would have to participate in the conspiracy to cover up her vulnerabilities. By the time Anjali Auntie came in, hanging up the cordless, we were on opposite sides of the room, strangers again.
“You made chai?” Anita’s mother stood over the pot and laughed, not unkindly. “It’s overdone.” As she brewed a fresh pot, we got back to the activity Anjali Auntie and I had been engaged in earlier: gossip. At the Dayals’， the gossip my mother so loved—who was winning what, who was engaged in nonsense—translated differently. When my mother gossiped, she was trying to teach herself and us something about who was living America correctly. When Anita’s mother gossiped, the question was: Who might be worth acquiring a little something from?