Traffic at eight on a Saturday was light. Wendi merged violently onto the highway and crossed three lanes in a frantic spurt to the HOV side. An unlikely number of tall pines lined Georgia highways, and though it was hardly nature, it still felt like air, like breath, a reminder that something beyond Hammond Creek existed.
Wendi: “This girl—do I know her?”
“She used to go to OHS,” I said, and named Anita.
Wendi shook her head to say it didn’t ring a bell. Then the headshaking grew vehement. “You know what I feel about this, though?” I figured she would tell me no matter what. “Like, just wait a couple of years to dick around. I’m going to dick around a lot at Harvard, trust me.”
“Anita wants to go to Harvard, too,” I said. That briefly silenced Wendi. We passed under green sign after green sign announcing another suburb where other Neils and Wendis were waiting. The interstate spat us out in Buckhead, where there were more trees—historic trees, all knotty. We turned onto a wide street where each home resembled a small plantation—enormous white houses with wraparound porches and lawns as well maintained as a golf course green.
I suddenly recalled visiting Harvard when Prachi and I were kids, on a vacation to see cousins in Boston. In the photographs, we are big squished ravioli in magenta and traffic-cone-orange coats. My father holds me up to the lucky John Harvard statue, on which, it turns out, freshman boys have an affinity for pissing. All the hope of the Asian immigrant is crammed into my father’s hands as he lifts me up—though I am too old and too fat to be held—so I can scratch a little good fortune from that urine-drenched talisman.
“Wendi,” I said. “What’s after Harvard?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. You get there. To Harvard. What happens next?”
She looked at me like she had something sour on her tongue.
“Whatever the fuck I want.”
* * *
? ? ?
You could almost miss the entrance to Anita’s school as you passed by the old-style Southern diner boasting, on a signboard, the butteriest grits in Atlanta and the sweetest tea to boot. We caught sight of the brick gates just in time. Two tennis courts loomed to our right, ringed by old magnolias. A sign in bright orange lettering congratulated the Bobcats on winning the state championship in men’s and women’s cross-country—Anita’s team—and then cycled to add more titles collected that fall: football, robotics, quiz team, show choir . . .
“Maybe if I went to school here, I wouldn’t wait to dick around, either,” Wendi said bitterly as we crossed a small blue bridge running over a creek. My window was down. The water warbled. Campus was dark, but a few lights switched on automatically as we drove.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“This is practically already the Ivy League. She’s got a free ticket.”
I stiffened. “Turn right here, I think,” I said, trying to remember the directions Anita had given me. “She said she’s in the old junior high.”
“She’s not going to barf in my car, is she?”
“No,” I said. “And she doesn’t have a free ticket. She works really hard.”
“Didn’t say she didn’t,” Wendi said, and briefly that puckered face loosened. Suddenly, she slammed her horn, hard. We’d nearly hit a train of figures sprinting across the road.
“Wendi!” I said. “They have security on campus!”
“Security? Why are these kids drinking here on a Saturday, then—” but she shut up as I pulled out my phone and dialed the number Anita had called from. Three rings, four, no reply. “You got a cover story ready, superhero? I’m not taking the fall for this chick.”
“You’re supposed to be the fast thinker,” I snapped.
I tried the number once more, and this time a guy’s voice answered. It was deeper than mine, cloaked in a friendly Southern burr. “Are you Anita’s brother?”
“Brother?”
“She said her brother was coming to pick her up?”
I paused. I assented.
The voice directed me where to come. “Hurry,” he said.
The crowd that awaited us, in a parking lot next to a one-story brick building, was wedged against a broad tree. Two figures peeled away: a guy taller than me, and a girl leaning on him. The guy was white and had dark brown hair that fringed above his ears. He looked annoyed.
Anita grinned at me dizzily. “Neil. Happy happy to see you.”