“Neil Narayan?” Mrs. Latimer, a graying woman with an air of brutal capability, stepped into the hallway. “Oh, Shruti, you’re still here? I’ll get back to you about Hong Kong. I couldn’t reach that alum.”
Mrs. Latimer spent a few minutes reviewing my file with an air of unfamiliarity. I gathered that she’d heard of Shruti before her meeting—most teachers had—but that I’d flown under her radar. Without looking up from my transcript, she suggested I begin to define myself.
“Not according to what you think a college wants to hear, understand,” she insisted. “But according to where you see yourself in, say, ten years. So. Any idea? Where you see yourself?”
I said I guessed I could see myself in California. I’d been to the Bay Area once, on vacation, when we visited my uncle Gopi and aunt Sandhya in Fremont. I’d loved San Francisco—the way the gray fog met the gray water, the way the Golden Gate emerged from the sienna mountains. I saw myself roaming amid the pastel homes crowded against one another like uneven smiles, or reading in a bay window with a view of the Pacific. （“You want to live here?” my father had chuckled, noticing the pull the city exerted over me. “You better get rich. Those houses on the water, they’re millions-millions.”）
“California,” Mrs. Latimer repeated. “Well, geography is a start. But how about your interests? What are you passionate about?”
“I’m a debater.”
“That’s your passion?”
Neeraj, you’re supposed to imagine!
“Sure,” I said.
“A debater. So, you’re interested in, say, politics? Law?”
I mumbled a few more sures, and then she began sculpting the fib into a plan—I should consider doing voter registration drives, tackle a column in the school paper, found a chapter of the Young Republicans or Democrats. I should sit for the AP Government exam, though the class wasn’t offered at our school—“Are you friends with Ms. Patel out there?” Mrs. Latimer asked. “She self-studied for the exam last year. Perhaps she could tutor you.”
By the time the meeting ended, I’d become a committed Young Democrat, at least on paper. Though I spent my days throwing around the language of policy and politics, I practiced agility more than advocacy: in one round, I played the neoconservative defender of American imperial policy in Afghanistan; in the next, I argued for diplomacy with rogue states. Sometimes Wendi let me draw on the kritik research I’d done last summer, to argue, for instance, that capitalism was the true cause of the fossil fuel crisis. Sometimes I enjoyed how debate made my mind work. But it was the win I craved, the look of sympathy the judge gave the other team before announcing our victory. What it took to get there was not passion, but lemonade.
What I did love, discreetly—and what I never thought to tell Mrs. Latimer—was history. My AP European History teacher, Mr. Bakes, was a compact, white-haired man, a former lawyer with a Tennessee drawl and a shuffle step who liked to pull me into his classroom when he spotted me in the hallways and ask for my help putting up or taking down the timeline for each unit. （I was, at last, tall enough to be of assistance to a smaller person, having hit a growth spurt over winter.） I think Mr. Bakes may have been waging a private war against Mrs. Latimer, for he never asked what my plans for the future were; instead, he batted around the past with me. He praised my essays—the one where I wrote about the scientific revolution as one of the great optimistic epochs, and the one arguing against the great man theory of history re: Napoleon. But I’d never heard of any alumnus of Hammond Creek going on to study history. Why putter around in the dead past when the future of our community required such ruthless attention?
This was why it so rankled when Shruti Patel turned around at the end of AP Euro to announce that she had been accepted to the Hong Kong entrepreneurship boot camp and to a four-day conference for young leaders in San Diego （which really was on the beach）， with scholarships for both. I could conceive of East Lansing, by contrast, only as an oversize parking garage.
I kept thinking about Prachi, pacing the kitchen all Christmas break, fuming as my mother chased her with a bowl of sesame oil, attempting to administer a calming Ayurvedic head massage. “Duke’s already got an Atlanta suburban brown girl who wants to be a businesswoman!” Prachi howled. “They won’t want me! Gita Menon! Gita fu—sorry, Amma, Gita fudging Menon!”
Shruti fudging Patel. A tiny, radical part of me had started to believe, over the course of the Lemonade Period, that one day I might be good enough to be in the kinds of rooms Anita had always planned to be in—the rooms Shruti had begun to unlock. But Shruti fudging Patel—who would want me when they had her?