“Jealous?” Shruti smirked. She did that curl-tugging thing again, and it infuriated me to see the lock bounce on her forehead. Her small marble eyes, which were too wide for her face and set too close together, bore into me shrewdly. I felt violated by the intensity of her attention.
“Not a bit,” I said, but minutes later I was kicking my locker after class. Fewer heads turned than you’d expect; in the honors hallway, people were always kicking things upon the distribution of grades.
Manu passed while I was examining the metal to see if I’d made a dent. “Chemistry?”
“Shruti,” I said.
“Did you apply for her summer stuff, too?” he said gloomily.
I shook my head. “I didn’t know—I had no idea you could do stuff like Hong Kong.”
“Have you talked to Mia?” Manu lowered his voice. “Be careful in East Lansing.”
Then he sighed and went to find Kartik, whose locker was in the normie hallway, with the white kids. He’d joined the lacrosse team that spring as its water boy, and claimed he would list the sport on his college application, therefore standing apart from other Asian applicants. I wasn’t seeing much of Kartik this year. The lemonade provided sharper focus, made me willing to ignore things—and people—that did not seem immediately useful. But I was afraid of wasting all this gold, spending it by kicking a locker instead of becoming something already.
Get it together, I thought furiously at myself. I was still failing to see my future, the way Shruti seemed so capable of doing, the way I presumed Anita must be able to, the way I knew Prachi could. How could it be that Shruti believed in her future self enough to survive the fact of her unpopularity, her date running away from her at last year’s Spring Fling just as mine had, the mocking in basements, the birthday party for which her parents had to issue invitations? Was it because she trusted a future Shruti was waiting, the girl just ahead of her in a relay race, to take the baton and bolt to Hong Kong, and college, and a better life? I lacked such certainty.
“We need more of Shruti’s,” I told Anita and her mother. Another Friday in the kitchen, Anita fresh from tennis.
Anjali Auntie shook her head. “We’ve taken a lot from her already. Two—”
“Three times,” Anita interrupted. I smelled the tang of her unwashed sweat.
“What’s the problem? You’re concerned she’ll notice stuff is missing?”
“That,” Anita’s mother said, lowering her nose to sniff a pot of chana masala. “But also, that we don’t want to overdo it. Poor girl, leave her something.”
“She’s got everything,” I sighed.
Anjali Auntie gave me an odd look, brief, full of some knowledge she might have shared, but that I missed. “There’s no shortage of others.” She turned to her daughter. “Anita, why do you insist on stewing in your own stink like this? You think Neil likes to smell you?”
I blushed.
“Upstairs, shower, please. You have a lot of homework?”
“Just AP US,” Anita said. “It’s a joke.”
“How are they filling up a school year with only American history? Neil has a millennium of Europe to study and this girl has just two hundred years of this strange country.”
* * *
? ? ?
Anita and I went on in our renewed way, passing more of those afternoons, brewing the lemonade ourselves. She was letting me back in, illuminating the black space that had spooled between us. Her mother was increasingly out, inside the perimeter and around the other suburbs for what I assumed was a combination of legitimate work and acquisitions. On the occasions that she was home, Anita’s mother was often on the phone, upstairs, padding around, speaking in an urgent voice as we made the lemonade in the basement.
Anita had once been on jobs with her mother, but now she was never brought along. And months into our routine, I was growing impatient with this division of labor. I felt like a lazy, fat lion, remaining at home while the lioness hunted. I pictured myself tearing through the Bhatts’ mansion for Jay’s old coins or chains. Flipping Leela Matthews’s mattress upside down, seeking the lucky gold pinky ring she wore on test days. Most of all, Shruti. I pictured ripping her room apart. Absconding with all that gave her power. Those weirdly set eyes dimming. These impulses swelled in my vision, red and blinding, for minutes at a time before subsiding. Like war rage. Like bloodlust.
“How’s your dad?” I asked Anita one day in the basement. I opened the fridge and pulled out the lemons.