Girls were crying. Not Anita, I don’t think. It took a lot to make her cry. From somewhere came my sister’s voice, in the buttery lilt that never failed her: “Coach, I just came out here to find my necklace, it fell off, it’s my grandmother’s, you know I don’t drink—”
“I’ll ask, missy,” he said. “What were you doing to cause you to, ahem, lose a necklace?”
I shuddered and didn’t catch Prachi’s reply because Anita stood behind me, propping open the door whose alarm had at last been killed.
“Neil, get inside, you’ll get in trouble,” she whispered. Her glossed lips quivered and for a moment I was suffused with a premonition that something phantom wished to be spoken aloud but that no one—not me, not the people around me—could find the language. Anita clamped her mouth shut and blinked very fast, as though beating back that ghost, and there we remained, still rooted to our finite asphalt selves.
I said Prachi was out there and it didn’t sound good. “The coach already saw me,” I added. “I’m not supposed to move.”
“Are you kidding me, Neil?” Anita was framed in the doorway as the hallway light streamed out around her. “My mom’s waiting, like, right now.”
“I wasn’t drinking.”
“I know you weren’t drinking,” she said. No, more like—“I know you weren’t drinking.” I wondered how she had come by all her new wisdom, how she had grown so fast, so far ahead of me. “Did you set off the alarm?”
I nodded miserably.
“Dude,” Anita said. “People go out the food delivery door.” She pointed. She spoke rapidly, percussively, with a bravado that might have masked her nerves at being so near trouble.
“C’mon, kid.” Coach Jameson led his small troupe of prisoners inside, beckoning me with that meaty finger, holding the alcohol pinched in his other hand like a used rag. The captured students followed, heads bowed—two white guys I didn’t know, Katie Zhang, Mark Ha, Prachi. My sister mouthed, What? at me while Coach Jameson looked Anita up and down and added, “And you, rubbernecker.”
“I just got here, Coach,” Anita said. Her voice caught in her throat before she switched to a clipped tone like the sort my mother used on work calls. I could feel her straining to be someone with whom she had not yet become fully acquainted. “Actually, we were trying to leave. My mom’s outside, you can ask her—”
“Y’all well know not to be in the parking lot.”
“I just got worried, see,” she tried again, in a slightly sharper pitch. “Because—”
“What’s your name?”
“Anita Dayal.”
“And yours?”
“Neil Narayan.”
He repeated. “Anita Dial. Neil Nay-rannan. Y’all’re freshmen?”
“Yes, sir,” Anita said.
“Stay away from this crowd,” Coach Jameson said grandly. “Getcherselves home.”
He escorted his captured cool kids past us. The scent of our innocence—or mine, anyway—was strong enough to overpower everything else.
Some kids my age drank alcohol, but I was afraid to, not because of the things the health class teacher cautioned would happen to your body and brain but because of my mother’s warnings that engaging in nonsense could abort all you were supposed to become, could in fact abort the very American dream we were duty-bound to live out. Take the case of Ravi Reddy, whose parents had shipped him to Hyderabad to finish high school upon smelling beer on his breath. No one had heard from Ravi since, but my mother had hinted that she and my father were not above taking a leaf out of the Reddys’ book.
I would not have wished such a fate on anyone, let alone my sister, so I said to Anita, “Can you get your mom to wait two minutes? My sister lost our grandmother’s gold necklace, and she’ll be even more screwed.”
Anita bit her lip. Something shifted in her posture, brought her into a new alertness, like when she was asked a question to which she knew the answer in algebra.
“Oh.” She retrieved her pink flip phone from her fake-pearl-encrusted purse. “Mama. Coming. But Prachi lost this gold necklace, and Neil—” A pause. She hung up. “My mom says be quick.”
“My sister doesn’t drink.” I held up a flashlight that connected to my Swiss Army knife and house keys. Nothing showed itself on the asphalt, just the black Georgia ground beneath the black Georgia sky. Puddles of yellow lamppost light revealed the riddled texture of the parking lot. There were no secrets here; in this stupid place, what you saw was what you got.