“You are?”
The mother clarified. “There is one camp, Neeraj, see, they take only very talented students, you have to have taken SAT”—once more, sat—“in sixth grade only. You did not go for this?” She looked terribly concerned, if not for me then for my parents, who clearly had missed some memos on the opportunities available to aspiring geniuses. “Right now, Hema, she studying for spelling bee, you did not do that either?” Shruti’s mother spoke each s and sh sibilantly, like a steaming kettle requesting attention.
Then, like some blessing from above, my “date” arrived in the living room, wearing a pink dress that made her look like a Publix bakery cupcake, tulle around the hips and frightful tissue-paper-like flower blooms on the shoulders. Her hair had been straightened. It seemed like it might have taken hours to get it as flat as it now hung, which was depressing because it looked like an ironed squirrel’s tail, tamed but twitching. She had smeared something over her acne scars. Her mouth was switching rapidly between a contorted smile and an expression of terror, like one of those tragicomic dramatic masks. Her chickeny legs—long and skinny, unevenly shaved—stretched into high silver heels, on which she wobbled.
Her parents were not waiting for her with a camera, not waiting for me to put a corsage on their daughter’s wrist—I had not brought one, anyway. There were no protocols for what happened when Shruti Patel was actually taken on a date. （Last year, she had met Manu at the dance.） Protocols would have made it easier—a churlish Southern father with a shotgun, threatening me. I conjured other scripts from television, from white culture, and wished to belong to any of them. Instead I stood as she took a shaky step onto the hardwood from the carpeted stairs. And I saw that in her ears were two large pearl studs. Around her neck was a silver chain with another pearl pendant. Probably not even real pearls.
She was not wearing a single piece of gold. I had miscalculated.
I said I needed to use the bathroom. Before anyone could point me to a room on the main floor, I was marching up those stairs, which smelled like cat, though there was no cat in the house. I pushed open one door and found myself in a child’s room full of stuffed animals. They piled high on the bed: a twin set of bright pink teddy bears wearing bowties, a lavender elephant, a bulge-eyed green frog. I had gotten the little sister’s room. I went back to the hallway and opened the other door to find a pale yellow bedroom housing shelves and shelves of porcelain dolls. The duvet looked like someone had vomited doily. There was no difference between age ten and age fifteen in this house. I was at a loss.
I heard Shruti’s voice downstairs saying, “I’ll tell him, Mummy,” and “ouch,” and “I’ll take them off, hang on,” and the sound of bare feet climbing the stairs, and Shruti, watching me standing at the fork of her hallway, the doors to both bedrooms wide open.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to go. I guess I knew . . . it wasn’t fair to ask you.”
“Oh, god, no,” I said. “I just . . .” My hands were raised. I was still reaching for both doorknobs. “Which room’s yours? Dolls or stuffed animals?”
She didn’t blush. “Dolls,” she said. So, my gut had been wrong. So perhaps I couldn’t find my way to her jewelry box on my own.
“Show me around,” I said.
“Really?”
“I want to see where the magic happens. Where you beat me at all the tests.”
Giggle. “Not recently.” She gulped. “I’m sorry I said I forget you’re an honors kid. It wasn’t true. I don’t. Um. Forget.”
“I’m not as stupid as I seem, Shroots.”
“I never thought you were stupid,” she said.
I was hot. Sweaty. I had to keep talking or I’d wuss out. “Can I see? Unless your parents have some kind of rule about me being up here.”
Shruti laughed, and her ironed hair tried to join in, crinkling awkwardly but too murdered to really engage, and she said, “They wouldn’t think to make rules about . . . boys.” She seemed more embarrassed to pronounce the last word, to acknowledge what I was, than to find me lurking in her space.
There were many white dolls and one Native American one with a long braid and face paint, whom Shruti said she thought she best resembled, and whom she had christened Kalyani—the name she always wished she had been given.
I took each doll as she proffered them, even rocked one a bit. I stepped closer to Shruti when she opened her closet, and she shouted down to her mother, “Coming, Mummy,” and then began to giggle.