“Wait. Can I see your jewelry?” I whispered.
“Hey, Neil,” she said. “Are you, um, gay?” She blinked those uncannily set eyes several times, and I realized what could happen: the next time she was cornered, mocked, she could say this to everyone; you needed a way to reroute the cruelty when it descended on you.
“Fuck no,” I said, and the panic drove me to do something else: I put my lips on her mouth, which was slick with something sticky. I withdrew. I had done it wrong. I thought of my one prior kiss at camp last summer—it had been rough, and too wet, doglike. I had overcompensated this time, with reticence. I said, “Still think that?”
Her face grew pink. The second time, she lifted the back of her hand to her mouth, wiping away whatever lip gloss remained, and leaned into me. It was neither dry nor slobbery. If I concentrated, I could forget who she was.
She pulled back. I was supposed to say something. What had I said to the camp girl before, or after? You’re hot, I’d muttered.
“You’re smart,” I said. “You’re really, really smart.”
The wrong choice, for now she was going in again, and then I felt her hand on my wrist, guiding me to her pink cupcake breast, and I felt it—the first breast I’d ever touched, and I was repulsed. I stopped. In her expression I saw confusion—Is this . . . isn’t this . . . what people do? She had overestimated my experience and tried to catch up by stealing second base. Her mother’s voice came again, and she shouted back, “Hang on, Mummy.”
I moved quickly toward her closet and reached for a pink box on her shelf, next to the row of floral blouses with flappy collars. I opened it. I knew I was right this time, because the heat of the room was guiding me to the box, and when I saw the thin chain, I said, “That’s gold?”
She nodded.
“Can I keep it?”
“My mom would be so mad, I lost this ring she gave me—”
I leaned in again, cutting her off—a fourth time. When I withdrew, she nodded. The wondering expression—Is this what people do? There was still suspicion in her face, but it was combined with stupefaction, and most of all, ignorance. I needed to bookend the scene, to make her certain that what she had just given me made sense according to the transactions of boys and girls our age, that it was some sort of love token. I went in one final time. I told myself it was good practice.
I pulled back, my tongue wet with hers—she’d gone very French that time. And there Shruti Patel stood in her room full of dolls, all of their bead eyes on us, all of the eyes of her childhood watching her as she took a great step toward what she thought was adulthood.
* * *
? ? ?
That I abandoned Shruti for Manu and Kartik and Aleem and Jack and Abel at the dance; that I ignored her studiously for the week thereafter; that I managed to move my assigned seat in Euro from the place by the window, next to her, to the back chalkboard, telling Mr. Bakes （not untruthfully） that I was suffering migraines and couldn’t handle the light; that I ignored, too, the hoots about Spring Fling, until they subsided into a consensus that I had gone with her out of kindness . . . all this caused the incident to abate with dangerous ease.
I had thought originally that I would need to have some sort of conversation with Shruti, explaining the merits of friendship over romance at this stage in our lives, but on the first day I saw her after the dance, kneeling by her locker, her eyes narrowed to suspicious ovals, and all I could mutter was a hi. I shuffled past. She seemed unsurprised. Normal reality had subsumed her once more. She only cast a few injured looks at me across the history classroom before stubbornly turning back to her notebook. I heard her speaking to Mr. Bakes after class about some must-read books on Hong Kong. I’d become just a silly incident in her past.
Wendi Zhao commented on my glum mood over the following weeks: “Kid, don’t fuck up when I need you most.” She’d been wait-listed at Harvard, and the coaches had suggested that if they could tout a nationals win, she might be shifted to the “Z-list,” meaning she would be offered a chance to take a gap year and enroll the following fall.
My family noticed as well. I was dull at dinners, dampening the celebratory mood—for despite all the heartache and cursing of Gita Menon over the past few months, Prachi had in the end received her glorious fat envelope in the mail. My father, never a drinker, had made a toast with his water glass several nights in a row, while my mother’s eyes welled up, and I hmmed a congratulations gamely through a mouthful of saaru.