“Stop doing this,” I told her after a few days. “It’s weird.”
I didn’t care that my mother’s eyes filled, as though I’d pinched her hard with my fingernails, when I said that.
My father subbed in. One night he came home from work still wearing his white coat and knocked on my door. I was napping. I was almost always napping. He placed several laminated diagrams on my messy desk and indicated that I should take a seat. I obeyed and looked at the pictures. A black-and-white brain appeared in one, punctuated by brightly colored dots that marked the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebellum, etc. On another, a neon DNA helix and a word salad of gene names.
“I know you have not yet had your AP Biology and all,” my father said, fingering the paper’s laminated edge. “But just see, there are these distal factors, these family histories, these genes, all brain issues—you do not have to understand it all, Neeraj; I only want you to see how much is going on when something like this happens.”
“Dad.” I pushed the papers to the side, and with it, his hand. He slipped and caught himself on my chair. He placed one palm on my shoulder and I instinctively shrugged it off. “I have to pack. I’m leaving for Michigan soon.” I hadn’t brought down my laundry; the whole room smelled of oversprayed Old Spice and other, less pleasant odors.
“Neeraj, we are worried about you.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“These things, Neeraj, they occur sometimes, but—”
“Dad.” I stood so violently that he took a few steps back, tripping on the clothes strewn about. I was taller than he was now, and unaccustomed to my new size. I could see the brightness of his bald spot anew; it beamed beneath my bedroom light. His mustache quivered. He smoothed the lapels of his coat. He stood there, breathing hard, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowing. I looked on his anger as a curiosity. There was so much he didn’t know—about me, about the world.
“You want me to treat you like an adult, you behave like an adult,” he finally said. He looked around my bedroom. “Clean up this damned filthy place.”
Guilt, grief, yes, but also the worst crash, the endless jonesing, the withdrawal that my pharmacist father never suspected as such. I shivered and sweated as my body ached for lemonade. On Kartik’s advice, I approached Lowell Jenkins, who had an ADHD diagnosis, and used my leftover allowance for debate tournament meals to buy some of his Ritalin. I would find ways to acquire the stuff readily over the following years. Pharmaceutical methylphenidates could instill focus, and they kept some of the worst awareness of what had happened at bay. But they offered none of the comfort of the lemonade, none of the assuredness of identity, none of the implicit promise that tomorrow would contain in it a home.
There was no memorial service for Shruti, at least not one her classmates were invited to. But in late May, a few days after my run-in with Pranesh Uncle, Manu told me people were gathering notes to send to the Patels. “Overdue, man,” he said. “I feel like shit I didn’t do it sooner. Just. Exams. Killed me.” He rubbed his eyes; he’d grown dark bags beneath them. It was the unlikely Mia Ahmed, whom I’d never seen speaking to Shruti except in passing, who had trotted a big condolence card around the honors hallway during AP week, but there had been nothing more personal. We were in Kartik’s basement. The other guys were playing Grand Theft Auto. Manu and I stood in the kitchen, drinking Pibb Xtra. I felt like I was made of bubbles and syrup and nothing else. I’d dropped several pounds in the past month, and I stood at five-ten now, a few inches taller than Manu, though haggard in the cheeks, growing irregular patches of facial hair.
“Who’s people?” I asked.
“Juhi and Isha and all.”
“Seriously?”
I’d shut down Facebook—and never came back, even in adulthood—the morning they announced Shruti’s death at school. My feed was clogged with statuses from the girls who’d snickered at her, now claiming the deceased as their intimate: Last weekend we lost a classmate and a friend, Juhi wrote. We will miss you and your brains and your laugh, Shruti.
Manu’s brow furrowed. He lowered his voice. “It’s not their fault, and it’s not yours.”
“They were so mean to her,” I said. All the saliva in my mouth dried out. I put the soda down and filled a glass with water. I couldn’t rid myself of the bad taste. “We—”
“I know you feel bad, Neer. I do, too. I think about Spring Fling a lot.”