“Neil?”
I looked up. “Oh, I mean, I haven’t,” I said, too late.
Anita’s spaghetti strap and bra strap had slid down her right shoulder, and she tugged both back into place. I scooted a few inches away, though it required all my might. As Anita turned her head to assess me, there were Shruti’s frizzy locks, catching the light.
“How many girls have you done stuff with?” she asked.
“Three.” I closed my eyes. Shruti in my ear: No, you’re supposed to be taking the compound probability of two independent events, see? “Two.”
If I kept my eyes on the carpet, Shruti’s voice faded. Two possibilities, equally likely—
“I’ve only kissed two guys,” she said. “Never, um. Never even second base.”
“Who?” I said it instinctively—I had to know . . . Which adds up to all possible events, see. Shruti’s mouth—the smacking of her lips before the second kiss . . .
“Oren, from drama camp, remember?” I’d forgotten—a ginger, in seventh grade. “And Sam.” Say it’s tails, heads, heads, tails . . . “At this end-of-year tennis party.”
“Really?” No, what you’ve done here, it’s very common, you’re thinking about those two things as connected, but they’re entirely independent events. It was all I could do to stop Shruti from rising wholesale out of Anita. If I kept everything even—my voice, my expression—she remained on the right side of reality. Anita’s eyes stayed Anita’s eyes: wide, lively, their darkness illuminated by her bedroom lights. There. No Shruti. No hard, calculating pupils.
“It’s only ’cause I’m leaving. He’d never date me in public. Who are yours?”
“You don’t know them.”
“I told you all mine.” Anita was hugging her knees to her chest and chewing on the ends of her hair. For her, the world was easing; this terrain—our old terrain of small secrets, minor confessions—made her feel safe. “There was that girl from your computer camp. Let me guess the others.” She bit her lip. She seemed to be trying to prove that she knew all material truths about me even when I had not explicitly shared them. “Wendi, right?”
“Not that much happened.”
She laughed; she looked unthreatened, having some sense that she preceded, or superseded, all others. “And the third . . .” She tapped her chin with a finger.
I stood up. “No, it was just two,” I said. Determine the probability of this exact order, Neil. I paced, stepping loudly to stop Shruti’s high pitch from trailing me around the room.
“Don’t stomp, Neil; my mom will come up.” Anita giggled. Had I been sober or unhaunted I might have seen that she was happy in my company. “And, wait. You said three.”
I was sure I heard someone—not Shruti—calling her name. “Is that your mom?”
“Who was the third, Neil? Oh, my god, was it Juhi? I always thought—” and then she stopped. Her fingernails dug into the bare skin around her knees. Through clenched teeth, she said, “No, you didn’t. At Spring Fling.”
I stared miserably at the carpet. Maybe I’d said three on purpose. Maybe I’d wanted her to know. Maybe I couldn’t picture holding the secret alone for the rest of my life.
“So,” she whispered. “All that . . . to get what you needed from her.”
“I didn’t mean for it to go that way—”
“Did you get what you needed from me?” she said, still in that tinny, mean voice.
“Anita, it’s not the same thing, like. With you . . .”
The moment was racing past me, into terrain I had no language for, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to seize the words to explain, or apologize, in time.
These are all independent events, see, so here are all the different possibilities. Shruti was done explaining. I heard the satisfying clunk of a pencil being dropped onto a desk. No, it wasn’t that—someone was knocking on Anita’s door, and calling for her through the wood.
“Ani, Papa wants you to say good-bye to the Shettys, please come down.”
“You know everything,” I tried again urgently. “You’re the only one who can—”
“In a minute, Mama,” Anita said. In her frosty gaze was a new kind of recognition. She was not seeing the boy who needed help to imagine, not coaxing him out of his paralysis and into the world. She was seeing the boy who was such a nothing that he had begged and stolen and finally killed in desperation to become something. For the first time, I wished she wouldn’t see me at all.