“Or Jimmy’s paying,” Hae-mi said, taking her phone out. “But I definitely would have seen something on social media if Jimmy got engaged.”
“Or her dad’s paying,” Prachi doubled back.
“Ugh,” Hae-mi reported. “Jimmy’s on zero apps. I can’t tell.”
“Meanwhile”—Maya leaned her elbows on the counter, clearly ready to be done with the talk about Jimmy Bansal’s cracked-up ex—“my parents announced the other day that they’ve spent half of what I thought was my wedding fund on my sister’s post-bacc. If she’d just been premed from the start—”
“I can’t believe you guys are that out of touch,” Manu said, edging nearer so he was only addressing me. In his gentle regard I felt recognized as the teenage boy I still was, or contained. “You two were always a unit. To me, anyway.”
“She ran hot and cold on me,” I said. “Did you talk? When you ran into her?”
“A little. She was pretty thoughtful, in a way people in tech aren’t always. Honestly, I never found her very thoughtful, when we were younger. She was so into winning stuff that I couldn’t have told you what she loved.”
“What did you love then?” I asked, probably too sharply.
Manu blanched. “I loved math, Neer,” he said. “I wanted to go to grad school for it. I just wasn’t smart enough. I’m a very good engineer, but I’m not cut out for pure math.”
“I don’t think I ever knew that,” I said.
“I don’t think it ever came up,” he said, not unkindly. “I can’t remember talking about anything very real at OHS.”
“But you and Anita—you talked about something real?”
“Not quite. She seemed kind of dissatisfied. Maybe I’m projecting. Galadriel’s super prestigious, but they run people to the ground, and their portfolio companies start at suspect and go all the way to evil. Data theft and worse. She said she was going to quit soon, she wanted to do something good, only she didn’t know what.” He nodded somberly, sympathetically, for surely it was this shared sentiment that had him considering enduring Grindr in Iowa.
“Well,” I said, “that’s a start.”
Lost on earnest Manu was my dryness.
“I’ve gotta bounce, Neer,” he said, hugging me. “It’s always great to see you. Just makes me reflect on how far we’ve all come, don’t you think?”
* * *
? ? ?
I spent that summer flailing through my research, in advance of the proposal defense that impended that fall—I needed an outline for the whole dissertation, plus two sample chapters, or I risked losing my funding. I’d already missed several deadlines in spring, and my exigent adviser, Irwin Wang, had let me know that I was on probation.
Each day, I grew headachy from staring at my laptop until my vision fuzzed. I was exhausted from sleeping and eating too little, subsisting on Adderall or coke, the latter of which was slowly becoming more than a party habit. My hair and limbs hung off me like peeling bark and Spanish moss. I was a ghost to myself, one of those Japanese mythic creatures—the unsatisfied self peels away from the body to haunt it.
I drove, often. My love of the road may be the most American thing about me. When I felt a crash coming on, or when I could no longer bear to be in my own brain, I’d get in my Honda, roll down the windows, and push onto the 880, winding past Oakland’s warehouse edge, taking the 92 to Half Moon Bay. I’d follow the trampled grass on the bluffs above the state beach, all dotted with weathered, blister-blue clapboard houses. Untamed purple salvia sprouting up everywhere, the spring’s yellow wildflowers drying out. If ever I had an open house craving to match my mother’s, it was for these homes of windbeaten wood and high windows, places that seemed the right sort to hide away a writing man, shelves stocked with Great Americans, Styron and Stegner and Steinbeck. In gray-glum corners of California like this, I imagined myself not so much living—for that seemed to require a burdensome act of imagination, living—but persisting through the years.
Other times, I’d cross the Bay Bridge, wheezing my car up a vertiginous San Francisco hill. The sight: California splayed out around me. I’d cross the Golden Gate to the Marin Headlands, passing through the veil of fog to breathe the green-and-gold horizon line. Pockets of the Pacific bloomed out around Sausalito. The careens and curves jostled something loose in me. Every thirty minutes on one of those roads, the light and heat or chill of the air rearrange.