“I’m wrong,” she said, sitting down. I realized we hadn’t hugged, so I leaned over, but we were on barstools and mine was uneven, and I sort of toppled, and she stopped me with her knee. We tried again. A real hug. Warmth. Even a bit of an up-down stroke of her flat palm on my upper back. “You do look different. Older, but also . . .” She paused, reassessing.
I took it up for her. “Weathered. Wiser. More gallant?” I said. “Wiser? Philosophical.”
A full laugh erupted, like a hiccup. “Looser. That’s what I mean. Looser. I always think that when I see people from high school, you know? I saw your friend Wendi Zhao one time at this sushi place on Castro Street and she was slouching a little. She never slouched.”
“Never.”
“Oh, and Manu!”
“I see him sometimes.”
“He’s lovely. Super successful, and now he’s getting very political, isn’t he?”
“I think that’s relative. The political part.”
Anita was trying to catch the bartender’s eye and missed my response. “I like their Napa chardonnay. A little oaky, but.”
“You know wine? Classy.”
“The basic adjectives. My college roommates only want to hang out by taking these wine tours of Sonoma, and if I want to have any social life at all, well.”
I ordered an Anchor Steam. The bartender poured Anita’s chardonnay and cranked the tap forward for my beer. Anita pressed her knuckles to the glass and frowned. “I’m sorry, but it’s warm,” she said. The bartender nodded rigidly, and went back for a more properly chilled bottle.
“Neil,” she said, after taking a sip of the corrected drink, “I’m truly glad to see you.”
“Me, too.”
“I’m sorry it was so long.”
“Me, too.”
“I didn’t mean for it to be so long, but you look up and all this time’s gone by.” She blinked. Her eyes, though wide, with a tendency to catch the light, revealed little about her emotions—as though something constricted them from behind the pupils. “How’s your sister?”
“Settled, as my dad says. My mom’s over the moon about the wedding.”
“Is she chasing after you about your turn?”
I grimaced. “I’m far from that—what was it you said? The way opposite of engaged?”
Her lips quivered, as if to imply that she was unsurprised, or maybe that my singlehood was not quite like hers.
We drank, both of us. A swish, a thud of the glasses back on the bar, and I slid mine to admire the rings it made on the dark wood, also so I could have something in motion to look at.
“Tell me about your history work.”
“Uh, well. I don’t know. I’m supposed to be writing about the Gilded Age. But I’ve been messing with some stuff about an Indian dude in the gold rush.” I shifted uncomfortably. I hadn’t tried to explain Snider to anyone. It felt strange to try to account for what I’d been doing for the past weeks. “But really, mostly it’s the Gilded Age.”
It suddenly seemed that without directly discussing the span of time that had passed since we’d last seen each other, we would, in fact, have nothing to say.
“I watched your video,” I said, before my bravery dissipated. “Your speech.” She squinted, honestly; perhaps she’d given many speeches. “Miss Teen India?”
“Oh, yeah?” She shook her hair so it curtained her face, briefly, then re-parted it. “I got in trouble for that. They gave me three minutes to blabber about tech, and I went rogue.”
I bristled to see that she’d considered invoking Shruti a radical act. “You’re proud of it.”
“I mean, yes. I was given a platform. I wanted to say something with it. I was angry with that organization—it made girls anorexic and anxious, and I didn’t grasp how much damage all the high school messaging had done until I got to college. . . .” She slowed as her eyes flicked across my face. “Huh,” she said, almost disinterestedly. “You’re pissed.”
“Yeah.” I was speaking with an assurance that would have eluded a younger me. And yet I was afraid to push too hard, in case she retreated back to whatever world had possessed her for so long. “You traded on it.”
“What do you think I traded it for?”
My hand shook and beer sloshed. “You don’t think you got credit for being this . . . prophetess of mental health? You didn’t feel hypocritical? You just tied everything up. Like it was all way back in the past.”