“I just got here, Coach,” Anita said. Her voice caught in her throat before she switched to a clipped tone like the sort my mother used on work calls. I could feel her straining to be someone with whom she had not yet become fully acquainted. “Actually, we were trying to leave. My mom’s outside, you can ask her—”
“Y’all well know not to be in the parking lot.”
“I just got worried, see,” she tried again, in a slightly sharper pitch. “Because—”
“What’s your name?”
“Anita Dayal.”
“And yours?”
“Neil Narayan.”
He repeated. “Anita Dial. Neil Nay-rannan. Y’all’re freshmen?”
“Yes, sir,” Anita said.
“Stay away from this crowd,” Coach Jameson said grandly. “Getcherselves home.”
He escorted his captured cool kids past us. The scent of our innocence—or mine, anyway—was strong enough to overpower everything else.
Some kids my age drank alcohol, but I was afraid to, not because of the things the health class teacher cautioned would happen to your body and brain but because of my mother’s warnings that engaging in nonsense could abort all you were supposed to become, could in fact abort the very American dream we were duty-bound to live out. Take the case of Ravi Reddy, whose parents had shipped him to Hyderabad to finish high school upon smelling beer on his breath. No one had heard from Ravi since, but my mother had hinted that she and my father were not above taking a leaf out of the Reddys’ book.
I would not have wished such a fate on anyone, let alone my sister, so I said to Anita, “Can you get your mom to wait two minutes? My sister lost our grandmother’s gold necklace, and she’ll be even more screwed.”
Anita bit her lip. Something shifted in her posture, brought her into a new alertness, like when she was asked a question to which she knew the answer in algebra.
“Oh.” She retrieved her pink flip phone from her fake-pearl-encrusted purse. “Mama. Coming. But Prachi lost this gold necklace, and Neil—” A pause. She hung up. “My mom says be quick.”
“My sister doesn’t drink.” I held up a flashlight that connected to my Swiss Army knife and house keys. Nothing showed itself on the asphalt, just the black Georgia ground beneath the black Georgia sky. Puddles of yellow lamppost light revealed the riddled texture of the parking lot. There were no secrets here; in this stupid place, what you saw was what you got.
“All of them drink,” Anita said, peeling away. “You can’t run in that crowd and not drink.” Did Anita drink? A pang in my chest—for wasn’t she now in that crowd? “She ditched with Hudson Long because she knew she was going to lose Spring Fling Princess.”
“She lost?” I sighed. Even if Prachi escaped Coach Jameson, she’d be smarting from defeat. I didn’t fancy enduring one of her performances of grief, wherein she refused to make eye contact with us for days, or ensured I overheard her vomiting in the bathroom. “See anything?”
“Nah,” Anita called, a little nasally.
I cast my light beneath the dumpster, knelt and got a smashing stench of cafeteria chili and old bananas and a number of other smells both animal and human. I covered my nose, stood, ran the beam in a long line like a searchlight hunting a fugitive in desolate farmland, sweep, one, sweep, two, but nothing on the asphalt glinted like gold. “Nothing?” I called.
“Nothing.” Anita was kneeling by the wretched emergency exit door and reaching for something on the ground.
“Is that it?” I half jogged over.
“Nope,” she said. “It’s not here.”
I was right next to her now. “You didn’t find it?”
“I just said I didn’t. My mom’s gonna be mad; we have to go.”
“Your mom’s never mad.” I waved my hand dismissively. Anjali Auntie was different—a given—and Anita could not believably invoke her as a threat. “What’s in your hand, Anita?”
For her fist was clenched, her knuckles bloodless. She looked ready to slug me.
Her jaw tightened. Then she growled through her teeth, as though she’d been trying to tell me something and I’d been too dense to hear it. “Neil, you are such a freak! Prachi lost her necklace because she’s drunk and making out with Hudson Long, and I’ve got enough to worry about without helping you fix her shit.”
She opened the door and stomped over the green-and-gray carpeting. I followed. I couldn’t do anything but slide into the back of the Toyota. Anita and her mother sat in wooden silence up front. Anjali Auntie’s eyes landed searchingly on mine in the rearview mirror a few times before settling sidelong on her daughter’s taut expression. Her own face remained impassive; I could not tell if she was surprised at the coldness between Anita and me.
Back home, in my room, I wrenched myself free from my father’s tie and tried to fall asleep as the landline rang and heels sounded below me—Prachi coming home, Prachi in trouble, my parents’ voices rising. (“Who were you with?” “Open your mouth, show your breath!” “Where’s Ajji’s—?” “Ayyayyo!” “You’ll jolly well tell us—!”) Prachi, the golden child, fallen from grace, some essential blessing lifted from her.
I dreamt in shards, and I encountered Anita in my sleep—an Anita who had Melanie Cho’s red lips and was wearing a bright green dress like her mother’s, an Anita who removed said dress to display the body of one of the porn stars I had become familiar with, which meant a white body, ivory skin, and dime-sized, pert nipples. I woke up and found that my boxers were wet. In the bathroom, I tried to scrub away all that had happened that night.
• • •
I sat at the dinner table one evening the following week, poking my bisibelebath around with my fork, listening as Prachi stood in the kitchen and called our grandmother to issue a formal apology with regard to
