Anita’s mother doled out new doses of lemonade every few weeks, usually on Fridays, to precede a weekend of homework or a debate tournament. We consumed Shruti’s in pipette drips; a taste of her lemonade could set me up for a solid week of focused studying. Before a big math exam, Anjali Auntie gave me some from Jay Bhatt, former state math Olympiad champion. With each sip, I got better at concentrating—You’re supposed to imagine! Imagine yourself making use of all you took.
I followed Wendi Zhao’s directions flawlessly at the first tournament of the year, in Dallas, and shocked everyone by earning an individual award on top of our team semifinals finish. (“You might be more than just my tool, Neil,” Wendi said begrudgingly as we helped the school chaperone unload the rental car at the airport.)
I leveraged this first success with my parents, negotiating the right to attend driver’s ed before school twice a week. The teacher, Mr. Hudson, a pruny old man who had once been white but whose veins were so prominent beneath his skin that today he resembled something more like a bruise, had been at Okefenokee since “before the out-of-towners”—us. “Y’all all have this thing in your culture, don’t you?” he’d begin, while I was trying to circle the Chick-fil-A parking lot. He would unravel a list of anthropological observations on each minority: the Indian male’s plentiful chest hair and accompanying pungent scent, the composition of the Chinese stomach that allowed for consuming unlikely animals, the Koreans and the satanic rituals he believed to be secretly afoot in their churches. “There was a Nigerian kid here a long while ago,” he said once, sighing. “Tall. Unforchernately, he couldn’t play football for you-know-what.”
I began to spend time at Anita’s once or twice a week, the way I used to when I let myself in to raid the fridge. I’d finish homework and debate practice, then hitch a ride from school back to our cul-de-sac. Prachi was busy with her activities—charity clubs, the dance team, and (I had an inkling) Hudson Long. My parents worked late. So I was managing to hang around the Dayals’ without accounting to anybody about my reasons for being there.
Often, I’d land at their house before Anita’s carpool dropped her home. Her school was almost an hour’s drive away through miserable Atlanta traffic, which meant I spent a lot of time that fall with Anjali Auntie. On the occasions Anita was around, she treated me like her assigned partner on a mandatory school project. The spark of connection that had seemed to revive between us on the night of my break-in had dissipated. I wondered if she regretted letting me in, or if she could sense my want, if it disgusted her.
One early fall afternoon, I was alone in the Dayal kitchen, considering the warm burst of the Japanese maple on the front lawn, when Anita’s carpool arrived. She dropped her new lime green, monogrammed, L.L.Bean backpack in the foyer and looked surprised to find me at the counter, eating as usual—this time her mother’s spicy phodnichi poli. Anjali Auntie was in the bedroom, taking a phone call; the door was firmly shut.
“Do you want me to go?” I leaned against the counter, about six feet from her.
“No,” she said. Her eyes narrowed, perhaps out of exhaustion, but I read annoyance.
“I feel like you’re mad at me. And I don’t get what I did—”
“I’m fucking beat. I’m fucking hungry.” It was not a reply. “Is there food?” A silly question; there was always food at the Dayals’. She edged to the fridge and pulled out a neon orange Gatorade. “I’m up every day at five,” she said, addressing the vegetable crisper. “Do you know that? My mom wants me to do volunteer fundraising for Habitat for Humanity, because being a Habitat officer as a junior means you can be a Service Prefect as a senior, and every Service Prefect for the last five years has gone to an Ivy League or at least Vanderbilt, so I’m doing that, which means I have to be at Chick-fil-A at six thirty to help buy the chicken biscuits we sell for, like, six bucks each. Oh, and I’ve started eating meat at school, you know, because I couldn’t live on their slimy white-person okra or iceberg lettuce, but even then I can’t eat a chicken biscuit even though I’m standing over them for, like, an hour, because if one of the girls on the cross-country team sees you eating a chicken biscuit she’ll give you this look, you know, just to make sure you know they’ve noticed you have an ass and they don’t—I mean not you, I mean I have an ass. I have to size up on the cross-country shorts; everyone else double-rolls them. And Mary Claire Turner, the other day ‘Baby Got Back’ came on the radio on the bus, and she goes, ‘Is this your anthem, Anita?’ Oh, and on Fridays, I have to do the whole biscuit thing alone, because the other service kids are in Friday Morning Fellowship, praying or singing or whatever, and sometimes I think about going in there, doing the whole parade and accepting Jesus Christ because the only Asian girl they don’t hate is the one who wears this huge cross—well, her boobs are huge, too, and anyway I think she’s only half-Asian. I—I miss sleep.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that Anita might not be popular at her new school; I’d imagined her transitioning laterally from her position at OHS. (It also didn’t seem the time to inform
