Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

there?” Mrs. Latimer asked. “She self-studied for the exam last year. Perhaps she could tutor you.”

By the time the meeting ended, I’d become a committed Young Democrat, at least on paper. Though I spent my days throwing around the language of policy and politics, I practiced agility more than advocacy: in one round, I played the neoconservative defender of American imperial policy in Afghanistan; in the next, I argued for diplomacy with rogue states. Sometimes Wendi let me draw on the kritik research I’d done last summer, to argue, for instance, that capitalism was the true cause of the fossil fuel crisis. Sometimes I enjoyed how debate made my mind work. But it was the win I craved, the look of sympathy the judge gave the other team before announcing our victory. What it took to get there was not passion, but lemonade.

What I did love, discreetly—and what I never thought to tell Mrs. Latimer—was history. My AP European History teacher, Mr. Bakes, was a compact, white-haired man, a former lawyer with a Tennessee drawl and a shuffle step who liked to pull me into his classroom when he spotted me in the hallways and ask for my help putting up or taking down the timeline for each unit. (I was, at last, tall enough to be of assistance to a smaller person, having hit a growth spurt over winter.) I think Mr. Bakes may have been waging a private war against Mrs. Latimer, for he never asked what my plans for the future were; instead, he batted around the past with me. He praised my essays—the one where I wrote about the scientific revolution as one of the great optimistic epochs, and the one arguing against the great man theory of history re: Napoleon. But I’d never heard of any alumnus of Hammond Creek going on to study history. Why putter around in the dead past when the future of our community required such ruthless attention?

This was why it so rankled when Shruti Patel turned around at the end of AP Euro to announce that she had been accepted to the Hong Kong entrepreneurship boot camp and to a four-day conference for young leaders in San Diego (which really was on the beach), with scholarships for both. I could conceive of East Lansing, by contrast, only as an oversize parking garage.

I kept thinking about Prachi, pacing the kitchen all Christmas break, fuming as my mother chased her with a bowl of sesame oil, attempting to administer a calming Ayurvedic head massage. “Duke’s already got an Atlanta suburban brown girl who wants to be a businesswoman!” Prachi howled. “They won’t want me! Gita Menon! Gita fu—sorry, Amma, Gita fudging Menon!”

Shruti fudging Patel. A tiny, radical part of me had started to believe, over the course of the Lemonade Period, that one day I might be good enough to be in the kinds of rooms Anita had always planned to be in—the rooms Shruti had begun to unlock. But Shruti fudging Patel—who would want me when they had her?

“Jealous?” Shruti smirked. She did that curl-tugging thing again, and it infuriated me to see the lock bounce on her forehead. Her small marble eyes, which were too wide for her face and set too close together, bore into me shrewdly. I felt violated by the intensity of her attention.

“Not a bit,” I said, but minutes later I was kicking my locker after class. Fewer heads turned than you’d expect; in the honors hallway, people were always kicking things upon the distribution of grades.

Manu passed while I was examining the metal to see if I’d made a dent. “Chemistry?”

“Shruti,” I said.

“Did you apply for her summer stuff, too?” he said gloomily.

I shook my head. “I didn’t know—I had no idea you could do stuff like Hong Kong.”

“Have you talked to Mia?” Manu lowered his voice. “Be careful in East Lansing.”

Then he sighed and went to find Kartik, whose locker was in the normie hallway, with the white kids. He’d joined the lacrosse team that spring as its water boy, and claimed he would list the sport on his college application, therefore standing apart from other Asian applicants. I wasn’t seeing much of Kartik this year. The lemonade provided sharper focus, made me willing to ignore things—and people—that did not seem immediately useful. But I was afraid of wasting all this gold, spending it by kicking a locker instead of becoming something already.

Get it together, I thought furiously at myself. I was still failing to see my future, the way Shruti seemed so capable of doing, the way I presumed Anita must be able to, the way I knew Prachi could. How could it be that Shruti believed in her future self enough to survive the fact of her unpopularity, her date running away from her at last year’s Spring Fling just as mine had, the mocking in basements, the birthday party for which her parents had to issue invitations? Was it because she trusted a future Shruti was waiting, the girl just ahead of her in a relay race, to take the baton and bolt to Hong Kong, and college, and a better life? I lacked such certainty.

“We need more of Shruti’s,” I told Anita and her mother. Another Friday in the kitchen, Anita fresh from tennis.

Anjali Auntie shook her head. “We’ve taken a lot from her already. Two—”

“Three times,” Anita interrupted. I smelled the tang of her unwashed sweat.

“What’s the problem? You’re concerned she’ll notice stuff is missing?”

“That,” Anita’s mother said, lowering her nose to sniff a pot of chana masala. “But also, that we don’t want to overdo it. Poor girl, leave her something.”

“She’s got everything,” I sighed.

Anjali Auntie gave me an odd look, brief, full of some knowledge she might have shared, but that I missed. “There’s no shortage of others.” She turned to her daughter. “Anita, why do you insist on stewing in your own stink like this? You think Neil likes to smell you?”

I blushed.

“Upstairs, shower, please. You