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

choice, for now she was going in again, and then I felt her hand on my wrist, guiding me to her pink cupcake breast, and I felt it—the first breast I’d ever touched, and I was repulsed. I stopped. In her expression I saw confusion—Is this . . . isn’t this . . . what people do? She had overestimated my experience and tried to catch up by stealing second base. Her mother’s voice came again, and she shouted back, “Hang on, Mummy.”

I moved quickly toward her closet and reached for a pink box on her shelf, next to the row of floral blouses with flappy collars. I opened it. I knew I was right this time, because the heat of the room was guiding me to the box, and when I saw the thin chain, I said, “That’s gold?”

She nodded.

“Can I keep it?”

“My mom would be so mad, I lost this ring she gave me—”

I leaned in again, cutting her off—a fourth time. When I withdrew, she nodded. The wondering expression—Is this what people do? There was still suspicion in her face, but it was combined with stupefaction, and most of all, ignorance. I needed to bookend the scene, to make her certain that what she had just given me made sense according to the transactions of boys and girls our age, that it was some sort of love token. I went in one final time. I told myself it was good practice.

I pulled back, my tongue wet with hers—she’d gone very French that time. And there Shruti Patel stood in her room full of dolls, all of their bead eyes on us, all of the eyes of her childhood watching her as she took a great step toward what she thought was adulthood.

•   •   •

That I abandoned Shruti for Manu and Kartik and Aleem and Jack and Abel at the dance; that I ignored her studiously for the week thereafter; that I managed to move my assigned seat in Euro from the place by the window, next to her, to the back chalkboard, telling Mr. Bakes (not untruthfully) that I was suffering migraines and couldn’t handle the light; that I ignored, too, the hoots about Spring Fling, until they subsided into a consensus that I had gone with her out of kindness . . . all this caused the incident to abate with dangerous ease.

I had thought originally that I would need to have some sort of conversation with Shruti, explaining the merits of friendship over romance at this stage in our lives, but on the first day I saw her after the dance, kneeling by her locker, her eyes narrowed to suspicious ovals, and all I could mutter was a hi. I shuffled past. She seemed unsurprised. Normal reality had subsumed her once more. She only cast a few injured looks at me across the history classroom before stubbornly turning back to her notebook. I heard her speaking to Mr. Bakes after class about some must-read books on Hong Kong. I’d become just a silly incident in her past.

Wendi Zhao commented on my glum mood over the following weeks: “Kid, don’t fuck up when I need you most.” She’d been wait-listed at Harvard, and the coaches had suggested that if they could tout a nationals win, she might be shifted to the “Z-list,” meaning she would be offered a chance to take a gap year and enroll the following fall.

My family noticed as well. I was dull at dinners, dampening the celebratory mood—for despite all the heartache and cursing of Gita Menon over the past few months, Prachi had in the end received her glorious fat envelope in the mail. My father, never a drinker, had made a toast with his water glass several nights in a row, while my mother’s eyes welled up, and I hmmed a congratulations gamely through a mouthful of saaru.

Passing my room to get to the attic after one of those toasting dinners, my father paused. “You can do what Prachi did, too,” he said.

I thought I’d heard him wrong. “What?”

“We are feeling like our decision to come here makes sense, with you two doing so well.”

I almost wished for him to revert to his old suspicions.

I had, if you counted it out, what I needed to not fuck up debate nationals. I took a regular dose from our competitors—Soumya Sen, and one of Anita’s Bobcat classmates whose earring and anklet she had nabbed from the PE locker room, just for me. But I had come to understand that brewing the perfect lemonade was not a matter of taking luck or specific talents from another person and drinking those down. I needed whatever it was that had caused Shruti Patel to so effectively move on when I had done to her worse than what Anita had done to me the previous year. I needed her belief, her faith, and the thing that ignited both in her. I needed something to get me through tomorrow and tomorrow, tomorrow—when I would finally, finally be able to begin the process of becoming a real person.

•   •   •

A few days before she left for New Jersey, Anita’s instant messenger avatar reappeared online for the first time in months. She must have unblocked me, at long last. I found the conversation in adulthood, archived in my old email. I can’t remember what I felt like during or after the chat. It is like one of those artifacts of history I studied later as a graduate student—the thing the people experiencing it missed, the thing that might have changed the rest. When we handle such artifacts, we condescend about how ignorant the denizens of the past are. But we forget that the past is a blind, groping place.

neil_is_indian: sup

anibun91: guess whos gonna be in new jersey this weekend

neil_is_indian: uh u?

anibun91: other than me!!

neil_is_indian: ur mom ba doom chha

anibun91: *sigh* sam

neil_is_indian: o shit

anibun91: im like:OOO

anibun91: hes visiting his cousin or something

anibun91: who goes to rutgers

anibun 91: n then his parents r gonna take him to see princeton lol w/e

anibun91: