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

finally alone, it was perhaps one in the morning, and the night outside was still, the suburbs grotesquely undisturbed. I rummaged through my bag for the remaining vial of lemonade. I removed the stopper and brought it to my nose. I tipped the rest into my mouth and gagged; I ran to the bathroom, stuck two fingers down my throat, and watched a membranous fluid splatter into the toilet bowl. Nothing sparkled, nothing bubbled, nothing betrayed a hint of magic.

I don’t know what method she chose. I only know they found her on Sunday morning. She must have done it Saturday night. I have always pictured it happening in the closet, the one she opened when I asked to see her jewelry. I imagine it with rope. I see her placing her feet onto a step stool. Her brown lids closed. Watched by her many dolls’ eyes, which were as alive as hers, for she had already given up, for the life had been taken from her a few hours earlier, in a basement, by a boy who believed he was shaking away pay dirt. The purple blooming around her throat, in the place where a necklace would have hung.

5.

An open house sign teetered on the Dayals’ unkempt front lawn that late spring: for sale, remax realty. An agent named Kent Hunt grinned out at passersby. His sticky, flat grimace faded beneath the Georgia rainstorms. Below his bald head and his blimp-shaped face ran his slogan: everything i touch turns to sold!

I didn’t know Anita and her mother were moving to California until I saw Kent Hunt being knocked about in the southern monsoon on the day I returned to Atlanta from debate nationals. I’d fumbled a crucial argument in quarterfinals, ending Wendi Zhao’s high school career and ruining her last shot at Harvard. She was a mess that night, crying into her scrambled eggs at Waffle House as we ate our first proper meal all weekend, then banging on the door of my hotel room at three a.m., pushing me onto the bed, shoving her small hand down my pants to suggest I grow up already, only to find me limp. “You’re grieving,” she’d said finally, excusing herself. I smelled alcohol on her breath. “It’s not your fault.”

When we pulled up at my house, she gave my arm a squeeze and said it had, for the most part, been a pleasure doing business with me.

It was May now. Most flowers were dead and the knotty Atlanta trees erupted in shocks of green and the rain came down in a hot thick curtain.

“You can come visit me at UGA—before I transfer, I mean. Get a preview of college life,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the storm as I opened the car door. “Hey, your little neighbor’s moving?” She pointed at the Dayals’ yellow house—even its rollicking colors looked muted in today’s weather.

I had to squint to make out the open house sign. Thunder rolled above. About a year ago, I was watching these storms from the glassy interior of the Hammond Creek Public Library; a year ago my world was smaller, and I’d bristled against its confinement.

“I would have known,” I said. “No way.”

“Life moves pretty fast, or whatever the line is. Hey. I’m sorry, again, about your friend.” She screwed up her nose. “Shruti.”

She zoomed her Saab up the hill, leaving me to hold that word, friend, like some stranger’s baby I had been tasked with minding. I watched the bumper stickers advertising years of Wendi’s honor roll statuses retreat out of our cul-de-sac. I stood in my driveway holding my suitcase and the quarterfinals trophy Wendi had disdained; she couldn’t stand to look at anything but first place. My skin and clothes were turning soggy. I stood there until I felt like pulp.

I tugged my bag through the puddles and crossed the cul-de-sac. The Waltham children spun around beneath the family’s basketball hoop, mouths open. It seemed impossible that life persisted, that people still dwelled in innocence. I blinked and tried to make my eyes resemble a man’s eyes. I did not reach for the watering can behind the azalea bush. I rang the bell.

Anjali Auntie sighed to see me on her doorstep. Wordlessly, I looked at the open house sign, then back at her. She nodded slowly, and I began to cry. She pressed my forehead to her chest and her hair brushed my cheek and there she was, forgiving, as only one’s own mother can. In the hours and days after Shruti’s death, she had said weepy things—how it was her fault, not mine, her mistake, not mine, she was the adult, had failed me, us, failed, period.

“You’ll catch cold,” she said. “Come. Let me get you a towel.”

“Is Anita here?” I sniffed, following her inside.

“She’s here,” Anjali Auntie said warily, as though to add, That’s between you two. Because Anita had not spoken to me since the moment the Dayals arrived home from New Jersey to find me rocking madly on their doorstep, hacking and hiccupping as I tried to explain what I had done.

There had only been unanswered instant messages:

neil_is_indian: anita

neil_is_indian: if you rly didnt want to talk to me youd have blocked me

neil_is_indian: if you never wanna talk to me again

neil_is_indian: id understand

neil_is_indian: but i think u do

I lifted the trophy. The metal was cheap and covered in fingerprints. Anjali Auntie brushed it with her thumb like she was rubbing a stain from a child’s face. I didn’t want it in my house, couldn’t bear the sudden warming of my father’s expression, his monstrous validation.

She bit her lower lip. “Towel,” she said again, and turned to her bedroom.

“Anjali!” It was a man’s booming voice.

The Dayal house had an echoey tendency, and big sasquatchy footsteps resounded. It had been some years since I’d seen Pranesh Uncle. To be honest, I had mostly forgotten him until he manifested in the formal living room. He was plump