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

Auntie, Uncle. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Patel, I am sorry for your loss. Shruti was an incredible person, smart, funny, and a really good friend. My whole family is thinking of you both and Hema. NN.

“Write your full name,” Manu said, but I was already licking the envelope.

The guys had turned Grand Theft Auto back on, and the roar of an animated car at 120 miles per hour filled the basement.

Abel shouted, “Fuck!” and Kartik yelled to shut up, his mom was upstairs.

Manu dug in the Kroger bag and handed me another card. “Anita was sometimes really nice to Shruti. Can you have her do one? I just have to get these to Isha’s mom tomorrow.”

“I haven’t really talked to her,” I said.

“Try.”

I took it. It was one of the postcards you got for donating to the World Wildlife Fund.

“My mom said to use up these, too,” he said.

On the front were a rollicking polar bear and her cub running across a slab of ice. A sheer blue cloudless sky framed them. The year of debating climate change made me think of their habitat melting away in long cold trickles.

•   •   •

On my last evening before leaving for East Lansing, I snuck over to the Dayals’ when my father thought I was packing upstairs. He was semi-dozing over a textbook at the breakfast table, some continuing education. My mother and Prachi were on a Target run, buying extra-long twin sheets and a shower caddy and other dorm supplies. My mother was insisting on taking new purchases to the temple to have them blessed by a priest who specialized in educational consecrations, so they’d be out awhile.

The Dayals’ lights were on, and music played inside. The door was unlocked. Milling in the foyer were people I didn’t recognize, fobby-looking thirtysomething guys, white men and women, a young black couple. Pranesh Dayal was holding forth in the dining room, drinking red wine. He wore a key-lime-green summer button-down that stretched round his middle.

“Just came back to finalize all this moving business,” he said to his conversation partner. “It was getting a bit much for Anjali, she settles for any old amount, can’t be so generous when people are out to take you for all you’re worth.”

Pranesh Uncle’s eyes fell on me. “Anita’s in her room, Neeraj. She’s sulking.”

I didn’t need to be asked twice. I kicked off my shoes and bolted up the front stairs. The walls were still covered in Anita’s yearbook photos. The carpet looked recently vacuumed. I understood from years of tagging along with my mother to open houses that the limbo of placing a home on the market meant maintaining the illusion of life persisting within the walls.

I knocked on Anita’s door. She looked unsurprised to see me.

Her eyebrows had grown bushy. The whites of her eyes were roped with red. Her thick hair was tugged into a messy ponytail. She wore smudged glasses instead of contact lenses.

“You’re not at that party?”

“It’s people mooning over my dad,” she said. “Stupid shit.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said, practically bouncing on my toes, looming over her. “I’m leaving tomorrow, then you’re leaving, and you can’t just expect me to not say bye.”

She stepped aside so I could come in. Her room was barer than it used to be. The dresser and desk remained, but the Harvard shrine had come down. She took her glasses off and tossed them on the carpet.

“Manu wanted me to have you sign a card. For the Patels.”

“No,” she said.

“Yeah. I figured.”

She sat on her mattress, cross-legged. Her legs looked freshly shaved, inviting and buttery. There was nowhere else to sit—her desk chair was gone—so I chose the foot of her bed. My legs swung to the side, heels on the floor.

“You’re not kicking me out.”

She ignored that. “I took some of my dad’s wine. Do you want some?”

I bit my thumbnail and nodded. She reached into her nightstand and removed a half-empty bottle, uncorked.

“You already drank all that?” I didn’t want to spend another night holding her hair back.

“No, stupid. It was like this when I stole it.” She took a long pull. Her whole face screwed up against the bitterness. She exhaled. “It still tastes weird to me.”

I hesitated but followed suit. I was not particularly afraid of my mother’s ban on nonsense just then. All the barricades she’d erected to keep the world out had come tumbling down a few weeks earlier. The wine stung. But I did like the warmth filling my throat and the space behind my collarbones. Anita took only a few sips.

“Are you feeling it?” I put the back of my hand on my cheek as though to test for fever.

“Just a little,” she said.

“Uh, yeah. Me, too. Just a little,” I lied. I inched closer. I saw myself in Anita’s mirror. I was scruffy, but more substantial than I had been even months ago. I had the thought that I ought to take up more space in the world. “Why didn’t you tell me you were moving?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were—” She stopped.

“Say it. No one will say it; just say it.”

“You want me to say it was your fault.”

“Yeah.” The heat in my face swelled; I didn’t know if it was the wine or impending tears.

“Fine, it was your fault,” she said. “Do you feel better?”

I shook my head and reached for the bottle. Through the air vent: the continued buzz of the party downstairs, Beatles songs, wooden laughter. I didn’t reply. Through the window by her bed, you could see the edge of my house. It was after eight and the sky was the color of dulling embers, the sunset polluted by smog.

There was a finger’s worth of wine left. I chugged it. Anita shoved the empty bottle in her nightstand.

“I’ll toss it later,” she said, like she’d done this before. Then she stood, and I was still sitting. She stepped near me. She was tall for a girl, but I was now taller, so she