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

wooden cabinets. A single wineglass on the counter, next to a hardback copy of Sapiens. A three-quarters-full bottle by the sink, uncorked. Not a stain anywhere. I recalled Anjali Auntie’s kitchen—the imperfection of the white grouting always hued a little bit orange from turmeric; the general scent of pungent asafetida and browned onions lingering. This was a sterile, somehow anonymous life, as though Anita wanted to erase herself.

“I’ve been meaning to move,” she said apologetically, emerging from what I presumed to be a bathroom, wearing a black sleeveless tank top and, noticeably, no bra. Her nipples lifted through the shirt, and the room seemed incandescent. Below, maroon athletic shorts displayed her quads, taut from years of running and tennis. It was so little clothing as to be nearing none at all. “I keep selling my stuff, and then getting stuck on the next step. Anyway, that’s why it’s so empty. I can’t justify staying on here alone much longer.” She bit her lip. “We lived together. Here. But until I figure out where my next job-job is, I don’t know where to look, or what my budget should be, and it’s all one big crazy-making loop, so I end up back in Palo Alto.” She looked around the living room. “I know, it has no personality.”

“If furniture reflects our personalities, I’m not sure what it says that all my roommate and I have in our common area is a futon and a bong. And these alpaca rugs he brought back from an ayahuasca retreat in Peru.”

“That says something.” She grinned. “Speaking of weed. Weed?”

“You’re offering? Sure.”

She nodded, gestured to the couch. I sat. The leather was cold on my back. Anita went to fiddle in the kitchen, returning with the bougiest piece I’d ever seen, foldable, with a balsa-wood-type finish. She offered me the first hit.

“So, what kind of job do you want?” I asked.

“You and my mother and everyone else wants to know.”

“Sorry.”

She shrugged. “It was so easy to slide into the tech world from Stanford. I did a training program at a good company right out of school, and then Galadriel happened, and you don’t ask questions when Galadriel wants you. Which means you miss that they believe so intensely in this crazy science-fiction future—we’re all going to live in space and live a thousand years and be married to software, or whatever—they believe in it so strongly that nothing that happens between now and then really matters. Screw privacy, harassment, whatever. You didn’t happen to see our founder address the Republican National Convention, did you?”

I had. Galadriel also happened to be one of Chidi’s investors, which had been a source of some debate in our home.

“So. Yeah,” she said. “I’ve figured out I don’t want to help robotic white men build robots, but that doesn’t mean I know what comes next. You’re lucky. I thought you were unfocused as a kid, but you actually just had likes and dislikes.”

“You were too good at everything,” I said. “I was lucky to only be good at a few things, and no one will pay me for them, which significantly lowers the chance I’m accidentally evil.”

She handed me the piece again. “I told you all my shit last time. You go now. Who’d you lose your virginity to?”

“Erm.” I took a pull. “Wendi Zhao.”

Anita doubled over in hysterics, her legs curved into her stomach. She rolled her forehead on her knees. “Jeez,” she said. “I called that, didn’t I?”

“You get me.” That seemed to tighten her. I worried that I’d transgressed, moving too quickly to close the nine years that still lay between us. “Got me,” I amended.

Anita took a hit. “Don’t give me too much credit,” she said, with the smoke still caught in her throat. Exhale. “Any idiot could look at a tape of us back then and tell who liked who. It was all so obvious. You especially. You have no poker face.”

“You always knew?” I said softly. “About me?”

“Of course I did. Why do you think I was so skittish with you? You had this way of looking at me that was very intense, Neil. Like you were stripping me naked, and not just sexually. Like, existentially. It was a lot for a fifteen-year-old.”

“That’s embarrassing,” I said. I groped for the piece on the coffee table. Was the indignity of your teenage self always so close at hand, long after you thought you’d escaped?

She sucked in, held her puff, and then breathed out a slender rope of smoke. “Some girls, all they ever want is someone to look at them that way, you know? And I just ignored you.”

“Because you weren’t one of those girls.” I waved my hand, refusing another puff. “I drove. I should stop. If I want to drive back.”

“Those girls, though, they’re happy now. Their lives don’t look like this.” Anita glanced around at the emptiness of the apartment, and I followed her gaze. There was just one shelf across from us, with a few books, Bluetooth speakers, and a framed photo of Anita in cap and gown, flanked on either side by her mother and what I presumed to be her ajji—a fair-skinned woman with light eyes and the same Mona Lisa smirk as Anita. Next to it was her diploma: BA, magna cum laude, double major in economics and sociology. “Want less, and you can have everything you want. I always thought of those girls as unambitious.”

She was still waving the piece in my face, loopily.

“I can’t be too baked,” I said. “I have to drive home.”

“You don’t have to drive,” she said. She scooted closer. Her knee knocked mine. She didn’t move hers away. I didn’t move mine away. “What about you? What do you want? Love? Fame? Fortune?” She folded a heel into her crotch and dropped her bare thigh on my quad. Before I could answer, she added, in a newscaster baritone: “The chance to pull off the biggest known bridal gold heist in American desi history?”

My