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

at all, though behind her Mrs. Bhatt was saying, “See, Shruti, I told you all your classmates were hiding out down here.”

Which was when Isha, eyes on Anita, said, “Guess who you’re going to marry, Shroots?” She and Juhi snickered. Manu’s eyes met mine as we both considered intervening. But you had to save your ammo for yourself; the derision could land on you anytime, and even among friends, it had the effect of total destruction. It took so much to gather yourself up into some semblance of a person every morning. A rash of mocking could undo all that in an instant. I sat with my back against the wall and laughed as quietly as possible.

Shruti, always quick in her own defense, quick enough that you could believe she didn’t mind the banter, retorted, “I’m not planning on getting married, Isha. I happened to punch the last guy who asked me, you know.” And if we hadn’t all heard the strain in her rebuttal, seen the whitening of her lips, it might have been funny.

Anita stood, and though she had frequently used Shruti as a punch line, this time she spared a withering glance for Juhi and Isha. She could afford to, from her new position above the rest of us. “Come get some food with me, Shroots,” she said.

I remembered the day Shruti arrived in seventh grade, fresh off the boat. Anita made me cross the cafeteria to sit down with the new girl, who rolled her r’s too hard. The three of us ate our white-bread sandwiches. Kraft singles in mine, peanut butter and banana in Anita’s. Red and green chutney with potatoes in Shruti’s, emitting a distinct spicy smell. “It’s easy to make this yourself,” Anita advised Shruti, opening her triangles to reveal the smush of browning fruit and crunchy Skippy. “But I like mine,” Shruti had said.

We had since distanced ourselves from her. But you could never properly avoid, shun, renounce, extract, or untangle yourself from any other desi in Hammond Creek. You were all a part of the same mass. Some days you trampled on one another. Other days, you hid in the same basement, seeking shelter from the same parental storms.

“Yeah,” Isha called as Anita and Shruti made their egress. “Anita, enjoy the food—I mean, you must be so at home, eating this stuff.”

Aleem turned to me. “You hear my middle sister didn’t get into any schools?”

“None?” Manu gasped.

“What’s she going to do?” I had a vision of Shaira packing up the Khans’ station wagon and zooming west, a female Muslim Sal Paradise (I’d recently read—and treasured—On the Road). What if she just went . . . anywhere? Sought out the mad people? “She could do anything.”

“She’s applying again. More safety schools. This time she’s writing her essay on 9/11.”

“Why are you all so gay for college?” Kartik fiddled with the video game controller. School didn’t come easily to him. So, soon enough, we let him redirect the conversation to one of those teenage-boy brain trusts: “You know the secret to getting any in high school?”

We asked him to enlighten us.

“Avoid the Indian girls.”

“Why?” Manu said.

“They’re afraid of dicks. Every one of them. That’s what my brother says.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

“Three reasons to not fuck with Indian girls,” Kartik continued. “One: they’re afraid of dicks. Two: they’re hairy, like, gorilla hairy. Three: they bleed a lot.”

“What do you mean bleed a lot?” I said.

“I mean it’s a biological fact that they have the thickest—what’s it called—the thing that breaks when chicks get reamed for the first time.”

“The hymen,” Manu said professorially.

“Right, they’ve got the thickest in the world, so blood everywhere.” He emitted an explosive, diarrheic noise, making fireworks with his hands, puffing cheeks out, spewing air.

“Who’s that girl you debate with?” Aleem asked me. “Wendi Zhao? She’s kind of hot.”

Kartik leaned against the mirror. “Wendi Plow,” he said. Then he added, in case we didn’t get it: “I’d plow Wendi Zhao, all I’m saying.”

“Dude,” Manu said, turning to me, and I cringed, because he was about to do that thing—the male version of that thing Shruti did—where he deepened his voice and tried to access the patois of our generation. “Dude, I bet Anita totally likes you, though.”

“What did I just say?” Kartik moaned.

•   •   •

Eventually I got hungry and excused myself. I passed, on the way out of the basement, the sixty-inch television, on which home videos of Meena and Jay streamed. Currently, a little Jay was holding up a piece of construction paper to the camera. It featured a stick figure standing atop a mountain of green rectangles—dollar bills. Below, written in red marker, with a few letters facing adorably in the wrong direction: when i grow up, i want to be . . . rich!

I reached the buffet table in the Bhatts’ emptied three-car garage. Anita’s mother was there, reaching one of her slender arms up to a wire shelf to grab something. I ached to be tall enough that I could reach a shelf she could not. On the table were chaat fixings and mango lassi in a sweaty glass jug and yellow fluffy dhokla and a pile of mini cheese pizzas, in concession to the littler kids’ whitewashed diets.

“Neil!” she said. “Ani’s just gone home. She wasn’t feeling well.”

“Gone home with who?” You couldn’t walk back to our neighborhood from this side of Hammond Creek; you could hardly walk anywhere in Hammond Creek.

“Shruti’s parents decided to leave, so they took her.”

“She gets tired,” I said, thinking of that windup key in Anita’s back slowing, threatening the vigor of her public persona. These days I couldn’t imagine who she was in private, what she dreamt of or loved.

“You haven’t been coming by,” Anjali Auntie said airily. “Are you sick of my food?”

“It’s been busy.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Anita might like some company soon. She’s been busy, too. Here, you want to come help? I lost my best set of extra hands.”

I joined her behind the buffet table and began piling up