Josh chimed in. “I think you both truly have a connection though.”
Ryley felt a wave of bone-deep tiredness wash over her. Josh, she, and Ankur had never been in the same room together. She already knew Josh would come to class tomorrow, explaining that he’d been lost in trying to impress Kyle. He loved painting himself as the underdog, the nerdy boy in the high school movies, with Kyle the ultimate prize, the popular cheerleading girl that justified why he could make a fool of himself and by extension, Ryley. Ryley, however, didn’t care about his Hollywood ending and was tired of having no role in the narrative her fellow students were spinning. Ryley would give Josh the cordial shoulder starting tomorrow but held her peace for now.
Re-routing the topic of conversation to the party, Ryley said, “The party sounds fun.”
“Yeah, we’ll see. What, are you interested?” Kyle asked Ryley in a casual, breezy tone though Kyle’s careful, unsmiling eyes clearly provided Ryley with direction otherwise.
Ryley sat back, unperturbed. When Ryley had asked Carly why she’d skipped Taylor’s party in February, Carly had shrugged and said she was over it with such casual disdain that Ryley’s eyes had lit up. She’d liked the idea that Taylor’s parties could be passé.
“Nope, I’m good.” She’d liked that Kyle, so confident and popular, would talk with her, but she realized then how much Kyle fundamentally viewed her as the other, as someone to whom she could dictate rules, dismiss, and look through. Ryley listened with half an ear as Kyle began once more to discuss the play production they were putting on next week.
And then Ryley got up. She shot them both a fake smile, said, “I forgot I have to do something,” and left. Both looked momentarily startled, but then Kyle just waved her off and Josh went back to pushing things around his plate.
Ryley would bide her time. She’d observe and wait. She’d go along with things and stop trying to force them to see her when they couldn’t; they were too focused on themselves. She’d wait until the time was right, until she’d learned their language so thoroughly—how to embody confidence, how to project belonging, how to hold her ground—they’d see her and see one of us.
She was to blame too, she knew that. She hadn’t ever made a genuine effort to assimilate for all her pretense otherwise. Her mom had let her get away with it, thinking she could protect Ryley with the right clothes, by showing her how to minimize her Indianness, but all that had done was allow Ryley to zero herself out without building a new white-oriented experience over it. She’d not internalized the culture promoted in TV shows or movies, not consumed the right entertainment news, and not followed the latest beauty trends, jealous at being excluded and not wanting to partake in the visual erasure of herself.
She’d do it all, but for now, she’d focus only on moving from periphery friend to core friend in her old extended friend group, who’d excluded her because they must have sensed in part that she was in a no-man’s land. She’d been unwilling to accept the protection of being slotted simply as a nerd, which she could’ve done (probably should’ve done), had it not been for her desire to show she had choices and her place in the social ladder was not predestined; had it not been for seeing her mother so effortlessly mingle with other prep school moms and feel sad that she’d been too slow to learn. For all the proclamations celebrating difference, everyone wanted the same, and others, minorities and white people alike, had been much faster at delivering.
Ryley spent the rest of the day thinking and thinking—so not all that unusual of a day—and when Carly finally dropped her home after the softball game, she slowly and dramatically dropped herself onto the chair across the table from her mom. “I’m done. I’ll actually do it this time, keep my head down, and really just learn and observe. I finally see I can’t be both me and be white, so I’m going to be white instead.”
Her mom stayed silent, sighed, and then asked, “What happened?”
“Nothing. I finally realized how much of a no-man’s land I was in, where I didn’t stick out but didn’t fit in. Instead of living two lives, I lived one. Unsuccessfully.”
Her mom had tried so hard. She’d taught Ryley how to pretend to drink at parties, had dressed her according to rules linked up with seemingly arbitrary fashion trends, and had made pasta or a sandwich in the mornings instead of just letting her pack leftover Indian food from dinner.
Ryley looked down at her hands, back up at her mom, and said, “Want to go shopping this weekend?”
“Ryley, there is room for you to be you and to be white. Keep who you are strong inside, keep your strength and your heritage strong inside. Just present the white outside until you learn their language well enough that you don’t need it anymore.”
“Okay, well, right now there isn’t room for both. Want to go shopping this weekend?” Ryley kept her gaze focused on her hands, the color the same rich brown of the oak wood table. She liked the color on the table.
“Sure,” her mom eventually said.
Ryley walked out with one thought floating around in her head. If you can’t beat them, join them.
CHAPTER 23
APRIL 2019
“Hello?”
Ryley breathed in, breathed out, and breathed in again. She pressed the phone closer to her ear, as if to mimic the feeling of her mom wrapping her arms around her when Ryley would bury her head in her mom’s stomach.
“Ryley?”
She let another breath out, took another one in, and forced herself to speak. “Hi, sorry. I couldn’t catch my breath.”
Ryley heard her mom settle back into the couch and a part of her felt enormously guilty. They always fell back so quickly and smoothly into the pattern they had perfected years ago. She was constantly the little bird with the broken wing that her mom would nurse back to health only for the dumb little bird to hop out of the nest and try to fly again before it was ready.
“You’re okay,” her mom crooned. She kept repeating it until Ryley did finally start to calm. “Okay, walk me through it.”
Ryley couldn’t bring herself to talk about what had immediately precipitated the panic attack, so she decided to go to the very beginning. “I don’t know. I think everything just got to be too much. I feel like I’ve been on the verge of a panic attack for the last three months and it finally happened. Getting those grades wrecked me. You know that academics is the one thing I always had, where I could be myself, even if I was just fitting in everywhere else. And honestly, I’m so tired of pretending and doing everything I can to belong when it all feels fake. I’m faking with my grades, my relationship, my friendships.” Ryley was slightly breathless by the time she finished.
“Okay, then maybe you should take a step back. Figure out what you actually like and what you want so things can feel real.” Her mom’s tone was appeasing; pacifying.
Ryley fell back against the couch, shocked into silence, and then she felt her head begin to pound with rage, taken aback as she was by her mother’s audacity. She tried once again to breathe in and breathe out but could not calm herself this time.
“You’re the one who taught me how to live for others! To always be so focused on blending, on belonging. You wanted me to perfect that double life, keep the Indianness inside, keep everything ‘other’ about me inside. And I couldn’t do it so I gave up the ‘other,’ I gave up me. And now you’re going to tell me I should think about what I actually want?” She was talking loudly, any ability to control her volume thrown out the window. “How dare you?” Her fist was clenched, her jaw was clenched, her entire being drawn taut as a violin string.
“That’s not fair.” Her mom was talking loudly too now; Ryley could hear her get up and begin to pace. “Yes, I did want you to learn white people ways and white people talk, but I never wanted you to internalize it. I just wanted you to feel assimilated, feel like you belonged, because you felt so alone. I never wanted you to lose sight of who you were inside! You know how much I love you. How could I ever want you to be ashamed of who you funda
mentally are?”
“Well, great intentions but awful execution. I should go.” She knew she was being unfair now and had been unfair to Harrison as well by pushing blame onto everyone but herself.
“Ryley, stop. Talk to me. Don’t run away. Just talk.”
“Look, I don’t even know. I don’t know who I am anymore, and I don’t think I like what I’m left with if I’m not pretending. When I was down by the river, and Genie had looked at me, saw me with a boyfriend, surrounded by white friends, and at Harvard Law, she said I had it all. I liked how I felt when she said that.” Ryley looked down at the paper towel still clenched in her hands and at the water she’d spilled all over the wooden coffee table when she’d yanked herself up to run over to the refrigerator. “I’m scared of letting that go. I’m scared of being nothing when at least after years of work, I hypothetically belong.”
“Ryley, you’ll still belong without that. You know what Genie was reacting to? She was reacting to your belief that you are somebody. Harvard, David, your friends—it all helped you to finally see that, but it was about you, Ryley, interacting with the presumption that you belong in a way you didn’t before. You, Ryley, are just enough as you are.” Her mom took a deep breath and continued. “I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you weren’t good enough, but I don’t regret teaching you how to assimilate. Now you’ve lived the mirage and you’ve realized you don’t like it. You can give up the pretense without always wondering what it’s like on the inside.”
Ryley got up and went to her room to pick up her stuffed turtle; he’d always been there for her unquestionably. She needed his support now.
Squeezing him, she said, “Stop making it seem like I have a choice. I didn’t get the grades, my relationship sucks, and who knows what will happen to my friendships if I just be me. I failed out of the ‘mirage’ as you put it. Stop making it sound so romantic.”
“Fine, you failed out. But it wasn’t like you were happy when things were supposedly going your way and you were so focused on belonging and doing everything right.”
Ryley opened her mouth to interject, but her mother was not done.
“You know why I never had that hard of a time? I wasn’t asking anyone to let me belong. I knew my roots were in India—that India would always be my home. That made it easy for me to learn their game and learn their rules because my identity stayed strong inside. No one could ever touch me at my core. No one could take my sense that I was somebody away from me.”
“Good for you.” Ryley’s voice was decidedly sullen. Her stuffed turtle looked up at her in disappointment.
“Ryley, all I’m trying to say is that once you know who you are, nothing else matters. No one can make you feel on the outside if you don’t let them. We both know you’ll end up doing well in law school, if not this semester, then the one after that; you care about learning too much to give up. And you already have so many people batting in your corner who would love to know the real you. So, take this year and see it for the gift it was.”
Ryley needed to digest and think through everything, so that’s what she said. The farewell tone in her voice was soft as she said she just needed time. Her mom let her go, only slipping in a quick I love you before hanging up.
Ryley didn’t let herself think about her mother’s words immediately. Instead, she picked up the breadcrumbs on the table and cleaned the stack of dishes in the sink. Looking around, she decided it looked presentable enough and skipped the dusting; she doubted anyone would be running their finger along her bookcase in the near future. Ryley definitely wouldn’t.
She should reward her cleaning effort somehow, though. She considered texting Olivia or David, but both would be too draining for her to deal with now. Before she had to ponder the matter any further, she got a text from Mark. He was asking what she was up to and if she wanted to watch something together. She responded immediately, inviting him up. Mark must have been walking by her apartment right when he texted her because he was buzzing up only moments later.
She welcomed him in and soon they were settling onto her couch. She hadn’t hooked up the TV, a relic from her old apartment, yet. She was usually fine to just use her laptop to watch whatever had temporarily caught her fancy.
“Oh, what did you think?” Mark asked, pointing to the Supergirl scene still open on her computer.
“Different than I expected.” Ryley closed out of the window and navigated to Netflix. Mark side-eyed her very obviously but kept his mouth shut. They watched a couple of episodes of Parks and Recreation in silence but for the occasional chuckle and lazy back-and-forth every so often. They did this occasionally, one going to the other’s apartment at the end of a long day of drinking, but it had been a while.
After they’d gotten an order of Indian food delivered—Mark had wanted something spicy and Ryley felt homesick—Mark slowly began collecting his belongings. He looked as if he were moving through molasses as he inched over to pick up his phone from where it was charging, slowly put on his sweater, and carefully slipped on his shoes.
Eventually, Ryley asked, “What?” Sloths moved faster.
“Nothing. I was thinking of study plans for tomorrow.”
Ryley nodded before turning her attention back to her phone to give him time to gather himself.
Finally, he said, “I didn’t do so hot first semester.”
“Oh.” Ryley wondered if Cassidy had told Mark about Ryley’s performance or if today was just her day to have heart-to-hearts with every person imaginable.
“Yeah. I felt like shit about it and still haven’t told my parents. They think of me as the next Pete Buttigieg and can’t see beyond it.” Mark had shown Ryley the twenty texts that had streamed in from his parents the day Pete Buttigieg had announced his candidacy. He continued, “And I don’t know, I always thought you’d be someone safe to talk to, so when you said you didn’t even know if you wanted to apply to Law Review today, that felt like a sign.”
“Got it. I mean, I said that because I didn’t like sub-citing for a journal all that much, and Law Review would be that times ten.” Ryley couldn’t bring herself to talk about her grades—not after how she’d felt under Cassidy’s gaze earlier.
He looked down, tied a shoelace that didn’t need tying, and then gave her a soft, “Got it, bye,” before making his way to her front door. She felt Mark’s palpable disappointment and felt disappointed in herself. She thought about her mom’s words.
“Look, wait. I didn’t do so hot either.” Her voice slightly wavered and she looked down at her feet. When she looked up, Mark’s big, blue eyes were full of such fondness and care that Ryley felt warm all over. She pushed on.
“And it really got to me, so I met with Professor Kilmer. He said I needed to find my voice and I needed to learn how to communicate and cogently advocate for something.” She threw in an SAT word in case Mark thought she was dumb now. She was psychotic.
Mark responded, “Well, I’d love to study with you. If you’ll have me. Or do you and David do your own thing? I’ve been skipping most of the study groups Cassidy sets up, so I don’t know what’s up there.”
“Oh, we don’t study together. I think we’re going to break up.” Ryley couldn’t help the way her hands slightly, automatically clenched, as if already missing the presence of a security blanket, but otherwise, her body remained lax.
Mark lifted one shoulder up, put it down. “I mean, I can’t say I’m surprised. You both barely talked today. I was going to ask about David earlier but didn’t want you to feel like I was putting you on the spot.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s been a long time coming.” Seeing Mark beaming at her now, she continued, “Why are you smiling like that?” She would’ve appreciated a bit of sympathy for her impending breakup.
“I’m just happy. I’m glad you’re finally sharing real things with me beyond your favorite song of the day,” Mark said.
Ryley felt herself reaching emotional capacity. She needed to lie down and sleep
for a good twelve hours.
As he reached for the door handle, he rushed out, “I may regret asking this, but because you seem to be unusually open right now, can I ask if the Supergirl clip has anything to do with you wanting to break up?”
“Nope. Olivia had mentioned it and I was curious,” Ryley said flatly.
“Okay, cool,” Mark said, immediately crossing the threshold as if to physically show that he was not trying to step over any lines. “I figured that was the case. I’m going to leave now.” Then, giving her a cheery wave goodbye, he pulled the door shut behind him.
Ryley felt incredibly drained but proud of herself. Mark had respected her boundaries and respected her. He hadn’t looked at her like she was a failure or said he was sorry she was breaking up with David. He’d known not to push her about Supergirl. She felt free and powerful. She couldn’t be relegated to the status of outsider if she didn’t let someone else define the boundaries of the house.
CHAPTER 24
APRIL 2019
A couple of weeks after Ryley’s come-to-Jesus—or, more accurately, come-to-Krishna—moment, Ryley and David met at one of the tables outside the library. Even though it was late April, the grass was brown and dead…like their relationship.
They chatted about nothing, even as Ryley tried to muster up the courage to open Pandora’s Box.
When another lull of silence settled too heavily between them, David decided to take the reins. “This isn’t working. We both know it isn’t.”
“Yeah, not for awhile now.” Ryley tapped her foot restlessly against the side of the table.
“What went wrong? We were so good for the first few months and then I felt like we kept missing. We stopped getting each other.” He ran a hand through his mop of brown hair; it was getting shaggy, falling into his eyes and exaggerating his youth. He seemed more innocent and vulnerable.
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