Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  The lemonade: I pumped all the juice I could out of the fruit, feeling the thing release in my palm, a muscle spasming pleasurably at my touch. I picked up a string of lemon pulp with my pinky and felt its pucker on the inside of my mouth—headily, I thought, This life contains more than I know. And at last the gold falling into the lemonade, the sigh in the pitcher, the muffled rush of the carbonation forming, the columns of bubbles like the light falling from the disco ball at the Spring Fling dance. Then I drank, calling upon the focus Anita had taught me months earlier, and I tasted Shruti Patel.

  She tasted unlike the others, distinct from the baby bangles and coins and pendants and teardrop earrings and men’s Om chains that I had been consuming for months.

  Because she was not sweet.

  Perhaps I had done something wrong with the proportions. Or perhaps—I now think—I had not successfully masked the bitterness, the murk, the complications.

  Afterward, I cleaned vigorously. I poured the extra lemonade into one of the vials Anita’s mother kept above the basement fridge. I put it in my backpack, wrapping it in gym socks. I went for a three-mile jog—the run had nothing to do with Shruti, who could not run a mile to save her life; that was me, converting her into all I wanted to be.

  That night I watched Anita earn her crown as Miss Teen India USA, and when my parents came into the living room to see me tuned in to Zee TV, they raised their eyebrows and said, “Really, watching that?” and I said, “She’s not so bad,” and they sat, too, and my mother rolled her eyes when Anita launched into her charity speech—battered women, again. She had at last been to Queens; the Dayal women had stopped in at the shelter before heading to New Jersey, delivering soaps and lotions and cosmetic products. Anita told an anecdote of a Bangladeshi woman beaten by her husband, left homeless, turned to prostitution, because “we do what we must to survive, and there was nowhere for her to go, no safe place and no home for her in this foreign country.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was Prachi who answered the phone Sunday night. I don’t know who began the telephone tree, which aunties’ voices carried the news from the Patels’ house to ours. At eleven, my sister came into my room and asked me to put away the heavy Dell laptop on which I was typing frantically. I had a grand idea to premiere at nationals, a plan related to fusion energy. I was a diviner; my computer light in my dark room was the light of the gold in the rock—

  Prachi, wearing Blue Devils blue, sat on my bed, took the laptop, and told me the news.

  She repeated it; she did not know if I had heard. I was reduced to rabbity, muscular reactions. My cheek convulsed. I bit my lip and tasted blood, which smacks somehow of metal.

  I looked out my window, past the stinking spring Bradford pear on the Walthams’ lawn. Anita’s house remained dark. The Dayals had not yet returned from New Jersey. Perhaps they were barreling north from Hartsfield-Jackson in their brown Toyota. For a wild moment I wished that they would crash, be plowed into by some drunk or insane Atlanta driver, so they would never know what I’d done.

  At some point that night, Prachi left, and at some point that night, my parents said things, useless things. When I was 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 and entirely bald, his scalp recalling a glass egg. The skin below his eyes looked ink smudged. His lips were bloodless and chapped. He wore a baggy black T-shirt reading sf giants and cargo shorts. I wondered if he had ever been handsome.

  “Neeraj, you’ve grown,” he said. “Haven’t seen my wife.”

  “Hi, Uncle. She went to get me a towel.”

  “You’re all wet. Been dancing in the rain like some Bollywood star, have you.”

  Anjali Auntie returned, handing me a huge fluffy green towel. I longed to lie on their floor and use the towel as a pillow and fall asleep, except that sleep offered no safe haven. Shruti populated my dreams. Sometimes she held my Swiss Army knife to my throat and demanded I pour out all the lemonade in the Dayals’ fridge. Other times she pressed me against a wall and kissed me and I didn’t resist. Still other times she sat silent, ashy, blinking; I’d wake in cold sweats and swear I saw her cross-legged at the foot of my bed, fingering the fringe of my comforter, frowning at me with that familiar chemistry class disdain—It’s really not that hard, Neil, if you’d just focus. I’d tried to call out for Anita’s help, to no avail:

  neil_is_indian: i hate myself

  neil_is_indian: and if u just didn’t hate me

  neil_is_indian: idk id be rly grateful

  Anita’s father looked between his wife and me and grunted. “Oh. Having a tough time, I imagine,” he said. He crossed to their dining room and drummed one broad hand on the table.

  “Give me your hoodie, Neil,” Anjali Auntie said. I stripped it off and accepted the towel.

  “Anjali. You need to—”

  “In a minute, Pranesh.”

  She tossed the sweatshirt over her arm and disappeared into the laundry room, leaving me alone with her husband, who was blinking indifferently. There was something relieving about his gaze; it was so unlike the practiced gentleness of the teachers, the other parents, the school counselor, who had called in known “friends of Shruti” to recite the same absolutions, how we never knew what was going on in someone’s mind, how sometimes there were simply forces at work beyond our control. I fled the meetings with these adults as fast as I could, trying not to look at the spot where I used to see Shruti kneeling by her locker.

  Pranesh folded his arms. “This sort of thing used to happen at the IITs, you know. Some boy would come from a small town, all his parents’ money spent on getting him into this school. Fellow thinks he’s brilliant, then finds he’s now on some altogether different Gaussian curve, and he flunks some exam and, you know.” He clicked his tongue. “Calls it quits.”

  “Pranesh, drop it.” Anjali Auntie returned to the dining room and shook her head briskly.

  He waved his hand in dismissal. “They’d jump out some window or hang themselves. Nowadays it is all fashionable to blame the professors or the other students, but if you ask me—”

  “Pranesh.”

  “If you ask me,” he spoke over her. “I have an unpopular opinion.”

  I had lost track of my limbs and my facial features. I only registered the general fact of gravity keeping me on the ground.

  “Somebody wants to off themselves, they’ll do it no matter what. It’s a constitutional weakness.”

  Two sharp female voices spoke at once: “Pranesh, stop!” and “Papa, stop!”

  Anita stood on the cream-colored carpeting of the front staircase. She wore faded, frayed denim shorts and a blue tank top bearing her Bobcat Cross-Country logo—a dark, slender figure running on a winding road.

  Anita’s father glanced between all three of us, shrugged, and walked to the kitchen. “Anjali, that idiot Hunt fellow keeps calling. For godsake call him back.”

  Anjali Auntie followed. I was alone in the foyer with Anita. She was glaring at the floor. You’re supposed to imagine! How far she seemed from that little girl who’d brimmed over with myriad realities.

  “So,” I said. “You’re leaving.”

  “Yes,” she said, galumphing back upstairs. She was slight, but she had a soldier’s marching gait. “And I’m still not interested in talking to you.”

  I let myself out; the rain had halted, and the sun was drying out the concrete and the asphalt. The foliage shone even brighter, glistening with raindrops; we were rich with the season, and no one seemed to know that the border between life and death had suddenly become as thin as gossamer.

  I tossed the trophy in the Walthams’ garbage bin on my way home.

  * * *

  • • •

  My parents had mostly gone mute after Shruti’s death, as though afraid that by comforting me they’d disturb some crucial rhythms of my newly acquired work ethic. But after debate nationals, after AP exams (which I roundly flunked—even Euro), once summer had begun, my mother turned off my alarm clock and took to waking me up by sitting on the edge of my bed and placing her hand on parts of me that must have reminded her of me as a baby—the soft skin on my neck, the cushion of my belly. “It’s morning, rajah,” she’d try.

  “Stop doing this,” I told her after a few days. “It’s weird.”

  I didn’t care that my mother’s eyes filled, as though I’d pinched her hard with my fingernails, when I said that.

  My father subbed in. One night he came home from work still wearing his white coat and knocked on my door. I was napping. I was almost always napping. He placed several laminated diagrams on my messy desk and indicated that I should take a seat. I obeyed and looked at the pictures. A black-and-white brain appeared in one, punctuated by brightly colored dots that marked the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebellum, etc. On another, a neon DNA helix and a word salad of gene names.

  “I know you have not yet had your AP Biology and all,” my father said, fingering the paper’s laminated edge. “But just see, there are these distal factors, these family histories, these genes, all brain issues—you do not have to understand it all, Neeraj; I only want you to see how much is going on when something like this happens.”

  “Dad.” I pushed the papers to the side, and with it, his hand. He slipped and caught himself on my chair. He placed one palm on my shoulder and I instinctively shrugged it off. “I have to pack. I’m leaving for Michigan soon.” I hadn’t brought down my laundry; the whole room smelled of oversprayed Old Spice and other, less pleasant odors.

  “Neeraj, we are worried about you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “These things, Neeraj, they occur sometimes, but—”

  “Dad.” I stood so violently that he took a few steps back, tripping on the clothes strewn about. I was taller than he was now, and unaccustomed to my new size. I could see the brightness of his bald spot anew; it beamed beneath my bedroom light. His mustache quivered. He smoothed the lapels of his coat. He stood there, breathing hard, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowing. I looked on his anger as a curiosity. There was so much he didn’t know—about me, about the world.

  “You want me to treat you like an adult, you behave like an adult,” he finally said. He
looked around my bedroom. “Clean up this damned filthy place.”

  Guilt, grief, yes, but also the worst crash, the endless jonesing, the withdrawal that my pharmacist father never suspected as such. I shivered and sweated as my body ached for lemonade. On Kartik’s advice, I approached Lowell Jenkins, who had an ADHD diagnosis, and used my leftover allowance for debate tournament meals to buy some of his Ritalin. I would find ways to acquire the stuff readily over the following years. Pharmaceutical methylphenidates could instill focus, and they kept some of the worst awareness of what had happened at bay. But they offered none of the comfort of the lemonade, none of the assuredness of identity, none of the implicit promise that tomorrow would contain in it a home.

  There was no memorial service for Shruti, at least not one her classmates were invited to. But in late May, a few days after my run-in with Pranesh Uncle, Manu told me people were gathering notes to send to the Patels. “Overdue, man,” he said. “I feel like shit I didn’t do it sooner. Just. Exams. Killed me.” He rubbed his eyes; he’d grown dark bags beneath them. It was the unlikely Mia Ahmed, whom I’d never seen speaking to Shruti except in passing, who had trotted a big condolence card around the honors hallway during AP week, but there had been nothing more personal. We were in Kartik’s basement. The other guys were playing Grand Theft Auto. Manu and I stood in the kitchen, drinking Pibb Xtra. I felt like I was made of bubbles and syrup and nothing else. I’d dropped several pounds in the past month, and I stood at five-ten now, a few inches taller than Manu, though haggard in the cheeks, growing irregular patches of facial hair.