“I didn’t mean for it to be so long, but you look up and all this time’s gone by.” She blinked. Her eyes, though wide, with a tendency to catch the light, revealed little about her emotions—as though something constricted them from behind the pupils. “How’s your sister?”

“Settled, as my dad says. My mom’s over the moon about the wedding.”

“Is she chasing after you about your turn?”

I grimaced. “I’m far from that—what was it you said? The way opposite of engaged?”

Her lips quivered, as if to imply that she was unsurprised, or maybe that my singlehood was not quite like hers.

We drank, both of us. A swish, a thud of the glasses back on the bar, and I slid mine to admire the rings it made on the dark wood, also so I could have something in motion to look at.

“Tell me about your history work.”

“Uh, well. I don’t know. I’m supposed to be writing about the Gilded Age. But I’ve been messing with some stuff about an Indian dude in the gold rush.” I shifted uncomfortably. I hadn’t tried to explain Snider to anyone. It felt strange to try to account for what I’d been doing for the past weeks. “But really, mostly it’s the Gilded Age.”

It suddenly seemed that without directly discussing the span of time that had passed since we’d last seen each other, we would, in fact, have nothing to say.

“I watched your video,” I said, before my bravery dissipated. “Your speech.” She squinted, honestly; perhaps she’d given many speeches. “Miss Teen India?”

“Oh, yeah?” She shook her hair so it curtained her face, briefly, then re-parted it. “I got in trouble for that. They gave me three minutes to blabber about tech, and I went rogue.”

I bristled to see that she’d considered invoking Shruti a radical act. “You’re proud of it.”

“I mean, yes. I was given a platform. I wanted to say something with it. I was angry with that organization—it made girls anorexic and anxious, and I didn’t grasp how much damage all the high school messaging had done until I got to college….” She slowed as her eyes flicked across my face. “Huh,” she said, almost disinterestedly. “You’re pissed.”

“Yeah.” I was speaking with an assurance that would have eluded a younger me. And yet I was afraid to push too hard, in case she retreated back to whatever world had possessed her for so long. “You traded on it.”

“What do you think I traded it for?”

My hand shook and beer sloshed. “You don’t think you got credit for being this… prophetess of mental health? You didn’t feel hypocritical? You just tied everything up. Like it was all way back in the past.”