As she went on about what it was like to vacation with Jimmy’s mother in the Maldives and catch his father on a layover in Dubai, and how they never worried about what tomorrow would bring, they simply incarnated the future they desired, sometimes buying it, other times negotiating for it, I understood something new about her. We were both conceptual orphans. Perhaps that is the condition of any second generation. In the space between us and the rest of adulthood lay a great expanse of the unknown. We had not grown up imbibing stories that implicitly conveyed answers to the basic questions of being: What did it feel like to fall in love in America, to take oneself for granted in America? Starved as we were for clues about how to live, we would grip like mad on to anything that lent a possible way of being.

“Did he have to do with what you talked about in that MTI video? Leaving Stanford?”

“He was part of it. He broke up with me after graduating to go to Oxford for a year, and that unleashed a lot of stuff I hadn’t dealt with yet. I stopped eating and sleeping, and my grades slipped, and my mom and I were in a cold war because I’d said a bunch of awful things to her about how she’d fucked up my life. So, I withdrew. There was this farm-retreat place that a girl in my sorority had gone when she cracked up—it’s not uncommon, at Stanford, to suddenly… run out of whatever got you there. Anyway, I stayed at that farm for about a year.”

“I’m sorry. You lived on a farm?”

“I was shit at it.”

“What’s there to be shit at?”

“An ostrich attacked me once.”

I chuckled. She was laughing, too. The air lightened. My belly and throat were bloated with beer, and I was aware of how the drive to Berkeley would feel—fizzy and swimming.

“Did you feel different? After the ostrich incident?”

“Yes, I did,” she said. “After the farm—not just the ostrich—I was less… ruthless.”

“You?”

Now Anita was looking at me funnily, surprised. “You’re letting me go on and on.”

“You never used to tell me so much. It’s a nice change. Less ruthless, you were saying?”

“Well. After Shruti, I wished I’d wanted less. If I had just been okay being average—”

“You were never at risk of average.”

“If I had been okay being any old person, not obsessed with being the best, there would’ve been no lemonade. And the same thing with Jimmy—if I hadn’t needed someone to tell me I was going places, I could have picked a boyfriend I just liked spending time with. But I needed Jimmy because I needed what he promised me about my future.”