My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I traipsed along in the wake of some chattering brown undergraduate girls, around Memorial Glade, toward the life sciences building, not far from where I’d bumped into Anjali Auntie earlier that summer. The campanile sounded again, heralding the fall. All around me, the chattering sounds of new-semester autumnal excitement.

And then these girls collided with another pack of sorority desis. There were screams that at first startled me; someone was hurt, I thought, from the timbre and pitch of the shriek. But, no—it was just old friends re-encountering one another after a summer apart. Names were shrieked. Ohmigodyouresotan. Priya! Ranjana! Shehzeen! I skirted them, then looked back once I’d passed to see that one throng of girls had blended into the other. They were so packed together, a single amoebic blob, that they blocked the whole walk.

As they began to move, one girl slipped off the trail and onto the high point of a ravine. In her instant of solitude, I saw Shruti—not the menacing ghost of Shruti stealing this girl’s likeness, but the echo of Shruti, the kind of memory normal people see all the time. I thought of Anita saying, It is way back in the past. Perhaps holding the most abstract version of Shruti, as a blur of my own regrets and the generalized pain of the world, was all wrong. Perhaps I should have been trying to remember her. What she looked like. How she used to gather herself in a beat of silence against the lockers when a swarm of girls pushed past her. The fierce narrowing of her eyes when someone said something harsh to her. The way she searched herself for a retort, and fought her way back into a world that made her life so unpleasant, how she waged that fight over and over again, for years.

This girl, who was not Shruti, tugged on her fat braid and stepped back onto the cement, jogging a little to catch up.

I opened a new text to Anita: you free tonight?

ANITA LIVED IN ONE of those sandy-colored buildings off Embarcadero Road that put me in mind of a Florida beachside motel, and whose facade belied its exorbitant rent. I found my way to her one-bedroom on the third floor. She’d pulled out the deadbolt against the frame so the door remained ajar. I knocked, heard her call, “Come in,” and pushed it open.

There were only two pieces of furniture in the living room, a black leather sofa with wooden legs and a gray crocheted ottoman that looked like it had been purchased from a dorm furniture bin at Target. No television. The kitchen—cellblock-gray granite countertops, dark wooden cabinets. A single wineglass on the counter, next to a hardback copy of Sapiens. A three-quarters-full bottle by the sink, uncorked. Not a stain anywhere. I recalled Anjali Auntie’s kitchen—the imperfection of the white grouting always hued a little bit orange from turmeric; the general scent of pungent asafetida and browned onions lingering. This was a sterile, somehow anonymous life, as though Anita wanted to erase herself.