“Why are you all so gay for college?” Kartik fiddled with the video game controller. School didn’t come easily to him. So, soon enough, we let him redirect the conversation to one of those teenage-boy brain trusts: “You know the secret to getting any in high school?”

We asked him to enlighten us.

“Avoid the Indian girls.”

“Why?” Manu said.

“They’re afraid of dicks. Every one of them. That’s what my brother says.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

“Three reasons to not fuck with Indian girls,” Kartik continued. “One: they’re afraid of dicks. Two: they’re hairy, like, gorilla hairy. Three: they bleed a lot.”

“What do you mean bleed a lot?” I said.

“I mean it’s a biological fact that they have the thickest—what’s it called—the thing that breaks when chicks get reamed for the first time.”

“The hymen,” Manu said professorially.

“Right, they’ve got the thickest in the world, so blood everywhere.” He emitted an explosive, diarrheic noise, making fireworks with his hands, puffing cheeks out, spewing air.

“Who’s that girl you debate with?” Aleem asked me. “Wendi Zhao? She’s kind of hot.”

Kartik leaned against the mirror. “Wendi Plow,” he said. Then he added, in case we didn’t get it: “I’d plow Wendi Zhao, all I’m saying.”

“Dude,” Manu said, turning to me, and I cringed, because he was about to do that thing—the male version of that thing Shruti did—where he deepened his voice and tried to access the patois of our generation. “Dude, I bet Anita totally likes you, though.”

“What did I just say?” Kartik moaned.

EVENTUALLY I GOT HUNGRY and excused myself. I passed, on the way out of the basement, the sixty-inch television, on which home videos of Meena and Jay streamed. Currently, a little Jay was holding up a piece of construction paper to the camera. It featured a stick figure standing atop a mountain of green rectangles—dollar bills. Below, written in red marker, with a few letters facing adorably in the wrong direction: WHEN I GROW UP, I WANT TO BE… RICH!

I reached the buffet table in the Bhatts’ emptied three-car garage. Anita’s mother was there, reaching one of her slender arms up to a wire shelf to grab something. I ached to be tall enough that I could reach a shelf she could not. On the table were chaat fixings and mango lassi in a sweaty glass jug and yellow fluffy dhokla and a pile of mini cheese pizzas, in concession to the littler kids’ whitewashed diets.

“Neil!” she said. “Ani’s just gone home. She wasn’t feeling well.”

“Gone home with who?” You couldn’t walk back to our neighborhood from this side of Hammond Creek; you could hardly walk anywhere in Hammond Creek.

“Shruti’s parents decided to leave, so they took her.”