When the party wound down and the twins’ face-cake had been consumed—I got the corner of Meena’s kajal-lined eye—my family found me in the garage, still putting away accoutrements. Anita’s mother was carrying containers into the house so the Bhatts could freeze leftovers. My mother waved hello.

“Congratulations,” she said, a bit icily. “You and Pranesh must be very happy.”

Anjali Auntie blinked. “Pranesh?”

“About Anita’s new school.”

“Oh, yes,” Anita’s mother said, her voice suddenly at a steeper pitch. “Yes, I—we’re very excited—you know Pranesh, always so focused on her academics, good IIT man.”

“How nice that Anita has his brains,” my mother said. “We haven’t seen him in quite a while, isn’t it? Tell him Raghu and I say hello.” Before Anjali Auntie could reply, my mother turned to me. “Neil, come. We have to go to the Nagarajans’.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Another party?”

Prachi gave me a look as if to say, I’ve already tried. But I had something in me at that moment, something copped from the careless way in which Meena Bhatt had been draped over George Warner-Wilson, some absorbed averageness.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go to another party. No one will miss me. I’m not going.”

My parents were, for a moment, rendered immobile; we rarely bristled against them. They must have felt dread, sensing the emergence of adolescent rebellion, must have feared it, in the wake of Prachi’s Spring Fling missteps. But I was thinking about the constrictions of the rest of the summer, of all I was supposed to achieve or become in the next three months, and I felt choked, and I reacted. I threw a finger in Anita’s mother’s direction. “Auntie can take me.”

“Neeraj,” my mother hissed, using my damned real name. “Anjali Auntie might have things to do. Come.”

“Auntie,” I said, turning to face Anita’s mother, who was feigning deafness. She glanced back, her arms piled high with paper plates. “Would you mind bringing me home? I can help unload the car and stuff, since Anita’s not feeling good.”

She seemed to want to resist intervening, but I mouthed please, as though I was talking to one of my own friends, and she sighed.

“I can do it, Ramya,” she said. “It’s okay.”