I lifted my knife in the air again to remind them I had gotten what I came for, and walked to the door without saying anything else. I spent the rest of that night home, alone, attempting to wend my way through the gilded sentences of The Great Gatsby—my summer reading book—but instead staring out my bedroom window at Anita’s front lawn, where there was no seductively blinking green light like Daisy Buchanan’s, only a mustard yellow house with all its lights on, as though its denizens were having a party for just the two of them.

2.

In summers past, I’d traipse down to the neighborhood swimming pool with Prachi and Anita and Kartik and Manu, toting sunscreen that someone’s mother had prescribed, which we would all ignore, opting to become the color and texture of bottom-of-the-bag raisins. There had been a few day camps—one where I went trout fishing with a pink-skinned park ranger, to my Brahmin mother’s chagrin. In those summers, my dreams followed me into my waking hours, their logic lingering, turning the humid days magical, overlaying the season like a very thin net.

But this summer was cold with reality. I’d been grounded, due to my public display of impertinence in telling my parents I preferred not to attend the Nagarajans’ party. I was banned from Kartik’s, the only place I could play video games, and allowed to go only to the Kumon math center and to the library—the latter when accompanied by my debate partner, the acidic Wendi Zhao, who oversaw my work and berated me for my mediocrity. In the evenings, I was to sit in my room, doing my reading and math. If I wanted proof that summer had descended on Georgia, I had only to open my window. The insects were out, katydids and cicadas and flashing lightning bugs, little green constellations.

“Don’t you have assigned reading?” my mother said when I complained.

“The thing is, The Great Gatsby is a really short book,” I pointed out.

My father shouted from the bathroom, over a trumpeting fart: “In our schools, you never got hundred percent in anything!” He flushed. In the kitchen, hands washed, he continued: “Sixty percent was considered very good! You should jolly well never be done!”

I suspected that I had become a casualty of Prachi’s Spring Fling misbehavior. But my sister, the perpetrator herself, was allowed to roam free due to her pageant activities. It seemed immensely unfair. Perhaps my parents feared my descent into averageness more than they feared Prachi’s tumbles into vice. They trusted Prachi. My sister telegraphed her ambitions in the Duke poster on her wall and the Duke T-shirt she tugged on whenever she had a test, for good luck. She had a dream to lose. Me? I had no college poster, no talisman.