I sat fiddling with the gluey part of the Popsicle stick, on the curb a few feet from the Walthams’ red BUSH/ CHENEY: FOUR MORE YEARS sign—which had remained staunchly on their lawn for two of the four years. Just then, Anita’s mother’s Toyota rose over the crest leading to our cul-de-sac. Anita stepped out of the car. She didn’t see me at first; I was sitting beneath the out-of-commission lamppost, in the dark. She wore a crimson tankini. A blue towel was slung around her hips. Her birdlike, still-childish shoulder blades pinched together as she stretched her arms wide. They looked like a hinge beneath her skin, opening something behind her sternum. In there, somewhere, was the Anita I’d grown up with.

What had we played? House. It wasn’t, with Anita, a game of cooking or cleaning, but a game of arranging the components of a neat life. She’d grill me: Name? I’d pick Ben or Jake or Will. One day I said, Neil, and she said, That sounds like Neeraj, so she made me Neil. Age? she’d ask. Occupation? Having nailed down the particulars, she’d then grow wistful. Look outside, she’d say. Tell me what you see. What I saw: the loops and twines of our neighborhood and neighborhoods like ours—trees and asphalt and medians and sedans. Hot southern sky. Hot Georgia asphalt. Suburbs, endless suburbs. I’d remain frozen, afraid of making a mistake. As a child, I feared mistakes. In the face of my paralysis, Anita would lay a small hand on my shoulder and shake me. Neil, you’re supposed to make it up! You’re supposed to imagine!

Other times, she would decide we needed to be productive. Once, she had us publish and circulate a newsletter for the neighborhood, reporting on the Walthams’ church and her father’s business. When we sadly counted out the money from that endeavor—a measly few dollars—Anjali Auntie, hovering over a pot of dal on the stovetop and looking on, bemused, weighed in. “Don’t kids here make lemonade stands?” Like she was playing, too. All three of us straining, against the heat, to figure out what American kids did. Then she boomed, her voice like a used car salesman on television: “It’s a great day for a lemonade!”

That afternoon, we made lemonade. Anjali Auntie switched between stirring the dal and helping us. Our hands were too weak to eke all the juice out of the lemons, so together we pressed each fruit against the ceramic and watched the acid consume the sugar.

All this I remembered, and mourned, at the sight of those girl shoulders. Whatever was entering Anita through that open hinge was obliterating the child I had known.

She turned, squinted, spied me.

“Oh, hi, Neil!” she called, in a voice that was, miraculously, the inheritor of the voice that had once said, You’re supposed to imagine! All the life that had gone into imagining the landscape outside our shared house now went to… what? The Harvard pennant above her bed? “Were you waiting for me?”