Anjali Auntie positioned us shoulder-to-shoulder. Anita linked her arm through mine so the insides of our elbows kissed. This was how we’d been posed in Diwali photos as kids, when our families got together and Prachi dressed Anita up as Sita and assembled a paper crown for me, her spouse, Lord Rama. The posture suddenly seemed foreign.

There was no time to be angry. I smiled. In the photos, I am washed out. She, in electric blue and crystal, beams, her eyes settled somewhere just above the camera lens.

The dance: People were learning to inch closer to each other, and some girls didn’t mind the short guys’ heads bobbing below theirs, and some guys didn’t mind the girls with braces. The teachers on chaperone duty patrolled the bathrooms, where kids who were not my crowd might engage in “nonsense,” as my mother put it, nonsense that was inaccessible to me at the time.

As with any other event at Okefenokee High School, the room was semi-segregated. A handful of white kids mosh-pitted in the middle of the party; others made their way to those nonsense-filled bathrooms or the parking lot. The good-looking Indian and Asian girls hung by the long banquet table. The debate, math Olympiad, robotics, etc., Indians and Asians were the likeliest ones to be bopping around, because though none of us could really move, the dancing offered a prescribed activity for the evening, a script. I depended on scripts in those days, before anyone asked me to invent my own life.

I followed Anita onto the floor, expecting to join the circle dancing around Hari Chopra, who was attempting to prove his B-boy abilities to the Kanye song that was ubiquitous that year, flicking a finger across an imaginary flat-brimmed hat in the warm-up. But Anita veered toward a cluster of girls that included my sister and Melanie. I stopped at the edge of the squeaky gym floor in my dress shoes, which were vast, boatlike, slippery, and made me sweat.

“Anita,” I whispered frantically, but she mouthed, Just a second, and darted into the girl cluster—as though she was crossing the finish line in a race I hadn’t known she was running. She’d grown spritely and uncatchable lately, always squinting at a secretly looming horizon line.

I didn’t see my date again until the end of the evening, let alone dance with her. The ghost of her touch on me—the inside of her elbow against the inside of mine—lingered on my skin. I felt insubstantial.