We were preparing for one of the larger tournaments of the semester, coming up in Chicago. My mother was going to buy me a down jacket, which she had said might “come in handy” if I went to school in the northeast, which for my parents meant the Ivy League; my grades that semester had made them hopeful.

I was positively thrumming with a recent dose of lemonade, and therefore reading rapidly, connecting arguments, anticipating rebuttals, and feeling the surety that came with the gold. The lemonade powered me through research, yes, but more important, it provided a swagger that laced my speeches, delivered at hundreds of words per minute, and the cross-examinations, held at a slower pace, which nonetheless required as speedy a mind. Who could have imagined the power carried around in the rings and pendants of unassuming desi debaters? Who would have guessed that in such gold (even in the girls’) lay what I must call an intellectual alpha masculinity? Though that strength was borrowed—and temporary—I was drinking enough such that, bit by bit, my private self was coming to resemble the person the lemonade helped me be in the aggressive theater of debate rounds.

I was spinning my pen, reading something about solar energy in Afghanistan, when my red flip phone rang. My parents had not paid for text messages on our family plan, and I didn’t give the number out often. So I was surprised to see it buzzing on the table. I didn’t recognize the voice on the other end at first; it was loopy and sodden.

“You’re, what—?… Where?… What about your mom?… Jesus, Anita… You know I don’t have my license…. I could ask Prachi—okay, okay, I won’t… Where am I supposed to get a car?… Fine… Say the address again.”

I put my highlighter down and looked straight at Wendi Zhao, who eyed me viciously before agreeing to drive me the forty minutes to Buckhead.

Traffic at eight on a Saturday was light. Wendi merged violently onto the highway and crossed three lanes in a frantic spurt to the HOV side. An unlikely number of tall pines lined Georgia highways, and though it was hardly nature, it still felt like air, like breath, a reminder that something beyond Hammond Creek existed.

Wendi: “This girl—do I know her?”

“She used to go to OHS,” I said, and named Anita.

Wendi shook her head to say it didn’t ring a bell. Then the headshaking grew vehement. “You know what I feel about this, though?” I figured she would tell me no matter what. “Like, just wait a couple of years to dick around. I’m going to dick around a lot at Harvard, trust me.”

“Anita wants to go to Harvard, too,” I said. That briefly silenced Wendi. We passed under green sign after green sign announcing another suburb where other Neils and Wendis were waiting. The interstate spat us out in Buckhead, where there were more trees—historic trees, all knotty. We turned onto a wide street where each home resembled a small plantation—enormous white houses with wraparound porches and lawns as well maintained as a golf course green.