ON A SATURDAY EVENING in mid-November, I was in the debate trailer, highlighting files with Wendi. We were behind, because Wendi had lately been waffling between debate and community service hours, having decided she needed to augment the moral and civic aspects of her Harvard application. (“Fuck fossil fuels,” she’d wailed the other day while dropping me off at home, as she dialed Jack Kim’s brother. “Can I come by your church? Well, yes, I know I’m not Korean or Christian, Frank, thanks for informing me, but ask yourself, what would Jesus do? He would probably give me a recommendation about a hungry homeless person I could feed…”) The trailer sat behind the gym and boasted one grimy window, a pizza-stained couch, and a whiteboard on which so many genitalia had been drawn and erased that there remained a perpetual shadow of dicks and balls beneath whatever text you tried to write on top. Just then it read WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION in a slanty hand over a faded green penile shaft.

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.”