I shook my head. “I didn’t know—I had no idea you could do stuff like Hong Kong.”

“Have you talked to Mia?” Manu lowered his voice. “Be careful in East Lansing.”

Then he sighed and went to find Kartik, whose locker was in the normie hallway, with the white kids. He’d joined the lacrosse team that spring as its water boy, and claimed he would list the sport on his college application, therefore standing apart from other Asian applicants. I wasn’t seeing much of Kartik this year. The lemonade provided sharper focus, made me willing to ignore things—and people—that did not seem immediately useful. But I was afraid of wasting all this gold, spending it by kicking a locker instead of becoming something already.

Get it together, I thought furiously at myself. I was still failing to see my future, the way Shruti seemed so capable of doing, the way I presumed Anita must be able to, the way I knew Prachi could. How could it be that Shruti believed in her future self enough to survive the fact of her unpopularity, her date running away from her at last year’s Spring Fling just as mine had, the mocking in basements, the birthday party for which her parents had to issue invitations? Was it because she trusted a future Shruti was waiting, the girl just ahead of her in a relay race, to take the baton and bolt to Hong Kong, and college, and a better life? I lacked such certainty.

“We need more of Shruti’s,” I told Anita and her mother. Another Friday in the kitchen, Anita fresh from tennis.

Anjali Auntie shook her head. “We’ve taken a lot from her already. Two—”

“Three times,” Anita interrupted. I smelled the tang of her unwashed sweat.

“What’s the problem? You’re concerned she’ll notice stuff is missing?”

“That,” Anita’s mother said, lowering her nose to sniff a pot of chana masala. “But also, that we don’t want to overdo it. Poor girl, leave her something.”

“She’s got everything,” I sighed.

Anjali Auntie gave me an odd look, brief, full of some knowledge she might have shared, but that I missed. “There’s no shortage of others.” She turned to her daughter. “Anita, why do you insist on stewing in your own stink like this? You think Neil likes to smell you?”

I blushed.

“Upstairs, shower, please. You have a lot of homework?”

“Just AP US,” Anita said. “It’s a joke.”

“How are they filling up a school year with only American history? Neil has a millennium of Europe to study and this girl has just two hundred years of this strange country.”