“Neil, get inside, you’ll get in trouble,” she whispered. Her glossed lips quivered and for a moment I was suffused with a premonition that something phantom wished to be spoken aloud but that no one—not me, not the people around me—could find the language. Anita clamped her mouth shut and blinked very fast, as though beating back that ghost, and there we remained, still rooted to our finite asphalt selves.

I said Prachi was out there and it didn’t sound good. “The coach already saw me,” I added. “I’m not supposed to move.”

“Are you kidding me, Neil?” Anita was framed in the doorway as the hallway light streamed out around her. “My mom’s waiting, like, right now.”

“I wasn’t drinking.”

“I know you weren’t drinking,” she said. No, more like—“I know you weren’t drinking.” I wondered how she had come by all her new wisdom, how she had grown so fast, so far ahead of me. “Did you set off the alarm?”

I nodded miserably.

“Dude,” Anita said. “People go out the food delivery door.” She pointed. She spoke rapidly, percussively, with a bravado that might have masked her nerves at being so near trouble.

“C’mon, kid.” Coach Jameson led his small troupe of prisoners inside, beckoning me with that meaty finger, holding the alcohol pinched in his other hand like a used rag. The captured students followed, heads bowed—two white guys I didn’t know, Katie Zhang, Mark Ha, Prachi. My sister mouthed, What? at me while Coach Jameson looked Anita up and down and added, “And you, rubbernecker.”

“I just got here, Coach,” Anita said. Her voice caught in her throat before she switched to a clipped tone like the sort my mother used on work calls. I could feel her straining to be someone with whom she had not yet become fully acquainted. “Actually, we were trying to leave. My mom’s outside, you can ask her—”

“Y’all well know not to be in the parking lot.”

“I just got worried, see,” she tried again, in a slightly sharper pitch. “Because—”

“What’s your name?”

“Anita Dayal.”

“And yours?”

“Neil Narayan.”

He repeated. “Anita Dial. Neil Nay-rannan. Y’all’re freshmen?”

“Yes, sir,” Anita said.

“Stay away from this crowd,” Coach Jameson said grandly. “Getcherselves home.”

He escorted his captured cool kids past us. The scent of our innocence—or mine, anyway—was strong enough to overpower everything else.