I lifted the trophy. The metal was cheap and covered in fingerprints. Anjali Auntie brushed it with her thumb like she was rubbing a stain from a child’s face. I didn’t want it in my house, couldn’t bear the sudden warming of my father’s expression, his monstrous validation.

She bit her lower lip. “Towel,” she said again, and turned to her bedroom.

“Anjali!” It was a man’s booming voice.

The Dayal house had an echoey tendency, and big sasquatchy footsteps resounded. It had been some years since I’d seen Pranesh Uncle. To be honest, I had mostly forgotten him until he manifested in the formal living room. He was plump and entirely bald, his scalp recalling a glass egg. The skin below his eyes looked ink smudged. His lips were bloodless and chapped. He wore a baggy black T-shirt reading SF GIANTS and cargo shorts. I wondered if he had ever been handsome.

“Neeraj, you’ve grown,” he said. “Haven’t seen my wife.”

“Hi, Uncle. She went to get me a towel.”

“You’re all wet. Been dancing in the rain like some Bollywood star, have you.”

Anjali Auntie returned, handing me a huge fluffy green towel. I longed to lie on their floor and use the towel as a pillow and fall asleep, except that sleep offered no safe haven. Shruti populated my dreams. Sometimes she held my Swiss Army knife to my throat and demanded I pour out all the lemonade in the Dayals’ fridge. Other times she pressed me against a wall and kissed me and I didn’t resist. Still other times she sat silent, ashy, blinking; I’d wake in cold sweats and swear I saw her cross-legged at the foot of my bed, fingering the fringe of my comforter, frowning at me with that familiar chemistry class disdain—It’s really not that hard, Neil, if you’d just focus. I’d tried to call out for Anita’s help, to no avail:

neil_is_indian: i hate myself

neil_is_indian: and if u just didn’t hate me

neil_is_indian: idk id be rly grateful

Anita’s father looked between his wife and me and grunted. “Oh. Having a tough time, I imagine,” he said. He crossed to their dining room and drummed one broad hand on the table.

“Give me your hoodie, Neil,” Anjali Auntie said. I stripped it off and accepted the towel.

“Anjali. You need to—”

“In a minute, Pranesh.”

She tossed the sweatshirt over her arm and disappeared into the laundry room, leaving me alone with her husband, who was blinking indifferently. There was something relieving about his gaze; it was so unlike the practiced gentleness of the teachers, the other parents, the school counselor, who had called in known “friends of Shruti” to recite the same absolutions, how we never knew what was going on in someone’s mind, how sometimes there were simply forces at work beyond our control. I fled the meetings with these adults as fast as I could, trying not to look at the spot where I used to see Shruti kneeling by her locker.