THAT I ABANDONED SHRUTI for Manu and Kartik and Aleem and Jack and Abel at the dance; that I ignored her studiously for the week thereafter; that I managed to move my assigned seat in Euro from the place by the window, next to her, to the back chalkboard, telling Mr. Bakes (not untruthfully) that I was suffering migraines and couldn’t handle the light; that I ignored, too, the hoots about Spring Fling, until they subsided into a consensus that I had gone with her out of kindness… all this caused the incident to abate with dangerous ease.

I had thought originally that I would need to have some sort of conversation with Shruti, explaining the merits of friendship over romance at this stage in our lives, but on the first day I saw her after the dance, kneeling by her locker, her eyes narrowed to suspicious ovals, and all I could mutter was a hi. I shuffled past. She seemed unsurprised. Normal reality had subsumed her once more. She only cast a few injured looks at me across the history classroom before stubbornly turning back to her notebook. I heard her speaking to Mr. Bakes after class about some must-read books on Hong Kong. I’d become just a silly incident in her past.

Wendi Zhao commented on my glum mood over the following weeks: “Kid, don’t fuck up when I need you most.” She’d been wait-listed at Harvard, and the coaches had suggested that if they could tout a nationals win, she might be shifted to the “Z-list,” meaning she would be offered a chance to take a gap year and enroll the following fall.

My family noticed as well. I was dull at dinners, dampening the celebratory mood—for despite all the heartache and cursing of Gita Menon over the past few months, Prachi had in the end received her glorious fat envelope in the mail. My father, never a drinker, had made a toast with his water glass several nights in a row, while my mother’s eyes welled up, and I hmmed a congratulations gamely through a mouthful of saaru.

Passing my room to get to the attic after one of those toasting dinners, my father paused. “You can do what Prachi did, too,” he said.

I thought I’d heard him wrong. “What?”

“We are feeling like our decision to come here makes sense, with you two doing so well.”

I almost wished for him to revert to his old suspicions.