IT WAS PRACHI WHO ANSWERED the phone Sunday night. I don’t know who began the telephone tree, which aunties’ voices carried the news from the Patels’ house to ours. At eleven, my sister came into my room and asked me to put away the heavy Dell laptop on which I was typing frantically. I had a grand idea to premiere at nationals, a plan related to fusion energy. I was a diviner; my computer light in my dark room was the light of the gold in the rock—

Prachi, wearing Blue Devils blue, sat on my bed, took the laptop, and told me the news.

She repeated it; she did not know if I had heard. I was reduced to rabbity, muscular reactions. My cheek convulsed. I bit my lip and tasted blood, which smacks somehow of metal.

I looked out my window, past the stinking spring Bradford pear on the Walthams’ lawn. Anita’s house remained dark. The Dayals had not yet returned from New Jersey. Perhaps they were barreling north from Hartsfield-Jackson in their brown Toyota. For a wild moment I wished that they would crash, be plowed into by some drunk or insane Atlanta driver, so they would never know what I’d done.

At some point that night, Prachi left, and at some point that night, my parents said things, useless things. When I was finally alone, it was perhaps one in the morning, and the night outside was still, the suburbs grotesquely undisturbed. I rummaged through my bag for the remaining vial of lemonade. I removed the stopper and brought it to my nose. I tipped the rest into my mouth and gagged; I ran to the bathroom, stuck two fingers down my throat, and watched a membranous fluid splatter into the toilet bowl. Nothing sparkled, nothing bubbled, nothing betrayed a hint of magic.

I don’t know what method she chose. I only know they found her on Sunday morning. She must have done it Saturday night. I have always pictured it happening in the closet, the one she opened when I asked to see her jewelry. I imagine it with rope. I see her placing her feet onto a step stool. Her brown lids closed. Watched by her many dolls’ eyes, which were as alive as hers, for she had already given up, for the life had been taken from her a few hours earlier, in a basement, by a boy who believed he was shaking away pay dirt. The purple blooming around her throat, in the place where a necklace would have hung.

5.

An open house sign teetered on the Dayals’ unkempt front lawn that late spring: FOR SALE, REMAX REALTY. An agent named Kent Hunt grinned out at passersby. His sticky, flat grimace faded beneath the Georgia rainstorms. Below his bald head and his blimpshaped face ran his slogan: EVERYTHING I TOUCH TURNS TO SOLD!