I didn’t know Anita and her mother were moving to California until I saw Kent Hunt being knocked about in the southern monsoon on the day I returned to Atlanta from debate nationals. I’d fumbled a crucial argument in quarterfinals, ending Wendi Zhao’s high school career and ruining her last shot at Harvard. She was a mess that night, crying into her scrambled eggs at Waffle House as we ate our first proper meal all weekend, then banging on the door of my hotel room at three a.m., pushing me onto the bed, shoving her small hand down my pants to suggest I grow up already, only to find me limp. “You’re grieving,” she’d said finally, excusing herself. I smelled alcohol on her breath. “It’s not your fault.”

When we pulled up at my house, she gave my arm a squeeze and said it had, for the most part, been a pleasure doing business with me.

It was May now. Most flowers were dead and the knotty Atlanta trees erupted in shocks of green and the rain came down in a hot thick curtain.

“You can come visit me at UGA—before I transfer, I mean. Get a preview of college life,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the storm as I opened the car door. “Hey, your little neighbor’s moving?” She pointed at the Dayals’ yellow house—even its rollicking colors looked muted in today’s weather.

I had to squint to make out the open house sign. Thunder rolled above. About a year ago, I was watching these storms from the glassy interior of the Hammond Creek Public Library; a year ago my world was smaller, and I’d bristled against its confinement.

“I would have known,” I said. “No way.”

“Life moves pretty fast, or whatever the line is. Hey. I’m sorry, again, about your friend.” She screwed up her nose. “Shruti.”

She zoomed her Saab up the hill, leaving me to hold that word, friend, like some stranger’s baby I had been tasked with minding. I watched the bumper stickers advertising years of Wendi’s honor roll statuses retreat out of our cul-de-sac. I stood in my driveway holding my suitcase and the quarterfinals trophy Wendi had disdained; she couldn’t stand to look at anything but first place. My skin and clothes were turning soggy. I stood there until I felt like pulp.

I tugged my bag through the puddles and crossed the cul-de-sac. The Waltham children spun around beneath the family’s basketball hoop, mouths open. It seemed impossible that life persisted, that people still dwelled in innocence. I blinked and tried to make my eyes resemble a man’s eyes. I did not reach for the watering can behind the azalea bush. I rang the bell.