“Somebody wants to off themselves, they’ll do it no matter what. It’s a constitutional weakness.”

Two sharp female voices spoke at once: “Pranesh, stop!” and “Papa, stop!”

Anita stood on the cream-colored carpeting of the front staircase. She wore faded, frayed denim shorts and a blue tank top bearing her Bobcat Cross-Country logo—a dark, slender figure running on a winding road.

Anita’s father glanced between all three of us, shrugged, and walked to the kitchen. “Anjali, that idiot Hunt fellow keeps calling. For godsake call him back.”

Anjali Auntie followed. I was alone in the foyer with Anita. She was glaring at the floor. You’re supposed to imagine! How far she seemed from that little girl who’d brimmed over with myriad realities.

“So,” I said. “You’re leaving.”

“Yes,” she said, galumphing back upstairs. She was slight, but she had a soldier’s marching gait. “And I’m still not interested in talking to you.”

I let myself out; the rain had halted, and the sun was drying out the concrete and the asphalt. The foliage shone even brighter, glistening with raindrops; we were rich with the season, and no one seemed to know that the border between life and death had suddenly become as thin as gossamer.

I tossed the trophy in the Walthams’ garbage bin on my way home.

MY PARENTS had mostly gone mute after Shruti’s death, as though afraid that by comforting me they’d disturb some crucial rhythms of my newly acquired work ethic. But after debate nationals, after AP exams (which I roundly flunked—even Euro), once summer had begun, my mother turned off my alarm clock and took to waking me up by sitting on the edge of my bed and placing her hand on parts of me that must have reminded her of me as a baby—the soft skin on my neck, the cushion of my belly. “It’s morning, rajah,” she’d try.

“Stop doing this,” I told her after a few days. “It’s weird.”

I didn’t care that my mother’s eyes filled, as though I’d pinched her hard with my fingernails, when I said that.

My father subbed in. One night he came home from work still wearing his white coat and knocked on my door. I was napping. I was almost always napping. He placed several laminated diagrams on my messy desk and indicated that I should take a seat. I obeyed and looked at the pictures. A black-and-white brain appeared in one, punctuated by brightly colored dots that marked the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebellum, etc. On another, a neon DNA helix and a word salad of gene names.