I felt a burst of the best kind of pride. The kind that cracks open your whole face into a giant smile so big that you feel it in the tips of your fingers and toes, every muscle in your body coming to the party. Little things like this verified everything I had suspected about him from the beginning. And that verification felt great. It reaffi rmed my faith in myself, because I saw this, I sensed this, I picked this. I picked him and he was incredible.

I paused for a moment to hope that there was someone in his life—a friend, a brother, a girlfriend—to give him a high five or a long, fierce kiss in acknowledgement of his achievements. I was too happy and thrilled for him to even care that I was not the one allowed to tell him—congratulations, you’ve done the impossible. You’ve worked up excitement in that universal paragon of apathy: a too-cool-for-school teenager.

Hell, forget school. Bozey was too cool to express enthusiasm about anything that wasn’t a Kurt Cobain throwback or cutting-edge tech. Bozey was the last to arrive at parties, shaking his long hair out of his eyes and deigning to sip on a beer. Bozey was—oh shit! Bozey was waiting for me to reply.

‘S-sounds nice. He sounds nice, I mean. I think. Like, I don’t know. Um. What was he wearing?’

Polo stopped scratching Roger Fedora behind the ears for a minute to scrunch his nose at me. ‘You’re weird.’

Bozey hit Polo in the face with the cushion I’d chucked at him.

‘Ow! What’d you do that for? Listen, let’s roll.’

‘Why? Hey, Tars, when do you go back to the States?’

‘Less than two weeks, but I have to go to Delhi firs—’

‘Because I have to kick your team’s ass? Let’s go to my room and FIFA it up, dude.’

Bozey hung back as Polo left the room. ‘You coming, Tars?’ I laughed. ‘Yeah, totally! I can never ever get enough of video games! Idiot.’

He grinned. ‘So, like, do you want to go check out the new Italian place in Forum before you leave—’

‘BOZEY!’

‘COMING!’

‘COME NOW!’

‘COMING!’

‘DUDE, FIFA’S SET UP!’

‘COMING!’

‘Oh my God, just go. You guys are giving me a headache.’ Looking frustrated, Bozey shuffl ed away and I scurried online to see if I could find pictures of Jay giving the speech.

Under the golden glow of lights, so ostentatious that they highlighted what they were supposed to hide (ill-executed Dilli shoshagiri. At least they complemented the splurged-on Fendi purse spilling lipstick and crumpled cash by Nitwit’s feet), in a living room thick with glass platters and kebabs and mint sauce and gossiping aunts and stocks-are-up, pour-the-Walker uncles, I sent Polo a text:

Get me out of here.

He texted me back from Calcutta:

Thank God for my exams. Just eat and ignore.