Aria had never been given the luxury of wondering whether or not she could swim. She had never been given the choice to jump or not to. There was something in the weakness of their buffered lives that she both despised and envied. For the first time in months, she thought about the school she had dropped out of. Dropping out had proven to be a conflicting move. On the one hand, it made her both freer and therefore more empowered than her peers. It was like she had broken out of a prison that the rest of them had chosen to stay trapped in. On the other hand, she could clearly see now how everyone else was being funneled down the road of success. They were both supported and led. She was now forced to fend for herself in a world that she had not been ready for. Nothing about her future was a guarantee, least of all success. Aria’s graph was measured by an axis of pain.

Sitting on the green, Aria felt bad about herself. Though the other students would see her as indistinguishable from themselves and probably mistake her for one of them, Aria could not forget the differences between herself and them. She felt classless. It was strange to her; given that she found school so embarrassingly cumbersome, dumb even, that seeing herself as a dropout would cause her to feel so bad about herself. She chased the feeling away by finding a bathroom and washing her face with cold water.

The threat of failure chased the students like a specter toward their chosen majors. It made them run from classroom to classroom and study from dawn to dusk. Only the occasional student looked to have ended up there by accident, or to have been placed there because of the prestige belonging to their parents, who viewed their attendance there to be critical. Academic prestige lingered over the buildings, whose prime had come and gone. The words belonging to the books read and exams taken there for over a hundred years were written heavy on its chaptered stone.

Aria leaned against that stone, waiting to see Omkar’s face again. Waiting for him to take her somewhere less pretentious, somewhere that wouldn’t serve as such a somber reminder of her shortcomings.

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 29

Their love was in the color of conviction. It was in the weightless communion of their lips and nectared smiles. The light coming through the window of the motel room was blanched. It teased its way through the over-starched curtains to spill across their faces. They did not answer its call.