Varun stopped pacing. ‘I’m fucked, no? You fucked me.’

‘In a manner of speaking. Mate in three,’ Eram said.

‘Tchah,’ Varun spat out his disgust. He toppled the white king with a toe and stormed off into his bedroom. He came back seconds later insisting that Eram arm-wrestle him.

Boys killed Gehna. They forever wanted to arm-wrestle or some damn thing. Even before sex had entered the mix, she’d been hooked. On their crude high-fiving banter. The way they were secretly grubby but preened like peacocks whenever someone entered the room. All they needed to make any day perfect was to crack a joke and people laughed. Funny boys, skinny boys, sweaty boys, geeky boys. Boys who asked you to feel their bicep every two minutes. The ones who peed without lifting the seat just because, y’know, excellent marksmanship. They took careful aim with their shiny air rifles and shot pigeons down to the ground; they rescued pigeons with broken wings and nursed them back to health. Bigger was always better, faster was better still, and loudest won.

Their main fear was that they would be laughed at, so they learnt to laugh first.

Once, when she was around nine, Gehna had followed Varun and three of his buddies to a nearby lake where they liked to sunbathe. Sneaking up behind the flat rock on which her brother’s gang lay like a quartet of shirtless pancakes, she had been curious. Was there some secret code to being a tribe of boys? How did one get in? She thought that if she eavesdropped on their conversations a little, she might unlock the mysteries of boydom. Varun, the undisputed leader of the pack, had been engaged in deep debate with Parul, the chubbiest of the four.

In a fair fight, Varun was saying, Superman would mop the floor with Batman.

What’s a fair fight? The guy’s got superpowers, man!

Well . . . any fight then. In any fight between them, the Bat’s going down.

The other two cronies agreed, reaching up to slap palms with Varun. The Bat’s going down. Word.

Parul breathed on his spectacles and polished them as a prop while he made his point. I don’t know, Batman’s pretty versatile. It wouldn’t be a straight-up victory for Supes. And anyway the thing is that the question is academic. They’re both successful DC franchises and there’s no profit in bringing them together in the same comic. Better to hint that it might happen someday, to keep idiots like us guessing.

Varun was pretty versatile himself. He was no bully, but he did like to win. And if an argument couldn’t be won with words, he usually won it by other means. He jumped up and the three of them flung Parul into the lake. Franchise this, Fatso. They swaggered off, hooting.

Poor Parul. Even now, remembering the incident, Gehna could feel his pain. The pain of being a thirteen-year-old boy who was overweight. As he had sat slumped and dripping on the mossy shore of the lake, everything about him said heavy. The flesh that pooled under his soaked T-shirt and on his thighs, making his knees disappear. The specs that seemed to drag all the features of his face downward. Even his name, which was gender-neutral but traditionally given to girls, was a burden the young boy was ill-equipped to carry.