“I’m not hiding,” she said with all the indignation of a liar. Then, just to prove it, she stepped out from under the bleachers, dusting off her soccer shorts and jersey.

It was safe now anyway. Her teammates were gone. She usually hid until they left, so she didn’t have to go through the entire song and dance of why she couldn’t go out with them on a Friday night after practice.

She had to get back to Baba. Fridays were hard on him. Curried Dreams stayed open until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, so she went to Palo Alto to help.

It’s not like she couldn’t tell her teammates this, but she didn’t want to. No one needed to know anything about her family. She liked having her life divided neatly into airtight compartments, nice and tidy. No one in her family knew that she had gone back to playing soccer either. It wasn’t a small thing to hide, playing a varsity sport, but Trisha had graduated early, and Vansh was at boarding school, so Ashna was the only Raje at the high school, which had worked out perfectly when, as a freshman, she had rediscovered the sport by accident.

When she’d lived in Sripore, it hadn’t been a choice. Mamma’s life revolved around getting girls to play sports, so naturally her daughter had to play. Ashna didn’t let the pop of sadness drag her down. The days of her mother caring about what Ashna did were long gone. When Baba moved her here, he and everyone else in the family seemed to forget that she’d had a life before that. It was as though that twenty-hour flight erased her life in Sripore.

In freshman year, Ashna had found herself at the tryouts. She had no idea why she’d gone, because she hadn’t allowed herself to miss it. When she made the team, the idea of telling anyone didn’t even enter her mind. Baba wouldn’t have come to her games anyway. He’d gotten so big in the past few years that he was having a harder and harder time getting in the car. Driving out to the Anchorage once every few months to see his mother was the only time he left home and the restaurant. She didn’t want Mina Kaki and HRH coming to games and making a big deal out of it. As for Shobi, it was out of the question. Ashna did not need to give her parents another reason to fight.

Exactly when the secret started to feel good, Ashna had no idea, but having something all her own had felt great. One less thing in which her success or failure was naked in front of everyone. Her cousins were her best friends, but she couldn’t even tell them. The lie had become comforting in a way she couldn’t explain.