She’s usually too rushed and exhausted on her visits home to go through any of the stuff in her room. But today, her eyes pause on the gold spine of her seventh-grade yearbook. She flips to her picture. Nobody who knows her now would believe that’s actually her. The baby fat, braces, frizzy hair, thick glasses, and forced smile make her look like another person. A sadder, softer person.

She’s taken back to the musty gray locker rooms where she was too self-conscious about her weight and hairy legs to change in front of the other girls. One day, Blair, the school’s queen bee, asked why Suhani always ran into the bathroom stalls after PE. Suhani tried to ignore Blair (in her fantasy, she told Blair off, but really, she awkwardly laughed, then ran away). Blair then appointed the rest of the popular girls to start chanting “Suhani is a dark and hairy man!” every day after class. For the rest of middle school, Suhani gave up on getting out of Blair’s way. Instead, she cried on the bus ride home every afternoon, and when she walked through the door she focused on the two things she could control: getting perfect grades and pretending she was fine. It was too easy to tell Mom and Dad everything was great as she asked them to sign below her row of straight As. The only time she felt anything close to relief was over the summers, when she’d sit in the backyard alone with a dripping grape Popsicle and a Baby-Sitters Club book in her hands.

Two years later, in an attempt to be less of a target at school, she mastered the art of being likable and polite. She learned to keep controversial opinions to herself, nod even when she disagreed with someone, and brush off insults. She also discovered waxing, contact lenses, calorie counting, and makeup tips from the Glamour magazines she still has. Beauty was supposed to shield her, but sometimes she forgot whether she was growing up or giving in and just becoming who the world wanted her to be.

And while the bullying stopped, the more subtly corrosive discrimination continued. She got called “exotic.” Minutes after she was voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” a teacher asked if her parents were setting her up to have an arranged marriage. Once, when she picked up tampons from CVS, a customer told her to “go back to India.” During her lowest moments, she had fleeting thoughts about what it would be like to end it all, and then she’d snap back to reality.