Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian (10 ebook reader txt) 📗

a habit of tallying up other brown girls’ victories in her own personal loss column: Anita had a shot at MTI nationals; Imrana Ansari, one of Prachi’s frenemies from the dance team, had won a national essay-writing competition. Worst was Gita Menon, the former Scripps National Spelling Bee runner-up from Northview High School, who had gotten her Duke acceptance in December, taking the one slot Prachi was sure had been hers.

“Aloo,” my father said, reaching for the mushy potatoes.

“Let Anita Dayal prance about. Nothing to be jealous. We are very proud of you,” my mother said.

Preparation for the national pageant—to be held in New Jersey in April—was, as Prachi surmised, keeping Anita busy. Plus, this spring, she was playing tennis and tutoring English as a second language, while also finally turning the chicken biscuit sales into Habitat for Humanity houses. All this kept her late at school and brought her inside the perimeter on weekends.

Sometimes I held the hoops I’d taken from her nightstand in my palm. I wondered what they—she—would taste like. If I could smelt down her powers and mysteries and take them as my own. But for now, I stowed the earrings in my wallet, behind my learner’s permit, where they would remain for a long time.

•   •   •

Students on the honors track met with the college counselor once at the start of their sophomore spring. I plodded over to Mrs. Latimer’s office on the ground floor of Okefenokee High School one morning and sat in the hallway, waiting for her to finish another meeting.

I found myself staring at a bulletin board covered with photographs of OHS alumni holding up T-shirts displaying their collegiate futures: Wake Forest and Vanderbilt and UNC; sometimes Dartmouth or Caltech or Yale. The rest of the school was papered with pep rally banners and bake sale flyers; kids chewed gum and made out and bartered cigarettes and Ritalin. But here, in the nonsense-free honors corridors, there was a different currency. A currency that meant the unlikeliest people were rich, as I remembered when I saw who was now pushing open Mrs. Latimer’s door. Shruti Patel stopped in her tracks to see me outside.

“Oh, Neil!” she said, in that scratchy voice. “I always forget you’re an honors kid.”

“What a compliment, Shroots,” I said.

She plonked down next to me. “Mrs. Latimer is making some important phone calls on my behalf right now, so you’re going to have to wait a little bit. There are a lot of people who might want to have me around for the summer. What are you doing?”

Shruti wouldn’t speak to Juhi or Isha or Kartik or even Manu this way. It was me she felt comfortable poking at, and while normally I wouldn’t deprive her of this rare social joy, I was irritable that day. It was the end of a lemonade cycle, and I’d been trudging through precalculus homework feeling laconic and woolly.

“A debate institute,” I said evenly. “In East Lansing.”

She tugged one of her springy locks of hair. Her eyes crossed as she watched it bounce.

“I wish I had a track like you,” she said. “I have to be creative about my summers. Mrs. Latimer’s calling up this Congresswoman—” I tried to close my eyes and ignore Shruti as she painted pictures of her possible opportunities: bustling around Washington, D.C., chasing a House member, or being flown to Hong Kong to participate in a youth entrepreneurship summit, or immersing in a program for math geniuses at Stanford, and she was pretty sure Stanford was practically on the beach, so she’d be solving integrals in the sand. “But I heard from Mia Ahmed that people have tons of fun at debate camp, too.”

“Institute,” I said through gritted teeth, as though that sounded better.

“Mia says there’s this place in Michigan that’ll deep fry a burrito, an Oreo, anything you want. And a shop for dollar pizza. She got drunk in East Lansing last summer. She says there are hobos you can just ask to buy you alcohol. But promise you won’t, Neil, okay? Don’t get drunk in East Lansing all summer, right when you were getting to be so smart—”

“Neil Narayan?” Mrs. Latimer, a graying woman with an air of brutal capability, stepped into the hallway. “Oh, Shruti, you’re still here? I’ll get back to you about Hong Kong. I couldn’t reach that alum.”

Mrs. Latimer spent a few minutes reviewing my file with an air of unfamiliarity. I gathered that she’d heard of Shruti before her meeting—most teachers had—but that I’d flown under her radar. Without looking up from my transcript, she suggested I begin to define myself.

“Not according to what you think a college wants to hear, understand,” she insisted. “But according to where you see yourself in, say, ten years. So. Any idea? Where you see yourself?”

I said I guessed I could see myself in California. I’d been to the Bay Area once, on vacation, when we visited my uncle Gopi and aunt Sandhya in Fremont. I’d loved San Francisco—the way the gray fog met the gray water, the way the Golden Gate emerged from the sienna mountains. I saw myself roaming amid the pastel homes crowded against one another like uneven smiles, or reading in a bay window with a view of the Pacific. (“You want to live here?” my father had chuckled, noticing the pull the city exerted over me. “You better get rich. Those houses on the water, they’re millions-millions.”)

“California,” Mrs. Latimer repeated. “Well, geography is a start. But how about your interests? What are you passionate about?”

“I’m a debater.”

“That’s your passion?”

Neeraj, you’re supposed to imagine!

“Sure,” I said.

“A debater. So, you’re interested in, say, politics? Law?”

I mumbled a few more sures, and then she began sculpting the fib into a plan—I should consider doing voter registration drives, tackle a column in the school paper, found a chapter of the Young Republicans or Democrats. I should sit for the AP Government exam, though the class wasn’t offered at our school—“Are you friends with Ms. Patel out