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

not that he could get into princeton (!)

neil_is_indian: thats rando

anibun91: ok ya

anibun91: but then when i mentioned the pageant he was like o maybe ill come

anibun91: (!?!!?!!?!?!?!!?!?! whaaaaat)

neil_is_indian: the brown ppl will trample him

neil_is_indian: “one of these is not like the others”

neil_is_indian: “kill outsider”

anibun91: im so embarrassed

neil_is_indian: no ur not

anibun91: what do u mean of course i am

neil_is_indian: ur gonna win its gonna be fine

neil_is_indian: & he likes u even if he is an asshole

anibun91: who says hes an asshole?

neil_is_indian: u did?

anibun91: w/e no he isnt

anibun91: but actually im like so sick of this pageant and all the fobs

anibun91: and sick of being only

anibun91: like

anibun91: pretty for a brown girl

anibun91: hey u still there

anibun91: ??

neil_is_indian: ya sorry @ debate

neil_is_indian: wendi on my ass

anibun91: oooooooooh

neil_is_indian: not like that shes anal

neil_is_indian: also not like that

anibun91: w/e u have yellow fever

neil_is_indian: ???????

anibun91: melanie, wendi, lol

neil_is_indian: theyr both twinkies and im a coconut so nothing counts

anibun91: um literally ur screen name

neil_is_indian: its IRONIC

neil_is_indian: g2g

anibun91: ok bai

neil_is_indian: good luck

neil_is_indian: this weekend

neil_is_indian: w the pageant i mean

anibun91: i might not like him

anibun91: like im not totally sure now?

neil_is_indian: sam?

anibun91: ya

neil_is_indian: who do u like then

anibun91: who says i *have* to like someone?

neil_is_indian: okok

anibun91: now i g2g

neil_is_indian: actually wait

neil_is_indian: can i talk to u about smthg

neil_is_indian: kinda important

anibun91 has signed off

•   •   •

The weekend Anita and her mother were in New Jersey—which was also the weekend before debate nationals—I let myself into the Dayals’ house early on Saturday morning using the key beneath the watering can.

In the basement, I set about performing the routine I had been memorizing for months.

Shruti’s chain piled into itself in the basin. Was this how the forty-niners felt—sweaty, exhausted, sick with themselves, having left behind all that was familiar for this gleaming element? Flux, sloshing. Goggles, the rest of the ill-lit basement obscured through the plastic.

I started to recite the string of foreign phrases—Asya swarnasya kantihi shaktir gnyanam casmabhihi praapyataam—but I stumbled. I started again. I watched the gold almost throbbing in the basin, like it was daring me to take it. “Fuck,” I muttered. Then I clamped my hands over my mouth, afraid for a moment that I’d polluted the enchantment with my cursing. I took a great heaving breath, began again, and got through it that time . . . and at last, there was the liquid, my shot of gold, the same as it had always looked at the end of this process and yet completely different—because this time it was all mine.

The lemonade: I pumped all the juice I could out of the fruit, feeling the thing release in my palm, a muscle spasming pleasurably at my touch. I picked up a string of lemon pulp with my pinky and felt its pucker on the inside of my mouth—headily, I thought, This life contains more than I know. And at last the gold falling into the lemonade, the sigh in the pitcher, the muffled rush of the carbonation forming, the columns of bubbles like the light falling from the disco ball at the Spring Fling dance. Then I drank, calling upon the focus Anita had taught me months earlier, and I tasted Shruti Patel.

She tasted unlike the others, distinct from the baby bangles and coins and pendants and teardrop earrings and men’s Om chains that I had been consuming for months.

Because she was not sweet.

Perhaps I had done something wrong with the proportions. Or perhaps—I now think—I had not successfully masked the bitterness, the murk, the complications.

Afterward, I cleaned vigorously. I poured the extra lemonade into one of the vials Anita’s mother kept above the basement fridge. I put it in my backpack, wrapping it in gym socks. I went for a three-mile jog—the run had nothing to do with Shruti, who could not run a mile to save her life; that was me, converting her into all I wanted to be.

That night I watched Anita earn her crown as Miss Teen India USA, and when my parents came into the living room to see me tuned in to Zee TV, they raised their eyebrows and said, “Really, watching that?” and I said, “She’s not so bad,” and they sat, too, and my mother rolled her eyes when Anita launched into her charity speech—battered women, again. She had at last been to Queens; the Dayal women had stopped in at the shelter before heading to New Jersey, delivering soaps and lotions and cosmetic products. Anita told an anecdote of a Bangladeshi woman beaten by her husband, left homeless, turned to prostitution, because “we do what we must to survive, and there was nowhere for her to go, no safe place and no home for her in this foreign country.”

•   •   •

It was Prachi who answered the phone Sunday night. I don’t know who began the telephone tree, which aunties’ voices carried the news from the Patels’ house to ours. At eleven, my sister came into my room and asked me to put away the heavy Dell laptop on which I was typing frantically. I had a grand idea to premiere at nationals, a plan related to fusion energy. I was a diviner; my computer light in my dark room was the light of the gold in the rock—

Prachi, wearing Blue Devils blue, sat on my bed, took the laptop, and told me the news.

She repeated it; she did not know if I had heard. I was reduced to rabbity, muscular reactions. My cheek convulsed. I bit my lip and tasted blood, which smacks somehow of metal.

I looked out my window, past the stinking spring Bradford pear on the Walthams’ lawn. Anita’s house remained dark. The Dayals had not yet returned from New Jersey. Perhaps they were barreling north from Hartsfield-Jackson in their brown Toyota. For a wild moment I wished that they would crash, be plowed into by some drunk or insane Atlanta driver, so they would never know what I’d done.

At some point that night, Prachi left, and at some point that night, my parents said things, useless things. When I was