In “Valedictorian,” Annesha Mitha tells a coming-of-age story in which two “good” Indian girls decide to shed their squeaky-clean images. In doing so, the protagonist discovers that friendships can betrayed, that getting what you want can be crushing, and that happiness isn’t always what you expect.
The problem, Nandini and I both agreed, was that we were too good. We made honor roll each year. We had ivy league aspirations. We participated in twelve extracurriculars between the two of us. Quiz Bowl and Model UN, violin and Kathak, competitive baking and Future Problem Solvers. We were well-rounded, which was a phrase that meant that we could have any future of our choosing, as long as our parents agreed.
Nandini’s father was a manager at a suburban athletic store and her mother was a dental hygienist, but she came from generations of West Bengal farmers. My father, on the other hand, worked for NASA. His work kept him out of the house on most days, which I did not mind. When I was around him for too long my fear clung to my clothes and made them smell tart and animal. I was the last point in a long line of doctors and scientists, lawyers and priests. So while Nandini felt pressure from her family to create a legacy from scratch, my own ancestors huffed at my neck with their sour breath. Ma and Baba made sure I knew that I must be equal to my past, and more importantly, equal to my cousins, the daughters of Baba’s only and far more successful brother.
Later in our lives I would understand the depth of the gulf that separated us, how at odds continuance and creation could be. But when we were fourteen, all that mattered was that we wanted the same things. We wanted 4.0 GPAs. We wanted to win the science fair. We wanted full scholarships to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, anywhere with a name that felt heavy in our mouths.
And we didn’t want to be so good anymore.
It was Nandini who said it first. We were sitting at the fireproof lunch tables with our precalculus homework fanned out in front of us, neglecting our worksheets to eavesdrop on the popular girls at the neighboring table, their stories about sneaking out through the fire escape, handjobs in the parking lot of Taco Bell, boyfriends old enough to sport goatees. This was not unusual. The popular girls always gossiped, and while seating was not assigned at lunch, it might as well have been—we all knew where we belonged. Nandini was my best friend, and we understood each other. She had a fearful way of existing in the world, her face peering out of her wild tangle of hair, but I knew that she could be fiercely ambitious. Not everyone with good grades is ambitious. Some of them are just following a script. Nandini’s fire was strong and true.
I knew her better than anyone. But that day, Nandini was wearing a smile, small and pained, that was entirely unfamiliar to me.
“Why can’t we do any of that? The kissing and stuff,” she asked me, clicking her pen twice against her chin.
I thought the answer to her question so obvious that it was not worth my energy, and it took me almost a minute before I looked up and said, “We’re better than that. Our parents raised us different.” Ma’s voice squatted under my tongue.
“But it’s not that we don’t want to,” continued Nandini. “It’s that we can’t. It’s not in us. We just can’t. Even if we wanted to.”
“That’s not true.”
“But doesn’t that make you sad?”
For the first time in our friendship her voice was unkind.
I waved her off, then made an excuse to go to history class early. But as I sat in that cold empty room, my sweater drawn over my lap and flashcards color coded across the desk, I found that Nandini’s thought had slipped inside of my head. There it paced, filling my brain with footsteps. There are things that the other girls do that I cannot do. The thought stayed with me as I received my A+ paper for the day, then impressed my piano and Kumon teachers at two separate after-school lessons. It worked its way into my blood as I typed under the blue beam of the family computer, collecting graphics for my science project on electrical radiation and its effect on hormonal growth. And it continued to follow me through the weeks and months, through the first crest of tests and papers and the junior musician competitions that came after. The sheen of my success unglossed, my trophies felt ugly, and for the first time I felt the full suffocation of my circumstances. It became a feeling, not a fact, that Ma never let me linger with my friends after Model UN practice, that Baba wouldn’t let me go to homecoming because he didn’t raise a whore. It was as if I was suddenly aware of the paths of life that were closed to me, and I felt each of these dead futures as a wall in my chest that kept my breath from flowing. And though throughout all these weeks I acted normal for Nandini, sharing testing strategies and proofreading her essays, I was annoyed at her for making me feel this way, for making me feel the coasts and cliffs of the small island that was my fourteen-year-old life. But I didn’t dare show it.
“Ma,” I asked once during this time, hating the upwards slide of my voice. “Do you think I could go to homecoming?” It was late at night, and the rouge she put on each morning and wiped away each night had faded into a tangerine blush. It was always surprising to me that my mother put on so much makeup, and yet never allowed me even the most muted lipsticks. In fact, the moment I began to bleed, she threw out all lotions except those with neutral, unattractive scents, aloe or spearmint. Ma looked at me in surprise. Trouble flashed across her brow—I never asked her for anything.
“Ask your Baba,” she said, something she knew I would never do. And then I was ashamed of myself for wanting to go.
* * *
Exam season was already underway when I realized that Nandini had been changing for the worse. She walked into class looking different. She still wore the Salvation Army sweaters her mother found for her, but on her neck was a solid black choker, and on her wrist a silver chain. That day, for the first time, she looked more like the other girls than me.
“You’ll never guess what happened,” she told me.
What happened is that she had lied to her mother and gone to the mall instead of to Teens Against Drugs (TAD). She had met up with two of the girls from our history class, girls that sparkled in chameleon clothes and wore their hair in curtains, girls who didn’t even know my name. At the mall they bought matching jewelry. Afterwards, a man Nandini had never seen before drove them all down to the creek, and she had kissed a boy named Steph very gently, on the cheek. Nandini told the whole story on the balls of her feet, a smile crazying her mouth.
“Steph?” I asked.
“He’s a college student,” said Nandini, almost exploding with glee. “Me,” she whisper-screamed, “with a college student.”
The image of Nandini’s lips, oiled and red, stuck in my throat like a fishbone. I felt the kiss against my breast, the greasiness of it. I imagined Steph as tall, many-pimpled, with a backpack full of notebooks slung over one shoulder. I imagined him stooping to her level. I imagined my own lips kissing, but they were dry and chafing, with a ledge of chapped skin that bled a little when I smiled too wide. How did she know to go to that mall and talk to those girls?
Who had she been talking to without me? From my bones emerged a tangled, fiery feeling—anger, jealousy, and something else, some strange desire, that gathered like a heat in my throat.
The teacher began the lesson, and for the rest of the class Nandini and I sat in separate pools of silence.
* * *
“I’ve been thinking of what you did, and I have an idea,” I told her the next day at lunch.
Nandini’s kiss, I argued, wasn’t proof that we were free. It was too small a thing, too chaste. Kids’ stuff. We needed to do something else, I explained, one single act to soil ourselves, forever and ever and ever, definitive proof that we were not as good as our parents and the whole school wanted us to be. We needed to lose…and I whispered this part…our virginities.
I can’t tell you where the thought came from, why it was so drastic. It was just the wildest thing I could think of. Once I did this, I thought, Nandini would see me, really see me, for the first time. Not as a fellow loser, but as a full and adventurous girl.
“I thought you didn’t approve of that stuff,” Nandini asked.
I forced a smile. “I’m not some kind of prude,” I replied, “If the other girls do it, it can’t be that bad.”
Nandini grinned. Any other time she would have been skeptical, but I could tell she was happy not to have lost her friend. “We’re not going into this blind,” she said. “We have to do our research.”
* * *
Research, for us, meant a flailing internet connection and incognito mode. It meant lying that yes, we were over the age of eighteen and prepared to see sensitive materials. We googled words I had only ever heard in health class, added flesh to the diagrams from biology.
On the porn site we watched any video we could find in the amateur category (everything except the lesbian ones, because Nandini told me there was a limit to what God would forgive). The first video we watched Nandini ran to the bathroom and heaved until yolky vomit spilled over her lips. But then she came back, and we watched the videos again. Again. Until our stomachs hardened to lead, and the taste of acid faded from our tongues. Until we could say, “I could do that, if I wanted to,” and it was only half a lie. Our hands were sweaty with the cartons of strawberry milk we had taken from the cafeteria, which we loved for the color and the delicate, ashy taste.
“How do you know if you’re orgasming?” I asked.
Nandini pointed at the video we were watching on her father’s laptop. “You make that face.”
I watched the pleasure-pain surge from under the white lady’s skin, how it crested over her features and came to rest at the corners of her penciled eyebrows.
“How do you know when to stop?”
“I think he decides that,” said Nandini. There was a shot of the woman’s behind, skin rippling so quickly it must have bruised.
“What if we get pregnant?”
“I feel like we’re too young.” She leaned over me to get a pencil, but her arm brushed mine and we jumped back. The watching had raised heat to the surface of our skins, and we were shocked by the burning we felt in our touches. We looked around the room, the bean bag chairs, the video, anything but our red-rimmed faces.
After hours of research, we concluded that sex was more good than bad. We learned about STIs, but thought it unlikely that we’d receive one if we chose another virgin. We learned about pregnancy, but felt in our hearts that we were too young, even though the internet said that we weren’t. Besides, there were free condoms in the nurse’s office, though we found it too embarrassing to practice them on bananas and pencil cases like the internet suggested for first-timers. Despite the risks, we craved the ripe pleasure of the women in the videos. Our favorite parts were when they stopped faking, when their moans and cries lapsed into something more wild, more guttural, more free. That was what sex could give you, what we could not give ourselves. True abandon. That was what Nandini and I were chasing.
* * *
I went to the bathroom to look at myself. I knew of my vagina, newly furred. It was a fur unlike that of my arms and legs, crunchier somehow, with wicked twists. I felt two large lumps of flesh at the crux of my legs, and two thinner tongues. The right tongue was longer than the left, long enough that in the summer months it would become gummy with sweat and chafe. I knew there was a knot of flesh between my thighs that oozed sparks when I scraped it, but this did not give me any sort of pleasure—only a peculiar jolt. I never touched it for more than a second, and only out of curiosity, to check if such an intensity of sensation was still within range of my body. I tried to imagine a man inside me. I tried to imagine how he would fit, down there, where it felt like all possible space was taken.
* * *
Nandini and I were raised brown in the American half-South, Northern enough that the barbecue was still mediocre, but Southern enough that sex education was an illuminated NO on a flickering projector. Our parents hadn’t told us anything except to remain stitched in our clothing and to train our eyes on the floor and our homework. The only scrap of information we had between the two of us was that kiss by the creek bed, which Nandini described as “soft.”
Nandini and I signed a contract, but we couldn’t bear to write the words sex, or lose, or virginity. The understanding was that if it went well for me, Nandini would follow, perhaps with Steph, if he replied to her email, but perhaps with someone else. At first, I wondered if I should ask her to go first. But I wanted her to know that I was brave, that I could be as bold as she was on that night when she kissed a boy on the cheek.
“Do we have to write it down?” I asked.
We signed a blank page, torn out of our math notebooks. Her name after mine. “We can never tell anyone,” I said. Nandini nodded.
* * *
We went through a list of names.
“Arthur?”
“Too conservative.”
“Michael T?”
“Weird nose.”
“Steph?” I ventured, naming the college student who had kissed Nandini on the cheek, the one who had started all of this. Nandini blushed, then lied (I could always tell when she was lying, she always buried her hands in her hair).
“He hasn’t replied to my email.”
So she wanted him to herself, I thought. That was fine. I’d show her that I could find a boy all my own.
“Tripp?” I asked.
“He’d tell his mom.”
“Noah?”
“God, no. He’d tell the whole school.”
“What about Liam?” I asked. Nandini looked skeptical.
“He doesn’t like you,” she said, and then her face changed. “Or maybe he likes you too much.”
Liam was a childhood bully. Mine, everyone’s, but especially mine. I think a part of him had always been in love with the way I felt pain. He pulled on my hair and dumped an entire bottle of Elmer’s glue onto my chair. He once tried to drown me, but had laughed it off as a prank. I used to be afraid of him, of his knuckles that grew untimely calluses from years of junior karate. On Facebook he’d post pictures of himself snapping boards with a spray of sweat, and I watched them on a loop, hoping I’d become less fearful if I saw him at his worst. I didn’t know what made me extraordinary to him, what made him concentrate his roughness upon me, even though with other girls, the ones Ma said were practically prostitutes, he was, though not kind, at least a little less cruel. But I saw how my pain glowed in his face.
The social hierarchy of high school had not been kind to Liam. Middle school bullying techniques didn’t age well, and the first time he put a lizard in a cheerleader’s lunchbox he was exiled to the outer reaches of the cafeteria, where he read pulpy mysteries and spit at anyone within spitting distance. Compared to the boy I once knew, the terror of my childhood, he looked deflated, maybe even in need of rescuing. I knew what the girls always repeated to themselves after every skinned knee or pulled ponytail; boys only do that when they like you. And besides, from the videos I had seen with Nandini, the robotic thrusts, the snarls that filled our screens, I couldn’t see how any man could do that to a woman without hating her at least a little.
“I think he’s changed,” I told Nandini. “He’s so quiet now.”
But privately I thought about how my father hated my mother, but still held her close at night. Maybe this was power, to stare hate in the face and make it small, like turning a wolf into a dog. I liked this thought because it made my mother seem powerful, not broken by her years of marriage. I liked it, too, because it seemed easier than the alternative: to find someone who actually wanted me.
“Your funeral,” she shrugged, but she knew that from our list, Liam was the boy most likely to agree.
* * *
I thought it would be difficult to get Liam alone. I thought I would have to reproduce a weakness in my face that would override whatever he had learned in anger management last summer. But I suppose that weakness was already present, because after class he paused by my desk as if he knew I had something to say.
“Can I talk to you?” I said, my voice quavering as I tried to give it a seductive lilt.
“What is it?” Liam asked impatiently, his face vampiric under the fluorescent lights.
“Let’s go somewhere, not here,” I said, shooting a look towards the science teacher.
“Why?”
“Just do it, I’m serious, it’s important.”
He followed me out to the deserted hallway.
“So I’ve been thinking,” I started, “I’ve always found you… kind of cute?” Even these tame words felt strange on my tongue.
“What?”
“It’s just that… I’ve been thinking…”
“Yeah, you said that,” said Liam.
“I kind of want to do it with you.”
“It?”
“You know. Like it it.”
The shock spread through Liam’s face. “It it? Like sex?” he repeated. “Are you fucking serious?”
I flinched at the curse word. “Yeah,” I said, and then, after a moment, “do you not know how?”
Liam grabbed my face, roughly, then softly, and I felt like his fingers were sinking into my skin, into the gristle of my skull and bones. “Of course I fucking know how.”
And then I said, with the steel of a much older woman: “Show me.”
* * *
We chose the janitor’s closet, because we knew the janitor was out sick. We chose roughness and eye contact and most of our clothes still on. I tried to choose the softness of Nandini’s kiss, but before I could guide my lips to his, gently, he was pushing me back against the supply cabinet, the chlorine smell of bleach burning our nostrils. His hands fumbled for the buckle of my belt.
Now, when I remember his face, I remember the boy in him. Acne smeared cheeks still heavy with baby fat. A coarse crop of his teenage hair teased into an unflattering spike. I remember how his face contorted with that first rough shove, his lips disappearing in a pucker.
The pain was bright. It lit up the closet and made me gasp between my teeth. I could feel him squishing against me, and it felt so different than I imagined. I didn’t have to scream, and he didn’t have to tell me to shut up. The scream was already in my face, and the shut up was already in his. We held the violence in the veins that popped on our collarbones. Afterwards I was left with the scream rough around my ankles, a few drops of blood hissing from between my legs.
He walked out and I told myself not to follow him, not to grab his shoulders, not to take the shout in my lungs and shove it between his lips. Hadn’t he done exactly what I wanted him to?
* * *
Nandini was supposed to wait for me in the bus loop so we could debrief before Ma came to pick me up. But she was nowhere to be seen.
I thought I would feel different somehow, but I didn’t. Instead, it was the world that felt different, raw and red, the whole planet like an open wound. I wanted this, I reminded myself, I asked for it, and now I’m not good anymore. And then that thought, repeated with weight: I’m not good anymore. I saw Ma’s car in the driveway and shoved myself inside, slouching in the passenger’s seat so she wouldn’t see where that thin seam of blood met the denim of my jeans. Ma was meant to take me to SAT prep (it’s never too early, she said to anyone who questioned why a fourteen-year-old was in SAT prep), but she could see the wrongness under my skin, and even though I tried to answer her questions with my typical buoyancy, I couldn’t make myself match the girl I had been just a few hours ago. I didn’t fit myself.
“Are you okay?” Ma asked in Bangla.
“I’m feeling a little sick.” I wanted to go home and hide in the jaws of my bed. I wanted to cry until the jagged edges of today dissolved into tomorrow, until I didn’t have to be in today anymore. I wanted this, I wanted this, I told myself, and Nandini wanted this for me.
Normally, my mother would say something like, “You look fine, that’s no excuse to be lazy,” or “You think Nobel prize winners stop when they’re sick?” but she was my mother, and she knew when something was wrong.
“We still have to go to SAT practice,” she said, but more gently than she normally would.
I felt like a wet mouth into which anything could be placed. As the car pulled out of the parking lot, all I could think was that I had done it. What I was not supposed to do. And the thought was not as open or as free as I had imagined.
* * *
The only time when I was encouraged to be social was at pujas, when the roving eyes of the Bangla aunties were upon me. It was generally considered unsavory when a child sequestered themselves at puja, even to pray, because our community was religious only as far as religion led to good food and dance. Parents wore their children’s ostensible happiness as badges of achievement, especially when this happiness was paired with good grades and a chaste reputation, as mine was. And yet, though we did not invest ourselves overtly in religion, we followed a careful code. The rules came from nowhere, or they came from India, or they came from our parents’ parents. Where they came from didn’t matter, only that they were real. Only that they were followed.
“Where’s Srijana?” I asked at puja, about two weeks after I had honored my pact with Nandini. We were a constellation of barely pubescent girls gathered in the community center stairwell. We had styrofoam trays balanced on the knobby points of our knees; butter chicken for those who still considered themselves kids, ilish maach and begun bhaja for those of us with more adult pretentions. Nandini sat further up the stairwell, braiding another girl’s hair. She was wearing a kurta and jeans, while the rest of us were in elaborate saris shipped to us by aunts and uncles. Nandini and I had only had a cursory debrief, in which she asked me how it went, and I said, “Well.” I thought she would ask more questions, but she didn’t. She let the silence curtain between us. She seemed angry somehow, but that seemed impossible to me. We had dreamed the action together, we had signed a contract, made a pact.
“You didn’t hear about Srijana?” Piali said with her mouth full. “They sent her back.”
“Back?”
“They sent her to Kolkata. You know. For what she did with Eric.”
Piali stopped eating at the shock on my face. A few grains of curried rice dropped from the fingers she had compressed into a beak. “You didn’t know?”
Piali explained that a cop prowling the Barnes & Noble parking lot had found Srijana naked in the back seat of her boyfriend’s Toyota Camry. She explained the calls to the parents, the pants around the ankles, the lips around the—
“I get it,” I said quickly.
Piali shrugged.
They sent her back. I had only been to Kolkata once. My mother had lost sight of me in the market. I was only five, and barely remember what I had seen and heard in the hours where we were apart. I only remember the scolding I received afterwards, all my memories of the city replaced by shame of what I had done. India, I learned from my mother’s yelling, was not a safe place for good girls.
I imagined Srijana misted with sweat, beating rugs in the sunshine and singeing her eyebrows over vats of daal. I imagined her pastiched into all the National Geographic specials I had watched about India while studying for my global history test, specials that seemed to reek with pain. Back. A panic clenched inside me. Would my parents send me back? Would I deserve it?
I looked at Nandini, to see that she was already staring at me with a mix of fear and pity. There was a hollowness in the way she looked at me, as if from a great distance. I was in danger and she was not.
The year before, Srijana, Nandini, and I had crouched in the stairwell and pretended that the sounds of the crowds above us was evidence of the zombie horde, that we were the only ones with enough life inside of us to resist the apocalypse that had certainly ripped through our puja. When our mothers called for us we grabbed each other and giggled. “It’s a trap,” we had whispered. “Monsters can take the voices of mothers.” Srijana and I lived in different school districts, and we loved each other with the half love of people who only saw each other once a year, and who knew they would never make the effort to see each other anymore.
We had grown up in the past year. Srijana, Nandini, Piali, the other girls. A year ago, Piali would have been more embarrassed than I was about bodies and blowjobs, a year ago any mention of kissing would have instigated a riot of laughter. A year ago, none of us were at risk of being sent back. I looked at Nandini again, but her gaze was turned away. I knew that on Monday she would not be at our lunch table.
“Mrittika,” Ma’s voice floated down, “we need to go.” I looked up at Ma, who was wearing a peach sari overlaid with gold leaves. Her hair was braided down her back. She was beautiful. She was always beautiful. She had married my father, despite the fact that her parents disapproved. But then she quit her job, became the perfect mother, the perfect wife, and maybe that’s why she was allowed to be beautiful. As I climbed up the stairs, following her voice, I wondered if I had given away my chance to be as beautiful as her, simply by doing what I was not supposed to do.
* * *
“Ma?” I asked one night, when my mother came into my room to leave a water pitcher by my head. “Are you happy?”
My mother looked perplexed. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged under the covers, “Just… are you happy?”
My mother sat down on the side of the bed, smoothing out the tectonic wrinkles in her apron that had appeared after a long day of cooking and cleaning.
“I’m happy to be your mother,” she said, and kissed my forehead. I knew that she would be awake for hours longer, preparing my lunch for tomorrow, finishing the dishes that piled high in the sink. I knew, too, that my father was already asleep, a snoring heap of flesh and cologne in my parents’ large bedroom. This was not the answer I was looking for, but I didn’t know how to tell her what I wanted to know.
Are you glad you chose this life? Are you glad that you were good?
“Are we ever going to visit India again?” I asked instead. Mom placed the pitcher down with a soft thud on my side table, then moved a coaster underneath the glass so that it wouldn’t stain.
“One day. When your father wants to,” she said.
“Would you ever send me without you?”
“Why would I do that?”
I shrugged. She smiled, called me silly, and kissed me goodnight.
* * *
“What if I’m pregnant?” I asked Nandini at school, after another week of her cold shoulder. She stared at the nauseatingly patterned cafeteria floor. Her knuckles whitened around the calculator she was holding.
“Did you hear me? I could be pregnant. We didn’t use a condom or anything. I had one in my hand but I forgot.” I knocked on the table in front of her, as if she couldn’t see me, as if the sound would make me visible to her.
“My mom said you’re a bad influence,” said Nandini, her neck turned away from me. It looked like she was spitting the words over her shoulder. “She said you can afford to lose things that I can’t.”
“You told your mom?” A pain stoked in my stomach.
“My mom says contracts don’t matter unless they’re officially notarized. And they need to state their terms clearly.”
“What do you say?” And then I remembered how multiple times a week my mother dragged a stool to our landline and called a roster of her friends to catch up on gossip—who was having marriage troubles, who was going bankrupt, whose daughter needed to get remedial writing lessons before the SAT. “Did your mom,” I said in horror, “say anything to my mom?”
Nandini unclenched her hands and let the calculator clatter on the table. She let her eyes flit to mine, then blushed.
“I don’t think you’re good for me either.”
Hurt radiated through my arms and legs. “Nandini, I don’t know what to do.”
“Do? We were playing. I like my life. You weren’t supposed to do anything. You’re not good for me.”
Shame warmed my skin.
Nandini was right. I was not good for her. I let my emptiness run wild in our friendship, I grabbed her insecurity by the loose thread and ran. Nandini wanted to drink beer by a riverside, maybe cheat on an exam, but I yanked her into this new adult world. When she saw me, the way my hands cupped my flat stomach, the way in which I had grown up, in which we had grown up together, she couldn’t help but hate me.
* * *
Days passed. Liam told everyone at school. I knew because of the glances shot my way that covered my body like a million papercuts. I knew because when Liam and I were within earshot, people would ask Liam what “Indian pussy” tasted like and tell him he smelled like curry.
One day, I was so late to biology that everyone had assumed I was not coming, I walked in on him telling it.
“And I was like bam!” he told a semi-circle of enthralled boys, while the girls looked into the corners of the room or their laps. At his crotch was a purple pencil case, unicorned and glittered, a holdout from middle school. He thrusted into it and it strained, the graphite tips of each pencil snapping against the polyester. I understood that I was the pencil case. His face was ugly, an echo of that viciousness that had met me in the supply closet. The expression he bore was so similar, in fact, that I could see a mirage of myself forming around the glittering sleeve of the pencil case, as if with each thrust I was less in the spot I was standing, and more with Liam in front of the class. I shifted from one leg to another to remind myself of the floor. Liam hadn’t been this popular in years.
“Bam!” he said again, to less of a response, because people had seen me and were staring. Liam followed their gazes. He had the decency to look guilty. I thought, Oh, just oh, and I remember the crisp vowel and how it felt in my mind, a whole bubble bursting.
* * *
I put my backpack down onto the ground, unzipped it, and began rummaging. Everyone leaned in closer to see what I was doing. Liam squeezed the pencil case harder, so the fabric popped between his knuckles. I didn’t know what I was looking for until the carton of strawberry milk was in my hand, cold and square and sweaty. I opened its rough paper lip, took a sip of the chalky liquid inside. Liam started to laugh, but no one joined him. With the carton in one hand, I walked to him, and I poured the entire container of strawberry milk over his head. It was the first time I remember feeling true anger. The milk was the color of my own rage, not red, or black, but something delicate, like blood running under water or the inside of an eyelid. Something that would vanish in an instant if I lost a little of my strength.
The pinkish-white ran over Liam, the color of his own acne, and he didn’t protest, only blubbered mildly.
I knew that I would always be the girl that poured milk on Liam Parker. I knew that I would always be the girl who lost her virginity to Liam Parker. But I would be many other girls, as well. I could see my whole future in the strawberry milk that broke across Liam’s face. I could see in the pink that one day I would forget this place, one day I would laugh about this day, one day I would learn how to redden my anger, to make it live alongside me so that it pushed me through the days. I saw other things, too. Gentler things. I saw that I loved Nandini and wanted to kiss her on the cheeks. And maybe on the lips. I saw that I would be valedictorian and that in a few years everyone in this room would be forced to hear me speak.
Liam came back to himself, sputtering, at the same moment that the science teacher walked into the room and saw me with the empty carton in my hand. “Mrittika!” she said, sounding more surprised that I was the troublemaker than at the puddle of milk on the floor of her classroom. On the ceiling, the papier-mâché lungs swirled. I brushed past the teacher. She was too stunned to follow, though I could hear her voice hounding me through the halls.
I walked out of the room, past the metal front doors that clanged shut behind me, past the cherry tree planted for the sophomore who died, past the litter and rubble from yesterday’s football game. I went straight to the street corner where the city bus sometimes lurked. I paid the driver four dollars I had in my back pocket and for the first time in my life went home before the final bell.
* * *
When I was fourteen, I stepped off the city bus and walked the last five minutes to where Ma was alone in the house, cooking. I could see her through the window, her body pressed and packaged in a dirty smock and dirtier apron. Ginger paste smeared her cheeks. Her messy bun was fairy-dusted with flour. Usually, when she picked me up in the bus loop, she was dressed neatly in a salwar, or even a sari, with a faint sandalwood perfume lingering on her neck and earlobes. She was a movie mother, a Bollywood mother, always waiting with a steam-cloaked bowl of my favorite foods—Malai curry, goat liver, spaghetti with bacon and pepper. I rarely saw her with a hair out of place.
But there she was, a frayed knot of a woman, looking at the clock and stirring furiously. I thought that maybe what my mother wanted for me, through perfect grades and an overstuffed resume, was for an equal exchange—the image of a perfect mother for the image of a perfect daughter.
I knocked. I heard the smack of her footsteps, the rustle of a bolt being undone, even sensed the approaching heat of her body. She opened the door and her eyes widened with surprise. For a moment, she didn’t question why I was there, didn’t interrogate me or shout at me, or realize that something had happened, something terrible. She was happy to see me. And I could see in her eyes I was good.
Annesha Mitha a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she received her MFA in fiction. Her work has been published in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, American Short Fiction, and more. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, StoryKnife Writers’ Residency, Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is currently based out of Chicago.