Pushing Perfect(35)

“You look great. This is what I always wear to movie night.”

“It’s very seventh-grade sleepover,” I said. “You’ll have to warn me next time.”

“I bet Raj will appreciate the effort,” she said, and elbowed me as I started to drive.

“Don’t get your hopes up. I’m not in a dating frame of mind right now. Are you going to tell me what the plan is?”

“Just follow my lead. Better that you don’t know the details.”

We pulled into the Quik-Stop; it turned out we’d both skipped dinner, so we were starving. It didn’t take us long to pick out three different kinds of Pringles (plain, barbecue, and pizza-flavored), three different kinds of M&Ms (plain, peanut, and pretzel), and an assortment of the weirdest sodas we could find. We’d brought a Whole Foods reusable grocery bag to put everything in, which struck us as hilarious, since the food we’d brought was pretty much the opposite of Whole, and we were still giggling about it when we rang Raj’s doorbell.

“Hello, ladies,” Raj said when he opened the door. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved green T-shirt over a long-sleeved black one. He looked as good as ever, and I felt a pang of guilt about whatever it was we were about to do. Except, I reminded myself, there was no reason to feel guilty if it turned out he was the reason why we had to do it in the first place. “Kara, you look lovely. Alex, you forgot your teddy bear.”

“I was going to borrow one of yours,” she said, and handed him the bag of snacks.

He took it and pretended to collapse under its heft. “Did you spend your body weight in money at Whole Foods?” he asked, then peered in. “Ah. The bag is just a ruse. I sense Kara’s influence in all the plain variations here.”

Alex smirked at me. “Raj seems familiar with your taste in snack food,” she said. “Interesting.”

“That’s the kind of thing friends know about each other. What are we watching?” It wasn’t a subtle way to change the subject, but it was the best I could do.

“Come in and get settled and we’ll go through the Netflix queue,” Raj said. “Alex made her own list last time. Apparently my selections were insufficient.”

“Wait, aren’t you going to give Kara the tour?” Alex asked. “This is her first time here. Unless you guys aren’t telling me something.”

I rolled my eyes at her. But I’d said I’d follow her lead, and this was most likely part of the plan.

“Happy to oblige,” Raj said. “Follow me, ladies.” He led us down the hall. “Kitchen and dining room over here to your left. Note the predominance of takeout menus on the fridge. Workaholic parents equals a lack of home cooking.”

“It’s like being in my own house,” I said.

“What’s your favorite restaurant?”

“Alex’s house,” I said, and she laughed. “What’s yours?”

“I’m partial to Thai Palace myself, not having gotten an invitation to dinner from Ms. Nguyen lately. But after living in England, I’ll eat just about anything—I basically survived on takeaway curries for years. The only thing I’m picky about in the States is Indian food. Once you’ve had Indian food in India, there’s no going back.”

“I am so doing that someday,” I said.

“Into travel, are you?” Raj asked.

“Anything to get away from Marbella.”

“Well, you can’t get much farther than India.”

We passed a couple of closed doors—“Parental office and the bathroom, respectively,” Raj said—before we reached the end of the hall and a staircase. “Bedrooms on the next level. Are you sure you ladies will be able to contain yourselves?”

“We’ve managed so far,” Alex said as we followed him up the stairs.

He led us to a foyer surrounded by three doorways. “Parents’ room to the left, Priya’s room to the right, mine in the middle,” he said. “Explore at your leisure.”

All three rooms were tidy and simply decorated—his parents’ was navy and cream, his sister’s was pink and yellow, and Raj’s was white. But where his parents’ walls were covered with art, and his sister’s were covered with pictures of British boy bands, Raj’s walls were bare.

Or were they? I walked in and peered a little closer. I could see the edges of some pieces of tape, as well as pin holes. I turned to Raj, who was trying to keep from cracking up. “I wondered if you’d be able to tell,” he said. “I did some editing.”

“No kidding,” Alex said, emerging from Raj’s parents’ room. “Aren’t your walls usually covered with soccer players and swimsuit models?”

“Guilty as charged,” he said, holding up his hands. “But I wanted to make a good impression.”

“Way too late for that,” Alex said.

I thought it was sweet, actually, but I wasn’t about to say so. “Let’s go pick the movie,” I said.

We went back downstairs into the living room, all fluffy rugs and comfy couches and brightly patterned blankets, though hardly the explosion of color Raj had told me about, along with a huge flat-screen TV. Raj went to the kitchen as we got settled in, putting snacks into bowls and ice into glasses for our sodas. “We can watch whatever suits your fancy,” he called out. “You can go through Alex’s list or pick a category.”