Big Summer(105)

Keep her talking, I thought again. Maybe Darshi would come home early. Maybe my across-the-hall neighbor would notice the unlocked door. Maybe my parents would decide to do their first-ever unannounced pop-in. I squeezed my eyes shut, pain piercing me as I realized I’d never see my mom and dad again.

Leela’s tone was brisk. “Bath time.”

I made myself stand up. “I just want to understand. Before I die. I want to know what she did to you that was so bad that she and I both have to die for it.”

Leela rolled her eyes. “You already know what she did.”

“She got you kicked out of school?”

“She stole my life,” Leela said, her voice suddenly loud and wild and raw. Her chest rose and fell as she breathed. “You don’t understand what it was like. You can’t imagine. My parents came to this country, not speaking the language, with five hundred dollars between them. They paid my father’s aunt to take care of me so they could work around the clock in a convenience store. They’d take turns sleeping in the storage closet so they wouldn’t have to pay rent.” Her voice was shaking. “They told me every single day that it was all for me, so I could have an American life; so I could go to a good prep school and an Ivy League college, and be a big American success.” She paused, breathing hard. “You don’t know what it’s like to be one of the only Asian kids at a place like Croft. To be different. To never fit in.”

“I was a scholarship kid—” I interrupted, hoping I could get her to see the similarities between us. “I didn’t look like Drue and the rest of her friends.”

“You think that means we’re the same?” Leela sneered. She gestured toward my midriff, her eyes hard as pebbles, her face twisted with scorn. “You could lose fifty pounds and be just like the rest of them. I never could.”

“We’re all people,” I whispered.

Leela shook her head. “You don’t get it. You could never understand. How it felt to work, and work, and study and study, and finally have it all pay off and get into every college you applied at. And then to have everything you worked for just…” She stretched out one open palm, then snapped it shut. “Just taken away.” She caught her breath and licked her lips.

“I do know,” I said. “I promise. Maybe it’s not exactly the same, but I know what it’s like to be different.”

It was like she couldn’t hear me, like she couldn’t hear anything but the rage inside her head. “I thought Drue was my friend. My beautiful American friend. I’ll bet you thought that, too.” She smirked. “She told me all about you, you know. How pathetic you were. How you followed her around like—how’d she put it?—a pudgy little puppy dog.”

Ouch. Even though Drue was dead, even with Leela pointing a gun at me, it seemed there was a part of me that was still available to feel that slap.

“I thought that what we had was different.” Leela’s voice was musing. “I thought she was telling me about you because she wanted me to know that she respected me. That I wasn’t pathetic, like you were.”

“And then she burned you,” I said. “The same way she burned everybody else. So you weren’t special at all.”

Leela made a noise that might have started its life as a laugh, and came out sounding more like a sob. “When I got caught, she denied everything,” she said. “She told the headmaster and the Honor Committee that I was crazy. Obsessed with her. In love with her. She said it was my idea to take the test in her name, that she’d never even known about my plan. She said I’d hacked into her computer and found her Social Security number and registered in her name. And they believed her. Or at least, they decided to believe her.” Leela paused, her face thundery with rage and remembered shame. “She was someone, and I was no one. She mattered, and I didn’t. I was expendable. I’d always known it, deep down, but that was when I really saw it. That was when I saw the way the world really is, and how little I mattered.”

“And then what?”

“The day we had to go before the Honor Committee, Drue’s parents showed up with lawyers. My parents weren’t there. They couldn’t get off from work, and even if they could have, they couldn’t afford tickets to fly across the country.” Her voice was cracking. “I had no one. And they believed her. Croft kicked me out. All the schools that had accepted me rescinded their offers. Harvard, Yale, Princeton. Poof. Gone. My parents…” Her voice thickened. “They were so ashamed. They told me not to come home.” Her shoulders slumped. “And when I did, they wouldn’t even let me through the door. They said I’d disgraced them. Which I had.”

She paused, collecting herself, smoothing her hair, then her top, shaking out the skirt of her dress. “So I had nothing,” she said. “No home. No college. No family. No place to go. No friends, because Drue made sure that she was the only friend I had. I tried to kill myself, and I couldn’t even do that right.” She pushed up her left sleeve, lifted her wrist, and turned it, showing me the faint line of a scar. “I ended up in a psych ward. The September after senior year, Drue went to Harvard, and I went to the loony bin. For a long time, I wanted to die. What did I have to live for?” Her gaze was fixed on a point above my head; her eyes were far away. “And every single day, I got to go online and see her leading her perfect, shiny life.”