The Vibrant Years(45)

“Did you go on a date with someone who made you smell dog poop?”

The laugh that spurted from him was so sudden, it sprayed her. “I’m so sorry,” he said, embarrassment suffusing his expressive face, and rushed to extract wet wipes from his backpack.

She had the odd urge to hug him. “That’s okay. You won’t believe the things I’ve encountered today.” A little spittle was nothing. But seeing him pulling out wet wipes restored her faith in humanity. And hygiene.

“Did you say your date made you smell dog poop?” His large, thickly lashed eyes widened with shock.

She put the wipes to good use, scrubbing her hands so hard they turned pink. “Yup, he can identify his dogs by the smell of their poop.” She started laughing, and he joined in.

Their laughter vibrated together, tapering off into awkwardness when they remembered they were strangers.

“You win.” He swallowed and pointed at the flower bed she’d thrown up in. “It all makes sense now. Where did you meet this specimen?”

“Long story, but I found him on Twinge.”

“Maybe use a different dating app next time?”

“Really weird that you say that. Which one do you use?”

The awkwardness was back in the way he studied her. How were they talking about dating apps like old friends?

“I’ve never used one.” He sounded offended. Oh my God, he was vain. “Never needed one.” Yup, vain as hell.

For the first time, she noticed that he wasn’t just hot—he was dramatically beautiful. If you liked square-jawed model types who liked gyms. She herself was someone who went for skinny nerd types. And no, one bad experience was not going to make her rethink her type.

They stood there like that for a beat. The overheated blacktop smell of the parking lot mixing with the smell of the oleander blooming around them. The smell of home. Being able to register that smell was more relief than she could contain, and she sighed. It made him smile. Something he seemed to do often and widely. Possibly because he believed those dimples were making women everywhere swoon.

Now that she had noticed it, it jumped out at her. How full of himself he was. It was in how he carried himself, with loose-limbed confidence. As though he were someone.

“Why has your day been awful?” she asked.

The smile slid off his face. The proud shoulders slumped infinitesimally. “I came here on important business,” he said as though he’d been waiting to say those words to someone, to let them out. “But I think I’m going to have to go home—to Mumbai—without a resolution.” He looked so upset that Cullie was gripped by an unfamiliar urge to comfort him. Pat his shoulder, do something.

This was the second time she’d had the totally out-of-character urge. Maybe it was all those years of seeing her parents help people who’d just arrived from India. Taking them shopping, showing them around, trying to ease something they recognized and related to at a visceral level, the transition from outsider to local.

“Maybe I can help you,” she said, then realized they didn’t know each other’s names. “Cullie Desai.” She offered him her hand.

His eyes widened as he looked down at it, but then he grabbed it with both of his own. “That’s a pretty name. You have no idea what your offer to help means. Thank you. I’m . . .” Looking up to meet her eyes, he seemed to lose his train of thought. Cullie felt a blush warm her cheeks under his gaze. “I’m Rohan. Rohan Shah.” And then he smiled as though he’d been waiting his whole life to meet a girl who made him forget his name.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


ALY


Bhanu once asked me, “Why are we supposed to be ashamed of our own nakedness? Doesn’t that turn the vessel we live in, our most precious possession, into an ugly secret?”

From the journal of Oscar Seth

Radha and Aly had been friends since sixth grade. They’d become friends when Rick Johansson—possibly the most handsome human being Aly had ever encountered in her earthly life—had tossed Aly’s cilantro-coconut chutney into her hair and told her that she and her food smelled “like ass.” It had been a bafflingly unintelligent insult, but it had stung.

The upside was that when the time had come to write her college essays, Aly had mined gold with that experience: a child of immigrant parents learning what being othered in her own country felt like and the journey she’d traveled from that feeling of helplessness to being the winner of the John F. Kennedy prize for promising American teens as a high school junior.

The other upside—the far more valuable one—was that it had given Aly her best friend. Radha Kambli had used the incident to start an anti-hate club at Washington Junior High.

Washington’s Activist Teen Coalition for Hate Interception and Tolerance. WATCH-IT for short. It had become known as the Watch-It-Rick-Johansson Club in school, because no one could ever remember what Radha’s acronyms stood for except her. It was certainly the last time someone had poured an ethnic food into the hair of the person of that ethnicity in the cafeteria (food fights for other reasons continued undeterred).

To no one’s surprise, Radha had gone to Harvard and was now a human rights lawyer in Miami and still the best thing that had ever happened to Aly.

“It does make sense that Cullie told Ash that a man died in his mother’s home,” Radha said, turning around to face Aly as they crossed the bridge that led over the shrubbery from the downtown Naples parking lot to the beach. “You’d want someone to tell you if a man died in Karen Auntie’s . . . well, never mind. That’s absurd.”