"Maybe I just won't take the PSKs again. Maybe I will just drop out right now and become the next best American novelist."
I give my best friend, Meher, my You're annoying me again look, since this is the third time she's interrupted me as I worked on my latest sketch. "Come on."
"No, really. What's the point of the PSKs? There's no real-life application that we can get here." She twirls her curly hazel hair with a finger. Her foot kicks my left ankle. "And your legs are in my space again."
I fold them just a bit more, but there's not much I can do in this booth.
"You're going to do fine. They were fine the first time around. So what if your math scores aren't perfect? They are still great. And you will ace the writing part, Ms. Editor in Chief. I know it."
"And you are going to ace all of it. Because you are Vani fucking Nambiar," Meher says. She pretends to take an angry slurp of her lassi, condensation leaving a puddle next to her. Since middle school we've always had iced coffee to get us through the mountain of homework we have. Senior year just started but I already feel as if I am buried.
Some of my lassi spills onto the table, soaks the edges of my cream-colored sketch pad. I don't clean it up. Ms. Yamamoto is in my head, saying, If you want to be an artist, you will need to get messy. I focus on my sketch.
Downtime at the restaurant is actually a nice time to draw. The empty seat next to me to balances my Prismacolors. My eraser, an ugly blend of all the colors I have been using, sits beside them. The sketch is not going that bad. The assignment: Draw your memories. Instructions: Why the hell should I tell you what to do? Or at least that's what Yamamoto always says to our art class.
I am drawing a beach scene, remembering the time Ba taught me how to float on my back, and where Amma taught me how to "cook" with sand—or play make-believe as I dug concave dents in the sand, poured water in them to make bonda, a sweet steamed treat you can hold in the palm of your hand and eat.
My older sister, Eva, stayed under the shade of our umbrella, reading—of all things—a book about the human skeleton. Guess who's now majoring in biology at NVPAS?
The tip of my colored pencil breaks as I shade an area under my beach umbrella.
"What is it?" Meher says, reaches over her PSK book to touch the picture—but I quickly slap her hand away. "Bhagwan, you are a beast when you are drawing, you know that?"
I pull back my sketch pad. "It's not ready yet." And it would never be if I keep losing focus, or let Meher distract me with her talking.
And that's what she does best.
Luckily, I am used to it. Meher is a fixture in the restaurant after school, and for years, it was me, Evie, and Meher, and nothing really changed, unless you count the fact that now Ali steals the last vada, always shooting me an impish grin.
There was a time for a year when her parents were going through a divorce, and as strong as she was, home was more like a battlefield. The divorce eventually happened, and everything is more stable now. She's back to being the Meher who likes my artwork so much that she always has to take a peek at it. She says that one day we are going to dominate the world—her as a writer, me as an artist.
"What's with your dad today?" Meher tips her chin toward the front of the restaurant, where Papa takes up his own booth. The light from the front windows streams in, turning his normally salt-and-pepper hair a blinding white. He's writing the checks for the week, but keeps looking up at the Nairs' restaurant. Best guess is that he's keeping an eye on the Nairs. Ba's weird like that.
