Free The Hindi-Bindi Club by Monica Pradhan Page B

sound like you’re doing it—”
    “What?”
    “Let yourself be happy. Don’t force it, but don’t fight it, either. There’s no reason to feel guilty. Bryan isn’t jealous or resentful. He’s genuinely happy for you. And you know what? Your pleasure’s the closest thing he’s got to his own right now. So don’t cheat him out of it.”
    I cast George a sidelong glance. “I never thought of it that way.” After a moment, I add, “That was some sleight of hand. You redirected my guilt to fuel the opposite outcome.” I smile. “When you’re good, you’re good. You’re good, George.”
    “I know.” He flashes a cheesy grin. “That’s why they pay me the little bucks.”
    “Oh, man. I knew I forgot something. Tell me you brought some of those little bucks with you because I forgot. Again.”
    “Gotcha covered, pal.”
    “Thanks. For everything.”
    We run to the Starbucks on Union, where we get four lattes to go (for us and our spouses), then walk the remaining blocks home. George’s door opens just as we return.
    “Wow,” I say. “Who
is
that sharp-dressed man?”
    Said sharp-dressed man chuckles. “Morning, Rani.”
    “Morning, Walker. Love the power suit.”
    “Thank you. See you tonight.”
    “Tonight.” As George hands him a latte, I wave good-bye and go inside.
             
    “T onight, tonight, won’t be just any night…” In his rich baritone, Bryan belts out the show tune from
West Side Story,
and I chime in with my off-key-from-fighting-a-cold soprano.
    As he twirls me around the kitchen, I remember when we used to be silly like this all the time. It was what I loved most about Bryan. He wasn’t afraid to be a complete and total dork. He took pride in it, embraced who he was. He had such courage and conviction, such strength of character. But when his dream shattered, so did his confidence. And with it, his joie de vivre
,
as the French call it, or
masti
as Saroj Auntie says. Passion for life. How I want to give it back to him.
    Restore the gleam in his eyes. Rekindle his excitement. Resuscitate his
masti
.
    “Pick you up at five,” he says, grabbing his laptop bag.
    We met the first day of our freshman year at Berkeley. We lived on the same dorm floor, though we didn’t date until two years later. For two years, he watched my parade of boyfriends, if you can even call them that, since their average shelf life was two to four weeks. It seemed all the good guys were taken, already in relationships, as Bryan was with his girlfriend, who was two years younger and still in high school. That left the available market glutted with the commitment-phobic, just-want-to-get-laid crowd.
    I looked around and thought: I’m the only virgin I know on this campus. Virgins were an endangered species. All of my friends were sexually active, which is not to say “sleeping
around,
” though that certainly happened, too. Most committed, monogamous relationships, which was what I wanted, involved sex. So did flings, which accounted for the lifespan of my romantic interests. The guys I hooked up with seemed to view sex as a
prerequisite
for a relationship, bass-ackwards in my book. On this, I agreed one hundred percent with my mother: Why buy the cow if the milk’s free?
    Now before you pat me on the back, or the head, you should know I can’t credit my “fine moral upbringing” or my “superior, wholesome values” for the fact I held onto my prized virginity until the ripe age of twenty. Don’t think for a second it was any valiant struggle. It wasn’t. The truth is, I was a loser magnet, which made it easy to keep my legs closed—a no-brainer—until Bryan.
    “There’s no high school girlfriend,” he told me one day.
    “You broke up?”
    He shook his head. “I made her up.”
    “Why—?”
    “Because I’m a geek, and I have no life. It was easier—”
    “No.
Why
are you telling me this? Why not take the story to its natural conclusion and say you and Imaginary Girl