Curtain Call

ACT 2: SCENE 7

"What do you mean you're having a wedding this weekend?" Amma screeched into the phone. Her voice, normally calm and collected, was high and sharp like nails on a chalkboard. A rapid-fire string of Telugu sentences followed, punctuated with bits of English. With a grumble, Aarav yanked his headphones over his ears and clung harder to his texture, as though the harder he pressed, the more information he could absorb through his skin.

Unfortunately, his bedroom door creaked open to reveal his mother, who thrust the phone into his hands. She lingered at his desk with her heavy brows drawn together, arms folded while she tapped her foot expectantly. Biting back a groan, Aarav turned the phone on speaker. "Hello?"

What followed next was a heavily accented "Hello" and the crackling voice, cut with static, responded with an intelligible soliloquy. Aarav squinted, pretending he couldn't understand mainly due to the poor connection. His knowledge of the language was mediocre at best. Having grown up his entire life in America, he only knew basic greetings and aside from the occasional family trip to Andhra Pradesh, made no effort to keep up with Telugu.

Not to mention that he didn't even know who he was speaking with. Which Indian auntie even was this? Was it an actual auntie in the sense she shared blood relations with the family or another one of his mother's friends? Aarav shot a look at Amma, who fed him a steady diet of silent answers to fend off the series of invasive questions.

There was a shuffling and overseas, the phone was passed around from auntie to auntie, uncle to uncle. Aarav lost track of who was related family and who wasn't; in the end, it never mattered. Each time, he rattled off memorized phrases, every conversation identical like a skipping record on repeat.

Drumming his fingers against the desk, he ignored the disappointed look in Amma's eyes. His parents were quick to lament his lack of cultural understanding—as though it were his fault he'd been put through the American education system where he learned English and U.S. history.

When the phone switched again to another new speaker, the language jolting from Telugu to accented English. "Have you received your Stanford decision yet?"

Yet another question he couldn't answer. The words dried on Aarav's tongue and he slid the phone over to his mother. Without missing a beat, she turned off the speaker setting and pressed it to her ear. "Oh, Aarav's having trouble deciding between Stanford and Harvard. We decided to skip early action since we don't want to shut out any options."

Then a laugh. Her eyes brightened and she continued talking in an easy, relaxed tone—nothing like the shrill voice from earlier. Amma swept out of the room—probably to track down Aadhira—and left the door wide open.

Aarav turned back to his textbook, the tiny words glaring back at him, and tried to focus on IB chemistry. But against his own will, his hands automatically kept reaching for his phone. Fingers kept opening Westminster's grades app. He skimmed over the list of current grades and tapped on his class ranking. The number one next to his name was almost a constant familiarity.

A cold, icy dread coiled in his stomach. Aarav had too much to lose—the valedictorian status that he'd worked for ever since middle school when he enrolled in high school math courses. His gaze flickered back to the textbook. All it took was one midterm going wrong for everything to go down the drain. If he screwed up, if he failed to ace even a single exam—

Aarav slammed the book shut and his fingers dug into the pages. Goddamn Madison Aster. He'd already lost Stanford to her. He could only imagine the smug smirk on her face at graduation when she was announced as valedictorian instead of him and the disappointment on his parents' faces. How many more screw-ups would he risk suffering until his family had lost enough face?