“Oh, but look at this one!” Dolly said, swiping past a bunch of pictures of her and her friends at the beach. Dolly even had perfect, unblemished skin. Abe was white, and Meera Mausi was dark like Pinky and her mom, and Dolly had gotten this smooth, sun-kissed complexion. She stopped at a picture of a giant golden retriever grinning the doofiest grin Pinky had ever seen. “This is Sigmund,” Dolly said, gazing as proudly at the picture as if it were her newborn on the screen. “We got him last August. He just passed the canine good citizenship test and now he’s a certified therapy dog! Mom says I can take him to the pediatric ward on the days she works in the hospital.”
“Awesome,” Pinky forced herself to say, though she really wanted to do a cartwheel right out the window into the lake. “He’s really photogenic.” Like your entire family.
Dolly studied the look on Pinky’s face and then set her mom’s phone aside. “But that’s enough about me.” She smiled a perfectly kind, empathetic smile, as if she’d ordered it from the “therapists’ progeny” catalog. “What have you been up to, P?”
In spite of her almost-eerie perfection, it was impossible to hate Dolly. She was like a Teletubby. They could be annoyingly upbeat, sure, but you knew they were all about making the world a better place and it was hard to disagree with that. Pinky shrugged. “Not much, really.” She didn’t think she’d bring up her graffiti wall by the train tracks at this particular moment in time.
“That’s not entirely true,” Pinky’s dad said, putting a pale hand over hers. “Tell them where you’ve been spending so much of your time this year.”
“I volunteer at the soup kitchen in Berkeley,” Pinky said, not adding that she started doing that as a punishment, after her mom caught her FaceTiming with Preston when she’d been expressly forbidden to see him on account of his recent juvenile detention situation.
Dolly made a noise very much like a squeal. Her cheeks were actually pink with glee. “Ohmygosh, that is so cool! I do that too! Except mine’s a women’s shelter, but same difference. Isn’t it the most incredible feeling to help all those people?”
“Dolly actually got a commendation from the mayor for her work at the shelter,” Abe said, smiling fondly at his self-actualized daughter.
“Oh yeah?” Pinky said. “For what?”
“I sort of founded the shelter,” Dolly said, shrugging. Like founding shelters was something people did on the regular, when they got bored on any given Tuesday. “But it wasn’t just me,” she added, her unironically earnest eyes back on Pinky again. “A teacher at my school helped me get it all going and stuff, and we had the best volunteers who helped fund-raise.”
“Wow, that’s so cool,” Pinky said, suddenly feeling extremely tired. “You know, I think I’m going to go hang out on the deck for a bit.” She pushed her chair back and stood. “I’m just so exhausted after all that flying.”
The adults all looked at her, some of them smiling hesitantly. Not wanting to be rude, but definitely needing to get out of there posthaste, Pinky held up a hand in farewell and tried not to leap for the French doors.
* * *
Pinky tucked the bottom of her shirt into the band of her bra and sat on a chaise lounge chair on the deck. The sky was an interminable blue, the sun a blazing ball of heat. Pinky looked out over the enormous backyard, complete with the old barn and the newer gazebo her parents had put in two summers ago, and took a deep breath. There were a few other summer families nearby, and through the wooded lot, she could make out the white siding of the Millers’ house to the north. To her right lay the vast expanse of lake, glimmering in the afternoon sunlight. Maybe she’d go for a swim in a bit.
The French doors opened and Pinky turned to see Dolly walking out to her, holding her phone in her hand.
“Hey,” Dolly said, looking like a wildflower in a pair of pink shorts and a yellow halter top. Her chocolate-brown hair lay in waves past her shoulders.
Pinky nodded.
“Do you want to be alone?” her cousin asked, and Pinky could tell it really was a question, not just a statement meant to be responded to in the negative.
“Nah,” Pinky said, smiling up at her.
Dolly sat on the rocking chair a few feet away from Pinky, setting her phone on the table between them. “Did I annoy you with all those stories? I realized after you left that I probably sounded like a total ass.”
“You didn’t annoy me,” Pinky said honestly. “But it’s a little hard not to feel… What’s the word? Oh yeah, like a total dumpy loser when I compare myself against all the stuff you’ve done.” She kicked off her sandals and put her feet on the warm striped fabric of the chaise.
“You totally shouldn’t feel inadequate!” Dolly said, and Pinky did not fail to notice the more elegant phrasing her cousin had chosen. “You have a lot of stuff going on too. It’s just different stuff than mine, that’s all.”
A vivid image of Ashish lying on the couch in his purple wig, pretending to be a corpse, flashed through Pinky’s brain. “Right.”
“Hey, do you want a strawberry lemonade? I’m gonna get myself a glass.”
Pinky smiled at this peace offering. “Sure. Thanks.”
Dolly hopped up and walked into the house.
Pinky lay back on her chaise and closed her eyes. The thing was, Dolly was right. There was absolutely no reason for her to feel inadequate. She and Dolly were fundamentally different, and Pinky was fine with that.
Dolly was a peacemaker, the kind of person who founded clubs and edited the school newspaper. Newspapers to which people like Pinky wrote angry letters to the editor decrying the hazards of peanut M&M’s in the school vending machines. People like Dolly built monuments. People like Pinky graffitied them. There were few things Pinky enjoyed more than waging war. Pissing people off, especially people in power, and then getting them to do exactly what she wanted? Totally her thing.
Below, an incomplete list of causes for which she’d gone full-on beast mode (and won) in the past three years alone:
Getting Richmond Academy to change the prom king/prom queen graphic on the announcement TV in the main lobby to say prom queen/prom queen when Loretta Smalls and Mariana Jimenez won due to an overabundance of write-in votes
Helping YouTube stars crowdfund for ring lights
Setting up the first raccoon hospitals in the Bay Area (they were not just diseased rodents that deserved to die)
Getting vegan makeup options to prisoners in the local county jail
Pinky Kumar knew who she was—a social-justice warrior. She wore that metaphorical badge with pride, laughing at those anonymous Internet trolls who tried to use the phrase as a slur. What was wrong with being passionate and fiery and outraged? What was wrong with wanting the world to change, to expand its collective mind, to dig a little deeper to find the last dregs of empathy it could muster up?
So yes, Pinky knew and loved who she was. The only tiny niggling doubt, the only thing that gave her pause, was how much her mom seemed to enjoy Dolly’s brand of helping more. Why was it so easy for her mom to overlook the things she did? What was it about Pinky that her mom just couldn’t understand?