This is the final story in this summer’s Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.

In seventh grade, I tried to get out of frog dissection by telling Mrs. Graeber that I was Hindu and it was against my religion.

“Back to your desk,” she said.

Ritu was assigned to be my lab partner. Ritu, despite the fact that she had no accent and sat with the whites during lunch, got the highest grades in biology. I thought she believed she was better than me; still, I was glad she was my partner.

The frog was stiff and nasty. It was sort of gray and smelled of formaldehyde. Before we began cutting, we had to label a series of diagrams to show that we knew the basic structures. We also had to take measurements of the dead animal. At first, Ritu offered to do the paperwork; I kept asking her which organs were which, then she began taking out the organs and handed me the ruler. I truly did not know how to measure the various parts. Finally, she said, “Are you going to do anything?”

Mrs. Graeber walked around the class checking on our progress. By this time, Ritu had pinned the organs to the wax of the workbench, and they looked the way they appeared in the drawings: the heart, the kidneys, the stomach. Mrs. Graeber asked Ritu who had done what. Ritu and I were both standing. I said that I had done the measurements. Ritu looked down and didn’t speak.

“Is that true?” Mrs. Graeber asked.

Ritu remained silent.

Standing there, Mrs. Graeber called to the class, “Guys, both lab partners need to work. It has to be fifty-fifty.” Everyone was looking at us as though they all knew that Ritu had done the work and I had tried to mooch off her. I hoped that something bad would happen to her and to Mrs. Graeber.

I might not have spoken to Ritu again if three years later, in high school, I had not become friends with Jason. Jason was popular. He used to send postcards to the David Letterman show making short declarations, and, once, one of these was included on a Top Ten list. I was a hanger-on to him. Often, I made up stories to be interesting: Tyson Wu called his parents “Mommy” and “Daddy.” I had smelled beer on our math teacher’s breath. These were people Jason disliked.

Jason dated Ritu in high school. Through him, I discovered that Ritu’s dad drove a taxi, that he was one of those Indian men who believe a splinter can move through the bloodstream and kill you. When Ritu’s dad learned that they were dating, he called Jason’s home, asked Jason’s mother to give the phone to Jason, and told him that if he continued to date his daughter he would cut her up and feed her to the dogs.

What struck me as incredible about this, when Jason told me the next day, was that a grownup would call a teen-ager.

I used to see Ritu’s dad at temple. Mr. Shah was small and stocky, with thick forearms. He would stand at the back of the chamber, smelling strongly of cologne.

Ritu and Jason were the first couple I knew to have sex. They would meet after school at Jason’s home, because his parents both worked. Jason told me that, after sex, he and Ritu often sat in bed and played cards. Sometimes Ritu climbed out her window in the middle of the night to meet Jason and they’d walk for hours holding hands. I thought that there was something improper about Ritu dating a white boy. Even as I thought this, I knew that I would be happy to date a white girl.

Ritu was one of the three kids who were the co-valedictorians of our class. She also worked for the school newspaper and the yearbook.

It was no surprise to anyone that Ritu got into Princeton. Jason got rejected by all the Ivies but got into the University of Michigan. Mr. Shah called him “dummy.” By this time, Ritu’s parents had accepted that they were dating, but Mr. Shah told Ritu that she could only marry someone who went to Princeton or Harvard or Yale.

When we were back home during our first Christmas break, in 1989, Ritu went into her parents’ basement and hanged herself. Until then, the only people I had known who had died were my grandparents, and they had been in India, and I had met them just a handful of times, so it was as if they had never really been there.

After Ritu died, Jason went to her house to talk to her parents almost every day. I asked if I could come with him one time. It seemed exciting to visit the home of someone who had killed herself. I offered to interpret the Wordsworth poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” for Ritu’s parents. Apparently, Ritu had sent it in a letter to a friend over Christmas, and the friend had shown the poem to Mr. and Mrs. Shah. Ritu’s mother had asked Jason if the poem was about suicide. He’d said he didn’t really know.

In the car, he told me that, when Ritu’s father had begun to suspect that she was having sex, he’d said to her, “I should fuck you, too.”

This shocked me. I could imagine Mr. Shah beating Ritu, but this declaration was violent in a different way. Jason’s windshield was smeared, and the late-afternoon sunlight came through hazily.

I had expected the house to be hushed, but there was one TV on in the kitchen and one in the living room, both playing different Hindi movies. There were also lots of flies. Ritu’s mother was standing by the stove frying pakoras, and Ritu’s father was at the kitchen table, unshaven, white chest hair showing. As she cooked, Mrs. Shah periodically lifted a shoulder and wiped her eyes with it.

Eventually, Mrs. Shah came and sat down at the table beside me. “How is school?” she asked. I told her it was fine. Then I took a photocopy of the Wordsworth poem from my back pocket.

“I showed the poem to a professor,” I told her, “and he said that it was about suicide.” I said this in order to make the interpretation I was going to offer someone else’s responsibility. “Do you want me to explain it?”

Ritu’s mother didn’t say anything. She had a small, oval face, and her hair was pulled into a bun.

I moved a finger over the words. I wandered lonely as a cloud. “This is the writer talking about being lonely. If you are a cloud, you don’t belong to the world. Ritu may have felt lonely and wanted to leave the world.” When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils. “ ‘Host’ is a word Christians use to talk about the dead body of Christ. Daffodils don’t last long. They come and they go. They are waving. They are saying goodbye. Maybe Ritu was saying goodbye.” I wondered if I sounded stupid or smart. Mrs. Shah’s eyes were shining. I saw Ritu’s father looking at me. I turned the page around so that he could see the lines I was referring to. For oft, when on my couch I lie / in vacant or in pensive mood. “This is the writer imagining what he will be thinking when he dies.”

“Why are you bothering us?” Mr. Shah suddenly demanded. I was taken aback. “Are you the one making crank calls? Is that you?” I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

“Come on,” Jason said, and stood.

We left the house. The car was very cold. “He’s an asshole,” I muttered.

“Shut up,” Jason said.

In the years after, I would suddenly remember that visit to Ritu’s house, and shame would come in a hot flash. At first, I was embarrassed only about having been scolded by Mr. Shah. Later, I felt mortified at what I had done—gone into the home of people who had just lost a child and begun making up some weird interpretation of a poem I didn’t understand.

I recently ran into Jason. It was in the meatpacking district of New York. He recognized me. “I have a memory for faces,” he explained. We went into a café and sat down together. Jason was working for a real-estate company in Los Angeles. I told him about myself, then asked if he remembered when we had gone to Ritu’s parents’ house. He said that he didn’t, that there had been so much noise in his head at that time that he didn’t remember much. I asked if he ever thought about her now. “Not really.” He asked if I did, and I said yes, and then he asked, “Why?” I shrugged.

My parents still live in Woodbridge, so I go there regularly. The house where Ritu lived is gone, and so are the houses around it; there is a cul-de-sac there now. When I pass that cul-de-sac, I wonder whether anyone else thinks of Ritu, of how she used to climb out her window at night to go for walks with her boyfriend, how neatly she dissected her frog, how the organs she put to the side looked like jewels or parts of a flower. ♦