The card Karthik slaps down is the nine of hearts, and it lands face-up on the wool, the red shape of it staring at me like a wound. He looks at it, then at me, and something in his grin falters. "Game's done," he says, and scoops the deck up, shoving it into his pocket with the gold chain swinging. The room exhales with him.

Arjun is the first to stretch, his arms going up over his head, the bones in his shoulders cracking. Vinoth yawns loud and theatrical, flopping back onto the rug with his arms spread. Meena is already standing, brushing the wool from her jeans, her thumbnail finding her mouth again. Divya is on her phone, thumbs moving fast, the light of the screen blue on her chin.

"Goa," Ravi says, and the word lands in the room like a stone in still water.

He is counting on his fingers, the thin bones of his hand moving, his eyes not quite focused. "Five days. We rent a car. Split it six ways, it's nothing."

Vinoth sits up. "I know a guy. He knows a guy. He can get us a deal on a place near Baga."

"Baga's expensive," Karthik says, doing the math in his head, his lips moving with the numbers. "But if we go off-season, the rates drop. We split it six ways—"

"Five," Ravi corrects. "Arjun's not coming."

Arjun shakes his head, quiet, not looking up. "I have work."

"So five. Even better." Ravi's fingers stop at five, then he frowns. "Wait. Car seats five. We need six to make it worth the petrol."

Vinoth is already looking around the room, counting heads. His eyes land on Meena, then Divya, then me, and linger on Priya by the door. "Girls. Come on. Five days on the beach. You know you want to."

Meena doesn't even look up from her phone. "I have clinicals."

Divya snorts. "My mother would kill me. And then revive me. And then kill me again."

Vinoth turns to Priya, and Priya holds up both hands, smiling her city smile. "I have a cousin's wedding. In Trichy. I can't."

The room goes quiet, and I feel it before I understand it. The weight of eyes. All of them, turning to me, one by one, like a tide coming in.

Ravi's fingers stop counting. Karthik's lips stop moving. Vinoth is already grinning, the grin of a boy who has found the answer to his math.

"Kavi," Vinoth says, and my name is a door closing somewhere behind me. "You're free, right?"

I open my mouth. I have the words ready, I have them lined up in my throat like coins I have been saving: I can't, I have no money, I have to study, I have to send money home, I can't, I can't, I can't.

And then I feel it.

Suresh's eyes on me, across the rug. He is sitting cross-legged, leaning back on his hands, and his face is empty of everything except waiting. His right hand rests on his front pocket, the flat shape of the phone pressing against the cloth, and his thumb is tracing the edge of it. Slow. Back and forth. Like he is stroking something alive.

The coins in my throat turn to dust.

"I'll come," I hear myself say, and the voice is mine, but it comes from somewhere far away, from the place in me that learned to say yes without meaning it. "I'll come."

The room erupts. Vinoth whoops, actually whoops, and Karthik is already doing the math again, dividing the cost into six, into five, into a number that means nothing to me. Ravi claps his hands together once, sharp, and the sound is like a verdict.

Only Suresh does not move. His thumb stops tracing the edge of the phone. He looks at me across the rug, and his mouth does not smile, but something in his eyes does. Then his hand leaves his pocket, slow, unhurried, and reaches for the bottle on the floor beside him. He pours himself a drink, the clink of the glass against the bottle loud in my ears, and he raises it to me. A toast. From across the room.

I do not raise anything back. I cannot. My hands are under my thighs, my own hands, holding myself in place, and I am sitting in the middle of the room like a stone, letting the water go past.

The boys are already talking over each other, Ravi counting on his fingers again, Vinoth pulling out his phone to call his guy, Karthik writing numbers on the back of a receipt with a pen he found somewhere. The girls are gathering their things, Meena's thumb finding her mouth again, Divya's phone going into her bag, Priya by the door with her keys in her hand, jingling them, the sound a small bell that means the night is over.

And I am still on the rug. The wool is still scratching the backs of my legs. The nine of hearts is still face-up on the floor beside me, the red shape of it like a wound, and I cannot stop looking at it.

"Kavi." Priya's voice, soft, from the door. "You coming?"

I look up. She is standing with her hand on the latch, her jhumka earrings catching the light, her face open and warm and completely blind to what just happened in her room. She is the only person in this city who ever fed me, and I have just agreed to go to Goa with the boy who has a photograph of me that could end my life.

"Yes," I say, and my voice is steady. "I'm coming."

I rise from the rug, and my legs are asleep, the blood returning in a thousand small needles. I do not look at Suresh. I do not look at anyone. I walk toward Priya on feet I cannot feel, and she holds the door open for me with a smile that does not know what it is letting out.

The night air hits my face, salt and exhaust and the distant sound of waves, and I breathe it in like it is the first breath I have taken since the card fell. Priya locks the door behind us, the click of the latch a small, final sound, and the boys' voices are muffled now, a low hum through the wood. Meena and Divya are already walking ahead, their phones glowing in their hands, their laughter thin in the dark.

Priya falls into step beside me, her jhumkas ringing with each step, and she loops her arm through mine. "That was fun," she says, and I feel the words land on my skin like something I should agree with. "You were so brave tonight. The kiss, the dare—you're not the same girl who got on the bus."

I open my mouth to say something, anything, but the words are gone. The coins I had saved are dust, and there is nothing left in my throat but the shape of the yes I gave. I smile instead, and the smile is a door I close from the inside.

We reach the street, and the city is still awake, the tea stalls glowing orange, the auto drivers calling out to us in voices that are all the same voice. Priya squeezes my arm. "You should come over tomorrow. We can plan the trip. You'll need a swimsuit, Kavi. A real one."

"I don't have—" I start, and stop. I have nothing. I have a room with a cot that is not mine, a father who does not know where I am, and a photograph in Suresh's pocket that could turn the whole city against me. "I'll see," I say, and the words are small, the size of a coin I no longer have.

Priya does not notice. She is already on her phone, her thumb moving, her face lit blue in the dark. "Okay, I'll text you. Get some sleep. Big day tomorrow." She kisses the air beside my cheek, a sound like a small bird, and she is gone, her bob swinging, her heels clicking on the pavement.

I walk back to the rooming house alone. The streets are the same streets I walked on my first night, the same tea stall, the same corner where the man pressed the scrap of paper into my palm, and I am the same girl, and I am not the same girl. The difference is a photograph I have never seen, a moment I cannot take back, a yes I gave with a room full of people watching.

The rooming house is quiet when I climb the stairs. The light in the hallway is the same sickly yellow, the same crack in the wall, the same smell of cooking oil and damp. I push open the door to my room, and the cots are dark shapes in the dark, the boys' breathing a low rhythm I have learned to read like a language. Suresh's cot is empty. Ravi's cot is empty. I do not know where they are, and I do not want to know.

I lie down on my cot without undressing, without even pulling back the sheet. The pillow smells of the oil from my hair, of the city's dust, of nights I have spent pretending to sleep while my body learned new ways to be afraid. I stare at the ceiling, at the crack that runs from the corner to the middle, the same crack I have traced with my eyes a hundred times, and I try to make my breath go slow.

It does not go slow. It stays shallow, caught somewhere in my chest, a bird that cannot find its way out of a room. The boys' breathing around me is a rhythm I know, but tonight it sounds different, sharper, like each inhale is a word I am supposed to understand. Suresh's cot is still empty. Ravi's cot is still empty. The dark shapes of their beds wait for them, and I wait too, not knowing what I am waiting for.

The door opens. I do not hear it so much as feel it, the change in the air, the draft of the hallway moving across my face. Footsteps, two pairs, one heavier than the other. I close my eyes, the way I learned to do on my first night, the way I have done every night since, and I make my breathing even, deep, the breathing of someone who is asleep and has nothing to hide.

They do not speak. The footsteps cross the room, and I hear the creak of a cot, the rustle of a body settling. A phone lights up, blue in the dark, and I see through my lashes the shape of Suresh's face, the glow of it on his cheekbones, his thumb moving across the screen. He is looking at something. He is looking at it for a long time. Then the phone goes dark, and the room is dark with it, and I do not know if what I saw was the photograph or something else, a message, a game, a list of names.

I keep my eyes closed. I keep my breathing even. The bird in my chest beats its wings against my ribs, and I do not let it out. Suresh's cot creaks again, and I hear the sound of him settling, the sound of a body choosing its position for the night, and then there is only the breathing of the room, the low rhythm of boys who sleep easily, who do not carry photographs in their pockets that could end someone.

The tears come without sound. They slide from the corners of my eyes into the pillow, and I do not wipe them, do not move, do not give my body permission to do anything but lie still. I think of Goa. I think of five days, of a rented car, of the beach I have only seen in pictures, the water blue and endless, the sand white. I think of the swimsuit Priya will make me buy, the one she said I need, a real one. I think of Suresh on that beach, his phone in his pocket, his thumb tracing the edge of it while the sun goes down.

The room is dark. The room is quiet. The boys are asleep, or pretending to be, and I am the only one who knows what I agreed to, the only one who heard the word leave my mouth and understood what it carried. I close my eyes, and the tears keep coming, and I let them. There is no one here to see them. There is no one here to ask why.

I do not know when sleep comes. It comes the way the city comes, slowly, in pieces, a sound I cannot place, a light I cannot name. I dream of the nine of hearts, red and face-up, and in the dream it is not a card but a door, and I am standing in front of it, and I do not want to open it, but my hand is already reaching.