The crack in the wall above my cot is shaped like the river behind my house in the village. Not exactly. But close enough that I have been tracing it with my eyes every night for three weeks, the way I used to trace the river from the bank with a stick, dragging a line through the wet sand. The crack starts thin near the ceiling, widens in the middle where the plaster has fallen away in a small triangle, then tapers again toward the floor. I know it better than I know the faces of the people I sleep beside. I know it better than I know this city.

The room is not quiet. It is never quiet. The tap in the corner drips into the bucket with a sound like someone counting — one, two, pause, one, two, pause. Outside, somewhere past the lane and the temple wall, an auto horn cuts through the dark, short and sharp, and then another, farther away, and then nothing. The sea is always there underneath it all, grinding at itself the way it has ground at itself since before there were people to hear it. I have stopped noticing it most nights. Tonight I notice it.

I can hear the others breathing. Lakshmi, on the cot beside me, breathes through her mouth, a soft whistle on every exhale like a door left slightly open. Bhavani talks in her sleep sometimes, small words in English that do not fit together — the syllabus, the syllabus — and then goes quiet. Suresh snores, but only when he lies on his back, and I have learned to listen for the moment he turns onto his side and the snoring stops, because that is when the room feels smallest. Meena sleeps like a stone. I have never heard her make a sound in the night.

And Arjun, across the room, on the cot against the far wall. He is the one I think about. Not because of the game, not because of the dare — because of the sentence that stopped in the middle. My mother died three years ago and I have not— and then nothing. The road ending at water. I have been lying here for an hour, maybe two, thinking about that sentence and the way his voice had gone thin when he said it, and the way nobody in the room had known what to do with the silence after, so we had all just looked at our hands.

I turn onto my side. The spring digs into my hip. The sheet is damp where I have been lying on it, and I pull it up to my chin and let my eyes close, and I try to sleep.

I do not sleep.

My mind keeps moving. It goes back to the shop this afternoon — the one near the college gate where I bought a notebook and a pen, and the shopkeeper had handed me the change and let his fingers stay on mine a moment too long, and I had smiled and said thank you, sir, because that is what you say, and he had smiled back with his eyes somewhere below my face. It goes to the bus, the way the man in the seat across from me had watched my ankles the whole ride, the silver anklets I have worn since I was a girl, the ones my mother tied on me the year before she died. It goes to the canteen, to Arun's hand on my knee under the table, the way he had not looked at me once while he did it, the way he had kept talking to Priya about her commerce exam as if his hand were not there at all.

I do not know what to do with any of it. I never know what to do with any of it. In the village, when a man looked at you, you looked down. When a man touched you, you stepped back. When a man said something with a smile that did not reach his eyes, you went home and told your mother, and your mother told your father, and your father went red in the face and did something about it. Here there is no mother. Here there is no father. Here there is only me, and the crack in the wall, and the drip of the tap, and the sea.

I hear a creak.

It is small. The kind of creak a cot makes when a body shifts its weight, not when it turns over. I have learned the difference in three weeks. A turn is a long groan, the springs complaining all the way through. This is short. Careful. A body lifting itself, slowly, so as not to wake anyone.

My eyes are closed. I keep them closed. I do not know why — there is no reason to pretend, I am only lying here — but something in my chest has gone tight and still, and I do not open them.

Another creak. Bare feet on the concrete floor, soft, one step, then another. The floor is cool at night, I know that, I know the way it feels under my own feet when I get up to use the bathroom in the dark, the way the cold comes up through the soles. Whoever is walking is walking slowly. Placing each foot down with care.

The steps come toward my side of the room.

I feel it before I understand it. A shadow crosses the thin bar of blue streetlight that falls across my cot, and the light goes away from my face, and I know someone is standing over me. The shadow smells of sweat and soap — the same cheap soap we all use, the green bar from the shop at the corner, and under it something else, something male, something I have smelled on the boys' side of the room when the wind comes through the window and carries it across. My heart is beating so hard I am sure whoever it is can hear it. I am sure the whole room can hear it.

I do not open my eyes.

I do not know why I do not open my eyes. I could. I could sit up. I could say what are you doing, I could say go back to your cot, I could say any of the things a girl from my village would say, the things my mother would have taught me to say if she had lived long enough to teach me anything about men. But I do not open my eyes. I lie still. I breathe the way I have been breathing, slow and even, in and out, the way I used to pretend to be asleep when my father came home late and I did not want to talk to him. I am good at pretending. I have been pretending since the night I left.

The shadow lowers itself. I hear the small sound of a knee touching the floor beside my cot, and then the cot dips a little, just at the edge, as a hand rests on it. The canvas is rough under my back. I feel the dip through my whole body.

And then a hand is on my wrist.

It is warm. Warmer than I expected. The fingers are thin and a little damp, and they close around my wrist gently, the way you would pick up something you were afraid of breaking, and I feel the calluses on the palm — the same calluses I felt in the game, when I touched Arjun's thigh under the blanket, the rough skin of a boy who has done work with his hands. This is not Arjun. I know that already, from the shape of the hand, from the smell, from the way the breath above me is coming too fast and too shallow. This is Ravi. I do not know how I know. I just know. The thin boy from Trichy. The one whose father calls a phone that rings and rings.

He lifts my hand.

I let him. That is the thing I will think about later, in the morning, in the days after — that I let him. My hand is limp in his, heavy the way a sleeping hand is heavy, and he lifts it from the sheet and he brings it down, and I feel the heat of him before I feel the shape, the heat first, a furnace heat, and then the shape, and then I understand.

His cock is in my hand.

It is hot. Hotter than his fingers, hotter than anything I have ever touched. It is hard the way the wooden handle of the water pump is hard, but it is not wood, it is skin, soft skin stretched tight over something that pulses, and I can feel the pulse under my palm, a fast beat, faster than my own heart, and my hand is wrapped around it because he has wrapped it there, his fingers over mine, pressing my fingers closed around him.

I have never touched a boy's cock. I have seen them, in the village, the small boys running to the river, the ones who did not know I was watching from behind the tamarind tree. But I have never touched one. I have never had one in my hand. And now there is one in my hand, hard and hot and pulsing, and I am pretending to be asleep.

He moves my hand.

Up, slow, the skin sliding under my palm, and I feel the ridge of him, the way the skin moves over the hardness beneath, and then down, and his breath catches above me, a small sound, almost a whimper, and I feel the first wetness at the tip against my thumb. He moves my hand again. Up. Down. His hips press forward into my fingers, a small thrust, and I feel him push against my palm, and the wetness spreads.

I keep my eyes closed. I keep my breathing even. I do not move my hand on my own — I let him move it, the way you let a current move you in the river, and I feel every part of it. The heat. The pulse. The way the skin is soft and the thing under it is not. The way his breath comes faster and faster above me, small and ragged, and I can smell the sweat on him now, sharp and young, and under it the soap, and under that something else, something I do not have a word for.

He is shaking. His whole body is shaking, the way a leaf shakes in a wind you cannot feel, and his hand tightens over mine and he moves my hand faster, and I feel the wetness now all along my palm, slick, and the tip of him is leaking into my fingers, and I feel the pulse get faster, and faster, and his breath is a thin high sound in the dark, and I think — I do not know why I think this — I think, he is going to wake the whole room, and then I think, I do not care, and then I think nothing at all.

He gasps.

It is a small choked sound, the sound of someone who has been holding his breath and cannot hold it any longer, and his hips push hard into my hand and his cock jumps against my palm, once, twice, and then the wet comes, warm and thick, spilling over my fingers, over the back of my hand, into the crease between my thumb and my palm. It is hotter than I expected. It is stickier. It keeps coming, pulse after pulse, and he holds my hand there, pressed against him, until the last of it is out, and then he stays a moment, breathing hard, his forehead maybe resting against the edge of the cot, I cannot tell, I cannot see, my eyes are still closed.

And then he lets my hand fall.

It drops back onto the sheet, palm up, and the wetness is cooling already in the night air, and I feel it, every bit of it, the way it sits on my skin and starts to dry. I hear him stand. I hear his bare feet on the concrete, soft, one step, then another, going back the way he came. I hear the creak of his cot as he lowers himself onto it, and the long groan of the springs as he settles, and then his breathing, still fast, still ragged, but slowing now, slowing, the way a river slows when it comes out of the narrow part and into the wide.

I do not open my eyes.

I do not move. I lie there with my palm wet and my heart going hard in my chest and the crack in the wall above me, and the tap dripping, one, two, pause, and the sea grinding away at itself outside, and the small breathing of six people around me, one of them his. I do not know how long I lie there. Long enough that his breathing goes even. Long enough that the wetness on my hand dries to a thin stiff film. Long enough that Lakshmi beside me turns over and her cot groans and she settles again and does not wake.

I think about his hand on my wrist. The way he had lifted it so gently. The way he had wrapped my fingers around him, one by one, like he was teaching me something. The way he had shaken. The way he had gasped, that small choked sound, and then the warm spill over my fingers, and the way he had stayed there a moment before he let me go, as if he did not want to leave, as if he wanted to say something and did not know what.

I think about the morning. I think about the light coming through the window, the way it does, grey and then gold, and all of us getting up, and Ravi across the room, thin Ravi with his books he does not open, and how I will have to look at him. How I will have to say good morning. How I will have to sit across from him at the tap while we wash our faces, and hand him the soap, and take it back, and not look at his hands.

I do not know if I will be able to do it.

I do not know if I will be able to look at him at all. I do not know if I will be able to look at any of them — at Arjun, at Suresh, at the room, at the crack in the wall that I have traced every night for three weeks. Something has changed in the dark. Something has been done to me, or with me, or through me, I do not know which, and I do not know what it makes me. I only know that my palm is wet and my hand is not my own anymore, not the way it was when I lay down, and that somewhere across the room a boy I have barely spoken to is lying on his cot with his breath going even, and that tomorrow I will have to wake up and be the same girl I was yesterday, and I do not know if I can.

I turn my hand over on the sheet. The wetness has dried into a small stiff patch, and I rub my thumb across it, once, twice, and then I stop.

Outside, the sea keeps grinding. The tap keeps dripping. The crack in the wall keeps its shape in the dark, the river I have been tracing, the river that goes nowhere.