Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier

said, Heads up, she might have a point.
    —Dimps! Plenty of things need a third wheel, said Gwyn, pushing my hair out of my eyes and gazing into them.—A tricycle, for example.
    But I knew I’d only have a contraceptive presence if I stayed.
    —Well, then, I’m gonna ride, I said.—Call me?
    —Call you, she said.
    And I wiggled my sack onto my back and walked on.
    I was dying to sleep in my own bed and forget any of this ever happened, but figured I’d better work off the wooziness first. So I went in the direction opposite from home, towards the strip of woods bordering Gwyn’s yard. I crunched through twigs and fallen branches past the silent playhouse, the windows caked with dust as if the children had long ago vanished. I supposed they had. From there it was a hop, scrunch, and plunk to cut out to Mirror Lake. I stood on the edge of the three-holed concrete bridge that traversed it; on one side water gushed into a low-level creek with stones pitted for crossing. On the other was the pond itself in all its quasioctagonal tadpoled-and-minnowed glory.
    Once I had caught a rainbow that began in my own backyard; I followed it out to this bridge and saw how it stretched all the way to the other side of the pond, as far as India perhaps, I thought then, disappearing into what was then still forest, before all the construction began. The rainbow reflected so clearly in the water it went nearly full circle, like a Ferris wheel whirling with sheer speed into simple circumferences of vivid color. It was gone by the time I got home, blown away by the sun-dried wind. I’d always wondered where it had ended on the other side.
    Now the clouds glowed opaquely with the force of the moon behind them. A raft with a diving board swanned through the water, scepterlike. I stood on the bridge a moment and stared down, imagined diving. What it must feel like to turn your world upside down, let go, give yourself up to something. Fortunately I wasn’t wasted enough to try it, being more a practitioner of the belly flop, the slamming-against-the-world way of navigating it, than anything so graceful as a dive. I’d once known how to take the plunge when I was younger, but the more my brain started breaking down this concept of putting your head where your feet were supposed to be and vice versa, the more blocked I became.
    I crossed over, mounted the strip of woods where Bobby and I used to meet, and came out on the other side. It felt cooler here. To the right was the Fields, with not a field in sight, a neighborhood named, I suppose, for what it had knocked down to go up. That’s where Bobby lived and lusted. To the left, where once had been forest, were the newer streets, a neighborhood called Lake View. It was a bit of a misnomer, considering Mirror Lake was actually a pond, small and man-made, and unless you had eyes that could permeate bark, Pine View was much more along the lines of what you’d be buying into.
    I guess it was somewhat surprising I’d spent a sizeable amount of time in New York City already considering I hardly ever even crossed over to the other side of the pond. I hadn’t been here since a couple of years ago, in the beginning with Bobby, when the streets were all new, not even the house foundations down yet. One night, after hours of furtive first-basing, Bobby took a stick and carved our names in the still soft tar: Bobby O + Dimple Lala. It was juvenile, maybe, but strangely reassuring to have it there in writing. Like I really was someone. It wasn’t the same seeing my name on pop quizzes and report cards, even in the yearbook below my usually mortified face and overly sprayed hair; in these cases it seemed random, and if I stared too long the words started to sound funny in my head and lose their sense (not that my name makes much sense to begin with—I don’t even have a dimple). But here, paired up with someone else’s, my own appellation looked rock-solid. Like it had been picked for a team. It