Her mouth drops into a hesitant o when she first looks at herself in the mirror.
The girl on the screen films whenever she can. Her phone’s camera, a hungry eye, beckons. But she doesn’t mind being wanted. The more people keep watching her, keep calling her the best of the best, the more her mind loops with clever visuals instead of memories she’d prefer not to fall asleep to. So she records. So she posts—online. So, she presses her phone to her chest and waits for the comments to come in, all of them for her.
Today, the girl on the screen uses her thumbnail to slice open a box. Inside, a tube. Inside that, a product she layers over her face. Now she starts filming, and as the cream is absorbed there is a twist and a tug, like something caught needs release. It hurts, but in a good way, like floss parting the gums around a tooth, startling the mouth with blood. The girl’s features rearrange and for a split second her whole face looks mangled. She doesn’t flinch. In editing, she speeds up the process so no one notices when things go gruesome.
The girl’s face sculpted, elongated, augmented exactly as she wanted it. She smiles, both at that and at how her view count ticks up as soon as she posts. Her followers send her blue hearts, green hearts, whatever color heart their fingers hit first. Some crimson ones, too. Blood, the girl thinks again, then makes herself forget.
Later, the girl on the screen deletes her video and reposts a better version of it. She edits out one clip—her mouth, in that hesitant little o.
*
The whole party moves like a single animal, lumbering back and forth between the foul juice-and-liquor concoction haphazardly set up on the weather-cracked patio furniture and the in-ground pool where four boys play a game of chicken. One of them shouts a long “fu-u-u-ck” as he goes tumbling into the water, but Kashmira doesn’t look up. She stands between a seated boy’s legs and angles her mouth against his. Though Tej bites her lip too hard, she doesn’t stop kissing him. Tonight is about nothing but becoming someone new in the wake of her father’s call a month ago. The call during which Vinod announced not that he was coming home after a year and a half of forgotten holidays and missed school ceremonies, but rather that divorce papers would soon arrive in the mail.
“You’re better at this than I thought you would be,” Tej slurs.
Kashmira says nothing. She never shows up to these parties, though the guest lists are made up of South Asian kids from her so-called family-friendly suburb, Marlton, and the rest of South Jersey, too. Today’s party, on the second Saturday in June, is just a fifteen-minute drive from her house, but sometimes the hosts live much farther away. Because there aren’t as many brown teens here as in Edison or Jersey City, people travel for these things. But regardless of distance it always works like this: One of the richer kids’ parents go out of town, usually to some big wedding, and everyone starts texting about what alcohol to bring and what lies to tell the “aunties and uncles.” While Kashmira sometimes ends up on the text chains, no one really ever expects her to come. People have been calling her a loner since her father left, and even in the years before that, she rarely hung out with the other brown kids anyway. Tonight, though, she intends to change all this, to become someone new amid the blaring Bollywood music that some self-appointed DJ cuts with rap.
So far, none of the thirty or so attendees have acted surprised at Kashmira’s presence, possibly because they’re already too far gone on punch and hormones to care. The only one who notices her is the boy she is draped over now: Tej, a stranger, who she can only guess is interested because he is tired of sleeping with his usual girls. After an hour at the party even Kashmira has heard the gossip that he has been looking for someone new, someone fresh. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he circled her little wrist with his meaty hand and pulled her close and that she can pretend she is like the other girls here: flitting around the party in their light, lithe bodies.
“Have I even seen you around before?” Tej says. He blinks up at her, waiting.
“You would remember meeting me,” she tells him. It sounds awkward, but Tej laughs. She feels the rumble of it under the hands she settled on his chest.
“You need more punch,” he says. “Come on, it’s inside.”
Holding on to one of her belt loops, Tej leads her around the perimeter of the yard, where the grass is due for a mow. His thumb creeps under her waistband while he pulls her along. It feels for her hip bone, and she lets it. Inside, they pass the kitchen, where juice litters the island. Neither of them stops to ask about if they should be refrigerated. Instead Tej opens the door to a bedroom, and there, he sits Kashmira on the bed and sprawls next to her. The mattress is firm beneath her spine as she lays back. Tej’s stubble comes in at the underside of his jaw. She touches it. Then, they kiss.
It’s Kashmira’s first kiss, all messy tongue and alcohol stink, but she decides to enjoy it. She lets Tej pull her on top of him, and doesn’t stiffen when he grabs her ass so eagerly it puts her off balance. When she collapses, it just gets them closer, and he nuzzles her cleavage. Then he goes back to her shorts and undoes the sole button with an easy tweak of his fingers.
“You should, you know,” Tej says, unzipping his pants and gesturing.
She knows what he means, even though she hasn’t done it before. When Tej stands, Kashmira slides off the bed and onto the carpet. Instead of looking at Tej’s erection, she glances in the mirror, hoping she’ll see a clear-eyed girl, in control, pressing her hand against the muscular thigh of one of the most coveted boys at this party.
But no.
In the mirror, she sees the specter of her father, Vinod, animated in her face. Reflected at her, in her, are his heavy-lidded eyes, his crooked nose, his squarish jawline. That face that contorted in fury whenever she did the smallest thing wrong. That face that went scarily blank after he yelled himself hoarse. That face that never loved her enough and doesn’t love her now. Pain runs through her abdomen, and she gasps, but her breath won’t come in or out, and this leaves her panicked, digging her nails into Tej’s thigh without meaning to.
“Shit, let go,” he says.
“I—I—”
“Hey,” Tej says, nudging her shoulder.
Kashmira just shakes her head. Yes, people have always told her she looks like her father. Vinod used to say it himself. But now, for the first time, she sees how impossible it is—how impossible it will always be—to escape the man who so easily fractured the girl he demanded she be.
She can’t look any longer.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Ravishing by Eshani Surya. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Roxane Gay Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
