I dream that my sister is dead. Her body is on a wooden pallet, covered in the white and pink bedspread she and I sleep on. She should have been studying for her calculus test instead of dying. Now she won't get into Engineering and Baba will get a heart-attack. Maybe he'll die too. They've put cotton plugs in her nostrils—Ma explains in her cool teacher voice that they are to keep the corpse (her words) from bloating. There's a red sticker-bindi—the round, velvety kind—on my sister's forehead. She hates those. I try to peel it off with my thumb nail, but the pallbearers lift her up.

I did say "I hate you" and "I wish you were dead" the last time we fought, but I didn't want her to really die. I was hoping once I got my period, she would finally stop treating me like a baby and be my friend. Now I'll never know. She's gone.

The lump in my throat tastes like overripe mangoes—the ones that are on the precipice of rotting.

"Wait!" I shout, running barefoot after the funeral procession. "Don't take her away! She doesn't like that bindi!" I scream, and wake up.

She's right beside me on the bed with her calculus book open. I scare her with my sudden, tight hug.

"Don't leave me, Akka," I sob.

"What? Okay, I won't, stupid, now let go," she says, peeling me off her. Her lips are pinker than usual, slightly swollen, and she smells strange—Mama's perfume mixed with wet grass and... something else. The jacaranda tree outside our open window is swaying wildly. One of its leaves is stuck in her hair.

A motorbike revs and vrooms off below. My sister pulls me back from the window, but I manage to get a look.

It's Robbie, that loser (Ma's words), who wears a tie-dye bandana on his head, and a dangling skull earring in his left ear. He hangs out at the arcade even though he's like twenty-five or thirty or a hundred years old.

My sister and I stare at each other without a word.

I taste overripe mangoes again.