“A prince?” Luca snorted. “He’s, like, the son of a queen.”
“But what’s a queen? Words that seem easy can actually be pretty tough.”
Siddharth focused on his drawing, penciling in the man’s hefty torso. He drew the little horse that was stitched into the breast of his short-sleeve shirt. It wasn’t a real Polo horse, but one with wings, which reinforced the fact that Mr. Latella was lame.
The teacher clicked his tongue. “Come on, guys, what’s a prince? This is baby stuff.”
“Yo,” said Luca, “why don’t you ask Siddharth?”
“Luca, let’s quit while we’re ahead,” said Mr. Latella.
“I’m serious,” said Luca. “He should know.”
“And you shouldn’t?”
“Well, I’m not, like, royalty.”
A few sets of eyes turned to Siddharth. He put down his yellow pencil and turned to Luca, who separated his lips and flicked out his tongue. Siddharth had no idea where this was going, though he knew it wouldn’t end well. He had hoped that things would change between him and Luca after Bobby’s party, but the kid had barely glanced in his direction since Sunday.
Mr. Latella slammed his chalk down on the ledge of the blackboard, generating a tiny cloud of dust. “Can you keep your mouth shut, Mr. Peroti?”
“I didn’t even do anything,” said Luca, throwing his hands in the air.
Mr. Latella’s forehead went red. “You’re a real wise guy, Luca. You know that?”
“But I’m not kidding. Just ask him. Ask Siddharth.”
“You’re gonna be sorry, Luca.”
“Hit me,” said Luca. “I’ll sue.”
Mr. Latella walked over to Siddharth and thumped his hand down on his desk.
Siddharth winced. He placed his wrists over his drawing and stared at them in anticipation of what would follow.
“So, Siddharth,” said Mr. Latella, “your new friend back there is making some claims about you. He’s saying something about your family. Are you gonna sit there and let him do that? Isn’t there something you wanna say to him?”
“Tell him,” said Luca.
Siddharth took a deep breath and kept his eyes fixed on his desk. He reread the words a previous occupant had etched into it: Kiss Rules. His brother used to like Kiss. He wished Arjun would barge into the room at that very moment and save him.
“Siddharth, you need to look at me when I’m talking to you.”
He met his teacher’s angry eyes, green slits in his pudgy, bearded face. “What do you want?”
“What do I want? I want to be able to move on with class, if that’s not too much to ask.”
Each student was now looking at him, and his face burned.
“So?” said the teacher.
Siddharth turned toward the window. It didn’t matter that a hard rain was falling, or that water had turned the asphalt paths into little rivers — he would rather have been outside getting drenched.
“You want me to wait all day?” said Mr. Latella. He placed a hand on one of his flabby hips. “Because I can, you know.”
Siddharth put his pencil in his mouth and started chewing it, keeping his eyes fixed on the rain. “My great-grandfather. .” He peeked down to make sure his rendition of his teacher’s bulbous gut was still obscured by his arms. “Well, my dad. . he says my great-grandfather was royalty.”
“I can’t hear you with that pencil in your mouth. Lead poisoning is a serious thing, you know.”
He removed the pencil. “My great-grandfather was royalty, but that was a real long time ago.”
“Is this some kind of joke? Did you and Luca plan this or something?”
Siddharth shook his head, and his teacher wheezed deeply.
“You’re telling me you’re serious?” said Mr. Latella.
“I told you so,” said Luca.
Mr. Latella shifted his weight to his other leg, and his stomach jiggled. “So what? He was, like, a maharaja or something?”
“He was a prince,” said Siddharth.
“A prince?” Mr. Latella gripped his beard. “Wait, was he, like, nobility?” His eyes suddenly widened. “Was he English?”
The next sentences came out before Siddharth could pause to consider them. “My great-grandfather went to study in England — at Oxford. That’s a famous college.”
“Thanks, I know what Oxford is.”
“He married this, uh, woman there — my great-grandmother — and she was, like, a real distant relative of the king.”
“Which king?”
“King George.”
“How distant?”
“I don’t know. The king and my great-grandmother were fifth cousins or something.”
“Really?” Mr. Latella put his foot on an empty seat, and the keys on his belt loop jingled. He stared into the air and smiled. “You know, I always wondered if you were mixed.”
The teacher’s words made Siddharth feel bolder. “That’s why my skin’s light. And my eyes — in the right light, they have little flecks of green in them.”
“Go figure,” Mr. Latella snickered. “Your great-grandmother was British nobility.”
Siddharth nodded. In that moment, the lie he had told felt right. It didn’t feel like a lie.
Luca started pounding on his desk and chanting. “Prince Sidd-harth, Prince Sidd-harth.” The rest of the class joined in too: “Prince Sidd-harth, Prince Sidd-harth. .”
Mr. Latella shook his head, but he was still smiling. “Okay, okay. Settle down.” He gave Siddharth a high five for the second time that year. “Take a bow, Prince Siddharth. Take a bow, and let’s move on.”
5. Land of the Arab-Haters and Nymphomaniacs
Siddharth was pretending to do math homework but was really watching television. He heard his father call for him. “What is it?” he yelled back. He wasn’t in the mood to get his father a glass of water. He wasn’t in the mood to tell him if the clothes he was wearing looked good or not. Mohan Lal kept on calling, and Siddharth begrudgingly peeled himself off the sofa.
He found his father in the bathroom wearing a pair of tan pants and a ribbed banyan — what Marc called a wifebeater. He was on his knees scrubbing the floor of the shower.
“Dad, what do you want?”
Mohan Lal told to him to clean up the house. He said Siddharth had turned their home into a pigsty.
“I turned it into a pigsty? Me?” Siddharth was about to shoot back with something mean — that Mohan Lal was worse than a pig, he was like a dirty Indian beggar who lived in a slum. That the house got so dirty because Mohan Lal was too cheap to pay the Polish cleaning lady to come more than once a month. But as he looked down at the glistening gray hairs of his father’s shoulders, he realized something strange was happening. Mohan Lal did clean from time to time. He blued the toilet bowls with that gel, vacuumed the floors in the family room and kitchen. But he rarely got down and dirty like this.
“Go clean your room,” said Mohan Lal. “Rachel and Marc will be here soon.”
“They’re coming over? Again?”
“Hurry up. Thanks to you, she’ll think we are animals.”
“Yeah, thanks to me,” Siddharth muttered. “I’m the one who has seven dirty coffee mugs on my desk. I keep the catalogs on the dining table for five months but never actually cut the coupons.” He reluctantly headed to his bedroom with an empty garbage bag and the vacuum cleaner. He sifted through the chaotic assortment of school papers on his desk, chucking a blackened banana peel and a paper plate full of Dorito crumbs into the garbage. Two weeks of dirty clothes were strewn across the patterned carpet. He stuffed his sweaters and sweatshirts into a drawer, then dumped his pants and T-shirts into the laundry basket in the linen closet outside the main bathroom, where Mohan Lal was now ringing out a mop.