Afterward, he found me in the cafeteria nibbling through a sandwich. “We kept in touch,” he said. “After I dropped out. She would call me and check that I was reading enough Shakespeare. She told me everything else was optional.”

We talked about the intervening years. After his mother died, he had gone to live with an aunt. He didn’t finish high school. He backpacked around Mexico, and then he helped to organize a copper miners’ union in Chile, and after that he had taught English in Ecuador before returning to America. He met Julian, his best friend, while hiking the Presidential mountain range in New Hampshire (they had met on Madison and started talking on Jefferson, and by the time they had done the Washington traverse, they were inseparable). Days before I’d moved to Cambridge, Jules had convinced Cyrus to move into his house, just streets away from my dorm. By now I was over being shy; I decided it would be best to just tell him.

The metamorphosis was this: I was no longer the awkward new kid at school with the smelly lunchbox. I had taken the heaviness of my childhood—the story of my parents and their exile and those years above the pharmacy and all the striving I had to swallow—and I had turned it into fire-breathing. I was clever and awesome and, despite my less than stellar performance in Dr. Stein’s lab, beginning to understand my powers. [...]

The wedding was two hours outside of Boston in a bookshop that used to be a sawmill. We rented a car and Cyrus drove and we listened to Jeff Buckley singing “Hallelujah,” which put me in a very somber mood even though I was wearing my most cheerful outfit, a red tunic which was one half of a matching set my mother’s cousin had sent from Bangladesh. Cyrus was dressed in a not dissimilar shaped shirt with a small round collar and a navy waistcoat.

We pulled over at a rest stop and Cyrus unpacked two triangular-shaped rice balls he called Onigiri. He was always making me taste things—mostly Japanese things—I’d never heard of. He unwrapped one and showed me how to put the seaweed around it so it looked like a large samosa. It was delicious, filled with pickles and sour plums. As I plucked off a piece of rice that had stuck to the corner of my mouth, I felt his hand cradling the back of my neck, and then he was hovering over me, and I can’t remember which of us leaned in first, but soon we were kissing, and a little sound escaped from my mouth, a noise that appeared to originate elsewhere, deep down inside where my brain couldn’t reach.

But really, it was none of those things. There was both a very good reason and no reason at all for Cyrus and me to get married within a few weeks of meeting again. The good reason was that we were in love, or at least we believed ourselves to be in love, and for me the feeling was so strong that it felt like the first time I had ever believed in anything. But also, doing something so irrational both fit into who I wanted to be—a person who chooses her own destiny—and yet told me something entirely new about the world, which is that things that seemed impossible and out of my reach, like marrying a man I had teenage dreams about—were actually within my grasp, and all I had to do was stretch out my greedy little hands and take what was mine.

[...] Right now she was in rehearsals for Chitrangoda, a musical play about a warrior princess. I figured that’s why she reacted to my news like I was challenging her to a dual.

“I did consider Dante, but the whole point of laying someone to rest is that he goes somewhere, even if we don’t know exactly where that is. That’s the only knowable thing about it.” He closes the book, reaches for me. I feel that lurch in my stomach every time I’m near him. It’s been over a year, and I sometimes wonder when this particular feeling will fade—it has to, I’ve read too many novels to imagine it won’t—but right now I’m still in the swell of it, strange noises escaping my lips as he pulls at my sweater, all the time wondering what I would do if this feeling were ever taken away from me, if he stopped wanting me, if I stopped wanting him, if we turned into ordinary people who got tired of each other or simply decided to love each other in ordinary ways.

None of us has ever had real power. Jules has been smacked down by his family for as long as he can remember; Cyrus hasn’t even had a family. As for me, even though I’ve never thought of myself as a symbol, I can’t help but feel like every little success is a small fuck-you to all the people who glanced ugly at my mother in her sari in Walmart, or mispronounced my name even though it was only four letters long, or said something casually racist and then said, “But I don’t mean you.” I feel like I’m coming for all those people, and that fills me with a kind of satisfaction I didn’t even know I needed. I understand my sister a little more now, how she always insists that everything means something bigger than it seems. But instead of getting angry, I’m doing something about it. I’m knocking the air right out of the argument, me and my algorithmic genius.

“If we’re not spending anything on customer acquisition or marketing, why is our burn so high?” Cyrus asks.

“Burn is better than churn,” Rupert says.

Churn, I am told, is just not the latest fad in cultured butter but the number of people who sign up, then abandon, the platform. In our case, once they’ve asked the platform to give them a ritual, they’re hooked, perpetually asking it more questions, coming back daily and sometimes multiple times a day to see what their friends are doing, posting photos, commenting on other people’s rituals, and in general just hanging around like they have nothing better to do than to sit around not worshipping God.