“Mashenka, how’s your family?” Kristina asked.
Masha looked up. The skin under her eyes was drawn tight by the temperature. “Fine,” she said. “Normal.”
Lada’s leg was hotter in the spots where Yegor’s touched. “How’s Vanya?” she asked Masha.
“Is that your boyfriend?” asked the cousin.
“My brother,” said Masha. “He’s good.” She smiled, her teeth precise white in the room’s mist. “He’s graduating from high school this year.”
“No!” Lada said.
“He’s applying to university in Vladivostok. He wants to be a businessman.” That little boy who used to follow them outside and watch them play. Once, when Masha’s parents were out for the night, the girls told him ghost stories until he wet his pants. Now he was going to learn how to run a company.
“Good for him,” said Kristina. She pushed her bangs back from her forehead. Her bare face was all cheekbones and lips. “Good for both of you world travelers.”
“You’re cosmopolitan, then, aren’t you?” asked the cousin.
“I don’t know,” said Masha. “No. Not really.”
“You don’t miss Kamchatka life?” he asked. She shook her head. “You don’t miss Kamchatka men?”
“No.”
“You haven’t met the right one.”
Kristina’s fingers trailed on Lada’s leg. The steam lifted all the blood to Lada’s head. Masha’s discomfort was apparent in the line of her back—that beautiful back—her muscles, stripped and tensed and sleek—and Lada wanted to say, Masha, it’s New Year’s, relax, let him touch you, because Lada would let Yegor take her to bed tonight. Masha, she wanted to say, just do it. Be with us again.
The walls were hissing. Kristina slid down off the bench. Her shoulders shone with sweat. “I’m going outside.”
Masha stood up fast. Lada, too, got to her feet, and the edges of her vision blotted black. The boys would follow. Kristina led them out of the sauna up the noisy hall.
Opening the house’s front door, Kristina shrieked at the cold. It wasn’t yet midnight, but the sky was black, black. Millions of stars blinked down. Kristina’s boyfriend pushed her out onto the iced-over cement step, and they all squeezed after. People in the kitchen were shouting. The detective’s voice rose above the rest. When the door shut, the racket from the house was muted.
Though Lada had braced herself, the outside air came like nothing. She couldn’t yet feel it through the sauna’s leftover warmth. From the clarity of the air, the crystals on the ground, she knew the night was far below zero. Her nerves must have sizzled out. On the base of her spine, a hand touched, steady. She looked down at her arms and saw them steam.
Yegor, behind her, leaned forward so his lips touched her ear. “You’re so tiny.”
She supposed that was a compliment. “I’m all grown up,” she said and eased her weight back to press against his palm.
“Really. How tall are you?”
“One meter fifty-five.” One meter fifty-four.
His hand rested on her back. “Have you ever been to Esso?” he asked. “I could take you.”
Someone shoved against them. On the other side of the step, Masha said, “Stop it.”
“Come on,” Kristina’s cousin said. “What’s your problem?” Masha had moved away from the rest of them. The cousin was holding up his hands.
“I’m not interested,” Masha said, in that flat tone. My dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
The cousin lowered his arms. He was tall like Kristina, with her same pout. On his face that mouth looked soppy. “Fucking lesbian.”
He spoke like he was serious. People died for less. Lada felt the cold then. She was frozen.
“Don’t say things like that to her,” Kristina said.
“So what if I am?” said Masha. “At least I’m not a fucking pervert.” She stepped down into the snow and gravel and pulled herself up into a different part of the group. Everyone was silent. Kristina’s long neck bent forward.
The cousin said they made him sick. He was going back inside.
The other two men went, too. Yegor last, but he went. It was only them then—Lada, Masha. Kristina. Like it used to be.
Masha sat down on the edge of the step. Her bikini bottom wrinkled in back. “It’s too cold to sit,” said Kristina. “You’ll go barren.”
Masha did not answer.
A car flashed by the opening of the driveway. Its headlights lit up the trees. Someone was going late to another celebration. “Forget it,” Kristina said and turned around.
The door shut again. Finally just the two of them. Lada lowered herself to the step, and the cement scraped the backs of her thighs.
“He didn’t mean anything by it,” she told Masha. “Are you okay?”
Masha looked straight ahead. Her arms were crossed on her knees. Everyone’s cars were lined up on the driveway in front of them. “This is my last time coming here,” she said.
“Kristina’s cousin is an idiot. Stay the night.”
Masha nodded at the iced-over yard. “Here, I mean. Home. Kamchatka.”
The night was filling Lada’s lungs with ice. “You just got back,” she said.
“Yeah, well,” Masha said. Her shoulders were raised. The way she sat was as it ever was. “My parents wanted me to come this winter. Now they say they don’t want me to anymore.”
“That’s not true.”
“That’s what they told me tonight.”
The sauna warmth was long gone. Masha’s skin was raised in white goose bumps. Lada wanted to touch that skin—the impulse crested inside her. It had once been so easy to reach Masha. She was the girl that Lada knew, and she wasn’t, all at once.
“But you’re happy in St. Petersburg,” Lada said. “Right? Kristina says you are—you have been.”
“I guess,” Masha said. She rested her head on her crossed hands to watch Lada. “I have to find a new apartment when I get back. I just broke up with my girlfriend.”
“Oh,” Lada said. The roommate. Kristina had said Masha had a roommate.
A girlfriend. Masha was so stupid. A girlfriend, Masha said outside the door, while all those big familiar men sat just on the other side of the wall. A detective. A police detective was in there. Underneath the frost, the steam, and the liquor, Lada’s anger bubbled up, and she wanted to touch Masha now, but not gently, not with fingertips where Masha’s fine arm hairs rose. She wanted to grab her by the wrist and shake. Brilliant Masha, with her scholarship spot, her tech degree. Perfect Masha, who got a job at a global firm. Gorgeous Masha, who paid twenty-eight thousand rubles a month to live with another woman. Masha had been treated her whole life like she was exceptional. If she, from that, now believed she could act this way…
Some people don’t care if you’re special. They will punish you anyway. Neighbors, for example, will report a girl, even a smart girl, with a girlfriend. The police will hurt you, if they get the chance. One person up the Okhotsk coast had been burned to death for this only a couple years earlier. Masha moved away from home at seventeen; when she thought back on life in Kamchatka, she probably pictured volcanoes, tasted caviar, remembered hikes on stone paths to the clouds. She didn’t understand what happened these days to girls as innocent as she and Lada had been. They were destroyed for it. Any girl would be. The Golosovskaya sisters, who, walking alone, made themselves vulnerable—that one mistake cost them their lives.
If you aren’t doing what you’re supposed to, if you let your guard down, they will come for you. If you give them the opportunity. Lada could not believe Masha would be naïve enough to choose to have a girlfriend. They will hurt you, Lada had to say. You could die for this.