Strands of hair brushed Olya’s face. It was fine enough here by herself, anyway. Familiar, sun-warmed. Last spring, their year-seven history teacher had called Olya’s hair a rat’s nest in front of the class, and she had boiled with humiliation. But over this summer tourist season, as Olya turned thirteen years old, explored the city beside Diana, and felt her tangles tickle her neck, she thought again and liked that—a rat’s nest. She was a beast. This was her hollow.
She sniffed—even the smell had stopped bothering her.
A truck honked outside and another one answered. She rolled over to scroll through the news feed on her phone: selfies, skate parks, classmates in short skirts. Someone’s girlfriend had commented on his status with a heart. Olya clicked on that girl’s profile, looked through all its pictures, and moved on, finding mutual friends, scrolling, clicking, skipping. She went back to her feed and refreshed. She stopped.
A girl they knew had just posted a picture of Diana. Diana’s smile suspended between gleaming cheeks. Diana in her home clothes: that ridiculous red T-shirt, rhinestones lining the Union Jack on her chest, and those pink leggings cut off at the knee. Diana sitting cross-legged on her bed, and one of their classmates lying down beside her, and another leaning over in her school uniform while flashing victory signs with both hands.
Olya sat up. Texted Diana: What are you doing? Couldn’t wait. Sent another. Can I come over?
She shoved off the futon, found her jeans, grabbed her jacket, filled her pockets with her wallet and lip balm and headphones and keys. After class, Diana had told Olya she had to go home, but maybe she meant Olya should come with her. Maybe both of them had misunderstood. Olya looked again at the picture. There were four of them together? The girl who posted it didn’t even live in Diana’s neighborhood. Olya refreshed. Nothing new. She made sure she had her bus pass, slammed the apartment doors, then ran down the stairs.
Outside, the sun was bright enough to make her wince. She hadn’t been at the apartment for more than an hour, but already she had turned fully rodent, blinking at the light. As she hurried, she pulled fingers through her hair to smooth it out. Strands dropped behind. Olya had suggested they go to the center this afternoon—did Diana think she wanted to go only there? Nowhere else? Olya would’ve agreed to any other plan; Diana knew that. Diana knew Olya didn’t want to be alone. Best friends did not abandon each other.
Olya’s building’s long parking lot was pitted under her feet. She tried leaping over the biggest potholes so she wouldn’t lose her pace. Through her sneakers came the warmth of the asphalt, the pinpricks where gravel crumbled. In sunshine like this, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s bad roads softened as if to heal themselves. Even the billboard over the traffic circle looked like new; the model in its center grinned with her hands in a foaming sink. Residential buildings around the intersection showed off their many colors on squares of apartments outlined by dark concrete seams. There were flaking pink and peach façades on the units with owners who once had money, navy reclad balconies on the units with owners who had money now. In the gaps between buildings, Petropavlovsk’s hills lit up with yellow leaves.
Olya’s mother was somewhere far north of that foliage. She was on a tourism agency’s helicopter over the tundra. She was repeating arigato in the sun.
Hearing herself, the desperate noise of her shoes slapping, Olya slowed down, felt the light stroke her face, then hopped when she saw her bus rounding the traffic circle and had to dash to catch it.
The bus lurched as she went down the aisle. On either side were rows of people dressed in uniform after uniform: coveralls, scrubs, police dress blues, and blotted military greens. The workday was already coming to a close. Most of the men Olya passed looked like potential kidnappers. Useless, Olya’s mother said about the whispers flying through Petropavlovsk in August, which described someone heavyset, anonymous. Olya’s mother said the police’s witness probably hadn’t seen anyone at all. All that description did was make half the city’s population seem sinister. Olya found a seat and checked her phone.
Diana hadn’t responded. Quickly, Olya typed ???, sent it, locked the screen, and shut the phone between her hands like that would undo her message. To keep herself from anything else, she looked out the window.
“Golden autumn” her mother called this time of year, brief and beautiful as a picture. All the trees on fire. And the air still inviting. More summery, really, than it had been all summer. Way off on the horizon, the Koryaksky volcano was capped with its first snow. Cold weather was coming, but it wasn’t here yet.
By now Diana must’ve figured Olya had seen the picture. Olya crushed the phone between her palms. Were they all over there laughing at her?
This was how it went: the closer you were to someone, the more you lied. With people she hardly knew, Olya could say whatever she wanted: “That hurts” to the nurse giving her an injection, or “Put it back, I can’t pay” to the grocery-store cashier. On her own, Olya was honest. Even more distant classmates couldn’t constrain her—when the kid who sat behind her bragged about getting the highest score on their first exam of the year, Olya acted on the urge to turn away from him. Swiveling in her seat was enough to send a flare up her rib cage. Telling the truth was a thrill not found with her mother, who needed Olya to take merry care of their household, or with Diana, who made Olya measure herself out by request.
Just this morning, before the first bell, Diana had required that Olya be sweeter and softer-voiced. “My head aches when you talk like that,” Diana said, face buried in her arms on her desk. Olya didn’t say Like what? Instead she touched Diana’s shoulder and whispered when their teacher entered the room. Olya was nice even as the words piled up like pebbles in her throat.
Comparing their math homework at lunch, Olya nodded along with Diana’s corrections, though in that moment her best friend was ugly. Smug. As a little girl, Diana had been stunning; Olya, darker, rougher, used to admire the back of Diana’s head in line as they were led from class to class. Now that they were in year eight, Diana was still pale blond and oval-faced, and her mouth was red, bright red, exciting like the lacquer of a new car, but she had a belt of acne across her cheeks. Her eyelashes had faded from startling white to transparency. In one minute she was lovely and in the next she was a ghost.
Olya pried open her clapped hands to look at the phone. Nothing.
During gym this afternoon, they had jogged together like always. Olya made sure their feet matched. She could have run faster, but love meant making compromises. With the people that mattered, Olya did not want to be free.
Traffic gathered under Olya’s window. Lining the street were fiery orange and red leaves, bleached birch trunks, the sooty sides of buildings that had not seen new paint in decades. The bus’s walls were covered in block-letter safety warnings from its Korean manufacturer and fat-marker graffiti from its Russian riders. It rolled her steadily downhill.
They slowed at the outdoor market on the sixth kilometer, where old women sold trinkets and pastries beside the cinema, then turned left toward Gorizont. Olya sank in her seat. Next to her, the plastic window shook in its frame. She hated to picture buzzing Diana’s apartment without an invitation. Didn’t best friends still need to be told they were wanted? She shut her eyes against the day, opened them, and called Diana, but the phone only rang.
She called again. She called again. They were getting close to Diana’s stop. Phone pressed to her cheek, Olya squeezed past people’s knees, showed her pass to the driver, and stepped off on the corner she knew so well. The phone rang in her ear. Olya hung up.