All Olya’s rushing had made her a little too hot. Standing beside the bus shelter, three blocks from Diana’s apartment, she dropped her jacket back a little so the breeze could hit her shoulders.
The buildings in this part of the city seemed cleaner. The neighborhood was called Gorizont—horizon—because it did look, poised above a golden forested gully, like it was welcoming the dawn. Olya usually liked coming here. She refreshed her news feed, now crowded with music videos, and went to the search bar to type in Diana’s name. When the phone buzzed, Olya almost dropped it.
“Hi!” she said.
“This is Valentina Nikolaevna,” said Diana’s mother.
Olya pulled her jacket up. “Hello.”
“Listen, Olya, we can’t have you over,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. No girls’ voices rose in the background. The four of them must have been hanging out in a different room.
Olya squinted up. “I’m actually nearby already,” she said. “I can just stop in.”
Valentina Nikolaevna sighed. “Please go home. You should not be nearby. Isn’t anyone concerned about you? We’re frankly not comfortable with you two contacting each other outside of school anymore.”
“What?” Olya said.
“Diana won’t be able to talk to you outside of school.”
That exact way of speaking Diana’s mother had. Diana had imitated it, crisp, clinical, only this afternoon. Impossible to reconcile what Valentina Nikolaevna was saying with how she was saying it. A couple was walking toward Olya, and to give them room, she stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, where the pavement fell away into grass. “But why?”
Valentina Nikolaevna said, “You’re not a good influence.”
Olya wasn’t a good influence. “How?” she said. “Why?”
One of the girls in that picture with Diana didn’t wear underwear beneath her school skirt and got her first boyfriend in year five. Compare that with Olya, who had never even smoked a whole cigarette. All Olya ever did was attend to Diana, and copy her new music onto Diana’s player, and keep a box under her bed of the cheap translated romance novels Valentina Nikolaevna didn’t allow Diana to read. As a joke, Olya sometimes kicked Diana’s ankles under the kitchen table when she was invited to Diana’s for meals. She copied Diana’s math solutions. That was it—that was all.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. “Your behavior this past month has been frightening. When Diana told me today you suggested going to the center, I could not believe it.”
“But—it’s okay. It’s fine.”
“It certainly is not fine. You know that. And your family structure—the lack of discipline. It’s uncomfortable to watch.”
Olya pressed a hand over her eyes. A dog barked behind one of the clean buildings uphill. “Family structure…you mean my mom?”
“Who else could I mean?” Diana’s mother said.
Olya was well disciplined. By her excellent mother, by the needs of her best friend, and by her own daily efforts, she had actually become so disciplined that her mouth refused to form around the right response, which was that Valentina Nikolaevna was an overbearing bitch. Instead, Olya said, “Don’t talk about her like that.”
“We’re talking about you and my daughter.”
“Because that’s not right. That’s not fair.”
“That’s how it’s going to be. You can see each other in class, under supervision, but please do not bother her anymore outside of that. All right?” Olya could not answer. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Olya said, because that was the only way the conversation was going to end.
“All right,” Diana’s mother said. “Thank you. That’s all.”
After Valentina Nikolaevna hung up, Olya wiped her phone off on her shirt and looked at the smeared blackness of it. Unlocked it. She scrolled to her own mother’s name and stopped.
What would Olya say to her mother? Valentina Nikolaevna thinks we’re a bad influence. And what could be the response? Olya’s mother couldn’t fix what had already gone wrong.
Valentina Nikolaevna had always looked hard at Olya’s family. Since year five, when Olya and Diana started their friendship with nightly phone conversations, the woman had had something to say. An administrator at one of the city’s elementary schools, she took information from student files to use in little strategies. The last time Olya came over, Valentina Nikolaevna had interrupted dinner to point with the television remote to the evening news, which was again going through the endless cycle of the police’s comments and the civilian search party’s plans and the missing girls’ school pictures. “This never could have taken place in Soviet times,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. Diana sipped her soup. “You girls can’t imagine how safe it used to be. No foreigners. No outsiders. Opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake our authorities ever made.” Valentina Nikolaevna put the remote down. “Now we’re overrun with tourists, migrants. Natives. These criminals.”
Olya should have kept her tongue behind her teeth. But she asked, “Weren’t the natives always here?”
Valentina Nikolaevna’s face, the same oval as her daughter’s, tipped up toward the screen. She wore mascara to make her eyes look more alive. “They used to stay in the villages where they belong.”
The sisters were last seen in the center, the reporter repeated, which meant nothing in a city of two hundred thousand people and a peninsula twelve hundred kilometers long. These warnings had already faded to background noise. When the missing girls’ mother appeared on-screen, Valentina Nikolaevna said, “There she is.” She pressed her manicured hand between Olya’s and Diana’s place mats to make sure she had their attention. “It’s awful, isn’t it? Tragedy. That poor woman…it’s only her, no husband, and she works all the time. I read in the younger one’s class records that she didn’t come a single time to meet our teachers.” She glanced at Olya then lifted her chin. “No father, and the mother gone. That’s how such situations happen.”
And Olya did want to say something then, to say how dare you or shut up or I know you’re talking about me, but she didn’t try. Diana would not permit it. Instead Olya stirred the soup in her bowl. Valentina Nikolaevna left her job every day at three; she sat in her renovated kitchen, with her dumb husband stuck at his research in the volcanological institute uphill, and made up her mind that Olya had a flawed family structure—because Olya’s mother had a skill, because she had to travel, because they didn’t have the money to hang around painting their lashes and watching the evening news and fretting over two random little girls.
Olya’s apartment was different. Olya’s mother was fun. When home, Olya’s mother took the best clothes—a Red Army garrison cap, a silk robe bought in Kyoto during student months studying abroad, a leather pencil skirt—out of her closet for the girls to try on. If another friend followed Olya and Diana over, Olya’s mother greeted them in Japanese. Her cheeks rose as she spoke, smiling but trying to hide her smile, so Olya always associated the language’s swinging sounds with her mother’s flickering happiness. A couple months ago, Diana, full of phrases she learned from anime, tried to answer, and Olya’s mother propped one hand on her hip and chattered away. Diana tried for ten seconds to look like she understood. Then her mouth stretched in distress. Olya’s mother smiled and said, “I’m joking, sunshine.”
Silly and clever and trusting and fun. Olya could not ruin that by calling her mother now.
She crouched and hid her face in her elbow. On the other side of the street, trees rustled. Wind was passing through the gully. Cars kept going carelessly by.