“Sweet dreams?” the driver said, as they clambered off.
Vladimir snorted, gripped the waistband of his jeans, and loped down the block toward the Internet Kebab, and Ilya followed him.
Vladimir shouldered open the door. “Hey pervert,” he said to Kirill as Kirill poured water on the grill. It hissed, and a cloud of steam plumed around them. The monitors had all been set to the same screensaver—a tennis ball bouncing in eternal blackness—and they were all somehow in sync. A dozen balls hit the lower right corner, then drifted toward the middle of a dozen screens. “Ilyusha, can you spot me?” Vladimir said.
Ilya had a thousand in his wallet—name-day money that he’d planned to exchange for dollars in Leshukonskoye. He had imagined that transaction for months—the gray-green of actual dollars in his wallet—but there was a triumph in this too: handing the thousand over to Kirill, paying for his brother, two lamb combos, two Fantas, and a computer for fifteen minutes.
Vladimir trawled VKontakte—his “business,” Ilya guessed—while Ilya inhaled his shwarma. His stomach felt instantly better, like its gravity had been restored, and his hangover ebbed to a general fuzziness.
Aksinya, with her car, had beaten them to a computer. Her sister had one, Vladimir explained. It was a gift from a client, and in return, Aksinya’s sister had to send him naked pictures every night. Aksinya had posted a photo of all of them to Vladimir’s wall. Their faces were whitewashed and bright as snow, their eyes as shiny and black as a bird’s. Lana’s fist, her middle finger, took up much of the foreground, but he could see his own fingers on her waist. Aksinya had tagged herself and Vladimir, and as Vladimir scrolled the mouse across the picture, Ilya saw that he’d been tagged too.
“What bitches,” Vladimir said, his voice full of affection. Vladimir clicked to the next photo—he’d been tagged in a few more from other nights: dark rooms, white faces, cigarettes, the flash hugging the curves of a bottle. Vladimir sopped the last bits of lamb juice off his plate with a hunk of pita.
“Go back to the other picture. The one with Lana,” Ilya said.
“You want to see that one again, huh?”
Ilya nodded. It wasn’t Lana that he wanted to see, though. He looked so happy in the photo that he barely recognized himself. His smile, like it might break his face in two. When had he last smiled like that? he wondered. Or was this the only time?
“Don’t fall in love, Ilyusha.”
“Why not?” he said, but he was thinking that it wasn’t Lana he was in love with. It was himself, there, in a picture with Vladimir.
“Because you’re leaving, for starters.”
Kirill called out the one-minute warning, and Vladimir logged in to his email. He didn’t have anything except a one-liner from Aksinya saying, “Dolls tonight?”
“I don’t want to go.”
“To Dolls?”
“No. To America.”
“What do you mean you don’t want to go? Are you afraid you’re going to get homesick? You’re going to miss all this snow while you’re lounging on the beach?”
America is not one big beach, Ilya was tempted to say, because he knew that in Vladimir’s mind the whole country was Miami Vice—girls in string bikinis and men in pastel suits.
“You going to miss sleeping with me every night?”
I already do, Ilya thought.
Vladimir pulled on his coat, and Ilya followed him out the door. The sky was purple with the last of the sun’s light, and it had begun to snow.
“You going to miss getting five hours of sun and having a waste of space for a brother?”
“The boards were this morning,” Ilya said.
He didn’t see Vladimir’s hand until it had already hit him. Then there was a flash of pain in his cheekbone and a deep throb in one eye. It had been something between a slap and a punch, sloppily executed. Ilya’s eye began to sting and drip, and he pressed a hand to it.
“I thought you knew,” Ilya said, and this was true. Somehow he’d thought that Vladimir had known; he’d thought that, in his way, Vladimir was asking him to stay.
“I knew? Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t even know what day of the week it is.”
“Saturday,” Ilya said.
“Shut up,” Vladimir said. Ilya looked up, ready for Vladimir to berate him or to hit him again, but Vladimir’s eyes were slim and far away. He sucked his lip between his teeth and began chewing on it feverishly. It was a look of determination, a look as rare as a rainbow for Vladimir.
“It’s only a year,” Ilya said. “The America thing. It’s not like—”
“Only a year. Fuck you. Do you know what people would do for one year there?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ilya said, something Vladimir had said to him millions of times, and he tried to sound as casual as Vladimir always did, but of course he sounded as stung as he was: he had missed the boards for Vladimir. It was a penance of a kind, a way of making up for how happy he had been to leave.
“Shut up, Ilya.”
Ilya’s other eye began to sting, and he shut them both. If Vladimir could tell that he was crying, he didn’t show it. When he spoke again, his voice was tough, each word hammered out like a nail hit perfectly: “Listen to me. Do not tell anyone else that you didn’t show. Not a fucking soul. Do you hear me?” Vladimir’s eyes were darting across Ilya’s face, and sweat pearled above his lip. “I will kill you if you fuck this up,” he said, and then in a voice that was almost a laugh, “Ilyusha the smart one. Ilyusha the big brilliant brain.” His hands were clenching and unclenching, and it wasn’t just from anger. It was time. Vladimir needed a hit. Angry as he was, he was only half here now, and the stupidity of it all hit Ilya. He could stay here, he could go to America. Either way he would lose Vladimir.
Ilya stopped crying. He could feel the skin tightening on his cheeks. “I don’t know why you give a shit,” he said. “This has nothing to do with you. You’re going to be at the Tower no matter what, right? In that—” he searched for a word that would encompass the decrepitude of Vladimir’s room there, but Vladimir spoke before he found one.
“But I could have had you there,” he said. He smiled. It was this strange, jerky little lift of his lips that was in no way happy. “I’m going to fix this. I’m going to see Maria Mikhailovna and fix it,” he said, and he walked away, past the kiosk, which was lit up like a beacon, past Gabe Thompson’s bench, which was covered in new snow.
Vladimir was almost at the corner. He was limping. Just a little, one shoulder dipping down lower than the other. Had he been limping all day? Ilya wasn’t sure. Who cares, Ilya thought, but he did. Vladimir was only a block away. Ilya’s face still hurt; he could feel his eye starting to swell. He was angry—at Vladimir, at himself—but still he had to resist the same old temptation to follow Vladimir, to catch up.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The cheerleaders were stacked in a pyramid on the basketball court. The smallest one perched on top of the stack, gripping her stocky leg by the ankle, toes pointed in an ecstasy of school spirit.
“Leffie Gators!” she screamed, and the pyramid deconstructed in a flash of fluorescent orange bloomers. The girls rearranged into two lines that spanned the gym, and the football players ran through a gauntlet of shaking pompoms, while a male of murky sexuality yelled their names and numbers through a bullhorn.
It had surprised Ilya that Leffie High was not so different from School #17—as though institutional style had been an addendum to some international accord—but the gym was the exception. The gym at School #17 was a remnant of a concrete factory, with one wall of windows so old that each pane thickened at the bottom. The glass was barred against errant balls, so that the light coming through plaided the plank floors. Leffie High’s gym was windowless, trapped in the center of the school, with a smell that reminded Ilya of the opening gasp of a time capsule, of air held captive for centuries.