He was sitting at the top row of the bleachers. Directly beneath him a couple seemed to be having sex or something close to it. He and Sadie had done nothing but kiss. It had been a week of him and Sadie as a thing now, as something joined by an “and,” and his body wanted what came next as badly as his mind feared it. Vladimir had told him plenty of lewd stories and shown him a few pornos at the Kebab, but still Ilya felt completely unprepared to navigate anything beyond kissing, so he was taking breaks from the overwhelming pep of the pep rally to peer between the bleachers’ slats at the progress below. The boy had the girl pressed up against a wall, and his hand was down the front of her jeans. His mouth was on her neck, which was arched, her eyes closed in an expression that shifted continually from boredom to ecstasy to annoyance, and the mercurialness of her experience terrified Ilya.
On the basketball court, the last football player was announced. Ilya couldn’t find Sadie in the crowd. The entire student body was in Leffie High colors: fluorescent orange and lime green. The combination made the gym look like the confluence of two terrible chemical spills, and Principal Gibbons strode into the center of it with a microphone and began to wax poetic about the football team. Below the bleachers the girl’s pants were halfway off now, obscured by an overpour of upper thigh flesh. The boy’s head was bent, his hands at his own crotch. Ilya wasn’t sure what he was doing—whether he was working on his zipper or putting on a condom—and as he tried to puzzle it out, the girl looked up, and her eyes met Ilya’s.
“What the fuck,” she said, as though she had been copulating somewhere private and Ilya had intruded.
The boy followed her eyes and glared. “Fuck off,” he said, and Ilya slid down a row and over, toward a clot of kids playing some sort of fantasy card game. Below them, the marching band stood, their feathered caps shaking, a conductor waved an arm, and cymbals crashed. Ilya’s heart was racing from the girl’s yell and the boy’s glare, and so it took him a long moment to notice Sadie, who had just come in through a side door. Her ponytail whipped over one shoulder as she turned, scanning the crowd. He could tell that she was looking for him, and the knowledge of it calmed him, made him feel warm and full. Bread belly, he and Vladimir had called that feeling when they were little and happiness was as simple as eating too much.
She saw him and lifted a hand and ran across the basketball court. As a rule, Sadie was composed. Soft-spoken. Almost every conversation between Mama Jamie and her began with her saying, “I’m right here. You don’t have to yell.” He had never heard her say anything in public that might be overheard—Babushka would love this about her, her natural discretion—but as she took the stairs two at a time, she began to call his name. The kids playing the card game froze and looked at her. Her cheeks were splotched. On the court, the cheerleaders cartwheeled. Principal Gibbons began to sing the school song just as Sadie reached Ilya’s row and sidestepped past the gamers.
“Look,” she said. She was holding a piece of paper that was shaking in her hand.
“He wrote me back,” she said. “Gabe Thompson.”
“Back?” Ilya said.
Sadie nodded. “I wrote them all—all the outdated profiles. I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
She handed him a printout of a series of Facebook messages, and Ilya read them from the bottom up, from the first message Sadie had sent:
Hi,
I’m a high school sophomore doing a report on Russia, and I got your name through the LDS community. I just have a few questions about what it’s like there after communism and was wondering if you might be able to answer them. Thanks for your time and God bless!
Sadie,
I’m willing to talk to you about Russia, although I’ve got to say that God threw a lot of problems my way there. Honestly, before I saw your message I’d been trying to forget that part of my life, and I was this close to deleting it without responding, but I wonder if this isn’t God’s way of saying that forgetting is not the path to forgiveness, that I need to look the past in the eye in order to move forward. Honestly, your message feels like fate to me. I’ll help however I can. Who gave you my name again? Not sure where you’re located, but we could meet up or you could give me a call whenever.
A phone number appeared under his name. “It’s him, right?” Sadie said. “It has to be. ‘God threw a lot of problems my way there.’”
Ilya thought of Lana and Olga and Yulia dying in the snow.
“‘Forgetting is not the path to forgiveness,’” Sadie said.
Everyone around them was standing now, in response to some cue from Principal Gibbons that Ilya had missed. The marching band had removed their hats and were tucking their clarinets and trumpets and bassoons into velvet-lined cases.
“Let’s go to the library and look at your list. The area code here is for western Pennsylvania, so if we check all of those, the Pennsylvania ones…” She trailed off, seeing something on Ilya’s face.
Feels like fate to me, he was thinking, and it did feel like fate, in the best and the worst way. They had found Gabe, and somehow this solidified the connection between Gabe and the girls, between Gabe and Vladimir. It felt certain now, real and concrete, something only dreamt made manifest, and the certainty was terrifying, like seeing a monster slip out from under the bed, each scale just as he’d imagined it. They had found him. It was a good thing, but what Ilya kept picturing was Gabe in western Pennsylvania—wherever that was—staring at Sadie’s face on a computer screen. His hands were just barely touching the keys. He took her in, every bit of her, her jagged pupil, her white-blond hair, and then slowly, deliberately, he began to type.
“You’re mad,” she said. “I should have told you.”
The bleachers were almost empty now. Beneath them the couple was gone, and one of the boys from the fantasy game was searching for a dropped card.
“If we found him, he could find you too.”
Sadie smiled. It was this terrible, invincible, American smile. She didn’t think it could happen to her—the clothes ripped, the knife against her cheek, the blood in the snow. But he could see it all happening to her just as it had happened to Lana, and he would be responsible for it because he had opened a portal between her world and his.
“I didn’t use my profile,” she said. “I made a fake one.”
“With a different picture?” he asked.
She nodded. “A different picture and a different last name,” she said, and the anger drained out of him and left just the fear, because finding Gabe Thompson meant seeing Gabe Thompson.
There was only one Gabe Thompson in western Pennsylvania, in a town called Warren. The home phone number was on the list, and the area code was the same as the number Gabe had included in his message to Sadie.
“I bet one’s the landline and one’s his cell,” Sadie said, “which means he might not actually be in Warren.” She pulled her phone out of the front pouch of her backpack, and Ilya shook his head.
“You’re not calling,” he said.