It rained that week, and there was a comfort in sitting next to Miss Janet in the front office, in listening to the clack of her keyboard or the quiet rasp of her nail file. To avoid the rain, he skipped his usual Bojangles’ chicken box in favor of cookie packets from the vending machine, but that Friday the weather cleared a bit, and he trekked through the soggy woods. The woman at the register—Sharice, her nametag read—treated him with the same disdain she doled out to all the Leffie High students, who made out in the booths and left ketchup smeared on the tables, pee on the toilet seats, and more work in general for Sharice. At first Ilya had appreciated being included in her curled-lip nonresponsiveness, but over the weeks it had worn on him. He’d thought of his mother, endlessly plating pirozhki for the neftyaniki, wiping trays and spraying floors, and he’d wondered if she gave them the same face that Sharice gave him. He’d tried to treat her with extra politeness. He’d used every greeting from Michael & Stephanie, every expression from their unit on small talk, and Sharice had only ever responded with an unwelcoming “Welcome to Bojangles’. What’s your order?”
But maybe he’d worn her down after all, because that Friday, Sharice said, “The usual?”
Ilya was almost unable to respond both from shock and noncomprehension, and by the time he’d parsed her meaning, her eyebrows had clenched together in the same old scowl, and when he said, “Yes,” and then added, “It has rained all week,” she gave him nothing but a grunt.
As he took his receipt and turned to wait for his order in the sticky eddy by the fountain sodas, he bumped into a slight woman with a mass of blond hair that smelled like the front pocket of Vladimir’s jacket, where he’d kept old cigarette butts for when he got desperate.
“Excuse me,” Ilya said.
The woman ducked her head and walked up to the register. Ilya wouldn’t have paid her another second’s attention, except that Sharice said, “You bring your wallet this time?,” which was another break from her script. The woman produced a five-dollar bill from her pocket and passed it across the counter. It wasn’t until she’d ordered and turned to wait next to Ilya that he recognized her.
She was high, he could see that, and as they waited she seemed to become more so. Her neck slumped a bit, and she took a few steps backward, searching for support from the wall, but her elbow hit the soda machine, and Dr Pepper sprayed down her arm and onto the floor.
“Fuck,” she said.
At the register, Sharice rolled her eyes.
The woman looked at Ilya, and the shape of her eyes, the way they canted upward, toward her temples, was the only thing of Sadie that he could see in her. “You gonna get me some napkins, or you just wanna stare?” she said.
Ilya pulled a wad of napkins out of the dispenser and handed them to her, and she snatched them and said, “They treat me like shit here.”
She dabbed at her elbow, ignored the puddle of soda on the floor, and then stuffed the dirty napkins into a metal bucket of creamers.
“Me too,” Ilya said. “But I thought that was because I’m Russian.”
She laughed, a little too hard, then said, “Russia? What the fuck?” to herself, as though Ilya were an especially juicy hallucination.
Sharice slid Ilya’s chicken box across the counter, and when Ilya reached for it, she said softly, “I’d ignore her if I was you.”
Ilya nodded just as, behind them, Sadie’s mom stepped into the puddle of soda and slipped. She caught herself, but not before her spine hit the edge of the counter. Ilya saw the pain pierce her high. For a second, she stayed still, her knees bent, hand gripping the counter, and then she straightened.
“OK,” she said softly, and again Ilya had the sense that she was talking to herself. She stood up, hitched the strap of her tank top back onto her shoulder, raised her voice, and said, “This place is a dump. Clean the fucking floors once in a while, before I sue your asses.”
The Bojangles’ went silent. A group of boys whom Ilya recognized as some of J.T.’s basketball buddies froze, their chicken fingers poised above various dips. A man—Sharice’s boss, Ilya guessed—appeared, as though expelled from the bowels of the Bojangles’ at any threat of legal action.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” he said, and Sadie’s mom turned and walked out the door. “Get the mop,” he said to Sharice, and he disappeared back past the deep fryers and into the bowels once more.
Behind Ilya, the basketball players erupted in laughter.
“Did you see her face? It’s not like she’s going to say no,” one of them said to some suggestion that Ilya had not heard.
Sharice slid another box across the counter toward Ilya. “You want her chicken?” she said.
Ilya nodded, stacked it on top of his own, and followed Sadie’s mom out into the parking lot.
She was sitting on a crumbling concrete bumper at the head of a parking spot, with her arms draped over her knees and her hands dangling. It wasn’t just her eyes that were like Sadie’s—Ilya had been wrong about that—her hands were like Sadie’s too. Piano hands, his mother called them, with this note of regret because she had had them too but had never played a piano. Ilya set the Bojangles’ box by her feet.
“Did King send you?” she said. “It’s not like I’ve got anything.” She lifted her head and spread her arms as though Ilya might pat her down.
Ilya shook his head. He didn’t know whether she meant drugs or money, or who King was. “I just thought you might want this,” he said, holding out her meal.
“It’s not even real chicken,” she said. “Did you know that? It’s like some mashed-up cartilage and shit.”
He nodded.
“Where you from again?” she said.
“Russia,” he said.
She smiled and shook her head. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“It’s an exchange program,” he said. “You remind me of someone from home.” That wasn’t true. She didn’t remind him of Vladimir at all. Her personality seemed to hinge on self-pity, and Ilya had never known Vladimir to feel sorry for himself. Vladimir was an optimist, even when optimism seemed an impossible attitude to sustain.
She looked up at him. “I heard Russian women are good-looking,” she said.
“Sometimes,” he said, thinking that sometimes Russian women looked like her, like they were hanging on to life by a dirty, painted fingernail.
“Listen, if you ever need help, if you ever want anything—to stop—or anything, call me.”
It was easier to say than he’d expected, and the ease of it stung because it was the sort of thing he’d thought of saying to Vladimir a million times but had never managed to.
“Oh please,” she said, with a snort, and she opened up the box and began to pick at the manufactured chicken. “Now I know King didn’t send you. You religious or something?”
Ilya shook his head. He was groping inside his backpack for his history book, and when he found it, he pulled out the drawing that Sadie had done. In person, the likeness was even more profound. The coarseness of her hair, the way her nose ended in a shiny little knob, the grooves that cupped her lips like her pout was an offering. Ilya wrote the Masons’ number on the back and held it out to her.
“Sadie drew this,” he said.
He dropped the picture onto her lap. She didn’t say anything until she’d stared at it for a few seconds. “My Sadie?” she said.
He nodded.
“It’s not bad,” she said. She looked up at Ilya. “You know as a kid she was like that. Artistic. I could give her a couple crayons and she’d be so good—just coloring for hours. You could forget that she was there.” She had a memory in her eyes, he could see that, could see her watching Sadie color, a crayon clutched tight in her hand, before the commercial break ended, her show resumed, and she forgot Sadie all over again.