“My number’s on the back,” he said.
She flipped it over and the grease from her fingers turned the paper translucent.
“Did Sadie send you?”
“No,” he said.
“And not King either? For real?”
He shook his head.
“Then fuck off,” she said softly, and he walked back into the woods. Before long he was out in the open of the soccer field. Up a rise, the track ringed the football field. Sadie was up there somewhere, running, her white ponytail whipping back and forth between her shoulder blades. He thought of the soda dribbling down her mother’s arm, of the silence she’d inspired when she yelled, and he decided not to tell Sadie about it. If he did, she’d start a pilgrimage to the Bojangles’ too, and eventually she’d see a scene like the one Ilya had today.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Raz, dva, tri,” the gym teacher, Ekaterina Borisovna, counted.
It was the end of class, and Ilya was the last in the row, stretching, reaching his fingertips toward his toes, toward the floorboards, which had been scrubbed with lye so often that the smell of them made Ilya nauseous.
“Lana Vishnyeva was killed,” a girl said loudly, as though she needed everyone to hear it.
Her friend nodded. “I know,” she said.
Ilya stood up, and his vision went black and then cleared.
“What?” he said.
The girls turned, their hands still dangling at their toes, their rumps high in the air. Their ponytails dusted the floor. He had never spoken to either of them before.
“They found her yesterday,” one girl said. “But she’d been dead three weeks at least.”
Ekaterina Borisovna pointed a finger at Ilya and then at the ground, and Ilya bent back into the stretch. He could feel Lana kissing him. Their teeth hitting, her tongue darting into his mouth. “Don’t worry,” she’d said. “You were fine.”
“She was killed?” he said, thinking of her overdosing, of how thin she’d been.
“Her throat was cut,” the girl’s friend said.
“And stand,” Ekaterina Borisovna said.
They all stood and crossed their right arms over their torsos and began to count. They had been doing the same series of stretches for ten years.
“So not exactly like the other two. But she had the slashes on her cheeks. And apparently the knife was the same.”
“They were stabbed thirteen times,” her friend offered.
“No,” she said. “Twelve.”
Ilya skipped math for the first time in his life and went to the Internet Kebab to read the article in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki. It was short and formal. This time there was no picture. The girls were right: Lana’s throat had been cut, and she had been dead for three weeks before her body was found by a group of kids playing in the grove of trees behind the kommunalkas, only two kilometers from Berlozhniki proper. A two-minute walk from Ilya’s apartment. One minute in the summer. When Ilya was little, kids had used those trees as hiding spots in tag, crouching among the trunks until they were flushed out.
Most of the article was devoted to a self-satisfied explanation of how the police had calculated Lana’s date of death. Snow, the article explained, could serve as a chronological record in the same way that sediment layers did, and Lana’s body had been preserved under a layer of ice that rested beneath a half meter of snow. The ice was formed during a deep thaw and flash freeze that had occurred four weeks before. Her family had not reported her missing.
“She was living with a friend,” her mother was quoted as saying, “because we had argued about her lifestyle.”
It was impossible to read the tone in this—whether it was said with regret or reproach. The article said that Lana did not appear to have been robbed and that the motive may have been sexual. It closed with a list of what she had been wearing when she was killed—jeans, a parka, and a pink T-shirt—and a plea for any information that might aid the police in their investigation. Ilya read this last line over again, sure that he’d misread or imagined. She’d been wearing a pink shirt that night in the Tower. Four weeks and a day earlier. He remembered the pink of it with the pink of her hair; he remembered wanting to ask her if she liked to do that, to match her clothes with her hair, but he’d been too afraid.
He looked up the weather in Berlozhniki from the past month, which was a flat line punctuated by one deep dip, like a heart giving one last twitch. The thaw had been the night after the boards, the night after Ilya had kissed Lana. He tried to think when he had last seen her at the Tower, whether she’d left the mess hall with all of them or whether she’d stayed and kept dancing, but all he could remember was that she’d been gone when he woke up.
Ilya walked home so fast that his lungs were burning when he got to the grove. It was just a thin cluster of birch trees that had grown around some long-departed spring and that, for some unknown reason, the loggers had spared. The police had marked off the entire area. The slim gray trunks were banded together with police tape like a bouquet. The police were not there, though, and Ilya could not tell the exact spot where Lana had been found, whether she’d been leaning against a tree or lying in the snow between them. There were crisp packets and plastic bags and cigarette butts everywhere. All the usual garbage. High up in the branches of one tree, a bra dangled. It had been there for years, fading from red to pink, and a tiny icicle had managed to find purchase on one of its straps.
Yulia Podtochina’s and Olga Nadiova’s deaths had been met with shock, but Lana’s was met with resignation. Look at where we live, people said, gesturing, vaguely, toward the camp and its crosses. Should we expect anything different? And yet defensive preparations were made. Lana was blond like Yulia and Olga, and so women started darkening their hair. Dye rimmed the sinks in the bathrooms and the communal kitchen, and the women—who went everywhere in pairs now—took on the look of actresses poorly cast as sisters.
When the police tape was taken down, the grove became a shrine. People left teddy bears and plastic bouquets and laminated postcards of Jesus and Axl Rose, who had been Lana’s idol. Ilya hadn’t known this. He hadn’t really known her at all, he reminded himself, and when he thought of her death, it was with wonder rather than grief. Someone he had touched had died. Someone he had kissed. Someone young. He had the feeling too that her death was a portent of worse things to come—whether for him specifically or Berlozhniki in general, he couldn’t say—and he found himself desperate to get to America, to leave before whatever happened next.
He drew a grid on an enormous sheet of newsprint, numbered the days until he left, and crossed off each one with a red X. One hundred and fifty-two. One hundred and fifty-one. If Babushka and his mother resented his eagerness, they didn’t show it. Babushka bought him supplies: a new sweatshirt and jeans, a watch that was also a calculator, a pair of Adidas knockoffs with four stripes instead of three, a St. Nicholas medal to wear when he flew, and a St. Sergius medal for after he landed. She washed the clothes and folded them, and Ilya stacked them carefully in the crate under the couch, and tried not to think of Vladimir and all of his tapes in that pink bag in the Tower.
At the Internet Kebab, Kirill took his passport photo. Babushka had given Ilya a fresh haircut, and he wore the shirt with the collar reserved for the Winter Festival and the official announcement of the exchange. He looked good, he thought, but Kirill was not impressed.