Cornered

by Rhoda Belleza

“Mother. I’m shocked that you think I would lie to the administration at Boston Classical High School.”

  Mom gives me a squinty-eyed stare. I think she knows. Or suspects. “Well,” she finally says, “I bet that kid’s parents are pretty proud.”

  “I certainly hope so,” I say.

  “Yeah. You can count on it,” she says.

  • • •

  YouTube pulls the video a couple of days later after Kruzeman complains, but of course it’s been posted by like twenty other people by that point. They use it on the comedy shows where they make fun of stuff on the Internet, and somebody smarter than me prints up shirts that say “You’re a Disgrace.” The star of some reality show is wearing one in my mom’s US Weekly.

  And then, a week later, somebody posts a video of their toddler falling over as a golden retriever loudly farts in his face. Babies, dogs, and farts—you can’t compete with that, and “Max Takes a Tumble” dethrones us as the most popular video in America. “Bringin’ Crazy Back” passes into pop culture history.

  Kruzeman doesn’t exactly turn nice or anything, but maybe because he’s not sure when he’s being recorded. At least he stops being as abusive as he has been in the past. He doesn’t make fun of my clothes or tell anybody they’re a disgrace anymore. It probably won’t last, but if it gets me through to the end of the year, I’ll be fine with that.

  And the day after “Max Takes a Tumble” gets its ten millionth hit, Toni runs up to me after school. “Hey, Kevin. You have any of your metal songs lying around?”

  “I mean. Yeah, but—”

  “Because I could never have . . . that whole thing was . . . well I just wanted to thank you for the Kruzeman thing, and I know it’s not your kind of music, but I have like tons of horror movies and stuff. So if you want I could make a video for one of your songs. You know, only if you want . . .”

  I smile. “Yeah. That sounds great. You want to . . . uh, we can talk about it on the bus and stuff? On the way home?”

  “Yeah,” she says. We start walking toward the bus stop, and I honestly don’t know if it’s her or me who starts it, but we’re holding hands. And even though we were supposed to talk about our next project on the bus, we don’t end up saying a word.

  The Ambush

  BY MATTHUE ROTH

  VADIM SOUNDED SURPRISED when I called him to hang out, but he didn’t say no. He told me to meet him at the public park, in the baseball field where nobody played baseball. It was across from a hollowed-out swimming pool that the neighborhood kids used for roller hockey during the day and other things during the night. I didn’t know what. I only knew never to come here after dark. When we came to America, Vadim and me, fresh off the plane, the American kids told us that they caught children after dark and sold them. But we were new here. We didn’t know how it worked, America in general, or the way kids dealt with each other. You could tell us anything.

  “Why’d you want to meet here?” I asked.

  “Why did you want to meet at all?” said Vadim.

  “We have not seen each other since last year.” I poked his ribs like my uncle who always tries to be funny and never is. I was being clever, you know? Yesterday was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and the dual meaning was not lost on Vadim.

  “That doesn’t mean we must see each other this year,” he shot back.

  I tried to ignore the uneasiness. It was good to talk to Vadim—to open up my mouth and have him understand everything. All my words and all my intentions. We spoke our own language, a combination of English and Russian and words from science fiction books. Nobody understood me like he did.

  “Hey, Vadim,” I said. “You know how you’re supposed to ask forgiveness from everyone you know, for anything you did to them, whether it was on purpose or by accident?”

  “Yes.” He refused to make eye contact.

  “Well . . . do you forgive me?”

  “For what?”

  “For you know what.”

  “For maybe I think you should say it,” he said.

  “For losing my accent and getting all new friends and ignoring you for the entire first whole month of school.”

  I held my breath. I hated saying stuff like that, stuff that was true and damaging. It made me feel like I was poking holes in my own stomach.

  “A good start,” he offered.

  “So, do you?” I said.

  “Do I forgive you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Not yet.”

  I felt stunted and impotent. I remembered from somewhere—from that lone year of Hebrew school, maybe—that you had to ask someone if they forgave you three times. If they didn’t, at the end of the third asking, you were absolved and you didn’t have to ask again. But before then, you were still guilty. Forgiveness wasn’t an on-and-off switch; it was a combination lock.

  And Vadim, it seemed, for now still held the key to that combination.

  I fumbled for something to say.

  “Uh . . . how were your services?”

  Vadim looked at me askew—but at least now he was looking at me. “Are you really asking me that question?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  He looked disgusted, even less likely to answer. “How were yours?”

  “Crazy. We went to that Orthodox synagogue. There was a wall separating us from all the women. The only thing you could see was the outline of their breasts. So, guess what I spent all services thinking about.”

  Vadim’s face broke into a big toothy smile like he’d been waiting for this. No matter how he felt about me now, I was still the only person in the world he’d ever been able to candidly talk about girls with. And by girls, I don’t mean the female species that was created on whatever day, but I mean the objects of the all-consuming lust that suddenly possessed our minds and bodies.

  “What are you looking at me like that for?” I chided. “At least your parents’ synagogue is Reform. You can actually see them.”

  “Is even worse, Jupiter. They sit right there. Right in front of you. And we’re there for four hours. It’s almost like you’re supposed to stare at them. And they’re praying, which only makes you feel worse and more guilty for checking them out. You’re feeling all spiritual and pobozny, because you’re connected to the universe and you can do anything, then you open your eyes and there they are, and all you wanna do is touch ’em.”

  “Wow.” I was stunned. Riveted. “Whose?”

  Vadim hesitated. “Karla Bozulich.”

  “But she’s your cousin!” I cringed.

  “I know.” Vadim looked down at himself, miserable. “That should feel wrong, shouldn’t it? But her breasts are nice ones.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, and Vadim couldn’t bring himself to say anything else. I sat in silence, letting him lead. After a while, he checked his watch.

  “It is twelve o’clock,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “What? Already? I just got here. . . .”

  “It’s twelve noon. I need to visit my cousins. Come with me?”

  • • •

  When we were little, the kids in the park, the Americans, used to play games with our minds. We knew they were tricking us, of course. The way they laughed. The way they’d beat us up if we didn’t do what they said. Somehow we always ended up in this playground anyway.

  I was small. Vadim was tiny. Together, we made a better target practice than either of the video arcades at Roosevelt Mall. A common getaway from a common enemy: this was how Vadim and I decided to be friends.

  Now we were wiser. Now we knew names for the things that went on in this park: betting and gangfights and dealing. We knew more things, but it didn’t make us safer.

  Today, Vadim and his invitation—Come with me?—felt dangerous. Vadim was never dangerous. It was Saturday, and you only got one Saturday a week. Did I want to give it to Vadim?

  I did. I came.

  • • •

  As we walked, the houses grew incrementally bigger and more well-ma
intained. Vadim’s cousins—not the Karla Bozulich cousins, his other side—lived in Rushing Waters, a cushy development that lay between the Yards and suburbia. Rushing Waters was its own self-contained community of immigrant families.

  It just so happened that the opening of Rushing Waters coincided with the collapse of the Iron Curtain and several zillion Russian families immigrating to the United States. The Jewish Federation bought the entire development, and Rushing Waters was informally renamed Russian Vodkas. Each family got a free house, and they stuffed it to the gills. Friends and cousins back in Russia would get plane tickets for New York City, plan a two-week vacation, and never go back. You’d go to someone’s house and the door would be answered by any one of twenty-three identical cousins, each with the same Russian bowl-cut hairstyle. Everyone slept together, five kids to a cot, older cousins on the sofas.

  The houses still smelled of fresh paint, with new sofas and refrigerators that made ice when you hit a button. There were definitely no soldering machines to wake you at 5:30 a.m. every morning. It was a lottery. Sometimes you got the jackpot, and sometimes you didn’t get anything but a useless ticket and silver crap under your nails. For every family who didn’t get placed in Russian Vodkas, they had to find somewhere else.

  Vadim’s family was given a freestanding house where—like most of these kids—he had his own attic bedroom. For my parents, they found a vacant factory. I lived in Secondary Processing and shared a bedroom with a conveyor belt. Sometimes I woke up with black soot on my face.

  We had no say on how the Jewish Federation spent money on us; we just checked the mail and saw what new toys we had coming. That part was made even more incongruous for a family like us living in a factory. Out of nowhere they would send us brand-new water filters, or three full frozen chickens for Friday night dinner, or a really nice new Serta California King bed. The deliverymen were always confused. They weren’t sure if we were really poor or really rich.

  • • •

  As Vadim and I descended the main drive, the one that led from the main road into the valley of Russian Vodkas, I felt a palpable change, the America evaporating from the air as the Russia started to sink in. Goose bumps peppered my bare, T-shirted arms and crept stealthily up my spine. I could have lived here, I reminded myself. If we’d been one notch higher on the list of Poor Russian Aid Victims, my family could be here. My parents would have a house. I would have friends who understood my words and forgave my accent, because they would have one too.

  “Blyad,” Vadim muttered. “I hate this ghetto. I’m so glad we got a house on our own.”

  “What? Five minutes down the road can make that much difference?”

  “All the difference in the world,” he said at once. “Could you imagine having the kind of computer setup I have if I lived here? Thirty people would be over every night, bugging me to let them check their stupid Hotmail accounts. If no one stole it from me, I mean. And could you imagine what kind of a security system I’d need to protect my comics?”

  Actually, I could. Vadim had once exiled me from his house for two weeks after I breathed too heavily on his New Avengers #32, the one where Power Man’s baby might be a shape-changing alien. I could see his point.

  The street names—Maple Glen Road, Fairview Lane, Buttermilk Bend—were all cruel forgeries, promises of an Americana that we would never achieve. Not only because this neighborhood was in the dead zone between city and suburbs. Not only because we were Russian. But because everyone was too stuck in their own lives to even want to try to get out.

  We passed tons of people on the street. It seemed like everyone who lived there had chosen that moment to leave their house for the market, or to walk the dog, or just to see what was going on. It was like no one had day jobs.

  They all stared at us. Not the way that people stared downtown, the normal people who fixed us with that vacant, angry what-are-you-doing-here stare. No, here they stared as though they knew exactly what we were doing here, even if we didn’t know ourselves. In our thrift-store clothes and our dirty backpacks, they could tell we were trespassing.

  “So, Vadim—uh, not to be dense, but why are we here?”

  “You wanted to hang out with me? Well, this is what I have to do today. This is how we can hang out.”

  He had answered me in straight Russian. That was how I knew things were about to change.

  We stopped in front of a perfectly white door with tiny flecks of paint peeling from the outermost corners, red and white polka-dotted curtains hanging in the windows. Loud metal music blared from inside. My friend Bates had been teaching me to work out his favorite metal bands, to recognize them from the tenor of the lead singer’s yells and the first few notes of each riff: Danzig, Deicide, Morbid Angel, Godflesh. This band was none of them. Their sound was less bleak, less deathlike and more pretending-to-be-deathlike. I felt a weird, secret power over whoever was playing this music, but at the same time, I was scared.

  Vadim reached up and rang the doorbell. It was a normal electric doorbell noise. I don’t know what I expected.

  After a considerable time and what seemed like a struggle, or a conversation, someone came to the door. It was Peter Khazarimovsky, Vadim’s cousin. I’d met him a few times before, but it was always with his or Vadim’s parents around. I was more comfortable with it that way.

  Peter (born Piyotr) was over six feet tall. He had thick hair that was cut short and yet still treated with hair gel, and both his ears were pierced on the bottom and top. On anyone else, it would’ve looked gay. But Peter Piyotr had this glint in his eye—you could feel it even when he was wearing his $500 Oakley sunglasses, which was pretty much always—that seemed to suggest he might very well have a switchblade in his back pocket.

  He looked us up and down. Then he looked me up and down again. Finally, he nodded coolly. He offered his right hand to Vadim, positioned in the air opposite his considerably wide shoulders. They did a kind of combination handshaking/hug thing, and then he motioned for us to come inside.

  I knew Peter Piyotr’s parents lived there, but I had no idea how they managed to manifest their presence in the house. The shades were drawn, and bottles of wine and vodka lay strewn around the darkness. This wasn’t even my father’s kind of drinking, concentrated and private and starting at midday. This was balls-out, show-your-friends-what-you’re-made-of, early-morning drinking. Two guys sat on the floor in front of the TV and another lay on the couch. So did a fourth guy, although it took me a while to notice, because he was passed out and only half an arm was visible.

  “Who is this?”

  “I—” My mouth wanted to protest, but the words refused to come out. Peter Piyotr had met me at least twenty times. Our moms played Pachinko together. Where did he get to be all who-is-thissing me?

  “This is Jupiter,” Vadim cut me off. “He’s fine. He won’t give us trouble.”

  “I won’t give you trouble?” I asked. “Vadim, who is Piyotr pretending to—”

  “Sit down, Jupiter.” Vadim’s voice was cold. Even and tighter than before, like a robot. I ducked into the living room. The sofa squeaked when I sat.

  Vadim and Peter Piyotr spoke in whispered hisses for a minute. I heard him say that our parents were friends, and the words from my synagogue. Our parents?

  “Fine. He can stay,” Peter Piyotr said to Vadim at last. To me he smiled indulgently and said, “Shalom.” I heaved a sigh.

  Vadim walked over to the TV in the living room, where he high-fived two guys that I didn’t recognize at all. “Vadim, what are we doing here?” I said quietly.

  “Stop asking questions,” he hissed.

  I bit my lip and reclined into the stiff boarded leather.

  “Are you angry?” I said.

  “You said you wanted to come,” Vadim said at a normal volume. The TV guys looked over. Then—louder—he said, “You wanted to hang out with me, remember?”

  “Because we’re friends,” I said. “I wanted everything to be cool with us.
”

  “Which is, of course, something you and only you are able to do,” said Vadim. He smiled like he was joking, but his voice didn’t sound at all like it was joking. “What’s wrong, my droog? Scared? Is Jupiter out of his element?”

  I looked at Vadim. Had I really known this person on two continents, torn my sandwich in half for him on the first day of school, confided in him my secret fantasies about Emma Frost and Psylocke? This was a completely different Vadim.

  “Since when is this your element?”

  “How would you even know? You never pay attention to anybody’s life except your own.”

  “Please. Do you even realize how much of an effort I make to pull you along with me?” I got in his face. “Other people, when they get popular, they ignore their old friends. I would never do that.”

  “Of course not. You’re so much better than that. Instead, you drag me along so there’s someone around to look even more pathetic than you do.”

  I pulled back, stunned. “Did you just say I look pathetic?”

  “For all you think you understand people, Jupiter Glazer,” said Vadim, “you’re more clueless than all the rest of us put together. You wear these falling-apart clothes that are supposed to look like the ones they charge hundreds of dollars for downtown, but everyone knows they really are Salvation Army trash. You think just because you know Devin Murray, that automatically makes you rich by association—that your life will be easy and it’ll take you far far away from the Yards. But that doesn’t just happen, Jupiter. You need to work to get out of here.”

  Vadim didn’t know how far from the truth he was. I wore the least scabby, torn, thrift-store-looking shirts and jeans I could find. I had plenty of clothes that might have looked cooler, but they were also more dangerous, easier for someone to casually tease, Hey, where’d you get that—the Salvation Army? And Devin Murray didn’t waste any more time talking to me than I cajoled her into spending. We occasionally said hello in the halls. It was the kind of friendship that was awkward and forced, and I felt guilty just being in it. If I didn’t constantly keep watering it, it would evaporate.