“Ah ha,” Gibbons said. “Come on back.”
Principal Gibbons held out a hand to indicate a chair for Ilya, twisted a rod to shut the window blinds, and leaned against his desk. He had the body of a spetsnaz, like he’d know his way around a Kalashnikov. His skin looked buffed. It shone like the fruit had at the Walmart the day before.
“This is quite an opportunity for you,” he said. He did not smile. “I hope you’re ready to take advantage of it.”
“Yes,” Ilya said.
“The Masons are a fantastic family. And as I said, we’re glad to have you—” A bell rang, and Gibbons tilted his head and waited for it to finish. “But there are rules and ramifications here. You will be held to the same standard as every other student. No diplomatic immunity, you understand?”
“I understand,” Ilya said, wondering whether the man was always this aggressive. Gibbons picked up a folder from his desk. He opened it, though it seemed to be empty, then closed it again.
“I imagine that where you’re from is pretty rough—”
Ilya tried to speak—not to disagree, because Berlozhniki was rough by any standard, but to say that that didn’t mean he was—but Gibbons held up a hand. His fingers were incredibly thick and straight. “Whoa. Whoa. Let me finish. I admire the fact that you’ve gotten yourself here by hook or crook.”
Hook or crook, Ilya thought. That was in his book of idioms. He understood the insult in “crook” but could not remember what “hook” meant in this context.
“That takes determination, and we like to reward determination here. In this country. So keep that in mind.” Gibbons’s hand was still in the air. It had not moved a millimeter. “How old are you?” he said.
“Fifteen.”
“We’ve got you in sophomore classes for now. See if you sink or swim. Except English. And history. You’ll be with the freshmen for those two. I’m assuming that American history was not part of your curriculum.” A smile flitted across Gibbons’s eyes. That word, “curriculum,” was a test. He wanted to know how good Ilya’s English actually was, and, as luck would have it, Ilya had understood that word perfectly.
“In Russia, Russian history is the standard curriculum,” he said.
The smile leaked out of Gibbons’s eyes. “OK, then. Let’s get you integrated. First period began”—he looked at his watch—“two minutes ago.”
Miss Janet printed out a schedule for Ilya and led him through the empty halls to his first class.
“Don’t worry,” she said when they got to the door. “Nobody’s gonna bite.”
* * *
—
In each class, Ilya was introduced as the EnerCo Exchange Student. The teachers were so careful to say “EnerCo” that Ilya knew the school must be getting some sort of payment for taking him on, just as the Masons were. In first-period math, Mr. Cammer trotted out some elementary Russian. In second-period biology, Mrs. Lareaux asked him to write his name on the board. He did so, using the Cyrillic alphabet, and when he stepped back and brushed the chalk dust off his palms, she had the look of someone lost in a maze.
“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “There’s a different alphabet. Would you mind writing it in English too, so that we can read it?”
So Ilya carefully chalked the roman letters under each Cyrillic one and listened as, behind him, a dozen voices sounded out his name.
His new backpack was soon full of syllabi and textbooks. There were course calendars, course expectations. That was all as overwhelming as he’d expected, but he hadn’t anticipated the force of attention: the questions, the smiles, the silences he was expected to fill. For fifteen years Ilya had lived with Vladimir, who lived for attention of any sort, and Ilya’s personality had been shaped by Vladimir’s need. Ilya was used to observing from the edges; he was used to going whole days without saying much of anything—except, of course, to Maria Mikhailovna or Michael and Stephanie—and now, when he entered a room, every face turned to look at him, and he wished that he’d brought his tape player, that he could listen to Michael and Stephanie and slip from this America into that other one.
It didn’t help that he had worn the wrong things: his jeans were too skinny, his sneakers not nearly large enough nor bright enough. Boys in America did not, it seemed, wear their T-shirts tight, and no one had a fringed haircut like his that tapered into spikes above his eyebrows.
By fourth-period history, he was desperate to see Sadie. He wanted to hear her say again that tomorrow they would have forgotten all about him. Luckily, the history classroom was next to his third-period class, so he was saved the embarrassment of asking some other straggler in the hallway for directions. When he walked in the door, he saw her almost immediately, in the far back corner, framed by an enormous poster of a nobleman in a wig that was the same color as her hair.
“Sadie,” he said, and he was halfway to her, nearly across the room, before he realized that the seat next to her was taken by a boy who looked more like a man. The sort of man in cologne commercials. The sort of man whose abs had bristled on the packet of boxers that Ilya had opened just that morning. He was looking at Ilya now, and so was Sadie. They had been talking, Ilya realized, and had stopped when he said her name.
“Hi,” Sadie said.
Ilya could feel himself flushing. Sadie was smiling, as was the man-boy next to her. All around Ilya the desks were filling up—and he could tell that he would be left standing, the odd man out, the perfect target—and he tried to remember where the closest bathroom was so that he could propel himself there and hide in a stall until the last bell had rung. And then he heard a voice say, “Before you take a seat, would you mind coming up here and telling us a little bit about Russia? About your city or town?”
Ilya turned to find a small, thin man with a beard to rival Father Frost’s and the sleepy smile of a lizard on a rock.
“Mr. Shilling,” the man said, “American history buff and, by necessity, teacher, at your service.” He led Ilya to the front of the room. “So, Russia, tell us about it,” he said, and a silence fell over the class, so thick that Ilya could almost feel it on his skin. They were all looking at him. He knew they wanted the dramatic things, the things that reaffirmed America: that his grandfather had died in the mine, that his father had died coughing it up, that his grandmother had spent a third of her life in lines; that after the currency collapse your life savings could buy you a pack of Optimas; that his brother was in prison for murder. Or maybe they wanted to know about the cultural tidbits: about Victory Day, and the ice sculptures, and the fact that they gave presents for New Year’s, not Christmas.
“Let’s start with where you live,” Shilling said. “Russia is a big place, right?”
“Yes,” Ilya said.
“What’s your town called?”
“Berlozhniki,” Ilya said.
“Where is that?”
“The northwest.”
“OK,” Mr. Shilling said, and when Ilya didn’t offer anything further, he said, “Maybe it’d be easier if we let the class ask some questions, things they’re curious about.”
Ilya nodded.
“Please remember,” Shilling said, turning to the class, “that your grades are partially based on participation.”
A few hands went up, but not Sadie’s. She was writing something in a tiny notebook. Actually, from the way her pen was moving it looked like she was drawing.
“What’s the population?” asked a boy with glasses and a splash of acne on each cheek. When Ilya told him, he wrote the answer down in a notebook, which prompted a girl in the front row to ask if they’d be tested on this information. Mr. Shilling shook his head, and said that he hoped they’d pay attention anyhow.
“Was it part of the gulag archipelago?” a girl in the front row asked. She said the phrase—gulag archipelago—like it was the Latin name for some rare, carnivorous plant, lik
e she should be congratulated on her recall.
“Yes,” Ilya said.
“You ever meet a mail-order bride?” This came from the man-boy, who was leaning so far back in his chair that its feet lifted off the ground.
Sadie rolled her eyes, but a few other girls giggled.
“Ignore J.T., please,” Mr. Shilling said. “Let’s try not to sink to the lowest common denominator.”
Shilling pointed at a chubby girl with dark lipstick. “Chelsea,” he said.
“Is the refinery privately owned? Or does the state own it?” she said.
It was an easy question, easier than the gulag one in theory, but it felt somehow accusatory, as though it were Ilya’s fault that Yeltsin had dealt out the country’s resources to his friends like a hand of seka, but as she asked it, the sun came out from behind a cloud and half soaked the classroom, and the light was like melted butter, was like nothing he’d seen before, as if they orbited a different star here, and home suddenly felt so far.
As his silence grew, the class’s did too. They stopped moving in their desks, stopped cracking knuckles and chewing gum. Even J.T. had stopped fidgeting and was looking at him the way you look at a three-legged dog, with lots of pity and a little amazement. He thought of Aksinya saying, “Maybe over there you’ll grow a pair.” Of Vladimir saying that Ilya would be a boss, that he’d run shit. Of Vladimir asking Maria Mikhailovna to send him instead. He thought of Lana sleeping with Gabe Thompson, and he knew why she’d done it: she’d wanted to be here too, and Gabe had been as close as she could get.
“This oligarch owns most of it,” Ilya managed. His words were clipped, his voice terse. He sounded like some sort of demented robot. Vladimir, he knew, would be expansive. Vladimir would embellish, impress. He would not worry about the truth. “Fyodor Fetisov. An oligarch is someone who’s rich. Dirty rich.”
“Filthy rich,” Mr. Shilling said.
“Filthy rich,” Ilya said. “And this oligarch, once he filled a bathtub with caviar and two prostitutes.”
Sadie looked up from her drawing.
“Hell yes!” J.T. shouted.
“And these prostitutes, they’ve got diamonds for nipples and thongs made out of gold. These are women so fucking beautiful that they cost millions of rubles a day, and he has them for as long as he wants, forever. All thanks to oil. We have a joke at home, that the oligarch’s balls are filled with oil, instead of—I don’t know the word—and when he’s finished he takes a lighter—”
“OK, OK,” Mr. Shilling said, and J.T. started to laugh. Next to him, Sadie was smiling. He looked at her, and for one triumphant second it was clear to him that she liked him. It was right there in her eyes. And then J.T. leaned across the aisle, cupped his hand over his mouth and whispered something in her ear, and it was just as clear to Ilya that J.T. was her boyfriend. Of course she had a boyfriend, he thought; why else did girls sneak out in the middle of the night?
“I’m not sure how those words translate,” Mr. Shilling was saying, “but they’re not really appropriate for school.”
“Which words?” Ilya said.
“Mr. Landry,” Mr. Shilling said, to J.T., “maybe you can tell Ilya after class, once you’ve finished whispering with Ms. Mason.”
“Happy to,” J.T. said with a smirk. Beside him, Sadie went back to her drawing.
J.T. did corner Ilya after class, to tell him that he was a badass. “You’re a fucking oligarch,” J.T. said, raising a fist, and, when Ilya did not raise a fist in return, he bumped it against Ilya’s arm. Ilya wanted to hate him, but the force of J.T.’s enthusiasm was hard to deny. “Catch you later,” J.T. said, and he spun off into the crowd, and when Ilya finally had a chance to look for Sadie, her desk was empty.
By the end of eighth period, Ilya was exhausted. His eyelids were a force to be reckoned with. It had been two nights now of little sleep. Five if he counted the nights he’d spent traveling. He hadn’t taken a decent shit since arriving. He could only manage to expel these angry, fossilized pellets, and with so little output, eating had become uncomfortable. Plus, Sadie had a boyfriend, a boyfriend charming enough to charm even Ilya, though J.T.’s charm dissipated with time as Ilya roamed the halls trying to find his way back to his locker. In the end, he found the library and slumped in front of a computer monitor. It was the middle of the night at home, but he checked his email anyway, thinking that his mother might have stopped off at the Internet Kebab on her way to work. He had only one email, from Aksinya:
Have you heard anything from V? I still don’t know where he’s being held or whether he’s coming home for the trial. Your mom keeps fucking avoiding me and your grandma looks at me like I’m a ghost.
I don’t know about Lana and Gabe Thompson. He’s been gone for a few months at least. Pavel said the police sent him home, but Pavel wouldn’t know his dick from a toothpick.
Study hard, smarty. He needs you even more now.
—A
Ilya had no idea who Pavel was or whether the email was good or bad news. Surely it was more than a coincidence that Gabe had left Berlozhniki not long after Lana’s murder. Ilya tried to remember the last time he’d seen Gabe and could not. Gabe had been part of life’s backdrop, like the nasty-tempered babki who ran the flower kiosk in the summer and the ancient, one-armed dedok who bore the flag in the Defender of the Fatherland parade each year. The dedok who, Ilya had to admit, had been dead for several years before Ilya noticed. And the fact that the police had been involved seemed especially hard to parse. Had they suspected Gabe too and decided that getting him out of Berlozhniki was easier than reopening the investigation? Or had they just gotten tired of dragging Gabe back up to the Hotel Berlozhniki every time the temperature got below minus ten?
Why the police? Ilya wrote. He clicked send, hoisted his book bag onto his shoulder, and went back into the halls in search of his locker. Half an hour later, Miss Janet found him slumped against it, waiting for Sadie to finish track practice.
“You’ll get scoliosis if you keep sitting like that,” she said, and she ushered him to the front office and set him up at an empty desk that had belonged to another secretary. “Principal Gibbons no longer needed her,” Miss Janet said, with this swell of pride in her voice.
Ilya was afraid that Miss Janet was the sort who would chatter nonstop, who sought out quiet types because they offered the least resistance to verbal barrages, but once Ilya opened his chemistry textbook and began a problem set, she unwrapped a sandwich swaddled in tinfoil, and they settled into a companionable silence that she broke only once, to say, “It must be so strange waking up here. Half a world away from home.”
Home, Ilya thought. The police sent him home, which, of course, meant here.
“It is. It’s very strange,” Ilya said. He looked at Miss Janet, who was considering the last bite of her sandwich. “How would you find someone in America?” he said. He tried to keep his voice nonchalant, like finding this person was not at all crucial, like the prospect of it was not burning through his veins with the power of a drug.
“Find someone? Like in Leffie?”
Ilya nodded.
“You’d look online. In the White Pages,” Miss Janet said.
“The White Pages?”
“Yeah, the White Pages, the Yellow Pages. They were actual books—I’m aging myself—but now they’re databases.” Miss Janet sucked the tip of a finger and dabbed, absently, at stray sandwich crumbs.
“But what if you don’t know where he is?” Ilya said.
“Well, who is he?” Miss Janet said.
“He’s this American who came to my town on a mission, only I can’t remember where he’s from.”
“I guess you could search state by state,” she said. “What kind of mission was it?”
“He wanted to convert us,” Ilya said. He thought of Gabe, pleading with them for a minute of their time, for a ch
ance to be saved, and the way that his pleas had gone from earnest to angry and had seemed, eventually, like rants.
“I figured that,” Miss Janet said. “But convert you to what? Was he Baptist?”
Ilya shook his head, thinking of Papa Cam, who hadn’t been allowed to dance or date or drink soda. “The Church of Later Day Saints,” Ilya said.
Miss Janet smiled. “It’s not ‘later,’ she said. “It’s ‘latter,’ like a ladder that you climb.”
“Ladder. Latter,” Ilya said, and out of habit his hand drifted to his back pocket, where he used to keep his notebook of unknown words, but he’d memorized all the words in it and left the notebook in Berlozhniki.
“So he’s Mormon. I don’t know much about Mormons, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any in Leffie,” she said. She crushed the tinfoil into a tight ball and tossed it into the trash can under her desk. At home, they did not throw away tinfoil. Babushka rinsed it and hung it to dry on the laundry line, as did everyone else in the kommunalkas. And sometimes, when Ilya was walking home from school and the sun hit the balconies just right, the whole building seemed to sparkle.
CHAPTER TEN
Ilya woke the morning after the windstorm with the last bits of a dream melting in his mind the way sugar melts on your tongue. Had all of it—Maria Mikhailovna’s visit, the exchange program, America—been a dream? The heat was back on. All of the candles had burned down to nubs overnight. Frozen wax puddled on the countertops and windowsills. Babushka was chipping away at it with a spoon and collecting the shavings in a pot. Ilya watched her for a moment, then he sat up.
“Is it true?” he said.
Babushka nodded. She put the pot on the stove, walked over to the couch, and sat on its edge. “When I woke up this morning, for the first time in my life, I was thankful that your grandfather is with God instead of with me. Do you know why?”
Ilya shook his head. She leaned over him, the way she used to when he and Vladimir were little and still got good night kisses. She was beautiful as grandmothers go. Her spine was straight, her eyes clear and blue. She did not have any of the terrible and obvious signs of age—the knobs and growths, the shaking—but still it scared him to really examine her. Her veins were too apparent. Loose skin fringed her jaw like melting wax and every once in a while her voice slowed as she spoke, as though her brain were limping toward the end of the sentence.
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