by Megan Hart
Quietly, she went to the table herself and loaded up her plate in a similar fashion. She grabbed a couple of napkins and then hooked her arm through Ilya’s, careful but not successful in keeping him from spilling a little. He resisted at first, but she looked him in the face.
“Come outside with me,” she said. “You’re kind of being a dick.”
She hadn’t known Ilya before their parents got together. She’d only met him as an arrogant teenage boy with an infectious sense of humor and a penchant for getting into trouble, as well as the talent to talk his way out of it. She’d heard stories about him over the years. Those small seeds of gossip had found a way to bear fruit even in the next town over. Still, it surprised her how readily he reacted to her murmured admonition.
“Sorry,” Ilya said with his mouth still full.
Theresa shook her head and left the dining room, dodging the well-meaning, reaching hands of the women who’d gathered there to mourn Babulya, and avoiding Dina, who was still trying to catch Ilya’s eye. The weather was still so unseasonably warm they didn’t need their coats, but the day had been overcast, with a promise of more rain. There’d been no snow this year, a fact she was grateful for. Not having to deal with bad weather on top of everything else had made her life a lot easier over the past few months.
“Sit,” she ordered.
He did. He dug his plastic fork into the slithering pile of macaroni salad, managing to stab a few noodles and get them into his mouth before pausing to swallow. He gave her a startled look. “Babulya’s macaroni salad.”
“I made it this morning.”
He glanced up at her and took another bite before he answered. “I haven’t had this in years.”
“I haven’t made it in a while. I thought it would be appropriate for today.” She took a bite, savoring the flavors. Bits of green onion. Mustard. Small cubes of carrot. This macaroni salad was the perfect summer-picnic dish, as out of season as the warm weather, and yet somehow seemed perfectly right to also celebrate the life of a woman who’d been so loved.
“So, Dina,” she said after a moment or so of silence, interrupted only by the sound of them both chewing.
“She lives next door to Allie. She’s . . . nosy.”
Theresa laughed softly, catching a glimpse of blonde hair at the kitchen’s sliding door. “Ex-girlfriend?”
“She’s married. Four kids. None of them mine,” Ilya added sarcastically.
“I wasn’t accusing you of fathering half the neighborhood,” Theresa said after a pause. “Although the way she was looking at you, she might be looking for a daddy for number five.”
Ilya grimaced with a shudder. “Shit, I need another beer.”
“Do you? Need one? Or do you just want one?” Theresa asked.
He frowned and glanced at the house. “What difference does it make? Need or want?”
“It makes a big difference,” Theresa answered quietly and focused on her plate. “But only you can figure out what it is. If you need one, go in and get one.”
Ilya made as though to get up from the table, then settled back into the chair with a grumbling sigh. “Nah. I don’t want to go back inside, watch my mother holding court like some kind of queen. You know she wants to sit shiva this week?”
“I heard her inviting people, yes. Not that most of them knew what it is.” Theresa, baptized Catholic at her grandparents’ insistence but raised without much of any organized religion, had toyed with practicing a few different faiths over the years. She’d never gone so far as to officially convert to anything, but she did know what shiva, the traditional Jewish practice of seven nights’ grieving, was.
“It’s ridiculous.” Ilya rested his elbows on the table to let his hands make a cradle for his face for a few seconds. When he spoke, his voice was muffled. “Like what, she’s Jewish now?”
“I thought you were always Jewish.”
He peeked at her through his fingers. “Well . . . yeah. I mean, sure, but we never really did anything about it.”
“Doesn’t mean that your mom can’t find comfort in the traditions of her faith,” Theresa said mildly.
Ilya sat up and stared at her. “You’re different.”
She didn’t think so, but then again, he didn’t know her, did he? He’d hardly known her back then, this sudden younger sister forced on him by their screwed-up parents who’d thought they were in love until making it work got too hard. She didn’t answer him.
“I mean . . .” Ilya shrugged, staring at her. “Hi.”
Theresa’s brows rose. “Hi.”
“I’m a little fucked up.”
“Too many beers,” she said lightly.
Ilya shook his head. “That’s not what I mean.”
“I know,” Theresa answered.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Then
School was a special level of hell, Niko thought. They put you in these small rooms and made you sit there for hours to do work you could learn in so much less time if they only bothered to figure out a way to teach that made sense. It didn’t even have to be fun. His pencil tap-tapped on the notebook in front of him. Couldn’t they just make it less freaking torturous?
It didn’t help that all he could think about was Alicia Harrison.
All his friends had started panting after girls with their tongues hanging out like dogs since about the seventh grade, but he’d never seen much point in it. Why get all worked up over some flat-chested pimpleface who might or might not have to be pressured into opening her mouth when you kissed? Not to mention what you had to do in order to get her to touch your dick. Or to let you touch any of her parts. It hadn’t made any sense to him—why did he ever have to fall in love? Or worse, have some clinging girlfriend claim she was in love with him?
Niko planned on getting the hell out of this piece-of-shit town the first second he had the chance, so why would he want to get tangled up with someone here? Why start something that was only going to end? If he got horny, he had his own two hands that could take care of business. He didn’t need something else.
Except . . . now he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl across the street. Allie was the last person in the world he’d have thought he would ever want to kiss. The party had been a bad idea from the beginning. He’d known it. But Ilya had a way of convincing everyone that even the worst ideas were going to be great, so Niko had gone along with it because he almost always did. He’d drunk his mother’s vodka. And he’d kissed Allie in the garden. He’d done that, and neither of them had talked about it since. It had been almost a month, it had been a stupid thing, so why then couldn’t he shake the memory of how she’d tasted?
Why couldn’t he stop wanting to do it again?
Somehow he made it through the day, dodging a detention for not having his homework finished by arguing with Mrs. Haberstramm that straight As on his tests should prove that he understood the material.
“I can’t give you credit for the work if you don’t turn it in,” she said with a sigh she reserved for all the students who tried to wiggle their way out of turning in their homework. “And it counts for half your grade, Niko. So, no matter how many tests you ace, if you don’t turn in the homework, you’re going to barely squeak by with a D, and that’s only if I’m generous.”
They agreed he could turn in all the missing homework he swore with an angel’s face he really had finished and had just forgotten to bring in. Every day. For months. She gave him until Friday. Three days. He was never going to make it, not if he worked all night, every night, and had nothing else to do. The futility of the arrangement, the challenge, should’ve motivated him, but Niko headed home and tossed his backpack on the recliner in the living room the way he did every single day after school.
Babulya had snacks ready in the kitchen. She and Theresa had been baking again. Cookies, fresh from the oven, cooling on wire racks. He snagged one, knowing she’d scold him about ruining his dinner but not mean it. She wouldn’t make cookies if she didn’t w
ant them to be eaten, right?
Gathering a couple of cookies in one fist, he crossed the street and went through the Harrisons’ kitchen and into the den. Jenni was watching a soap opera while she painted her nails, and he tossed her a cookie. She squealed but managed to catch it.
“Jerk, you made me mess up my polish.” She ate the cookie anyway.
“Bitch,” Niko said, giving her the standard comeback they all used.
“Where’s your brother?”
Jenni and Ilya had been fooling around together for months, but they were acting like nobody knew it. Just to mess with her, Niko shrugged. “I think he went over to Kim Lee’s house.”
The way she flinched made him wish he hadn’t tried to tease her. He flopped onto the couch beside her and propped his feet on the coffee table, but first snagged the remote to change the station. He laughed at her cry of protest and held the remote up and out of her reach.
“Jerk,” Jenni muttered again, then fixed him with a sly look. “Allie isn’t home, by the way. She stayed after to do something for the play.”
Horrified and feeling caught, Niko forced himself to turn his burning face toward the TV screen. “Why do you think that matters to me?”
The pager on Jenni’s hip beeped, and she grabbed for it with a small, secret grin, studying the number on the little black screen. She held the pager to her chest for a moment. Did a little seated dance. Ilya wasn’t the one who’d paged her—he didn’t have one.
Curiosity piqued, Niko turned toward her. “Got a boyfriend or something?”
“None of your business, buttstain,” Jenni said, but she was distracted. Paying too much attention to the message on the pager to notice that Niko was close enough to snag it from her grip.
Getting under Jennilynn Harrison’s skin, as well as her sister’s, was a long-standing Stern-brother tradition. But what he saw spelled out on the pager’s screen set him back a step. It was a string of numbers and asterisks, a coded message. Niko didn’t have a pager, but he understood what it said because the list of codes and their meanings got passed around at school all the time.
I want to fuck you.
Niko’d seen porn. Randy Ebersole had found a whole stash of it under his dad’s workbench, and they all got drunk and watched it. But somehow, seeing someone say that to Jenni, watching her blush and giggle over it, made it all too real. Too . . . adult. Lots of their friends were having sex, but something about that message felt creepy.
“Give me that, shithead!” Jenni swept the pager out of his hand and punched him on the arm for good measure.
Both Harrison girls knew how to land a punch; Niko was lucky she hadn’t aimed for his face. He’d be sporting a black eye, for sure. Blushing now for a different reason, he avoided looking into Jenni’s face.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.”
“Fuck you, Niko.”
They swore at each other all the time. Ragged on each other. Something about this felt harsher, though. Angrier. Jenni cursed at him like she meant it, not like a joke, and Niko swallowed hard against a rush of something that felt like thorns in his throat. He wanted to apologize but couldn’t make himself do it. He didn’t want to have seen what he saw. He just wanted to get out of there.
So, he ran.
Out of the house, across the street. Past his own house and through his backyard, into the field and the woods beyond. He ran until he had to bend over, thinking he might puke. Not far beyond him was the fence that surrounded the quarry, but he was nowhere near the place where they usually hung out to swim and mess around. Even so, he pushed through the vines and bushes and found a spot in the fence that let him through. He wasn’t the first to seek access, after all. Despite the signs warning people to stay away, nobody ever did.
Niko stood on the edge of the quarry, looking down to the water below. If he jumped from here, there was a good chance he would hit the water, legs and arms straight, making him a bullet. It was so deep there wasn’t a chance he’d hit bottom. But he could mess up the angle, screw up the jump, hit a dozen places along the wall on the way down. Thinking of this, he shifted, and one foot slipped on a crumble of pebbles, which pattered downward and plink, plink, so far down he couldn’t even hear them hitting the water.
Heart pounding, he stepped back, grabbing for the fence, for a moment certain he’d gone too far this time. He was going to end up a broken mess on the rocks below. It would be better to die if that happened, he thought, sort of incoherently, knowing it was smart to stay back from the edge, but somehow helpless to keep himself from leaning forward again, anyway. Better to be dead than hurt so bad you couldn’t take care of yourself, or to be in a coma, or something like that.
He took in a deep breath when the ground beneath him didn’t give way and send him hurtling toward the pit. He gripped the fence’s rusty metal links with one hand and leaned forward with only that to hold him. Eyes closed, heart pounding, Niko considered letting go. Again and again he let his body swing forward, then back, with only his fingertips tethering him, until finally whatever was inside him that made him run had been appeased. Like a kind of dark demon, it ate something out of him and left him sort of shivering and empty, so that he stared at the marks of the metal fence gouged into his fingers, like he’d just woken from a dream. Shaking it off, Niko headed back to his house, which felt so different now that there was another man living there.
Barry wasn’t home when he got there. Neither was Galina. Niko could hear the faint sound of music coming from upstairs, some boy band that Theresa favored. Babulya met him in the kitchen with crossed arms and a frown.
“You’ve been stealing cookies.”
Niko was sweaty, with prickers and twigs scratching at him. Mud thick on his shoes that he’d tracked in on the clean kitchen floor. “I was hungry.”
His grandmother nodded once, sharply, and fixed him with a look. “You’ll always be hungry. You need to feed more than your stomach.”
“I’ll clean this up.” He gestured at the skid marks of mud, hanging his head, ashamed of having made a mess when he should have known better.
“Kolya.” Babulya put a hand on his shoulder and waited until he looked at her. She was so tiny he towered over her. “You don’t have to stay here forever.”
“Huh?”
Babulya shook her head. Her fingers squeezed for a moment, before she released him. “This house. This place. You don’t have to stay here forever, Kolya, moye solnishko.”
My little sun.
He’d only ever heard her call his brother that, and somehow even though he didn’t want to, Niko was sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. He didn’t cry, although his throat closed and his eyes burned. All he could do was sit there. His grandmother put the plate of cookies in front of him, along with a glass of milk. She rubbed the spot between his shoulders in slow, steady circles for a minute or so, then patted his shoulder.
“I just hate everything,” Niko said in a low voice, no longer hungry for cookies but taking one anyway.
Babulya laughed. “I know, you’re like your mother in that way. She hated everything, too.”
“I don’t want to be like her,” he muttered. The thought of it repelled him.
“We are what we are. That is the way it works.” Babulya shrugged and went to the sink to fill the kettle with water so she could make some tea. “Ilya—he likes to fight when he knows he can’t win. You like to win without fighting.”
“Whatever that means.”
He ducked away from her swat. When she hugged him, though, he closed his eyes and let her press his face to the front of her familiar scratchy sweater. Ilya was always her favorite, as Nikolai belonged to his mother. They wore the same lotion, Babulya and his mother, something the two of them shared, which they probably didn’t realize. The faint scent of flowers made him think of how it had been when he was a little kid who’d had a bad dream, and Galina had let him climb into bed with her until he w
asn’t scared anymore. He was way too big for that now, too old for that comfort, though sometimes he believed his mother would gladly keep him that close to her forever.
Babulya hugged him tightly, then let him go. “It means that it will be all right when you run, Kolya. That’s what it means. One day you will run toward something instead of away, and then you will understand.”
Run toward instead of away.
His grandmother had been full of stories, fairy tales, myths, and fables, but of all the advice she’d ever given him, those words had been the ones Niko carried with him. She’d seen something in him back then that he hadn’t been able to see in himself, not until he was older and had started traveling the world, telling himself it was because he wanted to see and do and feel and live a life far beyond the tiny rural Pennsylvania town where everyone knew everyone else’s business. That had been a part of it, but it hadn’t been all of it.
He’d definitely been running away.
He wasn’t so sure what he was doing now. He’d come back to Quarrytown without intending to stay longer than he had to, but a certain lethargy had overtaken him. If he wasn’t running, it was because he’d started sinking back into the quagmire of this small town, this house, his mother and brother, and the girl next door.
Oh, her.
He shouldn’t have kissed her. It was going to come back to bite him. Or haunt him, the way he’d been haunted forever already by the memories of her. He was supposed to be smarter, but it looked like he’d only gotten older.
Everyone was leaving by the time he got back from Allie’s house, and since Ilya had disappeared, Niko was the one who shook their hands and accepted the condolences. With the front door closed behind the last of the guests, he took in a long, deep breath and thought about the mess of food in the dining room he was certain his mother wouldn’t be doing much to clean up. To his surprise, he found her there packing away the leftovers into a pile of mismatched plastic and glass containers.