by Ellen Litman
Sveta, of course, gets a lot of attention, though this time she, too, struggles with her role. Pushkin’s wife is a complicated character, unfaithful, willful, splendid. Here she is, entering briskly and squinting in the limpid candlelight. “Less charm,” Anechka says. “And a bit more impatience.”
In this way they get through the end of the first quarter and reach the autumn break. The week before the break, rehearsals are canceled. Instead, the drama club must organize a disco—there’s one at the end of evey quarter—the one event the whole school always eagerly awaits.
ANECHKA AND MISHA used to take the discos seriously. They came up with contests and special themes, and in general they seemed to believe they could elevate the discos, make them into something artistic and meaningful. Kat remembers one time in particular when they did a whole sequence on the history of dance: minuet, waltz, foxtrot, tango. It took a lot of effort to train the students to perform all these routines.
Since then they’ve lost interest, or maybe they finally figured out it wasn’t worth their energy. The students don’t like the disruptions, don’t need prizes and quizzes. They only want to dance, though really it’s more like bobbing in the dark, to the unrelenting tunes of Modern Talking. “You’re my heart, you’re my soul,” or as the students prefer to translate it phonetically: “You’re my bread, you’re my salt.”
These days it’s the gym teacher who installs the lights and mounts the spinning mirror ball. Vlad Borisov supplies the tapes, since neither Anechka nor Misha can tell C. C. Catch from Sandra. After that, all they have to do is sit at the front of the gym, feed the tapes into the outdated sound system, say a few things into the microphone.
For the students, though, the discos have always been important. The girls come in on Monday with dresses and blouses propped daintily on hangers, with small arrays of lipsticks and extra knapsacks. They usually have until Friday to fiddle with their outfits and hair, to go through their baggies of cosmetics, to fret over scuffed pairs of heels they’ve swiped from their mothers’ closets. Do they clash? Do they fit? Will the music be good? Will there be slow dances? And if so, will anyone ask them this time?
The odds are never in their favor. In the whole school there are maybe half a dozen boys that look halfway decent—the son of the head of orthopedics, the nephew of the music teacher. These are the best prospects, the healthy boys. They are here because of the swimming, and also because the school has the best ranking in the district.
And if these boys are not to your liking, there are always the local boys. They lurk in the park outside the school bounds, and only the most abject, wildest girls dare to join them in the overgrown shrubbery or out on the deserted playground.
The local boys are curious about the crippled girls. The discos allow them to sneak inside, briefly dissolving in the gym’s pulsating darkness. But they are easy to spot on the dance floor. Everything gives them away: their street clothes, their smell, their strong, stocky bodies. Still, for a song or two, a girl might find herself pressed to a stranger’s sturdy form, her cheek crushed against the metal-studded denim, his breath on her neck thick with cigarettes and booze. And for weeks afterward, she’ll dream he might return for her.
ON THE day of the disco, Anechka doesn’t come to school. “Feeling out of sorts” is how Misha puts it. It happens. It’s happened before. A few days at home feeling ill, or feeling blue, and later a note from a cousin who works across town at a district policlinic.
“Is she okay?” Kat whispers, and Misha shrugs as if to say, who knows!
The day has gone haywire anyway. The schedule’s been thrown out of the window, and no one pays attention in class. The girls pass notes and even practice their dance moves. Mironov rips one of his notebooks and sends out a score of paper planes. The teachers let out empty threats, but even they don’t care. The quarter is practically finished.
After nap, Margo relents and lets the girls stay in the dorm and primp before the disco. The girls lounge in their pajamas or get their outfits prepped, darting to the room down the hall to borrow the iron. In the hallway, Jules has set up her makeshift beauty parlor. She is a pro with makeup brushes and hair implements, wielding them with ease, stepping around lightly. She seems strangely fragile in her flowery pajama pants, but also somehow indestructible, like a chess piece en route to a checkmate.
Kat perches on the couch nearby to keep her company.
“What are you wearing?” Jules asks.
Leaving for school that Monday, Kat plucked a blue skirt and white blouse out of her closet. Now, upon closer inspection, the skirt appears rather shrunken (she’s had it since before fourth grade), and the blouse isn’t any better—tight under the arms and with a small darn on one side that she hadn’t noticed. But in the dark, she reasons, it won’t matter. What matters is the overall impression, the full effect, which, she believes, is light and airy.
“What are you,” says Jules, “a snowflake? Honestly, child, it’s like I’ve taught you nothing.”
Kat’s never been too good about clothes. The stuff she wears is usually hideous, ill-fitting, badly made. Patched-up button-down shirts, corduroy pants, a few stretched-out sweaters that used to be Anechka’s, and a particularly ugly brown jacket. She knows her wardrobe is atrocious. In part it’s because of the brace, which turns everything into rags with its bolts, joints, and planks, so there’s never any sense in buying her good clothes. Besides, month after month her parents say they’re short on cash.
“We’ve got to find you something else,” Jules says. “And absolutely no brace.”
“You’re dreaming,” Kat answers, but then she thinks, Maybe? If Anechka were here, she would notice, but Misha’s not the most observant person, so it actually might work. Week after week Kat’s been rehearsing in her brace, aware of how much it dwarfs and limits her. Without it, she could soar.
Jules, in the meantime, is working on Vika Litvinova’s hair. Vika Litvinova—a pest, a parasite. You’d think after the whole thieving business, after all the times she’s been caught in extravagant lies, she’d be the leper, the black sheep of the class. Instead, she is more of a white sheep. Sweet-faced, soft-spoken, docile, she plays up her angelic attributes, poses as someone helpless, childlike. It’s no accident that her nickname is Cherub.
Kat thinks it’s repulsive the way she lisps on purpose, curls up in the fetal position, and even sucks her thumb at times. There’s a slickness to her, a silky sheen, that makes her appear trustworthy, especially to those who haven’t known her for long. She sidles up to Jules, and Jules, who’s lived through only some of Cherub’s debacles, considers her amusing.
Right now, Cherub’s blubbering some nonsense: how everyone despises her, how she feels misunderstood and sad, how when everyone leaves for the disco she’ll stay behind and hang herself with the belt of her bathrobe.
“Is it sturdy?” Kat checks.
Jules says, “Don’t encourage her.”
“It’s the same song and dance every year. One day it’s razors, the next it’s the gas.” Kat straightens up.
Jules says, “You’re going?”
“I’ll be inside,” Kat says. “Just let me know when the melodrama’s over.” She doesn’t know why she’s letting Cherub get to her. Maybe because she once believed her. Or maybe it’s the fact that Cherub has broken every rule without incurring any real penalties. Her brace is perpetually busted or hidden; she routinely skips swimming and other kinds of therapy, but you’d never know it from looking at her back. A normal, slightly chubby back, maybe a little uneven. In the six years they’ve been here, Cherub has barely changed.
Kat doesn’t mean to fall asleep. She isn’t sure how it’s even possible, given her irritation and the gaggle’s noise. She is reading in bed, and the next thing she knows it’s an hour later and someone’s thrown a hairbrush at her. “Rise and shine, Kysya. It’s party time.”
The gaggle is rigged out and ready: Shrew’s dressed in jeans and a red leather vest, Snake in
a miniskirt and fishnets. Cherub, it seems, has scrapped her suicide plans for the time being. Her hair is crimped into tight little ringlets and she’s sporting pink banana pants. Even Bones—poor skeletal Bones—has spruced herself up, donned a billowing, big-shouldered jacket and put a small ribbon in her hair. The rest of the girls are in dowdy skirts or cotton summer dresses, in high-necked blouses their grandmas wore when they were young themselves. Kira Mikadze, her bangs pinned back above her protruding forehead, swaddles herself in a big wooly cardigan.
Out in the hallway, Jules is still in her pajama pants, doing some witchery over Nina Petrenko’s stringy orange hair. “You’re next,” she says to Kat.
There is no time to hesitate. Kat leaves the brace off and pulls on her snowflake costume: the shirt that gapes between the buttons, the skirt that puckers at the waist. The sleeves are too short. Her tights are white and unattractive. One of her shoes has come unglued.
But Jules is undeterred. She rolls up Kat’s sleeves, untucks her shirt (“It’s not a parade, it’s a disco!”); from somewhere deep inside the wardrobe she produces a pair of black nylons. She paints Kat’s face, back-combs her hair and pins it on both sides with red barrettes.
“Observe!” she says, posing Kat in front of the big mirror in the bathroom.
Kat slowly takes in her transformation: bright lips, skinny arms, eyes big with mascara and kohl. There is something woeful about her, as if she’s a young urchin, a tragic, large-eyed creature from Hugo’s Les Misérables.
AT THE DISCO, the gaggle occupies its own corner. They always dance together, in a large and disorderly swarm. It’s the way Margo wants it. She stands not at a distance with the other matrons but directly across from the gaggle, her gaze unwavering, her back straight as a board. Margo the prison guard. You know it’s driving them bonkers. You see it in the way they dance, huddling together, squaring their bodies, pushing against other clusters of girls, hoping to provoke somebody.
Kat walks aimlessly around the gym. She locked up her brace in Anechka’s wall unit, for which she has a spare key, then waited until the last possible minute, until the lights were dimmed, hoping Misha wouldn’t notice her. It seems to have worked, though she must avoid the pair of hulking speakers behind which Misha has marooned himself. He’s there with Vlad and Nikita.
It annoys Kat sometimes that Nikita is so devoted to Misha, so awed by his ideas, so keen to embrace his every plan. Of course, it makes sense; Misha is brilliant. But some afternoons when she comes into Misha’s classroom and finds the two of them discussing something abstract, she feels superfluous, beside the point. Jules always tells her to speak to Nikita, but what, apart from Misha, would they speak about?
Kat and Jules always split up at the start of the disco. Jules goes to the gaggle’s corner, while Kat, they both know, will latch onto the group of drama club girls. It feels wrong every time, but Kat can’t possibly include Jules. It’s just not her scene. She might feel awkward or unwelcome among the older girls.
The older girls are loose-limbed, self-possessed, insouciant. They accept Kat’s presence like it’s natural. A couple of them wave or wink. They’re doing some synchronized sequence of steps, which Kat can’t hope to copy. At first, she just shifts her feet—utterly lost, trying to find her rhythm—and smiles like a moron. But then the music loosens her and she begins to feel the beat. Her steps become easy. The song pulses through her. She is nimble, she is weightless and lithe, a ball hitting the pavement. A bounce for every note, for every name. “I know five names.” She is normal again. She is in sync with the other girls.
KAT FINDS Jules resting outside the gaggle’s circle, fanning herself with a small handkerchief. “Too little oxygen,” Jules says, “too much exertion.” Kat is sorry for having abandoned her, but Jules is not resentful or even remotely upset. She is her usual unruffled self, and not even slightly spectacular in a simple white shirt and stylish tapered pants. Despite her magic touch she has done nothing to augment her own body, staying sticklike, athletic, razor-straight. Not a curve on her, not a hint of soft womanly plumpness.
They go outside to get some air. On the way to the second-floor bathroom, Jules complains that the music is lame. “Have a word with your dad, or your boyfriend.” “He’s not my boyfriend,” Kat retorts, though she’d like nothing more than to be Nikita’s girl. Whenever there is a slow song, which isn’t often, she gets this shaky, hopeful feeling. But it’s stupid, she knows, because Nikita doesn’t dance at all. Whenever he emerges from behind the speakers, it’s only for a cigarette or a sip of water. She might catch a glimpse of him returning, pausing briefly at the edges of the gym, so big, so out of place, a bulwark of a person, looking forlorn amidst the dancing throng. She’d like to go to him, to throw her arms around his sloping shoulders—but that’s such a romantic, improbable notion. Because who is she, really? She is no one to him. She watches him retreat behind the speakers and later curses her pathetic lack of courage.
She and Jules enter the bathroom. A group of girls Kat doesn’t recognize have crammed themselves into the anteroom, their hairspray canisters crowding the sink. They give her and Jules dirty looks, as though they own the bathroom.
The anteroom is empty when Kat comes out of her stall. Alone, she studies her reflection. Maybe it is the semi-darkness, or Jules’s handiwork, but despite Kat’s strange urchin-girl getup, her image in the mirror suddenly seems attractive. There’s a certain sharpness to her features, a certain deep and brooding look. Here in the drafty public bathroom reeking of pee and hairspray, she discerns in her face the traces of Anechka’s angular beauty, the softness she inherited from Misha.
She gazes at her face, her body, and murmurs the lines from the play: “My sadness is interminable. There’s so much baseness in the world.” Looking like this, she could be more than a bit player or a soubrette. She could be unforgettable. Entrancing.
She shivers for no reason. How long has it been? The bathroom is perfectly still. She calls out Jules’s name, quietly. All of a sudden she’s convinced that Jules has left.
Outside, the long corridor stretches in front of her: murky, unbearably vacant. She runs alongside closed classroom doors, her heart beating fast, her steps echoing in the emptiness. A door opens abruptly and, startled, she nearly trips.
She doesn’t recall whose classroom this is. What she knows is: a) it’s not theirs and b) Mironov, who is standing at the threshold, has no business being there. He and his ilk lurk outside the gym, ogling the dancing girls inside, smirking when one of them comes out for some air.
He is not smirking now. It’s hard to make out his expression in the dimness of the corridor; suffice it to say it isn’t anything Kat’s seen before. Perhaps it’s just a trick, a play of shadows, but she can swear his face looks almost handsome. And he is not a handsome boy. He’ll never be one—not with his hideous body or the ugly grimaces he seems to favor. But tonight there are no grimaces. Tonight his expression is solemn and stark. He’s just looking at her, as though he’s never seen her in his life.
Something or someone shifts inside the classroom, and then it is like ripples over a pond and his face once again clouds with malice. “What are you gaping at?” he says, his voice sour, raspy. Before she can begin to answer, he steps inside and shuts the door.
She stands there for a few seconds. She has an eerie feeling that if she were to glimpse inside, she’d find no one in the classroom. Werewolves, she mutters, thinking of Nina Petrenko’s ghost stories at bedtime. She doesn’t normally believe in werewolves or ghosts; nevertheless, she gets chills and a frantic desire to bolt. This time she doesn’t run; she walks fast to the end of the hall, and when at last she’s at the stairwell she dashes downstairs, where the music is thumping relentlessly and everyone’s bopping and sweating in the pools of blue and orange light, and where later, under the slowly rotating disco ball, Vlad Borisov will slow-dance with Sveta.
THE DORM is subdued tonight. No one’s throwing fits or tossing pillows. The gagg
le have changed into pajamas and nightgowns, and now they seem emptied out and pleasantly sedate, as if they’ve stomped off all their rage and left it on the dance floor.
Nina Petrenko is telling a story, something she’s seen in a video—a pornographic video, most likely, full of the smutty scenarios she likes to describe. She gets to see a lot of videos. Her mother is too busy for Nina. The mother has boyfriends (a new one every quarter), her own private life. When weekends come, she sends her daughter off to stay with distant relatives. They seem to have a lot of boys, these relatives. Teenage boys (or older), and always a video player. The boys show Nina the videos and later get into her bed, though she swears she never lets them do anything nasty.
“You’re fibbing,” says Kira Mikadze.
Nina, predictably, gets mad. She says she never lies, she’s not like Cherub. And if they don’t believe her, it’s their problem—’cause now she won’t tell them how the movie ends.
The girls yell at her to keep going; Shrew says she’ll smack her face; and when the threats don’t appear to be working, Jules throws Nina a decent chunk of chocolate.
Jules isn’t picky when it comes to entertainment, a fact Kat has learned to accept. She’s one of the land-bound ones, as likely to enjoy Vivaldi as the pop music TV program Morning Mail. And yet from the start, she and Kat have been inseparable—getting up in the morning together, sitting at meals together, shouldering each day together like a tight little crew. Every evening they walk, from four thirty to six, traversing every path within the campus. The bleak autumn light thickens slowly toward nightfall. One by one the streetlights come on, early and not yet strictly necessary. They start along the central alley, but soon escape into one of their favorite nooks, the space behind the swimming pool, with a swing and a view of the park, or the secluded corner outside the dorms that has the giant oak tree.