Summer Break

Southern Humanities Review Summer Break, a short story

“What do you want to do?” Leeka asked. “If we don’t do something right now, I’ll just die, you know.”

They were sitting on a bench by a dried-up pond. Around them, there lay dusty streets with barren concrete buildings, yellowing vegetation, and almost no human beings in sight. Vera could feel her own brain melting. They needed to do something or the boredom would crush them until their eyes popped, and there would be nothing left of them.

It was the summer of 1988. They’d just turned thirteen: Vera ten days ago, Leeka a week earlier. They were the miserable people who never got to celebrate their birthdays. Who would they invite to their get-togethers? Everyone left Moscow for the summer. Some people went away to camps for the whole three months; others spent summer breaks with their grandparents in various rural municipalities; still others, the luckiest ones, lounged in summer homes just outside the city. Vera’s father was an engineer and her mother a doctor, which meant they worked for the state for a salary that barely allowed them to get by. Leeka’s parents also had neither a dacha nor the money to buy one, so the two of them were stuck in Moscow with absolutely nothing to do.

They’d already done endless rounds of their neighborhood in the hope of running into someone. Last week, they’d met two boys from another school. The boys had a cassette player, not a good one––a Soviet thing that kept chewing up the tape––but they did manage to listen to some Depeche Mode and split a bottle of beer among the four of them. The beer was tepid and gross, but Vera felt she’d become more mature over the course of several hours. There was also the sense of finally having lived, even if just a little.

Vera was wondering why the boys hadn’t proposed another meetup when Leeka suggested, “Let’s visit someone.”

There was only one someone who they knew was in town.

Their classmate Olya Troofanova was twice the size of a regular person, crosswise, and had a face covered with large glistening pimples, reason enough for her to become an object of countless practical jokes. During the school year, her clothes got stained with gooey disgusting stuff, her books torn, her pens broken, and, once, her jacket got drenched in a toilet. Everyone seemed to think that was funny, even the teachers. Vera and Leeka didn’t take part in the bullying, though they, too, couldn’t help laughing sometimes at the sight of Troofanova smiling stupidly while a blob of window putty was lodged in her hair.

“You mean Troof?” Vera said. “What will we even talk about?”

“Maybe there’ll be some cool stuff at her place.”

They’d heard that Troofanova’s dad worked in the city administration, which meant he supplemented his income through bribes.

“Like a videotape player?”

They’d both seen a videotape player once. A boy who used to be in their class had invited them to his place for his birthday. Around twenty kids came, and after eating some snacks, they all watched two movies on VHS. One was called The Evil Dead, and the other was about American teenagers who got killed one by one by a maniac.

Next time, the boy promised to show them a comedy that was supposed to make them die laughing, but that time never came because he emigrated to Israel. It made you want to cry, the way other people’s lives were progressing. Things happened to them! While Vera was watching that second movie, her mind skipped over the gore. Instead, she obsessed over the fact that regular American kids went to restaurants like it was no big deal and hung out in malls, that they had nice clothes and went to parties. Vera had never seen a mall and had never been to a restaurant or a party.

They walked to Troofanova’s building, identical to their own, and ascended two flights of stairs, inhaling the familiar smell of old dust mixed with piss. After they’d pushed the doorbell button, Troofanova opened the door and poked her pimply face out.

“Hey,” Leeka said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Apparently, she’d decided not to invite herself in right away.

Troofanova studied their faces. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“My parents don’t let me.”

“Why the hell not?”

“It’s dangerous outside.”

“What’s dangerous?”

“There are drug addicts and prostitutes everywhere. They might infect me with AIDS.”

Vera and Leeka snorted. “Where did you hear this stuff?”

“Don’t you watch TV or read the papers?”

“No.”

“That’s why you have no idea.”

“We’re outside all the time,” Vera offered, “and we haven’t seen any drug addicts or prostitutes.”

Troofanova continued to stand there with a dull look on her face.

“You can let us in if you don’t want to go out,” Leeka suggested.

“I’m not allowed to have visitors.”

Outside, the heat descended on them again. Vera felt like she was one of the evil dead, her legs heavy and her mind empty and dazed. She dragged herself after Leeka, who had her face set in a determined expression and was clearly hoping against all odds to find something to do.

They happened upon a clothing store and ducked inside, but there was nothing to see except housecoats with lurid prints and rubber boots whose smell knocked you over if you came within a two-meter radius. Next, they tried their luck in the nearby park. The big metal swings they used to entertain themselves with were now broken, and the kiddie rides looked like they belonged in a scrapyard. They had no idea what to do with themselves for the rest of the day or the long summer that lay ahead. How could it be, Vera wondered, that she ached for summer all year and then when it actually arrived, it turned out she wanted to go back to school?

Leeka suddenly stopped, which made Vera trip over some tree roots. “What if we write her a letter?”

“Who?”

“Troofanova.”

Vera didn’t get it. Why would they write her a letter? They’d just seen her.

“We’ll pretend to be a boy,” Leeka explained.

“Huh?”

“You can be really dense sometimes, you know that?” Leeka said. Slowly, she announced, “We’ll pretend to be a boy who’s in love with her. Let’s go in the gazebo and plan it!”

She led Vera to the remains of the wooden structure where they often spent hours playing cards.

The next day, they rang Troofanova’s doorbell again.

“Hey, Troof,” Leeka said. “There’s this boy who likes you. He asked us to give you this.”

She held out a sealed envelope, but Troofanova didn’t take it. “What’s this?”

Leeka shrugged. “No idea. He just told us to give it to you.”

Troofanova eyed both of them and the envelope with distrust, probably weighing the possibility that they wanted to infect her with AIDS.

“What’s inside?”

“A note, I guess. I don’t know.”

“And who’s the boy?”

“He doesn’t want you to know who he is,” Leeka smiled sweetly.

“Why doesn’t he want me to know who he is?”

“Look, if you don’t wanna take it, don’t take it.” Leeka lowered her hand and made as if to leave.

“He just asked us to give this to you, but we don’t know anything else,” Vera added, starting to move after her.

“Fine,” Troofanova said and reached out for the letter.

The following morning, Vera and Leeka came to the courtyard in front of Troofanova’s building, plopped down on the edge of an empty sandbox, where she could see them from her window, and pretended to be absorbed in conversation. It dwindled shortly, and Vera sat biting her nails until Troofanova called out to them from her window, “Girls! Can you come up?”

She looked bashful when she opened the door and handed them an envelope. “Will you give this to him?”

As soon as they were out of view, they sprinted and ran all the way to the gazebo, where they tore open the envelope and, choking with excitement, started to read.

“Dear Max,” the letter said in neat circular handwriting. They’d chosen Max because it was Leeka’s favorite boy’s name. “Thank you for your wonderful letter! I liked it a lot. It was very interesting to find out about your life. It looks like we have a lot in common.”

Vera and Leeka had invented a boy who was moody and lonely. He thought that the girls in his class cared only about their looks while Troofanova was unique in that she was introspective and genuine. Over three whole pages, she tried to support this idea, confessing along the way that she was lonely, like him, and misunderstood.

Thus began the correspondence between Max and Troofanova, which made Vera and Leeka quite busy. In the mornings, they quickly swallowed their tea with cheese sandwiches and raced to the gazebo. There, they discussed various plots and characters, recalling all the people they’d met and movies they’d seen, picking out the most fascinating details and traits.

“Let’s make his dad a sea captain!” Leeka suggested.

“Sea captains live where there’s sea,” Vera said. “There’s no sea here. It doesn’t make sense.”

“There’s the Moscow River. He can take a ship to the sea.” Leeka was very stubborn. “A captain is great because he’s always away! It’s like Max doesn’t have a father. Troof will feel sorry for him.”

In this way, Max’s father became a sea captain, and his mother turned out to be a journalist suffering from an unspecified terrible affliction. Then Leeka and Vera invented a number of kids in Max’s class: a bully, a nerd, a beauty, a rich stupid guy. It came to light that Max went to a specialized math school, located quite far away from their own. How he’d found out about Troofanova and her unique qualities was never communicated––and Troof didn’t think to ask.

While it was fun to come up with people who never existed, reading Troofanova’s epistles bored Vera and Leeka. In letters from Max, they massaged her for juicy details, but she kept droning on about her interest in biology and what she saw on TV. They prodded her into talking about boys, but she ignored their questions. As time went by, their suspicion that she had no inner life grew stronger.

Within about two weeks, their enthusiasm began to wane. Things weren’t going anywhere, they thought. It was July already, and days had become unbearably hot and dry. One day, they picked up Troof’s latest reply but didn’t bother to open it, thinking it wouldn’t contain anything special. Instead, they went to the edge of the city where people’s dachas began and “borrowed” some berries from strangers’ yards. “They don’t need most of them anyway!” Leeka reasoned. “They just let them rot.”

When they finally got to the letter, they stared at each other in amazement.

“I love you, Max!” it said. “I can’t live without you.”

Vera’s mouth gaped, and she felt some vague stirrings inside that made her giddy.

“Now we’re talking!” Leeka said.

In his reply to Troofanova, Max confessed that he loved her too. After this, everything started to move fast. In her next missive, Troof asked for his photo; Vera and Leeka had to convene to decide on their course of action. They went through their family albums and found a picture in the corner of which some distant cousin of Leeka’s, who seemed to be of the right age, was holding on to a rickety wooden fence. He had tight blondish curls and a bit of a cross-eye.

“He looks stupid,” Vera said skeptically.

“For Troof, he’ll be a prince,” Leeka scoffed.

She was right. In her next letter, Troofanova swooned and suggested her place for a rendezvous. “I live in a very nice apartment,” she wrote, “and I usually have some sweets that we can have with tea. My parents are never home before seven.”

This rubbed Leeka the wrong way. “Unbelievable!” she fumed. “She didn’t invite us in once! Every day, we work as her messengers, and what do we get? Nothing! But when she thinks a boy might be interested, she’s ready for anything! Does she think he’ll have sex with her? He’d have to be blind, not cross-eyed!”

At the mention of sex, Vera felt her cheeks grow hot––it was something she couldn’t discuss even with Leeka. Sex was never spoken about at home and never alluded to by teachers or on TV. But it did exist, as far as she could tell. It was whispered about in their school hallways. Innuendos were dropped. Indecent jokes made. But there was no hard proof, which she craved.

Once, Vera had spotted a magazine with a topless lady and the word sex on the cover, lying on her parents’ nightstand. Her heart started beating so wildly she almost suffocated. She couldn’t look at the magazine right at that moment because her parents were home. When they’d left for work, she turned the apartment upside down but was unable to find it.

Oh, how she longed to know more! But there was no one she could ask. Leeka, in the spirit of breaking taboos, sometimes mentioned things vaguely related to what might happen between a man and a woman in bed, looking important, but it was clear to Vera that her friend didn’t know anything either. The mechanics of sex remained a mystery. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, Vera imagined an abstract man touching an abstract woman in an exceedingly hazy way and felt an insistent heat rise below her stomach. She didn’t know what it meant or what to do about it and wondered when the day would come when she’d finally know everything––or at least something.

Presently, they had to think of plausible reasons why Max couldn’t come visit Troofanova.

“His mom is sick, right?” Vera said. “We can say he has to care for her.”

“Good thinking!” Leeka approved.

It didn’t even occur to Troof to ask what exactly was wrong with the mom. “I hope she gets well soon!” she wrote. “I don’t think I can take it for much longer, not seeing your face.”

With each day now, the correspondence grew more thrilling. Vera had never had a boyfriend, and she was living a life yet unavailable to her through those two. Sometimes she even forgot that Max didn’t exist. She imagined his blond head and his blue eyes that were slightly different in shape, and he didn’t seem to her all that unattractive. Once, she and Leeka were reading another one of Troofanova’s letters, in which she described how she thought of Max every second––when she woke up in the morning, when she ate meatballs with mashed potatoes, when she was taking a bath. Vera thought of herself in a bath full of hot water and of Max taking his clothes off to get into the bathtub with her. All of a sudden, she felt the familiar heat below her stomach. It grew into an intense scorching mass and exploded, making her gasp.

“What’s wrong?” Leeka asked.

“Nothing.”

While Vera tried to collect herself, Leeka said pensively, “I don’t get it. Doesn’t Troof realize that no real boy would fall for her?”

She probably doesn’t, Vera thought. She felt sympathetic to Troof in that she, too, longed to have an exciting life. Vera craved the experiences that other, much luckier people apparently enjoyed, but she was stuck in the most boring, drabbest place one could imagine and had the least interesting parents of all. They didn’t even have friends who’d been abroad, like Leeka’s folks did. Vera herself wasn’t interesting either, and maybe that was the real problem. Pondering her own pathetic failure of a life, she could see why Troofanova wanted so badly to believe in something finally happening to her, but she couldn’t explain any of this to Leeka.

“Troof’s not so bad,” Vera suggested. “Maybe if she lost some weight––”

“What are you, her friend now?” Leeka was suddenly in her face. “You can go and keep her company for the rest of the summer, if you want! I’ll have no problem finding someone to hang out with.”

Shrinking under Leeka’s gaze, Vera mumbled, “I’m not her friend. I mean, who says that kind of stuff to someone they’ve never met? He could be anyone, like a maniac.”

“She’s a real dimwit!” Leeka laughed.

In a few days, Troof became more obstinate in her desire to see Max. She was evidently thinking about how he spent his time and trying to figure out a way to wedge herself in. “I can help you care for your mom,” she wrote. “If not, I can at least bring her something. I think I can get some oranges.”

“Is she not afraid to go out into the world anymore?” Leeka mused. “What about the junkies, the AIDS?”

Vera shrugged. She thought it was admirable of Troof to offer her services to this mom who might turn out to be pretty horrible, like some sick people were––and some healthy people too.

“Wait, this made me think of something,” Leeka said.

Unlike Vera, she’d been getting bored and looking for ways to introduce more drama into the whole affair.

The next morning, they were at Troofanova’s door telling her that Max had landed in a hospital just outside of Moscow and that they’d visited him there, having taken a commuter train. They were certain she wouldn’t even think of making the trip because awful things went on in those trains. To make sure, they told her they’d seen a guy shooting up right there in the train car and also a couple of hookers with faces disfigured by syphilis.

Troofanova listened to them, her round face scrunched up with worry. Then her expression changed as she declared, “I’m going to see him. How much was the train ticket?”

Shocked into silence, Leeka stood peering at her. Vera felt her hands and feet go cold. What would Troof do if she found out? What if she wasn’t as meek as they thought she was?

After a long and dreadful moment, Leeka began in a heartfelt tone, “Look, we can take you there, but there’s really no point. They don’t allow visitors at this place. Patients usually wave from their window to whoever comes to see them, but Max is bedridden and can’t come up to the window.”

What a genius, Vera thought. Who else could improvise like that?

“But if you can get some fruit,” Leeka continued, “like oranges or whatever, we’ll take them there for you. The nurse will give them to Max, and he’ll know you care. And maybe some ice cream? Max loves ice cream.”

Troofanova slowly batted her eyelids. “Isn’t it going to melt by the time you get to the clinic?”

“You can just give us some money,” Vera interjected. “There’s an ice cream booth right by the hospital.”

She didn’t know where this had come from and was startled even more than Troofanova was.

“You rock, girl!” Leeka shouted after they’d tumbled down the stairs.

Vera felt euphoric. A new and irresistible notion appeared in her mind. What if she tried to learn to be more like Leeka? Her friend was much prettier, what with her jet black hair, green eyes, and perfectly even, white teeth, the likes of which you wouldn’t be able to see in anyone else in the USSR. But there was something else too. She was also attractive in a way that had nothing to do with appearance. When she spoke, people listened.

Troof had supplied them with some money, and they took the subway to Gorky Park, where they strolled its alleyways, looking at tourists from the Central Asian republics. They bought ice cream and cotton candy and went on a ride that turned out to be lame. “Waste of money,” said Leeka. All the while, Vera kept thinking of Max and of how they would come here together. He would probably like her. Her eyes, though gray, were big––bigger than Leeka’s––and her light-brown hair was long and shiny.

“You think Max would like it here?” she asked.

Leeka stopped in her tracks and stared. “What? He’s not real.”

Biting her lip, Vera said, “Just joking.”

Since Troofanova had insisted on knowing the particulars of Max’s disease, they needed to do some research. Eating oranges on Vera’s couch and savoring every bit, they leafed through a thick fraying volume of her mother’s medical reference manual, published in 1954. They had fun mocking the illustrations that looked like old-fashioned cartoons and finally chose appendicitis. In the letter from Max, they wrote that he was recovering after surgery and that he would spend the next two weeks in the hospital.

This new development turned out to be propitious. Troofanova continued to give them money as well as cookies and candy. They’d decided not to inform her that patients recovering after an appendectomy were supposed to go easy on sweets. One day, looking solemn, she produced from behind her back two large bananas that looked like two objects from a parallel universe. Vera hadn’t tasted a banana in years. Later, sucking on the fruit’s tender aromatic flesh, she imagined herself to be sailing on a yacht, her face caressed by a breeze.

Lying in bed that night, though, Vera had to confront the feeling of guilt that she’d been trying hard not to notice. What they were doing wasn’t so innocent anymore, and it made her uncomfortable. Sure, Troofanova had an unfair access to all these wonderful things, but this made it no less objectionable to relieve her of them by means of deception.

The next day, Vera broached this subject with Leeka.

Her friend snorted. “I say, she’s asking for this! Every time I see her, I want to smack her on the face. Like, stop being such a dumbass!”

After this conversation, something started to change in Vera. She realized that she, too, was getting annoyed by Troof. Earlier, she’d tried to excuse her naivete. She’d remembered how, one time, her mother spoke about an acquaintance who refused to acknowledge her husband’s unfaithfulness, saying, “She wants to live inside the illusion because it’s so sweet.” Troofanova was doing just that, clinging to her cherished fantasy, and Vera had found it amusing, yet also, in a way, moving. But now Troofanova’s ignorance elicited no more pity from her. Leeka was right: People like Troof deserved to be treated with scorn.

Once Max had recovered, Vera and Leeka stopped getting money and foodstuffs from Troof. One day, they were leafing through a teen magazine that, with the onset of perestroika, had finally become interesting. Studying a portrait of a popular European singer, Leeka said, “I want to start wearing lipstick to school. See how cool she looks.”

“The first teacher who sees you will make you wash up.”

“We’ll see about that. The times are changing.”

Vera didn’t know if she believed this. Their teachers weren’t like the American ones in the movie they’d seen. They yelled at the top of their voices, casually insulted their students, and could hit an obstreperous boy on the head. But maybe there was something to what Leeka was saying. People had started to talk more freely and to do things they wouldn’t have been able to do even two years ago.

“Where would you get lipstick from?” she asked.

“What if––” Leeka turned to her. “What if Max asked Troof to buy lipstick for him?”

Vera cracked up, but Leeka remained unperturbed. “It’s his mom’s birthday. He doesn’t have any money, but he wants to give her a present.”

“Not bad,” Vera admitted. Wanting something for herself, she added, “Can we ask her for lipstick and eye shadow?”

“Sure,” Leeka replied benevolently. “I don’t see why not.”

They weren’t prepared for what came next.

“Do you know what this letter says?” Troofanova said when they came to fetch her reply. Her lower lip was quivering.

“How would we?”

“Max is asking me to buy makeup!”

She looked like someone who was about to lose it, and Vera felt her back getting unpleasantly wet.

“Did he meet someone?” Troofanova demanded. “Is he trying to make me buy makeup for his new girlfriend?”

Despite their attempts to assure her that there wasn’t anyone else, Troofanova remained adamant. “If he wants to get the makeup, he has to meet me.”

“We’re your friends!” Leeka tried to mollify her. “You have to trust us. I swear he’s crazy about you.”

“I have to see it for myself. There’s something fishy about this letter.”

That evening, Vera and Leeka had their first serious fight in a while.

“We have to break the whole thing off,” Vera said.

Leeka became defensive. “No way! I’m not chickening out!”

“What do you suggest we do? Bring that cousin of yours into this and fill him in on what we’ve been doing?”

Leeka shot her a furious glance. “Fine. If you want to end it, I say we write her a letter where Max tells her that she’s an ugly cow and that, all this time, he’s been messing with her!”

But Vera was against this idea, even though she couldn’t exactly pinpoint the reason.

They sulked for a whole day, unable to arrive at a solution that would move the situation forward. Two more days passed, and still nothing. They went to see Troofanova, not knowing what they would say.

When she opened the door, her face was puffy and red. “What happened? Why didn’t you come for three days?”

“What do you think we are?” Leeka snapped. “Your servants?”

“People have their own lives, you know,” Vera added. “You think we have nothing better to do?”

Troofanova swallowed hard. “Sorry.”

“Max won’t be able to meet you. His mom isn’t well. Actually, she is worse. He can’t leave her at all.”

“That’s okay,” Troofanova said. “I’ll get the makeup.”

In a week, Vera and Leeka were trying on a metallic-gray eye shadow and a lipstick that was a tender pink. Both smelled nice because they’d been made in Poland. The eye shadow was in a black lacquered box, and there was a tiny mirror inside the lipstick case. Yet the enjoyment Vera and Leeka derived from these beautiful objects didn’t last more than an hour.

Leeka hurled herself onto her squeaky bed, frightening her tabby, Murka, who hissed and flew out of the room.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Troof’s such a moron! She has the brain of a single-celled organism.”

Vera agreed. A vague nauseating feeling washed over her and made her sink into an armchair, wrapping her arms around herself. Every last bit of fun had been sucked out of the game. It had all started as a harmless spoof and would’ve ended on a hilarious, light-hearted note had it not been for Troof’s ludicrous dopiness that allowed them to milk her for stuff. Vera was realizing that she’d become a person she wouldn’t want to be in the same room with, and Troof was to blame for it.

She felt herself getting pissed at Troofanova. Leeka was evidently beyond that point, her hands itching to do something. “Let’s show her,” she said.

When it had grown dark, they took the chalk Leeka had pilfered from school and went to Troofanova’s building. On the asphalt in front of it, they started to write in huge letters, first making the outlines, then quickly filling them in. They took turns keeping an eye on Troofanova’s windows, in case she decided to look out onto the street. After they’d spent more than an hour on this project, the message TROOF IS AN UGLY RETARDED COW was staring at her window.

Yet Troofanova’s face the next morning was as happy as that of someone who ate bananas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Had she not seen the message?

“Hey, Troof,” Leeka said. “Someone wrote bad things about you in front of your building.”

Troofanova waved her off. “Who cares! It’s just some jerks.”

The only thing she seemed to care about was if Max and his mom liked the presents.

Her immunity to attacks from the real world got Vera and Leeka in a state of fury. It was as if she were wearing a sheath that made her feel loved and protected, while they succumbed to something invisible but unrelenting, like a dangerous fungus that crept up over their insides and shriveled them. For a while, they couldn’t even talk to each other, sitting on the bench by the pond. Leeka kicked a piece of brick angrily; Vera looked up and gazed at a cloud that looked like Troofanova’s face––fat round nose, huge speckled cheeks. She thought about taking a break from Leeka for a few days. After all, she was the one who had started this whole mess, and Vera couldn’t help but resent her for it.

But then she remembered how much fun Leeka was and how they’d been so close since grade school; they were almost like sisters. She couldn’t let Troof destroy all this! Besides, Vera felt anxious that Leeka might find a replacement if she decided to take a break.

“We have to come up with one last thing,” Leeka announced, putting an end to the silence. “Let’s go to my place and discuss!”

Vera was relieved to hear that her friend had decided to call it quits. At Leeka’s place, they made compote by mixing tap water with gooseberry jam and took their drinks to the living room. For a long time, they deliberated on what that ultimate thing could be, but their brainstorming session proved fruitless. They needed their final move to feel like a large exclamation mark at the end of the story. It had to be something that would feel like they’d triumphed over Troof, yet sneaky enough that she wouldn’t realize she’d been spited and run to her parents snitching. But they could come up with nothing.

Vera settled at Leeka’s desk to write the last letter from Max. He said he was going away and wouldn’t be writing to Troofanova anymore, at least for a few months. This was going to leave some hope for Troof, Vera thought, and prevent her from doing anything drastic.

She was about to seal the envelope when Leeka cried out, “I got it!”

Not without dread, Vera waited to hear Leeka’s idea. But it turned out to be just perfect.

They chased Murka, Leeka’s tabby, around the apartment, then wiped its ass all over the letter, being careful not to leave any obvious marks.

“I bet Troof kisses these letters,” Leeka sneered. “Like, every square centimeter of them.”

“She’ll be literally kissing your cat’s ass!” Vera squealed, and they both fell on the couch, convulsing with laughter.

Having delivered the final missive to Troof, they stopped coming to see her. Luckily, it was already the end of August. School was starting in a week, and people began to return to Moscow. Two days before school, Vera and Leeka met up with three of their classmates, whom they could hardly recognize. The boys had grown so much over the summer; they’d turned into young men.

Their group of five went to an ice cream parlor that had opened up after renovation and ate some plombir out of sweaty metal bowls on legs. From there, they continued to their neighborhood park. During all this time, the boys didn’t take their eyes off Leeka, who was visibly enjoying their attention. But when they’d settled down in the gazebo, one of the guys, Gosha the basketball player, put his arm around Vera.

The ecstasy she felt was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. The boys started recounting their various escapades during the summer, but Vera couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. Something about road trips and camping and games. She was too absorbed by the new sensations: the weight of Gosha’s arm on her shoulder, his breath on the skin of her neck when he turned to her, the heat emanating from his body. Yet Leeka had a fierce look on her face that she got when she ran in a race. Vera knew this look well. Her friend hated to lose.

Defiantly, Leeka said, “You think you had a fun summer? You wouldn’t guess what we did in a million years!”

Then she proceeded to tell them about the prank she and Vera had played on Troofanova.

One of the boys said, “No way! You did not!”

Another one challenged her. “Prove it!”

Leeka clearly felt that her honor was being questioned, so she darted home and brought over some of Troofanova’s letters. They all stayed in the gazebo until dark and had a blast reading them aloud in ridiculous voices. After a while, Vera didn’t think it was funny but made herself laugh, for Gosha’s sake.

He walked her to her apartment building, where, under the awning, he kissed her on the cheek and grinned. That night, she was unable to sleep. She kept imagining Gosha––his dark wavy hair, his slanted blue eyes with thick eyelashes, his large gentle hands. By morning, she’d envisioned their whole future life together, first going to the same university, Moscow State, then starting a family. They would never be bored with each other and would never yell like her parents, she thought. In the morning, she headed to school in a daze.

After the principal’s speech in front of the school building, students trickled into their respective classrooms. Vera and Leeka settled at their favorite desk, in the last row by the window. Vera kept glancing at Gosha, hoping he would smile at her or give her another indication that he was in love, but he spoke to his friends and didn’t look in her direction.

Suddenly, mayhem erupted as the kids started to giggle and howl. Vera observed Troofanova, who had just entered the classroom, halting by the door.

“Look at her!” people squealed. “A happy lover!”

“Will your imaginary boyfriend pick you up after school?”

“Troof, did you really think someone could fall for you?”

They were going wild while Troofanova just stood there with an uncomprehending look on her face. Then she focused her gaze on Vera and Leeka and headed in their direction.

When she approached them, Leeka hissed, “Get the hell away from us!”

Lowering her head, Troofanova trudged to an empty desk on the other side of the classroom.

For the next couple of hours, Vera and Leeka remained on guard. During the recesses, Troof hovered nearby, and they tried to stay close to other people. After a while, she seemed to have given up on the idea of talking to them, so Vera forgot about her, her attention absorbed by a new development. Gosha hadn’t looked at her once but kept giving Leeka mysterious smiles. He’d also made a sign to her with his fingers, which Vera couldn’t decipher. She couldn’t believe this was happening.

By their last period, the whole thing had become unbearable. Vera’s throat tightened as she witnessed Gosha passing Leeka a note, and for a moment, she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to cling to the hope that the note might concern her person, but having read it, Leeka just smiled and put the note away as if Vera didn’t exist.

Unable to stand it any longer, Vera asked for permission to go to the bathroom. Once in the hall, she continued down the stairs, then proceeded along the corridor, passed the principal’s office and walked out of the building. She didn’t care if her parents would be asked to report to school and punish her afterward. Her heart was about to detach from the rest of her body, snapping her major blood vessels and killing her. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, if it happened quickly. It just hurt so much, this betrayal. And by whom? Her bestest, closest friend. Her only friend.

The world around her became dim and blurry as Vera realized she was crying. She had to get away from it all as soon as she could. She would ask her mom––no, demand––that she be transferred to another school. That math school Max went to! She would meet him there, and they would become a couple, and she would forget about this whole thing.

Vera caught herself, remembering there was no Max, and cried even harder. Anyway, she couldn’t stay here. Those two would be making fun of her, she knew, when Gosha walked Leeka home after school. It was unthinkable, beyond cruel.

As she got to the dried-up pond, Vera collapsed onto a bench, suddenly exhausted to the point of being unable to move. She put her hands over her eyes and hunched over. Then she sat there a long time, feeling sorry for herself, steeping in the profound unfairness of it all, the loneliness, the agony, the ruination of everything that used to hold meaning.