a moment, brow furrowed, his profile sharp in the moonlight, and then lay back down. “Two of them.”
I rolled over, and checked my iPod. It was 3:17 in the morning.
“Fuck,” groaned Boris, scratching his stomach. “Why don’t they shut up?”
“I’m thirsty,” I said, after a timid pause.
He snorted. “Ha! You don’t want to go out there now, trust me.”
“What are they doing?” I asked. One of the women had just screamed—whether in laughter or fright, I couldn’t tell.
We lay there, stiff as boards, staring at the ceiling, listening to the ominous crashing and bumping-around.
“Ukrainian?” I said, after a bit. Though I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, I’d been around Boris enough that I was beginning to differentiate the intonations of spoken Ukrainian from Russian.
“Top marks, Potter.” Then: “Light me a cigarette.”
We passed it back and forth, in the dark, until another door slammed somewhere and the voices died down. At last, Boris exhaled, a final smoky sigh, and rolled over to stub it out in the overflowing ashtray beside the bed. “Good night,” he whispered.
“Good night.”
He fell asleep almost immediately—I could tell from his breathing—but I lay awake a lot longer, with a scratchy throat, feeling light-headed and sick from the cigarette. How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me? Boris—oblivious—snored beside me. At last, towards dawn, when I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of my mother: sitting across from me on the 6 train, swaying slightly, her face calm in the flickering artificial lights.
What are you doing here? she said. Go home! Right now! I’ll meet you at the apartment. Only the voice wasn’t quite right; and when I looked more closely I saw it wasn’t her at all, only someone pretending to be her. And with a gasp and a start, I woke up.
xvi.
BORIS’S FATHER WAS A mysterious figure. As Boris explained it: he was often on site in the middle of nowhere, at his mine, where he stayed with his crew for weeks at a time. “Doesn’t wash,” said Boris austerely. “Stays filthy drunk.” The beaten-up short wave radio in the kitchen belonged to him (“From Brezhnev era,” said Boris; “he won’t throw it away”), and so were the Russian-language newspapers and USA Todays I sometimes found around. One day I’d walked into one of the bathrooms at Boris’s house (which were fairly grim—no shower curtain or toilet seat, upstairs or down, and black stuff growing in the tub) and got a bad start from one of his dad’s suits, soaking wet and smelly, dangling like a dead thing from the shower rod: scratchy, misshapen, of lumpy brown wool the color of dug roots, it dripped horribly on the floor like some moist-breathing golem from the old country or maybe a garment dredged up in a police net.
“What?” said Boris, when I emerged.
“Your dad washes his own suits?” I said. “In the sink in there?”
Boris—leaning against the frame of the door, gnawing the side of his thumb nail—shrugged evasively.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, and then, when he kept on looking at me: “What? They don’t have dry cleaning in Russia?”
“He has plenty of jewelry and posh,” growled Boris around the side of his thumb. “Rolex watch, Ferragamo shoes. He can clean his suit however he wants.”
“Right,” I said, and changed the subject. Several weeks passed with no thought of Boris’s dad at all. But then came the day when Boris slid in late to Honors English with a wine colored bruise under his eye.
“Ah, got it in the face with a football,” he said in a cheery voice when Mrs. Spear (‘Spirsetskaya,’ as he called her) asked him, suspiciously, what had happened.
This, I knew, was a lie. Glancing over at him, across the aisle, I wondered throughout our listless class discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson how he’d managed to black his eye after I’d left him the previous night to go home and walk Popper—Xandra left him tied up outside so much that I was starting to feel responsible for him.
“What’d you do?” I said when I caught up with him after class.
“Eh?”
“How’d you get that?”
He winked. “Oh, come on,” he said, bumping his shoulder against mine.
“What? Were you drunk?”
“My dad came home,” he said, and then, when I didn’t answer: “What else, Potter? What did you think?”
“Jesus, why?”
He shrugged. “Glad you’d gone,” he said, rubbing his good eye. “Couldn’t