toe from all the swimming we did; my hair (longer then than it’s ever been again) got light streaks from the pool chemicals and basically I felt good, though I still had a heaviness in my chest that never went away and my teeth were rotting out in the back from all the candy we ate. Apart from that, I was fine. And so the time passed happily enough; but then—shortly after my fifteenth birthday—Boris met a girl named Kotku; and everything changed.
The name Kotku (Ukrainian variant: Kotyku) makes her sound more interesting than she was; but it wasn’t her real name, only a pet name (“Kitty cat,” in Polish) that Boris had given her. Her last name was Hutchins; her given name was actually something like Kylie or Keiley or Kaylee; and she’d lived in Clark County, Nevada her whole life. Though she went to our school and was only a grade ahead of us, she was a lot older—older than me by three whole years. Boris, apparently, had had his eye on her for a while, but I hadn’t been aware of her until the afternoon he threw himself on the foot of my bed and said: “I’m in love.”
“Oh yeah? With who?”
“This chick from Civics. That I bought some weed from. I mean, she’s eighteen, too, can you believe it? God, she’s beautiful.”
“You have weed?”
Playfully, he lunged and caught me by the shoulder; he knew just where I was weakest, the spot under the blade where he could dig his fingers and make me yelp. But I was in no mood and hit him, hard.
“Ow! Fuck!” said Boris, rolling away, rubbing his jaw with his fingertips. “Why’d you do that?”
“Hope it hurts,” I said. “Where’s that weed?”
We didn’t talk any more about Boris’s love interest, at least not that day, but then a few days later when I came out of math I saw him looming over this girl by the lockers. While Boris wasn’t especially tall for his age, the girl was tiny, despite how much older than us she seemed: flat-chested, scrawny-hipped, with high cheekbones and a shiny forehead and a sharp, shiny, triangle-shaped face. Pierced nose. Black tank top. Chipped black fingernail polish; streaked orange-and-black hair; flat, bright, chlorine-blue eyes, outlined hard, in black pencil. Definitely she was cute—hot, even; but the glance she slid over me was anxiety-provoking, something about her of a bitchy fast-food clerk or maybe a mean babysitter.
“So what do you think?” said Boris eagerly when he caught up with me after school.
I shrugged. “She’s cute. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Well Boris, I mean, she looks like she’s, like, twenty-five.”
“I know! It’s great!” he said, looking dazed. “Eighteen years! Legal adult! She can buy booze no problem! Also she’s lived here her whole life, so she knows what places don’t check age.”
ii.
HADLEY, THE TALKATIVE LETTER-JACKET girl who sat by me in American history, wrinkled her nose when I asked about Boris’s older woman. “Her?” she said. “Total slut.” Hadley’s big sister, Jan, was in the same grade with Kyla or Kayleigh or whatever her name was. “And her mother, I heard, is a straight-up hooker. Your friend better be careful he doesn’t get some disease.”
“Well,” I said, surprised at her vehemence, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. Hadley, an army brat, was on the swim team and sang in the school choir; she had a normal family with three siblings, a Weimaraner named Gretchen that she’d brought over from Germany, and a dad who yelled if she was out past her curfew.
“I’m not kidding,” said Hadley. “She’ll make out with other girls’ boyfriends—she’ll make out with other girls—she’ll make out with anybody. Also I think she does pot.”
“Oh,” I said. None of these factors, in my view, were necessarily reasons to dislike Kylie or whatever, especially since Boris and I had wholeheartedly taken to smoking pot ourselves in the past months. But what did bother me—a lot—was how Kotku (I’ll continue to call her by the name Boris gave her, since I can’t now remember her real name) had stepped in overnight and virtually assumed ownership of Boris.
First he was busy on Friday night. Then it was the whole weekend—not just the night, but the day too. Pretty soon, it was Kotku this and Kotku that, and the next thing I knew, Popper and I were eating dinner and watching movies by ourselves.
“Isn’t she amazing?” Boris asked me again, after the first time he brought her over to my house—a highly unsuccessful