year there?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ilya said, something Vladimir had said to him millions of times, and he tried to sound as casual as Vladimir always did, but of course he sounded as stung as he was: he had missed the boards for Vladimir. It was a penance of a kind, a way of making up for how happy he had been to leave.
“Shut up, Ilya.”
Ilya’s other eye began to sting, and he shut them both. If Vladimir could tell that he was crying, he didn’t show it. When he spoke again, his voice was tough, each word hammered out like a nail hit perfectly: “Listen to me. Do not tell anyone else that you didn’t show. Not a fucking soul. Do you hear me?” Vladimir’s eyes were darting across Ilya’s face, and sweat pearled above his lip. “I will kill you if you fuck this up,” he said, and then in a voice that was almost a laugh, “Ilyusha the smart one. Ilyusha the big brilliant brain.” His hands were clenching and unclenching, and it wasn’t just from anger. It was time. Vladimir needed a hit. Angry as he was, he was only half here now, and the stupidity of it all hit Ilya. He could stay here, he could go to America. Either way he would lose Vladimir.
Ilya stopped crying. He could feel the skin tightening on his cheeks. “I don’t know why you give a shit,” he said. “This has nothing to do with you. You’re going to be at the Tower no matter what, right? In that—” he searched for a word that would encompass the decrepitude of Vladimir’s room there, but Vladimir spoke before he found one.
“But I could have had you there,” he said. He smiled. It was this strange, jerky little lift of his lips that was in no way happy. “I’m going to fix this. I’m going to see Maria Mikhailovna and fix it,” he said, and he walked away, past the kiosk, which was lit up like a beacon, past Gabe Thompson’s bench, which was covered in new snow.
Vladimir was almost at the corner. He was limping. Just a little, one shoulder dipping down lower than the other. Had he been limping all day? Ilya wasn’t sure. Who cares, Ilya thought, but he did. Vladimir was only a block away. Ilya’s face still hurt; he could feel his eye starting to swell. He was angry—at Vladimir, at himself—but still he had to resist the same old temptation to follow Vladimir, to catch up.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The cheerleaders were stacked in a pyramid on the basketball court. The smallest one perched on top of the stack, gripping her stocky leg by the ankle, toes pointed in an ecstasy of school spirit.
“Leffie Gators!” she screamed, and the pyramid deconstructed in a flash of fluorescent orange bloomers. The girls rearranged into two lines that spanned the gym, and the football players ran through a gauntlet of shaking pompoms, while a male of murky sexuality yelled their names and numbers through a bullhorn.
It had surprised Ilya that Leffie High was not so different from School #17—as though institutional style had been an addendum to some international accord—but the gym was the exception. The gym at School #17 was a remnant of a concrete factory, with one wall of windows so old that each pane thickened at the bottom. The glass was barred against errant balls, so that the light coming through plaided the plank floors. Leffie High’s gym was windowless, trapped in the center of the school, with a smell that reminded Ilya of the opening gasp of a time capsule, of air held captive for centuries.
He was sitting at the top row of the bleachers. Directly beneath him a couple seemed to be having sex or something close to it. He and Sadie had done nothing but kiss. It had been a week of him and Sadie as a thing now, as something joined by an “and,” and his body wanted what came next as badly as his mind feared it. Vladimir had told him plenty of lewd stories and shown him a few pornos at the Kebab, but still Ilya felt completely unprepared to navigate anything beyond kissing, so he was taking breaks from the overwhelming pep of the pep rally to peer between the bleachers’ slats at the progress below. The boy had the girl pressed up against a wall, and his hand was down the front of her jeans. His mouth was on