Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“I didn’t want to capture the real deal.” Mama Jamie sighed. “Ilya, do you want one of just you? To send to your mom? First day of school in a new country—can you imagine, girls? Ilya is brave, right?”

A picture of him here, safe, would soothe his mother.

“Yes,” he said. “She’d like that.”

His eyes were gritty with tiredness, but as Papa Cam crouched behind the camera, he tried, for his mother’s sake, to look happy. “Cheese,” he murmured. The flash blinked, then burst. Papa Cam showed him the photo, and he had expected to look as grim as the convicts online, but the flash had collected in his pupils and made his eyes look like the lights of a train pushing through a dark tunnel. It was a look of purpose. He told himself to temper his hopes. All the picture of Lana in Gabe’s hat proved was that they had been involved. It wasn’t enough, but still it was more than he’d had the day before.

Leffie High was a concrete slab hunched under a big sky. Behind it, playing fields stretched into the distance, and kids ran back and forth between the goals with a sort of grace, like birds rearranging in the sky. Sadie had her own car and, much to Ilya’s delight, was in charge of driving him to and from school. She pulled into a parking spot between two pickups with huge, rutted tires. A melancholy rock song blasted from the radio—“Smashing Pumpkins,” Sadie said, when he asked who it was—and she mouthed the words while dabbing something that smelled like coconut on her lips.

“It’s familiar,” Ilya said, though it was not.

“Oh yeah? They’re big in Russia?”

“Very,” Ilya said.

Kids surged around the car, headed for the front doors. They yelled hellos, shrieking over new haircuts and new outfits. The song ended, and Sadie said, “Ready?” softly, as though she were talking to herself more than to him.

Inside, the press of bodies, the thin clanging of lockers, the sheer energy of teenagers colliding were all familiar to him, but that made it all no less terrifying. Ilya watched Sadie’s white hair slip through the crowd, and as she got farther from him, he began to sweat. Someone stepped on his foot. Someone else yelled, “The Russian!” He didn’t realize that he’d stopped walking until he saw Sadie’s slim shoulders sliding back through the crowd for him.

“You’re famous,” Sadie said, and when she saw his face, she said, “I’m just kidding. Everyone will get over it by tomorrow.”

Sadie brought him to the principal’s office first. “This is Miss Janet,” she said, nodding at a woman behind a desk. The woman couldn’t have been much older than his mother, but her skin had been sunned so that it crinkled like the brown paper lunch bag that Mama Jamie had given him that morning.

“And is this Ilya?” Miss Janet said, pronouncing the “I” like the letter.

“It’s Ilya . He’s supposed to see Principal Gibbons,” Sadie said, and her pronunciation wasn’t perfect, but still this heat seeped into Ilya’s chest at hearing her say his name, at the fact that she’d bothered to correct Miss Janet.

“He’s on a call, sweet pea,” the woman said, “but you head on, and I’ll take care of Ilya here.”

Sadie paused at the door. “We have history together,” she said. “So I’ll see you then,” and then she was gone, and Ilya was left alone with Miss Janet, who was baring too-white teeth at him.

“Russia, huh?” she said. “Now that is a far way to come.”

The phone on Janet’s desk rang, and she rolled her eyes in a conspiratorial way and ignored it. “I went to Alaska once. On a cruise. A long time ago. And at one point—I’ll never forget this—the captain came on the loudspeaker and said that we were close enough to swim to Russia.” The phone rang again, and this time she was moved to put a hand on the receiver. “Of course the water was too cold to actually do it but I just thought it was so exciting. Swim to Russia. Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” Ilya said, and if she noticed the sarcasm in his voice, she didn’t show it.

The phone rang once more, a door opened behind Janet’s desk, and a small, powerful man said, “The phone. Please.”

Janet looked back over her shoulder, unperturbed. “Principal Gibbons,” she said, “this is Ilya from Russia.”

“Ah ha,” Gibbons said. “Come on back.”

Principal Gibbons held out a hand to indicate a chair for Ilya, twisted a rod to shut the window blinds, and leaned against his desk. He had the body of a spetsnaz, like he’d know his way around a Kalashnikov. His skin looked buffed. It shone like the fruit had at the Walmart the day before.

“This is quite an opportunity for you,” he said. He did not smile. “I hope you’re ready to take advantage of it.”

“Yes,” Ilya said.

“The Masons are a fantastic family. And as I said, we’re glad to have you—” A bell rang, and Gibbons tilted his head and waited for it to finish. “But there are rules and ramifications here. You will be held to the same standard as every other student. No diplomatic immunity, you understand?”

“I understand,” Ilya said, wondering whether the man was always this aggressive. Gibbons picked up a folder from his desk. He opened it, though it seemed to be empty, then closed it again.

“I imagine that where you’re from is pretty rough—”

Ilya tried to speak—not to disagree, because Berlozhniki was rough by any standard, but to say that that didn’t mean he was—but Gibbons held up a hand. His fingers were incredibly thick and straight. “Whoa. Whoa. Let me finish. I admire the fact that you’ve gotten yourself here by hook or crook.”

Hook or crook , Ilya thought. That was in his book of idioms. He understood the insult in “crook” but could not remember what “hook” meant in this context.

“That takes determination, and we like to reward determination here. In this country. So keep that in mind.” Gibbons’s hand was still in the air. It had not moved a millimeter. “How old are you?” he said.

“Fifteen.”

“We’ve got you in sophomore classes for now. See if you sink or swim. Except English. And history. You’ll be with the freshmen for those two. I’m assuming that American history was not part of your curriculum.” A smile flitted across Gibbons’s eyes. That word, “curriculum,” was a test. He wanted to know how good Ilya’s English actually was, and, as luck would have it, Ilya had understood that word perfectly.

“In Russia, Russian history is the standard curriculum,” he said.

The smile leaked out of Gibbons’s eyes. “OK, then. Let’s get you integrated. First period began”—he looked at his watch—“two minutes ago.”

Miss Janet printed out a schedule for Ilya and led him through the empty halls to his first class.

“Don’t worry,” she said when they got to the door. “Nobody’s gonna bite.”

In each class, Ilya was introduced as the EnerCo Exchange Student. The teachers were so careful to say “EnerCo” that Ilya knew the school must be getting some sort of payment for taking him on, just as the Masons were. In first-period math, Mr. Cammer trotted out some elementary Russian. In second-period biology, Mrs. Lareaux asked him to write his name on the board. He did so, using the Cyrillic alphabet, and when he stepped back and brushed the chalk dust off his palms, she had the look of someone lost in a maze.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “There’s a different alphabet. Would you mind writing it in English too, so that we can read it?”

So Ilya carefully chalked the roman letters under each Cyrillic one and listened as, behind him, a dozen voices sounded out his name.