Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“That girl?” someone might say. “The one who wasn’t from here? Who knows what trouble she got herself into.”

On Ilya’s third day at Leffie High, a sexting ring run by a student who posted under the alias Madame Grandedoix was discovered, and the school’s collective attention shifted from Ilya to the Madame and didn’t look back. Ilya’s days settled into a pattern. He spent mornings and evenings online, compiling a list from the White Pages of all the Gabe Thompsons in America and checking the Vecherniye Berlozhniki site for news about Vladimir. He looked for news of other murders too, though he knew that the police would find a way of distancing any new murder from the ones for which Vladimir had been arrested just as they had initially insisted that the three murders were unrelated.

Days were devoted to school, and fortunately school in Leffie did not require much more from him than attendance. His science and math classes were remedial; home economics and gym were ridiculous. The English teacher was young and starry-eyed and obsessed with Chekhov, and he seemed willing to forgive any and all mistakes that Ilya made. Principal Gibbons had been right: American History was the hardest class. They were beginning the year with the Revolution, which was the driest revolution Ilya had ever heard of, mostly because it was discussed in such self-congratulatory terms, as though Americans had invented the concept of democracy. The Boston Tea Party. The Continental Congress. Dozens of noblemen in pastel coats and tights. Ilya did not care. Plus Mr. Shilling spoke in a soft drone, like his voice couldn’t possibly project through the thicket of his beard, let alone inspire interest. It didn’t help that Sadie was in the class. It was impossible to concentrate with her there, her skin lit by the projector’s glow, J.T. constantly whispering in her ear.

Each afternoon, while Sadie was at track practice, Ilya trekked through a patch of woods that neighbored Leffie High to Bojangles’, used his snack money from the Masons to buy a chicken-and-biscuit meal, and brought it back to the front office. He shared it with Miss Janet and then did his homework while she updated her online dating profiles.

The drives home with Sadie were the high point of his day. In the mornings, she was sleepy-eyed and slow to talk. She clutched a thermos of coffee between her thighs, scanned the radio with one hand, and rarely gave the road her full attention. But in the afternoons she seemed more relaxed, expansive. In the afternoons, she asked him questions—not about Russia, not about spies, or the KGB, or Putin, or vodka, which were the kinds of questions he got daily—these were simple questions about him.

“What do you like to do? For fun, I mean?” she asked one afternoon that first week, when they were driving home in a drizzle. The windshield wipers flicked across the glass, and the car had the damp, stuffy smell that his winter coat used to get when he left it on the radiator to dry.

Ilya thought of Michael and Stephanie. He knew that listening to them would not be anyone else’s idea of fun and that his dependence on them was definitely strange and probably unhealthy. Still, it was the closest thing to a hobby that he had. “I listen to tapes,” he said.

“Like music? Like Radiohead?” she said.

“Sort of,” he said, making a mental note to find a way to listen to Radiohead. “Do you know Kolyan?” he said.

She shook her head.

“He’s a rapper. From Russia. Very cool. He has white hair—like yours—and he wears these contacts that make his whole eye white, and he has these tattooed fangs.”

“Mama Jamie would love him,” she said. Most Americans spoke with this upward lilt, as though every utterance were a question, but Sadie had this deadpan sarcasm that reminded him of home.

“What do you do for fun?” he said.

“I draw.”

He nodded. “I saw you drawing in history.”

“My secret’s out,” she said.

“What do you draw?”

“Portraits,” she said. “You want to see?”

He nodded, and at the next stop sign she pulled a tiny red notebook out of her backpack. A pencil stub, well chewed, was jammed in the silver spiral. Ilya flipped open the cover. Papa Cam looked out at him from the first page with a sleepy innocence, a vulnerability that Ilya saw, now, from the way she’d drawn his eyes, was the essence of him. There was a half-finished sketch of Mama Jamie next, and then a finished one, and they were both of just her face, but still there was this energy to her, this thrust of optimism to her expression that was just right.

“These are good,” Ilya said. “The best I can do is a man with a line for his body and a circle for his head.”

“A stick man,” she said.

“Exactly,” he said. He flipped the page again, and there was Marilee, her face a study in scrutiny.

“She hated it,” Sadie said.

“But it’s her. She looks like she’s about to correct you,” he said, and Sadie laughed.

He flipped the page again. The next drawing was of him. In history, in that moment when he’d frozen at the front of the class. He glanced over at Sadie, but she was watching the road, fiddling with the windshield wipers. Ilya looked at his face. The lift of his eyebrows and gauntness of his cheeks suggested fear, and he had been afraid, he remembered, but there was also this kinetic quality to his eyes, as though somehow she’d been able to bottle all their infinitesimal movements.

“Do you like it?” she said. “I don’t mind if you don’t. No one ever likes their own portrait.”

He ran a hand over the page, could feel the dips and divots where she’d pressed hard with her pencil. It was him, but it looked like Vladimir too, and no one had ever seen Vladimir in him before. “I do,” he said.

It took Aksinya a week to write back and say that she had no fucking clue why the police had taken Gabe Thompson, that the police were not exactly forthcoming, especially not with her. A few days later, Ilya completed his list of all the Gabe Thompsons in America. There were close to a thousand. A hundred in California alone. They all had addresses, and most had phone numbers as well. Ilya imagined himself calling Gabe, or stealing the Masons’ car and arriving at his door. What would happen when Gabe opened it? Of course he wouldn’t confess outright, but surely Ilya would be able to tell something from his reaction. Seeing Ilya wouldn’t mean much to him if the police had booted him out of town for drinking or drugs, but if he’d committed the murders, Ilya and his Russian accent would mean everything.

Ilya had already found a database of Mormon churches online and that night he began the slow process of cross-referencing the addresses and towns with churches within sixty miles. An hour drive would be the limit, even for a zealot like Gabe, Ilya guessed. If there was no church within sixty miles, he crossed that Gabe off the list. He tried to go through ten Gabes a night, tried to make incremental progress the way he used to with his book of American idioms, and once he’d finished doing this and making his usual checks of VKontakte and the Vecherniye Berlozhniki, he’d email Vladimir.

I know you didn’t do it , he’d write. The same thing every night, and when that started to feel rote, he began to add things about his day: that he’d played American football in gym, that they ate their fries with ketchup here, that American girls never wore high heels to school, that Mama Jamie had a crush on Sting, that Papa Cam drank beer that had purposely had the alcohol removed. Vladimir would not be allowed to check email, Ilya knew, and so before long these emails took on the tone of a diary. He told Vladimir about Sadie, about how in moments it seemed that she liked him but in other moments it seemed that she was completely indifferent to his presence—to everyone’s presence. He told Vladimir about J.T., about how he was preternaturally developed and looked exactly like Sergey Fedorov in his prime, and how the fuck, he wrote, am I supposed to compete with that? He told Vladimir about the sexting ring, about Pastor Kyle and the way he sometimes made the pulpit seem like a strip pole. He attached the picture of himself that Papa Cam had taken on that first morning of school, looking terrible. It’s hard to sleep here , he wrote, and what he meant was, it’s hard to sleep without you.