Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“You want to see that one again, huh?”

Ilya nodded. It wasn’t Lana that he wanted to see, though. He looked so happy in the photo that he barely recognized himself. His smile, like it might break his face in two. When had he last smiled like that? he wondered. Or was this the only time?

“Don’t fall in love, Ilyusha.”

“Why not?” he said, but he was thinking that it wasn’t Lana he was in love with. It was himself, there, in a picture with Vladimir.

“Because you’re leaving, for starters.”

Kirill called out the one-minute warning, and Vladimir logged in to his email. He didn’t have anything except a one-liner from Aksinya saying, “Dolls tonight?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“To Dolls?”

“No. To America.”

“What do you mean you don’t want to go? Are you afraid you’re going to get homesick? You’re going to miss all this snow while you’re lounging on the beach?”

America is not one big beach, Ilya was tempted to say, because he knew that in Vladimir’s mind the whole country was Miami Vice —girls in string bikinis and men in pastel suits.

“You going to miss sleeping with me every night?”

I already do, Ilya thought.

Vladimir pulled on his coat, and Ilya followed him out the door. The sky was purple with the last of the sun’s light, and it had begun to snow.

“You going to miss getting five hours of sun and having a waste of space for a brother?”

“The boards were this morning,” Ilya said.

He didn’t see Vladimir’s hand until it had already hit him. Then there was a flash of pain in his cheekbone and a deep throb in one eye. It had been something between a slap and a punch, sloppily executed. Ilya’s eye began to sting and drip, and he pressed a hand to it.

“I thought you knew,” Ilya said, and this was true. Somehow he’d thought that Vladimir had known; he’d thought that, in his way, Vladimir was asking him to stay.

“I knew ? Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t even know what day of the week it is.”

“Saturday,” Ilya said.

“Shut up,” Vladimir said. Ilya looked up, ready for Vladimir to berate him or to hit him again, but Vladimir’s eyes were slim and far away. He sucked his lip between his teeth and began chewing on it feverishly. It was a look of determination, a look as rare as a rainbow for Vladimir.

“It’s only a year,” Ilya said. “The America thing. It’s not like—”

“Only a year. Fuck you. Do you know what people would do for one 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.

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 her neck, which was arched, her eyes closed in an expression that shifted continually from boredom to ecstasy to annoyance, and the mercurialness of her experience terrified Ilya.

On the basketball court, the last football player was announced. Ilya couldn’t find Sadie in the crowd. The entire student body was in Leffie High colors: fluorescent orange and lime green. The combination made the gym look like the confluence of two terrible chemical spills, and Principal Gibbons strode into the center of it with a microphone and began to wax poetic about the football team. Below the bleachers the girl’s pants were halfway off now, obscured by an overpour of upper thigh flesh. The boy’s head was bent, his hands at his own crotch. Ilya wasn’t sure what he was doing—whether he was working on his zipper or putting on a condom—and as he tried to puzzle it out, the girl looked up, and her eyes met Ilya’s.

“What the fuck,” she said, as though she had been copulating somewhere private and Ilya had intruded.

The boy followed her eyes and glared. “Fuck off,” he said, and Ilya slid down a row and over, toward a clot of kids playing some sort of fantasy card game. Below them, the marching band stood, their feathered caps shaking, a conductor waved an arm, and cymbals crashed. Ilya’s heart was racing from the girl’s yell and the boy’s glare, and so it took him a long moment to notice Sadie, who had just come in through a side door. Her ponytail whipped over one shoulder as she turned, scanning the crowd. He could tell that she was looking for him, and the knowledge of it calmed him, made him feel warm and full. Bread belly, he and Vladimir had called that feeling when they were little and happiness was as simple as eating too much.