Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

Ilya nodded just as, behind them, Sadie’s mom stepped into the puddle of soda and slipped. She caught herself, but not before her spine hit the edge of the counter. Ilya saw the pain pierce her high. For a second, she stayed still, her knees bent, hand gripping the counter, and then she straightened.

“OK,” she said softly, and again Ilya had the sense that she was talking to herself. She stood up, hitched the strap of her tank top back onto her shoulder, raised her voice, and said, “This place is a dump. Clean the fucking floors once in a while, before I sue your asses.”

The Bojangles’ went silent. A group of boys whom Ilya recognized as some of J.T.’s basketball buddies froze, their chicken fingers poised above various dips. A man—Sharice’s boss, Ilya guessed—appeared, as though expelled from the bowels of the Bojangles’ at any threat of legal action.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” he said, and Sadie’s mom turned and walked out the door. “Get the mop,” he said to Sharice, and he disappeared back past the deep fryers and into the bowels once more.

Behind Ilya, the basketball players erupted in laughter.

“Did you see her face? It’s not like she’s going to say no,” one of them said to some suggestion that Ilya had not heard.

Sharice slid another box across the counter toward Ilya. “You want her chicken?” she said.

Ilya nodded, stacked it on top of his own, and followed Sadie’s mom out into the parking lot.

She was sitting on a crumbling concrete bumper at the head of a parking spot, with her arms draped over her knees and her hands dangling. It wasn’t just her eyes that were like Sadie’s—Ilya had been wrong about that—her hands were like Sadie’s too. Piano hands , his mother called them, with this note of regret because she had had them too but had never played a piano. Ilya set the Bojangles’ box by her feet.

“Did King send you?” she said. “It’s not like I’ve got anything.” She lifted her head and spread her arms as though Ilya might pat her down.

Ilya shook his head. He didn’t know whether she meant drugs or money, or who King was. “I just thought you might want this,” he said, holding out her meal.

“It’s not even real chicken,” she said. “Did you know that? It’s like some mashed-up cartilage and shit.”

He nodded.

“Where you from again?” she said.

“Russia,” he said.

She smiled and shook her head. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“It’s an exchange program,” he said. “You remind me of someone from home.” That wasn’t true. She didn’t remind him of Vladimir at all. Her personality seemed to hinge on self-pity, and Ilya had never known Vladimir to feel sorry for himself. Vladimir was an optimist, even when optimism seemed an impossible attitude to sustain.

She looked up at him. “I heard Russian women are good-looking,” she said.

“Sometimes,” he said, thinking that sometimes Russian women looked like her, like they were hanging on to life by a dirty, painted fingernail.

“Listen, if you ever need help, if you ever want anything—to stop—or anything, call me.”

It was easier to say than he’d expected, and the ease of it stung because it was the sort of thing he’d thought of saying to Vladimir a million times but had never managed to.

“Oh please,” she said, with a snort, and she opened up the box and began to pick at the manufactured chicken. “Now I know King didn’t send you. You religious or something?”

Ilya shook his head. He was groping inside his backpack for his history book, and when he found it, he pulled out the drawing that Sadie had done. In person, the likeness was even more profound. The coarseness of her hair, the way her nose ended in a shiny little knob, the grooves that cupped her lips like her pout was an offering. Ilya wrote the Masons’ number on the back and held it out to her.

“Sadie drew this,” he said.

He dropped the picture onto her lap. She didn’t say anything until she’d stared at it for a few seconds. “My Sadie?” she said.

He nodded.

“It’s not bad,” she said. She looked up at Ilya. “You know as a kid she was like that. Artistic. I could give her a couple crayons and she’d be so good—just coloring for hours. You could forget that she was there.” She had a memory in her eyes, he could see that, could see her watching Sadie color, a crayon clutched tight in her hand, before the commercial break ended, her show resumed, and she forgot Sadie all over again.

“My number’s on the back,” he said.

She flipped it over and the grease from her fingers turned the paper translucent.

“Did Sadie send you?”

“No,” he said.

“And not King either? For real?”

He shook his head.

“Then fuck off,” she said softly, and he walked back into the woods. Before long he was out in the open of the soccer field. Up a rise, the track ringed the football field. Sadie was up there somewhere, running, her white ponytail whipping back and forth between her shoulder blades. He thought of the soda dribbling down her mother’s arm, of the silence she’d inspired when she yelled, and he decided not to tell Sadie about it. If he did, she’d start a pilgrimage to the Bojangles’ too, and eventually she’d see a scene like the one Ilya had today.

“Raz, dva, tri,” the gym teacher, Ekaterina Borisovna, counted.

It was the end of class, and Ilya was the last in the row, stretching, reaching his fingertips toward his toes, toward the floorboards, which had been scrubbed with lye so often that the smell of them made Ilya nauseous.

“Lana Vishnyeva was killed,” a girl said loudly, as though she needed everyone to hear it.

Her friend nodded. “I know,” she said.

Ilya stood up, and his vision went black and then cleared.

“What?” he said.

The girls turned, their hands still dangling at their toes, their rumps high in the air. Their ponytails dusted the floor. He had never spoken to either of them before.

“They found her yesterday,” one girl said. “But she’d been dead three weeks at least.”

Ekaterina Borisovna pointed a finger at Ilya and then at the ground, and Ilya bent back into the stretch. He could feel Lana kissing him. Their teeth hitting, her tongue darting into his mouth. “Don’t worry,” she’d said. “You were fine.”

“She was killed?” he said, thinking of her overdosing, of how thin she’d been.

“Her throat was cut,” the girl’s friend said.

“And stand,” Ekaterina Borisovna said.

They all stood and crossed their right arms over their torsos and began to count. They had been doing the same series of stretches for ten years.

“So not exactly like the other two. But she had the slashes on her cheeks. And apparently the knife was the same.”

“They were stabbed thirteen times,” her friend offered.

“No,” she said. “Twelve.”

Ilya skipped math for the first time in his life and went to the Internet Kebab to read the article in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki . It was short and formal. This time there was no picture. The girls were right: Lana’s throat had been cut, and she had been dead for three weeks before her body was found by a group of kids playing in the grove of trees behind the kommunalkas, only two kilometers from Berlozhniki proper. A two-minute walk from Ilya’s apartment. One minute in the summer. When Ilya was little, kids had used those trees as hiding spots in tag, crouching among the trunks until they were flushed out.

Most of the article was devoted to a self-satisfied explanation of how the police had calculated Lana’s date of death. Snow, the article explained, could serve as a chronological record in the same way that sediment layers did, and Lana’s body had been preserved under a layer of ice that rested beneath a half meter of snow. The ice was formed during a deep thaw and flash freeze that had occurred four weeks before. Her family had not reported her missing.