Just this morning, before the first bell, Diana had required that Olya be sweeter and softer-voiced. “My head aches when you talk like that,” Diana said, face buried in her arms on her desk. Olya didn’t say Like what? Instead she touched Diana’s shoulder and whispered when their teacher entered the room. Olya was nice even as the words piled up like pebbles in her throat.
Comparing their math homework at lunch, Olya nodded along with Diana’s corrections, though in that moment her best friend was ugly. Smug. As a little girl, Diana had been stunning; Olya, darker, rougher, used to admire the back of Diana’s head in line as they were led from class to class. Now that they were in year eight, Diana was still pale blond and oval-faced, and her mouth was red, bright red, exciting like the lacquer of a new car, but she had a belt of acne across her cheeks. Her eyelashes had faded from startling white to transparency. In one minute she was lovely and in the next she was a ghost.
Olya pried open her clapped hands to look at the phone. Nothing.
During gym this afternoon, they had jogged together like always. Olya made sure their feet matched. She could have run faster, but love meant making compromises. With the people that mattered, Olya did not want to be free.
Traffic gathered under Olya’s window. Lining the street were fiery orange and red leaves, bleached birch trunks, the sooty sides of buildings that had not seen new paint in decades. The bus’s walls were covered in block-letter safety warnings from its Korean manufacturer and fat-marker graffiti from its Russian riders. It rolled her steadily downhill.
They slowed at the outdoor market on the sixth kilometer, where old women sold trinkets and pastries beside the cinema, then turned left toward Gorizont. Olya sank in her seat. Next to her, the plastic window shook in its frame. She hated to picture buzzing Diana’s apartment without an invitation. Didn’t best friends still need to be told they were wanted? She shut her eyes against the day, opened them, and called Diana, but the phone only rang.
She called again. She called again. They were getting close to Diana’s stop. Phone pressed to her cheek, Olya squeezed past people’s knees, showed her pass to the driver, and stepped off on the corner she knew so well. The phone rang in her ear. Olya hung up.
All Olya’s rushing had made her a little too hot. Standing beside the bus shelter, three blocks from Diana’s apartment, she dropped her jacket back a little so the breeze could hit her shoulders.
The buildings in this part of the city seemed cleaner. The neighborhood was called Gorizont—horizon—because it did look, poised above a golden forested gully, like it was welcoming the dawn. Olya usually liked coming here. She refreshed her news feed, now crowded with music videos, and went to the search bar to type in Diana’s name. When the phone buzzed, Olya almost dropped it.
“Hi!” she said.
“This is Valentina Nikolaevna,” said Diana’s mother.
Olya pulled her jacket up. “Hello.”
“Listen, Olya, we can’t have you over,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. No girls’ voices rose in the background. The four of them must have been hanging out in a different room.
Olya squinted up. “I’m actually nearby already,” she said. “I can just stop in.”
Valentina Nikolaevna sighed. “Please go home. You should not be nearby. Isn’t anyone concerned about you? We’re frankly not comfortable with you two contacting each other outside of school anymore.”
“What?” Olya said.
“Diana won’t be able to talk to you outside of school.”
That exact way of speaking Diana’s mother had. Diana had imitated it, crisp, clinical, only this afternoon. Impossible to reconcile what Valentina Nikolaevna was saying with how she was saying it. A couple was walking toward Olya, and to give them room, she stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, where the pavement fell away into grass. “But why?”
Valentina Nikolaevna said, “You’re not a good influence.”
Olya wasn’t a good influence. “How?” she said. “Why?”
One of the girls in that picture with Diana didn’t wear underwear beneath her school skirt and got her first boyfriend in year five. Compare that with Olya, who had never even smoked a whole cigarette. All Olya ever did was attend to Diana, and copy her new music onto Diana’s player, and keep a box under her bed of the cheap translated romance novels Valentina Nikolaevna didn’t allow Diana to read. As a joke, Olya sometimes kicked Diana’s ankles under the kitchen table when she was invited to Diana’s for meals. She copied Diana’s math solutions. That was it—that was all.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. “Your behavior this past month has been frightening. When Diana told me today you suggested going to the center, I could not believe it.”
“But—it’s okay. It’s fine.”
“It certainly is not fine. You know that. And your family structure—the lack of discipline. It’s uncomfortable to watch.”
Olya pressed a hand over her eyes. A dog barked behind one of the clean buildings uphill. “Family structure…you mean my mom?”
“Who else could I mean?” Diana’s mother said.
Olya was well disciplined. By her excellent mother, by the needs of her best friend, and by her own daily efforts, she had actually become so disciplined that her mouth refused to form around the right response, which was that Valentina Nikolaevna was an overbearing bitch. Instead, Olya said, “Don’t talk about her like that.”
“We’re talking about you and my daughter.”
“Because that’s not right. That’s not fair.”
“That’s how it’s going to be. You can see each other in class, under supervision, but please do not bother her anymore outside of that. All right?” Olya could not answer. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Olya said, because that was the only way the conversation was going to end.
“All right,” Diana’s mother said. “Thank you. That’s all.”
After Valentina Nikolaevna hung up, Olya wiped her phone off on her shirt and looked at the smeared blackness of it. Unlocked it. She scrolled to her own mother’s name and stopped.
What would Olya say to her mother? Valentina Nikolaevna thinks we’re a bad influence. And what could be the response? Olya’s mother couldn’t fix what had already gone wrong.
Valentina Nikolaevna had always looked hard at Olya’s family. Since year five, when Olya and Diana started their friendship with nightly phone conversations, the woman had had something to say. An administrator at one of the city’s elementary schools, she took information from student files to use in little strategies. The last time Olya came over, Valentina Nikolaevna had interrupted dinner to point with the television remote to the evening news, which was again going through the endless cycle of the police’s comments and the civilian search party’s plans and the missing girls’ school pictures. “This never could have taken place in Soviet times,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. Diana sipped her soup. “You girls can’t imagine how safe it used to be. No foreigners. No outsiders. Opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake our authorities ever made.” Valentina Nikolaevna put the remote down. “Now we’re overrun with tourists, migrants. Natives. These criminals.”