Her uncle and aunt had clearly realized, they had figured out what was going on far too late and had come up with the completely stupid idea of finding new friends for their daughter, all of a sudden they had remembered that, hey, she has a cousin, well, of course, why not have her hang out with her cousin, who goes to a good school? Bent over the kitchen sink, Sirma felt rage, she had no desire to save her cousin, now she needed to save herself, to dissolve herself in water like a tablet and to drink herself down, she now hated her cousin for cracking open that door, which should have stayed shut, she had shown her vileness, which she had in fact liked, as if someone were teaching her to eat her own shit. On the bunk of the ferryboat to Rhodes, Sirma was suddenly paralyzed by a deeply forgotten memory, from when she was a kid and had been playing with a little boy in the neighborhood park, their grandmas were sitting on the benches and not keeping much of an eye on them as they played and chased each other, Sirma suddenly caught a strong whiff of shit, she grabbed the little boy by the hand and told him he’d stepped in poo, he lifted his foot and looked at the sole of his shoe, it was smeared with a reeking yellow mess, now watch this, he said, sat down on the ground and with the natural flexibility of small children lifted his leg, brought the shoe towards his face and licked it. In the bunk, Sirma again sprang up in wave of nausea, just like that morning over the cereal, and just like then, she had nothing to throw up, only a stream of stomach acid stung her tongue. Back then, that morning over the kitchen sink, she had decided to reduce her world to Spartacus and Maya. Before going out, she quietly went back to her room, pulled the dirty, rumpled bill out of her pocket and stuffed it in the bottom of the cupboard where she had kept various important things ever since she was a kid, the fiver stayed there up until she moved away from home. When she was gathering up her stuff she found it, she had almost forgotten about it, and since a lot of time had passed since then, she gathered the strength to reach towards the cinnamon-scented candle she liked to light in the evenings and to burn it up.
But her cousin sank and miraculously surfaced again, and Sirma was thankful to her for the latter, because, even though the two families had never really been close, they surely would never have forgiven her desertion if Chloë had died of an overdose, as seemed to be the case with many of her friends. She simply got lucky. Her father, Sirma’s uncle, found a job in Austria and they left; once cut off from the café with the pool table, where the barman was down, Chloë became a perfectly normal girl, she had already learned German and was studying some sort of economics. Sirma never did figure out how seriously her cousin had gotten hooked on heroin, but since the people around her were dying off, it clearly was no joke, and if that were the case, then she really had needed money, and that shakedown by the school was surely no isolated incident, she had done it regularly with the girl with the leather jacket, whose face Sirma could not recall for some reason, but she would remember her from time to time and would also remember that on that evening, she hadn’t smoked the joint, she hadn’t taken the money they had snatched from the scared girl on the street, she hadn’t even sipped the vodka Chloë had bought with the money. After her uncle’s family left for Austria, some long-forgotten kinship ties had suddenly reawakened, the fathers started writing emails and talking on the phone (Skype hadn’t yet become a mass phenomenon) and one day, right around the time Elena had appeared in their midst and Sirma had met her with instinctive hostility, because she threatened the inviolability of their trinity, her father triumphantly announced that they were going to visit Vienna. Sirma had nothing against setting aside a week of her vacation for Vienna. But when the day came for them to leave, Elena had already launched her attack dizzyingly fast, she had jumped from Maya to Spartacus, she was drowning him in sex and in doing so seemed to have lost Maya, who understandably was sincerely jealous now, but she had driven a wedge between the two of them and Spartacus, and Sirma left for Vienna with the bad feeling that in her absence things would get even worse. Dance a Viennese waltz for us, Spartacus joked before she left, and at that moment everything was just as before, but she knew that in the evening he would meet Elena and she imagined his hands unzipping her jeans, his fingers sinking into the yielding pink flesh. Her cousin really had become a perfectly normal girl and Sirma was happy for her, she realized that until now she had always been ashamed of that evening and of the fact that she had never called Chloë again, despite her parents’ urging. The two families strolled the streets and took photos of themselves in front of the extravagant, cream-pie buildings, Sirma had bought herself a new digital camera and one evening it occurred to her that she could show Chloë pictures of her friends, they hooked the camera up to the computer and she tried to explain to her, insofar as it was possible, her relationship with Spartacus and Maya, and Elena was in one of the pictures, too, Sirma groaned and explained that she was just some annoying chick who was trying to glom onto them, but her cousin abruptly fell silent, Sirma looked at her, she sat frozen, staring at the screen with unblinking eyes, hey, said Sirma, what’s the matter, she did not take her eyes off the picture, that’s Elena, she said finally. Yeah, Sirma said in surprise, her name is Elena, do you know her, of course I know her, Chloë said at last, don’t you remember her? Some powerful wave hit her on the head and sent her back to that bizarre and repulsive evening, she heard Elena’s voice, oh, what a good girl and felt her strange kiss on her own lips and only now could she reconstruct the image that had buried itself somewhere deep in the corners of her memory, the face of the girl with the leather jacket.