[2]
What crazy good luck — to get picked up by someone who can drive them wherever they want to go, and he’s not just some jerk, but Elena’s dad! If she hadn’t been sitting, Maya would’ve jumped for joy. When I get home, I’m gonna sit down and write her an email. Now here’s a good reason, it was stupid of them not to write, to avoid each other because of some childish stunts from two whole years ago. Elena’s dad looked like her — with ash-blond hair and a round Slavic face, whose features were perhaps too soft for a man, but which for that reason lent it a pleasant warmth, dignifying the otherwise severe nose and habitually pursed lips. It was strange, of course, to take off in your car just like that, aimlessly, on a long drive, that’s what he told them, and a couple times he seemed to hint at some problems, indeed, he didn’t look at all like a happy person, maybe it has something to do with Elena, she often created problems, why lie, although it could also have something to do with his wife, his health, his business. Maya wondered how rich he was. The car — she couldn’t see the make, and she didn’t know anything about cars anyway — was big, nice, comfortable, it drove smoothly but did not look luxurious by any stretch of the imagination. Elena, at least back then, hadn’t had a lot of money. But their house was positively mind-blowing: spacious, light, opening out onto a huge garden, where she had met Dobrin at one of Elena’s parties, lots of Elena’s friends were Slavs and that surely made sense at the end of the day, and Dobrin in particular was really a good guy, fully in keeping with his name, which meant “good” in Slavic, but, of course, nothing lasts forever. And Boril Krustev was surely rich, but he didn’t like showing it off with luxury and that definitely spoke well of him. How old was he? He looked young, definitely younger than her own father, with an almost athletic build, in fact, with a clean conscience you could say he was a good-looking man, yes, Elena was also pretty, a little too pretty, and she had been ever since she was a kid. Maya stared at the man’s hands on the wheel, despite the fact that he was relatively husky, his fingers were rather delicate, a musician’s fingers, after all, she told herself, even though B.B. King played divinely with his fat little sausages.
So Sirma was of Lydian descent. Maya couldn’t have been more surprised if Sirma had suddenly mentioned casually that Sirma wasn’t her real name, but instead something entirely different. Because her Lydian descent wasn’t what mattered here, but the absurd fact that Sirma hadn’t talked about it during all the years they had known one another, not only known one another, but had become a common organism, the three of them with Spartacus. It’s like your right leg blurting out to your left hand something it had never suspected, hmm, maybe that isn’t the best comparison, but given that it was something that wasn’t important in the least, why hadn’t she mentioned it until now? Was this some sort of secret, which had broken the skin that had concealed it suddenly and without resistance? In that case, Maya likely would have taken it better, she would’ve acknowledged her friend’s right to have secrets, things she didn’t want to talk about; but to keep quiet about something that didn’t matter, that wasn’t OK, because it puts you in a privileged position and Maya was taken aback by the whole pointlessness of the miscarried secret.
Elena’s dad picked exactly that moment in her thoughts to ask how the three of them had met. They had met on the first day of high school, so it had been almost seven years now, which wasn’t such a short time at all. Maya remembered very well how, curious, flustered and slightly scared, she had gone into the yard of her new school, a wide paved space swarming with unfamiliar faces, buzzing with unfamiliar voices — nobody here knew what they were in for, nobody knew what their class would be like, whether they’d make friends quickly, nobody knew who they’d end up sharing a desk with, who would be peeking into their notebook and whether that desk-mate would reek like garlic, here there were no longstanding desk-mates, everyone — OK, fine, with a few minor exceptions, but that only confirmed the rule — everyone was a stranger, everything was new for everyone, and everything had to start from the beginning, the first day of school was the first day of the world. Maya was convinced that she would screw something up and later it turned out that she really had screwed something up: she had gone to the wrong line, right next to the one her future class was forming, the faces in both lines were equally unfamiliar and there was no way to recognize her mistake, she timidly started talking to the girl next to her, who looked extremely bored with the welcoming ceremony, she wasn’t carrying a backpack, but a canvas army-surplus bag like soldiers used, and actually she looked quite sketchy to Maya, but still she had to shoot the breeze with someone, and it turns out that was Sirma. Maya realized her mistake only when the classes started off towards their respective homerooms, so that the rabbits could introduce themselves to one another in peace, then she saw that 8-IV was written above the door her line was going into, and not 8-III, this was an additional muddle on top of everything else; this year the Ministry was instituting some reform which nobody understood, but in any case, the preparatory classes at the language high schools would now be called “eighth grade,” and in contrast to the already-existing eighth grade classes, which had been preparatory the previous year, they would be divided up not by letters, but by Roman numerals, such that the chaos was totaclass="underline" if they asked you what grade you were in, you could no longer just say “eighth,” you had to explain whether you were from the letter ones or the numeral ones, the latter, of course, were younger, and in the end the upper grades thought up their own way of differentiating the two grades: the established eighth graders were just eighth graders, while the new eighth graders, who really should have been preparatory… Sirma had told her one day some time at the end of the fall. You know what the older kids call us? Fakes. Why fakes, Maya didn’t get it. Because those guys are the real eighth-graders, while we’re pretending to be eighth-graders, we’re trying to fake them out, get it, when in fact we’re nothing but a prep class — fakes. I’m not trying to fake anybody out, Maya said, and I don’t get it at all, it’s not like we decided what they’d call our classes. We didn’t, said Sirma, but that’s how it is, just go try to talk to one of the upperclassmen and when you tell him you’re in eighth grade, he’ll ask you: Are you an eighth or a fake? Maya didn’t know any of the upperclassmen and had nothing to say to any of them, but she was indignant nonetheless. Why the hell fakes? They stayed fakes, however, right up until the class ahead of them graduated: eighth-fakes, ninth-fakes, tenth-fakes, eleventh-fakes, and only then did they suddenly become the one and only twelfth grade, liberated from that shameful suffix, a change which surely could have offered some kind of gratification, if they had cared in the least. Back then, however, on the first day of the new world, Maya stopped, groaned and almost burst out crying, not because it was so fatal that she had missed out on talking to some girl from her own class instead of the neighboring one, but because she really, and I mean really, had known that something would get screwed up, and look, that’s exactly what happened. She pulled away from the line and set out against the human stream to get to the previous room. She took a deep breath and felt relief when she saw that the students there looked just as random and nondescript as the others, empty blackboards for acquaintance, just waiting for friendships, bad blood, crushes, and inanity to be written on them. Since was the last to come in, all the seats were taken, except one — in the back row, next to a tall and gangly boy with black hair and a dorky prepubescent moustache on his upper lip. Maya hesitated, because she preferred not to sit next to a boy, but she didn’t have a choice and everyone, including the teacher, was starting to look at her. She went all the way to the other end of the room, smiled and sat down. With a breaking voice like the buzzing of a fly hitting glass, the boy introduced himself: Spartacus.