On the road, Spartacus was digging around in his backpack for water, his backpack had stayed in the back seat, Krustev couldn’t fit them all in the trunk, and Spartacus had to untie his mat and loosen the straps to get the bottle out, while Sirma made fun of him for not putting his water in a side pocket. From that first day when Maya had met Spartacus, he was constantly digging around in all sorts of backpacks, bags, satchels, plastic bags, and pulling the most bizarre things out of them: rare CDs and even cassettes, wax figures, which he crafted himself at home, pieces of candy that looked suspiciously like pills, flying sheets of paper, which he wrote funny sayings on, used bus tickets, ketchup-stained cash. When she had sat down next to him in the back row, she was convinced he would annoy her. Lord only knows what he’d come up with to show off, to impress her, most likely he’d draw on the desk. The desk, however, had already been covered by Spartacus’s predecessor (someone from the real eighth grade), and the boy did nothing more notable than chewing on his pen. The introductions had begun. Each person got up, turned towards the class and said a few words about himself: usually only his name, what school he was coming from and how many years he had been studying English, now and then somebody would brag that he was on the basketball team or played guitar. Maya diligently tried to remember the connections between the faces and names, but when the introductions were finally over, she discovered that most of the desks remained blank spaces and only here and there did she manage to connect the two most visible constituent parts of her new classmates. Spartacus turned to her for the first time: Do you remember anybody? No one said anything that might help me remember their name. His or her name, Maya corrected him and he fell silent, flustered. What’s my name, she asked him. Uhh… Joanna? No, no I’m just kidding, I remember you for sure, you’re Diana. He chuckled in satisfaction at his own joke. Very funny, Maya said.
There were two reasons to stay at the same desk with Spartacus. First, she felt awkward moving, it would have seemed rude. Second, there was nowhere for her to move to: did everyone really like their new desk-mates so much or did everyone feel the same awkwardness or perhaps they were just lazy, but no pair from the first day changed places until much later. Quite soon the others began whispering, look, the first romance in the class had already sprung up. Maya could not imagine falling in love with Spartacus, nor did he show any particular interest in her. They cautiously felt out some shared terrain: he was into soccer and rock, Maya had nothing to say about the first topic, but they more or less saw eye-to-eye where rock was concerned. Maya smiled, how had their conversations gone in those first days, maximally reduced to the catechistic formula. Have you heard so-and-so? Yeah. And have you heard so-and-so? Nope. Oh man, you gotta hear ’em. Okay. And have you heard so-and-so? They went on like that for fifteen minutes and felt immense satisfaction upon grasping even the most superficial signals marking them as kindred souls. At thirteen, Maya thought to herself, you really can become friends with someone merely because you both listen to Zeppelin. Which might sound unfair towards someone you have grown so close to, but after all, there had been some beginning when you were strangers and it had to start from somewhere. It had taken quite some time, however. For the first few months, Maya mainly hung out with a couple girls who walked home in the same direction, they got on the bus together, only to scatter at different stops, yes, that was the other automatic system for establishing initial relationships when you were a rabbit-fake: one became friends with the people one walked home from school with, and not the other way around.
Is it too windy back there, Elena’s father asked. He had opened his window and Maya watched him thirstily drinking in the mountain air, heavy with the scent of pine sap. Spartacus and Sirma said it wasn’t. They discussed the Rhodope mountain chalets. Or rather, they recalled shared stories, because, of course, they had made the rounds of the Rhodope chalets in question together, the three of them. Maya struggled to think of when exactly she had met them: strange, she remembered everything so clearly, but precisely this, such a key moment, escaped her. Had she and Spartacus gone to the snack bar and there, in front of them in line, was that girl from the neighboring class with the army-surplus bag and the ironic smile? Even though back then, in that first month, the math teacher was on extended leave and the gym teacher had agreed to combined their classes, so neither group would have big holes in their schedules, so they had had gym together, forming huge mobs on the soccer field or basketball court, and in general everything had turned into one big goof-off fest, she might have met them then, or perhaps as late as the green school in December, although that was unlikely, it had to have been earlier, because by the time of the green school the three of them were already hanging out together. On the other hand, Maya remembered very well when and how things had abruptly gotten complicated and how she, to her own most sincere astonishment, had felt helpless and biting jealousy.