I ignore her. I do know that. Don’t I? Sure, a part of me will always be that girl eating alone in the art room—or, okay, the girls’ bathroom on days before the art room became an option. But that’s why I spend all my time when I’m not here in Riverwest. Riverwest is like ten blocks of people who ate lunch in their school bathrooms.
“Of course I know that. Abby has good qualities, too,” I reply, unequivocally.
“Like what?” Margot scoffs, not looking up. She is far more interested in her book now that actual skill has been replaced by a cartoonish attempt at existential thought. Andy Warhol. Jackson Pollack. Ugh. I mean, sure, paint a can of soup, but can’t you at least make it look good? “Besides her ability to find every hippie in a two-mile radius?”
“She’s sweet. She has a good heart,” I shrug. “I think she just legit has ADD.” Absentmindedly, I glance back at my MySpace messages. Nothing new, as I expected. That note from Zoya is like a pulsating neon sign in my mind. I know this woman is probably only interested in my nonexistent funds, but I can’t help wondering if there’s something else to it. I also find myself slightly jealous of her: she’s in Chernovtsy, the place I’ve been missing since I began missing things. I know this doesn’t make sense, I was only three when we moved and I’ve spent almost my whole life in Wisconsin. But sometimes being from Ukraine is the only thing that feels real to me. Even before she messaged, I was thinking about trying to go back there, maybe studying abroad or something.
“If she had ADD, then Adderall would calm her down, not make her even more restless,” Margot explains. “Not that I’m a doctor or anything.”
Before I can argue, there’s a knock on the door.
“Yes?” I say.
A pair of tattooed hands, which read Hard Rain across eight knuckles, push the door open. Our other roommate August sticks his head in, followed by the rest of his body: his long, copper-colored hair curly and matted, a dimpled grin, ropy muscles bursting out of a tight beige shirt. August looks so much like Elijah Wood’s Frodo we’ve gone as Hobbits for two Halloweens in a row. “Anna! I’ve been calling you! Your dad is downstairs.”
I look again at my phone but don’t see any missed calls. He leans into the room more, followed by a pleasant musty smell combined with bicycle grease from the shop where he works, or possibly one of the fixed gear bikes he’s repairing at home. “He seems really annoyed. He hates me, Anna.”
“He doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t even know you,” I explain. “He just doesn’t like that you’re not the same gender as me.”
“Come on, Anna. Dude is scary. Wasn’t he in the KGB?”
“No, he had friends in the KGB.”
“Whatever. I’m not going back out there until he’s gone.”
“All right. I’m coming, I’m coming,” I tell him.
“Has Abby started herself on fire yet?” Margot asks him with a laugh.
“Not yet,” he answers, shaking his head. “I told that crazy chica to stop snorting so much shit up her nose, but she never listens to me.”
“That’s not limited to you,” Margot grunts. “I don’t think she listens to anyone.”
“I heard that, you fuckers!” Abby’s voice yells from the other room.
I smile at August, then turn back towards the computer. No new messages. And why would there be? I never responded to Zoya and all my friends are currently within ten feet of me. Satisfied, I close Zoya’s message and log out of MySpace.
ANNA
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CHAPTER SEVEN
August is right; my dad is annoyed. Not that he tells me why. He doesn’t say a word the entire drive, which is fine, I guess, because it’s not as if I particularly want to talk to him. When he’s not actively telling me to get my life together and be more responsible, he’s thinking it silently. I guess it’s not enough I stopped painting so I could get this generic college degree, I have to be totally miserable while doing it.
A mere five blocks later my dad pulls into the parking lot of my grandparents’ subsidized apartment complex and double parks. Without looking up he asks, “Can you get them? Try to make it quick.” He starts typing something on his phone, a new “smart” one that is almost a computer. He’s like a little kid with a new video game, the way he hovers over that thing. I don’t know why but it’s embarrassing. I mean, who does he need to email so urgently anyway? With the exception of CIA agents, who does anyone need to email that urgently? Maybe he is a CIA agent? That sure would make me like him more.
“Quick?” I ask him, with exaggerated shock. “Have you met your parents?”
“I said try.”
“There is no try, only do,” I say in a gravelly voice, then laugh. It forces my dad to look up and attempt a smile, but only for a second. Immediately after, he starts typing again. It makes me a little sad. We watched that entire movie series together, and now his phone is more interesting to him than me.
At least my dedushka is happy to see me. He is always happy to see me. Sometimes I visit just for a hit of his unconditional love to get out of a bad mood. “What brings you here?” he asks when I get upstairs. Confusion wrinkles the brows behind his thick, clear glasses, then quickly turns to excitement. “It’s so late.”
“What? It’s only five. We go to that party at Marik’s,” I explain in broken Russian. “Why you aren’t wearing clothes?”
Instead of answering my grandpa happily pulls me into the apartment, where the television is blasting Russian news. He struggles with the remote, pressing at least five or ten buttons that I can tell even from here do not control the sound, if it’s the right remote at all. I walk over and press the power button on top.
“So. What’s new in Putin-land?” I ask, jokingly, when it’s quiet.
My grandpa—a man who has survived a concentration camp, the Russian army, and entire decades of near starvation—shrugs now in the face of Russia. “Oh, who cares? It’s not our problem anymore,” Dedushka says. Then why are you always watching the Russian news? I want to ask, but don’t. He looks behind him toward the open doorway to their bedroom, a small barrier of wooden beads hanging over the tiny hallway.
“Mila! Anastasia is here!” He tells me to sit down—“sadeece, sadeece”—and points at the couch. But for the last decade and a half, the couch has been covered entirely by various old, itchy rugs they’d, like nearly everything inside, brought with them from Ukraine. I do not particularly enjoy sitting on twenty-five-year-old rugs, especially when they are being used as couch covers. Instead, I choose a chair by the small dining room table, the granite top cluttered with white doilies and crystal bowls also brought over from Ukraine. I drop my winter hat and coat on top of a pile of unopened mail, a stack of photos that came from one of my cousins. Because she has so many siblings, my grandma has many nieces and nephews, and they are all starting to have children, a fact she never lets me forget for a moment, even though I’m barely nineteen and very single.
My grandpa, his bald forehead now perspiring from sweat, yells for a second time, “Mila, Anastasia’s here!”
“Dedushka, we have to go. Why aren’t you ready?”
My grandma finally waddles out in a paisley robe, looking half-asleep and smelling like old unwashed clothes. She sits down on the rug-covered couch and immediately asks me when I’m going to get married. Her thin white hair is matted, as if she just woke up, which can’t be true, at five PM. “I want grandchildren!” she says, melodramatically.