Although initially against Fang, Katya finally caved because she liked the boy himself so much, but she still needled him about it, asking him how his grandma Anne was, and saying, “You better distance yourself from those crazies, Fang. You better not go on a mission!” But Fang showed no inclination to go on a mission. He didn’t seem overly mindful of the prohibitions in the Words of Wisdom, either, and a Starbucks was almost perpetually in his hand. If he wore special underwear, Vera said nothing about it. And though he went to church semi-regularly, this discrepancy between word and deed appeared not to bother him at all. As to whether he actually believed in God or in the Mormon faith, I had no idea. He was fairly unreadable in that regard.
“Look,” Fang said, and pulled out his phone. He opened an app, was loading a video. “There’s this kid and he videoed Vera that night. He keeps posting it. Everybody at school has seen it. I didn’t know who to come to. You better look at it,” he said.
Then he pressed Play with his giant thumb, and together we watched the tiny, grainy, badly lit video in between his cupped palms. It was Vera. She was naked and there was something wrong-looking about her eyes — they were too dark. Her pupils were huge. She was in front of a laughing crowd, catcalling her, as she told them she was God’s daughter. No knife could cut her. “I am the immortal light,” she said, before reaching up with a long serrated knife and slashing at her extended arm. Laughter, and then, as the blood spurted from her, leaping like little red frogs at the drunk kids watching her, the laughter turned to shouts and yelling, and the kid who was videoing ran out of the house to the dark front yard where you could hear him panting and laughing uneasily, saying, “Jesus Christ, let’s leave before the cops get here.”
We sat in silence together when the video stopped playing. It was so bright out. I could hear young girls laughing a table away, silly, hysterical, the way only teenagers can be.
“I could beat him up, but I thought I should come to you first,” Fang said finally, his eyes worried above the planes of his cheeks.
“That’s good you did,” I said, though I wondered why he had come to me and not Katya, why he had driven the hour west to seek me out. Perhaps because Katya was still insisting that Vera wasn’t mentally ill, that this was all the result of some obscure vitamin deficiency. Or maybe it was an intuitive delicacy that made him prefer not to show such a disturbing video to Vera’s mother. Maybe he understood that Katya should be kept from seeing such things at all costs. “Don’t beat him up,” I said. “I’ll go to the school and have him expelled or something.”
Fang nodded, as though this was what he had been hoping for.
“All right,” he said, standing suddenly, his business clearly concluded. “You’re a good man, Mr. Lucas,” he said, before lumbering away.
But I wasn’t able to get the boy, Johnson, expelled, only suspended for three days, which was fine, except that the video kept being posted and reposted under a variety of names. Vera appeared not to mind the fact that she was openly taunted at school and often came home with spitballs in her hair that she was too out of it to remove. “Why are you so surprised by the potential for cruelty in teenagers?” she said in a sit-down with me and Katya one night. We were all eating grilled chicken breasts and tomato-and-cucumber salad that Katya’s boyfriend, Misha, had prepared so slowly and carefully that I had gotten panicky watching him do it. Did he not know how to slice a tomato? Why was he looking at the tomato for so long, turning it this way and that before making a cut?
I did not understand Misha, who was also Russian and exceedingly good-natured and possibly very Zen or else just mentally slow. They had been together three or four years now, but as far as I knew there was no talk of getting married. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that Kat wound up with another Russian émigré. Her Russianness could not be eradicated no matter how long she spent here. She was the only person our age I knew who brewed coffee in a percolator. But then, it wasn’t really about Russia, it was about Russianness. It was about ways of making tea, raising children, the importance of piano lessons, the incompleteness of a home without nice rugs. I wondered if Misha minded the way she kept the original plastic on the seats of the dining-room chairs. It made a small hissing noise whenever you sat down. But maybe his mother had done the same, maybe he found it comforting, maybe together they both recoiled at the sight of naked upholstery in other people’s homes.
“Did you not read Lord of the Flies?” Vera said. “This is just how humans are. This is it, guys, so just get over it.”
But we couldn’t get over it. After almost a month of this, Fang and his cousins cornered the boy who was with his two doofus friends and beat the living shit out of them. Katya was appalled, but I was glad. I would have loved to punch the kid myself. After that, people mostly stopped making fun of Vera openly, but perhaps they had simply moved on to someone else.
Even if Rancho Cucamonga High was comfortable forgetting, I knew I wouldn’t be able to. I would forever remember that shaky, grainy video clip, my naked daughter, her large, mannish hands making her arms look too thin as she held out her wrist, “I am the immortal light.” She was God’s daughter, she had insisted. I couldn’t help but feel it was my absence in her childhood that she was trying to fill, that really this was all my fault, that God had rushed in where I was supposed to be standing.
And as the months passed, that video was the only proof I had that Vera actually was mentally ill. Otherwise, I sometimes felt the doctors were simply trying to medicate the Russianness out of her. Sometimes I wanted to reassure them: “No, no, a perverse interest in nothingness is actually perfectly normal.”
That winter, Vera turned seventeen at the most depressing birthday party ever thrown for a seventeen-year-old girl. Katya made her wear a purple tissue-paper crown, and Misha had unexpectedly baked: yellow cake from a mix, chocolate frosting from a can, but he had iced it too soon and the layers were melty and slouching. Vera ate two slices. The medication made her crave sweets like crazy. She had gotten into the habit of eating Fruity Pebbles soaked in half-and-half in the middle of the night. I knew because I found her doing it in my apartment one night on one of her rarer and rarer weekend stays. Katya griped about Vera’s new Reddi-wip habit. The girl would just stand at the open fridge, shooting whipped cream into her mouth at intervals. It wasn’t that we worried Vera was getting fat. The weight she had gained since starting the medication hadn’t quite pushed her into chubby. It wasn’t even that we were worried about her health. It was that we could all tell that it wasn’t her. That she hadn’t always been like this. That it was the drugs doing this to her.
After cake and presents (Katya had bought her the newest iPhone, in which Vera was weirdly disinterested — she didn’t even open the box), we watched a movie together on the big corduroy sectional couch. Vera had picked the movie, Dangerous Liaisons with John Malkovich and Glenn Close, because it was Fang’s favorite film of all time and she had never seen it. I had never seen it either. And after watching it, I was even more puzzled as to who Fang might possibly be. And who was my daughter that she loved him? They held hands at the end, and in the final scene, where Glenn Close wipes at her face so savagely and all the makeup comes away to reveal the pink, almost burned-looking skin underneath, Vera gasped. This movie, about rich, bored, rococo French aristocrats, spoke to her and Fang deeply. Perhaps that was what Southern California had become: a world of artifice, as constricting as a corset. A layer of makeup over their burned skin.