Until today I thought I would have given anything to change the way things went with Sasha

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Sasha and Amy are reaching the end of their first-year textbook

Sasha and Amy are reaching the end of their first-year textbook. The final chapter is titled What We Need for the Table. It teaches the dative singular and ordinal numerals. The dative plural and cardinal numerals they will get to when they get to the second-year textbook, though first they plan to spend some time on poetry.

The subchapters in the final chapter of the first-year textbook are Buying Groceries; Age; Expressing Fondness, Need, Uncertainty, and Desire; and Time by the Clock. Amy finds it impossible not to say something incriminating when she tries to use the dative singular in expressions of fondness, need, uncertainty, and desire, so in her homework, she focuses on food.

One day Sasha says he feels more at home at their house than he’s ever felt anywhere in his life. He says it to their mother, but Amy knows it’s really meant for her.

Amy knows when Zoe lets the squirrels loose at last that her sister’s secret hope is they will choose to return someday, but Amy also knows they won’t

Amy knows when Zoe lets the squirrels loose at last that her sister’s secret hope is they will choose to return someday, but Amy also knows they won’t. So she makes Zoe a peanut butter and potato chip sandwich, with the crusts cut off, and she spends the whole afternoon watching Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast with her and letting her win at Monopoly.

In the evening after dinner in their room they play a game called If Sasha Were. If Sasha were an animal Zoe says she’s pretty sure he’d be a meerkat or a lightning bug or a Rhodesian Ridgeback, or a swordfish. But Amy insists he’d be a bluebird. If Sasha were a constellation the girls agree he’d be the Big Dipper. If Sasha were an instrument Amy says he’d be the cello. Zoe says he’d be the drums. Amy says that’s just because they know he plays the drums, which does not have any relation to what he’d be, but then as she watches the dog try to wriggle out of her sister’s clutches, she remembers Zoe’s just set Orange and Banana loose at Whiteside Park and will probably always be asking herself now if they’re okay when it rains or gets cold or gets hot, so finally Amy says fine, he can be the drums, although inwardly she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt from the way he sits and how his face gets when he gets serious that if Sasha were an instrument, he would be the cello.

Amy wears perfume to Sasha’s play

Amy wears perfume to Sasha’s play. She retrieves a vial named Sunflowers from the shoebox in her fossil drawer and sprays it gingerly on her wrist, in the bathroom, with the door locked even though they’re not allowed to lock the door in case what if they get electrocuted. She half expects everyone to make fun of her, but maybe she doesn’t put enough on because nobody says anything on the car ride there.

Amy doesn’t really watch the play. She waits for Sasha. When Sasha comes on stage the audience claps as though they’ve been waiting, too, and a bolt of jealousy shoots through Amy’s core. It is fine for Sasha to have other friends, she thinks, but some of these people are girls. But now Sasha is talking, and his firm male voice, all-encompassing, eradicates everything else, even the words, which Amy’s brain can’t process. She simply listens to his voice, appreciating his thick eastern accent, but treating it all as music, not talk.

Amy watches Sasha’s face. Sasha’s face is taut, but open. Amy watches Sasha’s hands. Sasha’s hands are big, but delicate. She tries to think what their first kiss might be like. She would shut her eyes. Past this she can’t imagine. She worries she will not be good at kissing. She watches closely when people kiss on TV, and she practices sometimes on her octopus in the bathroom with the door locked, but still. Maybe Sasha can teach her the way he teaches her Russian. She hopes he will not make fun of her. Although maybe she won’t be so bad. She hopes in fact that she will be a natural like she is at other things. That’s what their grandmother says, at any rate.

Despite the diagrams that came with the condoms they bought, Amy can’t quite really believe that Sasha would have a penis. The idea of their whole bodies touching from head to toe appeals to her, but she can’t even see herself naked when she attempts to envision it, let alone him. She likes to think that he will hug her when he graduates, to say a temporary goodbye, but then it won’t be their whole bodies. It will probably only be between their shoulders and their chins, and then their hands will rest on each other’s backs for an instant, though probably not more.

She feels guilty she has Sasha when she thinks of Yekaterina Gordeeva, who no longer has Sergei Grinkov. But she can’t help it that she loves him, and she tells herself it’s not her fault. She loves everything that Sasha’s ever said and everything he ever will say, and everything he will ever do, and everything he’s ever done.

After the play there is a party. Amy and Zoe stand in the corner shifting their weight from foot to foot. They are both wearing their church shoes. They don’t speak. They just wait for Sasha to come out from backstage.

But then he does. He sees them first thing, and his face lights up. But Amy flinches: it feels too good to be true. She takes a tiny step so that she’s shielding Zoe with her shoulder, but Zoe misinterprets it and thrusts her away, and Amy doesn’t counter because she wouldn’t know how to explain. And then he is there, holding Amy tight in his arms. She breaths in his cologne and the smell of his sweat and what smells like cigarettes although she knows he does not smoke, and other smells she can’t decipher, and when she gives up she starts to pull away, but he still holds her, and she becomes aware of her chest flattened against him, and she pulls away, and ducks down a little, and he lets go.

Immediately she knows she’s just gotten her period, and that there is blood running all down her legs. It is impossible to check and impossible to ask Zoe because they never successfully established any kind of useful code.

Amy sees their parents heading over and exhales. Sasha hugs Zoe, but it is not the same. Their mother wants to take a picture, but Amy excuses herself and goes to the bathroom.

There isn’t any blood.

Afterwards as they cross the parking lot their mom says Sasha must have been drunk. Scandalized, the girls wait for their father to correct her, but he says nothing. Zoe reaches for Amy’s hand, but Amy’s fingers wriggle loose.