I’ve had the same nightmare a dozen or a hundred or a thousand times, in which all things on earth come unstuck and fly off into space, and I look for you, but I can’t breathe, and then I see you, off in the distance, against a pitch black sky, smaller and smaller and smaller, until you finally disappear

**

Everyone in the family is aware that Sasha will be graduating soon

As the date approaches, they begin to consider what to do next.

Their dad has the idea of taking Amy to the community college, which offers Russian classes, too. But when they go to sign her up for one, the secretary says she has to take the SAT first. 

Their parents discuss. Even though the SAT costs twenty-three dollars, and their dad has lost his job again, they decide to let Amy take it. They sign her up for the next test date. She needs to score in the sixtieth percentile to be eligible to take her Russian class. Their dad says not to worry because the test is really for older kids, so if she doesn’t score high enough, it doesn’t matter.

But when her scores come back, they discover they are perfect. Amy is not in the sixtieth percentile, but rather in the ninety-ninth. This gives them a new idea.

Although few people do it, it is possible to go to college early, without even getting a GED

Although few people do it, it is possible to go to college early, without even getting a GED. You have to have good grades and really good standardized test scores, and do well in your interview. Amy is a polite child whose taciturn manner—in fact a blend of shyness and mistrust—tends to be confused with maturity. She is admitted to the University of Tulsa and given a free ride, including room and board. She is what is known as a Presidential Scholar.

She is admitted to other schools, too, but nowhere else gives her a full scholarship. Besides, since she is only fifteen, their parents say she needs to stay close to home. And besides, their parents like the University of Tulsa, whose mascot is the Golden Hurricane, and now they always watch them playing basketball on TV.

Amy enrolls for classes.

She does not think of the fact that her life is about to change forever and completely, or if she does, she thinks of that change only in terms of how it may affect her relationship with Sasha. Sasha will move away, but maybe he will visit someday, and by then she will be a college student, and she will know all the things you have to know in order to be a girlfriend. Then they may get married. Amy will wear high heels even though she will be taller than her husband.

She writes this all down in her diary, until one day she catches her sister poring over it when she thinks that Amy has gone to the living room to read. Without hesitation Amy rips the notebook away from Zoe with her left hand and punches her sister in the stomach with her right.

Zoe howls. Their parents come running. They find Zoe doubled over, crying, and Amy standing over her, fist still clenched. Amy braces herself. Yet she feels strangely indifferent, as though none of this concerns her any longer.

Then her sister surprises her by lying. She claims she just has cramps. That night Amy lies awake watching the catfish suck at the small stones at the bottom of the aquarium and listening to her sister’s steady, heavy breaths. She takes stock of the secrets between them: her secret stash of photographs, which she still keeps; secrets about Sasha, which now number in the dozens; her secret grief; her secret future.

Add the accidental secrets kept inside the labyrinths of signs and symbols Amy created to protect them from the world, all those notes Zoe refused to learn to read.

Subtract the secret rooms that Amy couldn’t access at the hospital, where things were done to Zoe that Amy cannot ever know. Subtract the lies that Zoe might be telling Amy, too, in the same way that she lied to protect her earlier that night.

The week of Sasha’s graduation they have one last class

The week of Sasha’s graduation they have one last class. Zoe has been learning a Ukrainian folk song for the past month, practicing by singing it to the dog and her stuffed animals and whenever they’re in the car and while she rides her bike. The song is about a girl who keeps promising to go on different dates with a boy but always stands him up. It starts on Monday when she says she’ll pick periwinkles with him but doesn’t end up coming. On Tuesday she’s supposed to kiss him forty times but doesn’t end up coming.

Ти казала в понедiлок

Пiдем разом по барвiнок

Я прийшов, тебе нема

Пiдманула, пiдвела.

Ти казала у вiвторок

Поцiлуєш разiв сорок

Я прийшов, тебе нема,

Пiдманула, пiдвела.

The song goes all week, but Zoe can only remember those first two days and the chorus, which reiterates the extent to which the singer is tragically disappointed by his beloved’s lack of interest.

Due to the fact that for them, all boys are Sasha, neither Amy nor Zoe is able to fathom how a girl could not want to go on a date with a boy. It may be because of this, thinks Amy, that her sister can’t remember the rest of the song.

Meanwhile Amy has prepared a ten-page paper on her plans for the coming years. The assignment was actually to use the conditional to talk about what she would do if she won a million rubles, but Amy wants to show Sasha that she is not a child, and that instead of winning a million rubles she plans to earn some money and travel the world in the future tense, rather than the conditional mood. She has learned the names in Russian of nearly every country, along with the names of exotic fruits, animals that live in the jungle, and because she happens on a book about architecture at the library one day, she also includes in her essay some famous architects whose names she transliterates into Cyrillic whom she may commission to build her a house on one of the continents (whose names she also knows).

As always, she waits in the living room while Zoe has her lesson. While Zoe attempts to sing, Amy pretends to read. Then when it’s her turn she presents him with her paper and looms over Zoe until Zoe finishes pretending to sort her papers and stands up. Then Amy gives her a look that makes her leave the room.

Sasha goes over Amy’s paper as he always goes over Amy’s papers, attentively, fondly, like a person playing a cello in the middle of a symphony. Amy can’t always tell if he thinks she is impressive or if he thinks she is a freak. She is aware that she works harder for these Russian classes than what is expected. In her mind as he reads she traces his premature laugh lines, the circles under his eyes, thinks what it would be like to brush his face at the cheekbone with the backs of the lower thirds of the fingers of her right hand. She repeats the gesture over and over in her mind as he turns the page.

It is all going as it always goes, as she wants it to go, when all of a sudden an unthinkable occurs: Sasha starts crying. He doesn’t even cover his face. He just cries, heaving like water beginning to boil, tears splashing down all over her paper, diluting the ink, undoing letter by letter.

Amy thinks she may be having a heart attack. Her left arm goes numb. Her heart is racing. She will die on the thick brown carpet of the dining room before anyone even remotely thinks of calling an ambulance.

Then as though possessed by some unfamiliar spirit she rises and takes a single step towards him like she’s gliding across a rink. She brushes the tip of her left middle finger against the back of his left hand. And in a flash he has seized her and is clutching her the same way the girls have clutched at their dolls and their octopuses in their most harrowing moments of despair. Amy is on Sasha’s lap, her left shoulder and her neck wet against his flooded face. He holds her so tightly she can’t move, can barely even breathe, so she is spared the uncertainty of how to rub his back or pet him on the head. He sobs. Amy breathes him in, his briny musk, and what must be alcohol, and what must be cigarettes.

They hear the screen door get stretched back and then voices with the entrance of the key into the lock of the inside door. Sasha casts her off him and races through the kitchen to the bathroom. Amy hears the door lock. Their parents are in the middle of some conversation when they come in, don’t notice Amy’s wet shirt or face. Sasha reemerges a few minutes later seeming fine. But Amy doesn’t really look at him. He leaves. She goes into the bathroom and takes the wet sea-green hand towel and brings it up to her face. She takes a deep breath.

Amy does not mention to Zoe what has happened between Sasha and her

Amy does not mention to Zoe what has happened between Sasha and her. There are now too many secrets to keep track. This one she would like to tell her, to relieve herself of this burden, this complete incomprehension and this complicated fear, but something new has begun to be erected between them, something like a wall, and on Zoe’s side it must stay safe, and on Amy’s side it can’t. Amy is responsible for repelling her sister as her sister tries to scale this wall. No matter how many boosts and footholds Zoe receives from their mother, who would rather there be more disasters.

Which is why when she lies to their parents about why she doesn’t want to go to his commencement she lies to Zoe, too. She’s almost even convinced herself she has a migraine. She spends hours in bed with the shutters drawn, silent, lying on her stomach with her chest pressed against her pillow and the octopus’ eight arms draped around her shoulders. Striving for quiet.