Page 21 of Vasily the Nail

Vasily has a closet half-filled with women’s clothing. Is Kseniya his girlfriend? Am I literally wearing her sweater right in front of her? Does she know why I’m here?

She’s already taking off her coat, so it’s a quick glance for me to confirm there’s no way her chest is fitting in this sweater. I’m not sure if I feel better or worse about that.

“Well then, let’s see the damage,” she practically sings as she meets me at the table and snatches my hand.

I yelp and pull away, having a half-second flash of Vasily’s men surrounding me at my pool, where I’ve spent my entire life thinking I’m safe. I shrink back, my brain running an inventory of the weapons I’ve found in the apartment since yesterday.

She takes a step back and holds her hands up. “My bad, I figured you were the girl. Ana.”

“I am Ana,” I retort, even though it sounds weird. I’m Lacey. Which is not a whore’s name. I tuck my hands under my arms as I approach hesitantly. I don’t think she meant to scare me, but I’m not ready to let her grab me again. “Who are you?”

“Kseniya. Vasya said he warned you I’d be coming. Did he not? He’s an ass.”

“Vasya?” I repeat as everything clicks slowly.

“Vasily? My brother? That’s who you’re here with, right?”

“Brother? But you’re American.”

She chuckles. “Not really.”

“You sound American.”

“I mean, yeah, but I wasn’t born here. We moved here when I was five.”

“Were you and Vasily—Vasya,” I correct to, relieved at how much more easily that rolls off the tongue, “separated when you were little? I can barely understand him.”

Kseniya chortles, the sound incredibly unladylike but endearing, which nearly cushions the blow of, “Dude, he speaks perfect English. He’s just fucking with you.”

Nearlycushions the blow. I stand up so quickly my chair falls back as I explode, “What themmmph?That son of a birch tree!”

With one raised eyebrow from Kseniya, I suddenly see the family resemblance plain as day. “Want me to teach you some Russian stuff you can call him? I won’t give you an exact translation, so it probably won’t count as cursing.”

Also a family resemblance, although I’m not about to tell her how Vasily wants to circumvent my values.

She pulls back one of the corn husks and slides it over to me. “Here. Tamales make everything better.”

I pick my chair back up and cut into the tamale, pleased to discover it’s a sort of stuffed bun, breading on the outside and pork in a red sauce on the inside. I don’t want her to think I don’t know what this is, so instead of holding it up to my nose to smell it, I let it linger in front of my mouth a second longer than necessary and inhale. It smells delicious.

It tastes delicious. Three bites in, I’m calmed down enough to think clearly. I decide that Kseniya probably won’t be any more of a savior than I would be if Tony suddenly asked me to hang out with some random girl he’d trapped in an apartment,but I want her as a friend for now. “Why would he do that? Pretend his English is bad?”

She shrugs and slides me another item, this one also a stuffed roll but wrapped in a flour tortilla and covered in green sauce. “All my princess movies were from America. All my favorite things were American. I hadn’t started school yet. It was this super cool journey for me. And there was always the American Dream. You could be anything you wanted in America.”

That’s not the American experience I’ve lived, but I understand. The America on TV, especially the stuff I watched growing up, really did feel that way. I just knew it was fantasy because I was already here and already knew what my life would be.

“But Vasya and Artyom, that’s not where their lives were going. They were . . . damn, what’s the term in your people? Made men?”

So she knows exactly who I am. “Not quite, but I get it. They were going to eventually be in the Bratva whether they wanted it or not.”

She nods and dumps cheese on the green thing. The whole time she talks, she eats, but avoids being slovenly or uncouth. She even pulls out two sodas, the color golden like ginger ale or cream soda but the label decorated with a brown bean pod and written in Spanish. She smacks them on the edge of the table to knock the lids off and hands me one. “Yeah. And in Russia, that was a big deal. Out on the coast and in the big cities, kind of a big deal, too.”

“But they’re in Flagstaff,” I finish for her. “So no one gives a crud about them.”

She nods but adds, “It’s not about the respect, it’s the boredom. And the fact that he’s trapped here. They both are.”

I’m about to ask why she says it like that, why she isn’t also trapped here, but then I see the wedding ring on her finger. She’s definitely trapped here.

“Anyway, he hates America, hates Americans, and gets the most idiotic boner out of making himself incomprehensible even though, if he wanted to, he could pass himself off as Todd from Des Moines.”

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