Page 34 of Vasily the Nail

But he did last night.

And then he called me the right name. A name that’s completely meaningless and I can’t spell and I can’t even ask Igor what it means because I don’t know if I could pronounce it right. For all I know, Vasily is calling me a different name every time, and each word sounds similar enough that I don’t catch it.

I yell wordlessly at the ceiling.

And then I drag my butt out of bed.

In the bathroom, I have the briefest scare when I see the blood and worry Vasily accidentally injured me last night. But then I crunch some numbers and realize I’m not upset with Vasily or in love with him. I’m hormonal.

And I’m definitely not pregnant, because I’ve started my period.

I don’t have any pads.

I roll myself up a little makeshift pad out of toilet paper so I can at least get through this morning while I give myself a pep talk about asking Igor for feminine hygiene products. He’s married, he’s got daughters, I’m sure he’s had to buy them before, but ugggh.

I hate everything Vasily packed in my suitcase, at least for right now, so I pull from his dresser some gigantic sweatpants and from his closet an absolute dress of a hoodie.

Coffee is critical. Pancakes are way too much work, but I go through all the cabinets and finally amass a loose packet of Pop-Tarts, some weird brownie thing with chunky rainbow sprinkles studded into it, and a bag of M&Ms. I hit the motherlode with a sleeve of Tagalongs that’s definitely been secreted away in the back of the cabinet above the refrigerator.

I had to stand on top of the counter to get them. I deserve them. I’mowedthem. Vasily’s a jerk.

I’m not proud of my binge, but I deserve all of this.

I’ve polished off the M&Ms, the brownie, and half the Girl Scout cookies when the door’s thrown open dramatically, but it’s Kseniya standing there, so I don’t even get the satisfaction of Vasily catching me chowing through his precious hidden cookies. Today she’s only got her purse and a small shipping box, no food or nail kit, and I slide the remaining Tagalongs over to her as she approaches slowly.

“Can I . . . get you anything?” she asks hesitantly, the high energy from two days ago all but vanished. I feel like this is the treatment I should have been getting as a stranger who’d been kidnapped by her brother, but I guess this whole debacle is going to be exactly that. A debacle.

“No, I’m good,” I grumble, thinking I should probably tap out on the food binge before I make myself sick.

Sicker. There are definitely grumblies already happening in my belly.

That makes me realize I just lied, though. “No, wait! I just started my period and don’t have anything!”

Kseniya freezes in the middle of reaching for the Pop-Tart packet, but then she lights up. “Yes! Here.” She digs into her purse and produces a little make-up pouch that she hands to me. “I’ll get you more, but that’ll help for now, right?”

I peek inside and see a couple of pantyliners and a selection of tampons. I cringe but nod, hoping it doesn’t look weird that I’m taking the whole pouch with me, but I’m not about to tellher I’ve never used tampons, because jerk Tony said it would ‘damage’ my ‘virginity.’ Yes, I did discover that was totally a lie and men are dumb and hymens are more complicated than virgin/not-virgin-but-maybe-tampons, but I wasn’t going to set myself up for a rage meltdown from him if he was snooping in my bathroom and found tampons.

When I get into the bathroom, I realize I don’t even have a way to get a pre-teen tutorial online. And I know this makes me sound stupid, but I waste three of them before I figure out how the applicator works. Hopefully, Kseniya either doesn’t keep inventory of this pouch or thinks I’m just paranoid and palmed extra for later.

When I return to the kitchen, she’s got a big glass of water and some pain medication for me. Her eyes dart around for a minute, making me feel awkward about having asked for the tampons, but then she says, “You’re positive it’s your period, right?”

“I’m not pregnant,” I blurt out as it hits me that she heard that lie to Vasily about the birth control. “I was a couple days late, in fact— but only a couple. I’m not pregnant.”

“It’s not that,” she says, and then her eyes— her pale blue eyes, that same color as Vasily’s— stare me down hard. She puts her hands over mine as soon as I take a drink of water and says, “Ana, what happened last night, are you okay?”

I nearly choke on the ibuprofen. “Oh. Oh, God. You saw that?”

She shakes her head quickly.

Too quickly.

Like, she’s definitely lying at least a little, although hopefully that means she only caught a glimpse of it, and ideally when . . . I don’t know, honestly. The first three seconds would be perfect, because the rest of it would have been my vagina or Vasily’s penis or a combination of both or his spit or his semen or—

“Oh God.”

“I just know what it was,” she promises. “I didn’t see it, and I don’t know who all got it other than Artyom. He wanted me to check on you, and he told me enough that I was concerned you might have been hurt by . . . by Vasily.”

Her skin goes ashen at that, and that’s totally understandable. I know Tony’s not a good guy. At the end of the day, he does bad things, and he does some of them for bad reasons. But I would still be devastated to know he raped a woman.

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