Learning to Swear in America (19 page)

Yuri trotted across the road, turning at the first side street to block himself from sight, then turned again. He needed to clear out for now in case the guards realized he was gone, and get flowers before Dovie showed up. He kept moving, found a bouquet in a stiff plastic sleeve at an overlit grocery store a mile down, paid cash, and got out as fast as he could. He walked back toward the hotel, wanting to catch Dovie before she got to the restaurant lot. Not wanting to think about her two-tone car rattling toward the hotel, maybe parking in sight of a guard, and Yuri being unable to approach it. He mumbled the list of Nobel winners under his breath to calm his nerves.

Dovie was singing when he saw her, bouncing her wrists on the top of the steering wheel, her head bobbing from side to side. He stepped out, waved the flowers to her, and her eyes flew wide. She jerked the wheel and he darted away from the road, heard tires hit the curb and caught the odor of scorched rubber. The wheels churned up grass along the last lot before the corner, missed a fire hydrant, and slammed off the curb onto a side street. The car rocked to a stop. Dovie leaned over and opened the passenger door, but her arms weren’t long enough to push it wide.

“You startled me!”

“I thought you were going to hit me,” Yuri said, swinging into the front seat.

“Well, I didn’t expect you along here.”

He looked at her. Dovie had undone herself for the evening. Instead of bright glitter around her eyes, she had soft brown shadows, and her hair was twisted up in a neat braid that nestled over the curve of her head. Her dress was soft pink silk that puddled around the accelerator.

“You look beautiful.” He suddenly remembered the eyebrow move and cocked it while he smiled. Better late than never.

“You sound surprised.”

She gave him a sideways grin as she pulled away and headed for the high school, and he saw the silver glint of a tongue stud. Maybe she wore it for formal occasions. Yuri stretched his legs, pushing his back into the seat. He glanced himself over, and figured he looked pretty good considering what he’d just done. He grinned.

“These are for you.” He held up the bouquet by its stems, the stiff cellophane crinkling in his hand.

Dovie laughed.

“They’re lovely. Thank you.”

“Um. Are they wrong colors?”

“Really, they’re pretty. It’s just the guy usually brings a corsage, not a full bouquet.”

“Oh. What does corsage mean?”

“Like to pin on your dress, or for your wrist.”

“Ah.” He flushed. “I’m sorry. I failed my first American high school task.”

“Unless you count band,” Dovie said. “Or gym. Or …”

“Do not say algebra,” Yuri said. “I got those problems right.”

She laughed. He stared at the flowers. Why hadn’t he thought about this? What was she supposed to do with a bouquet all night—just walk around and hold it? Her friends would laugh.
She
had laughed.

“I have idea.” He snapped a sprig of pink baby’s breath off. “Turn your head.” He waggled his finger toward her window. She turned, exposing the braid that coiled up the back of her head. Yuri tucked the sprig where one plait rolled under another.

“That okay?”

She nodded. He snapped off a pink alstroemeria and slipped it in the next junction, where the underneath plait emerged.

“Use some yellow ones, too,” Dovie said, driving with her right eye on the road, and her face to the side window.

“Can you drive okay while I do this?”

“No, but I can’t drive okay while you’re not doing it, either.”

He laughed. He had her braid exploding in bloom by the time they bounced into the high school parking lot and stopped, facing the building.

They got out of the car, and Dovie poked an alstroemeria bloom into his top buttonhole. She looked up at the darkening sky. “Did you wish on the first star as a little boy in Russia?”

“No. First star is actually Venus. I would be wishing on planet.”

She laughed and turned toward the school, and her expression grew serious. “Did you really look at the building the other day?” Dovie said. “Did you see all the rectangles? The building itself, each brick, the doors, the windows, the panes in the windows. It’s like the architect only knew one shape.”

“Oh, yeah,” Yuri said. “I see what you mean.”

Light spilled from the windows and an open double door, and couples ran lightly up the outside stairs, holding hands. Dovie hooked one hand around his elbow and elevated her skirt with the other as she led him up the exterior flight of steps and into the corridor.

“Some squares, finally,” Dovie said, pointing to the green and cream linoleum tiles. “You’d think the guy’s progressing, but there’s all those stairs up, and then the stairs back down.” She gestured to the well-coifed heads descending before them in regular jolts. “It’s impossible in a wheelchair.”

“Oh. Lennon. Did he study here?” Of course he did.

“Yeah. There’s wheelchair access behind the building. So you can get in, but you can’t feel good doing it.”

The steps down funneled them into a rustling parade of colored dresses. Excited chatter bounced off the stairwell walls, creating overlapping echoes. It was hard to hear.

“Can I ask? Why Lennon, um …”

“The wheelchair? He fell out of a tree, at that white house three down from us.” She looked at him, but he shook his head. Who notices a white house on a block with a purple one? “He was eight. He tells people it was a drunk driver. He gets more sympathy that way.”

They stood, trapped, at the foot of the stairs, caught in warm, humid air recently exhaled by a hundred would-be dancers, whose finery twitched with their nervous energy. Several girls hit their dates with elbows as they tugged on strapless dresses. Then they were through the doors and into the gym, heels clicking on polished gold boards. A woman herded them toward a freestanding archway covered with crepe paper and dangling foil stars, and a man snapped their picture, then took their names. The woman motioned them forward and turned to the next couple.

“Do you want to get some punch?” Dovie asked.

Yuri stared at the gym. Blue and white crepe paper twisted from the corners to the center of the ceiling, where a silver star with a sagging black-foil tail hung suspended. A banner along the far wall read, “Catch a Falling Star.”

“What is … That star, why …”

“Oh, yeah. Stunningly poor theme choice, isn’t it? The student council picked something else, but Mrs. Cronick overruled it. The principal,” she said.

“Unbelievable. ‘Catch a falling star?’ They know, don’t they? About asteroid? This is joke?”

“No, this is high school administration. The decorations were like eighteen dollars cheaper than the ones the student council wanted.”

He stared at her.

“She did” —he swept his arm across the room— “
this
, to save eighteen dollars?”

“Don’t try to understand high school administration. Your brain isn’t big enough,” Dovie said, pulling on his arm. “Come on, they’re dancing.”

And they were. A middle-aged DJ with a huge mustache smiled genially from the stage. His playlist was a little old, Yuri thought, as he’d heard the songs before, even though he couldn’t identify most of them. Dovie led him to a collapsible table covered with a disposable white cloth, holding a plastic punch bowl and a stack of clear plastic glasses.

“It looks like spiral galaxy,” Yuri said, nodding toward the swaying dancers.

“Yeah,” Dovie said. “I noticed that, too.”

Yuri didn’t catch the sarcasm.

“And that big guy surrounded by girls over there could be Saturn, except he’s missing one moon,” Yuri said.

She handed him a cup of startlingly blue punch.

“He’s missing more than that. That’s Kyle Davidson, the quarterback of the football team and a huge jerk.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s ar-ro-gant.”

“Is he good?”

“Yeah. He’s really good.”

“Then maybe he has reason.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“Drink your punch,” she said.

He drank.

“This is appalling,” he said, and meant it.

“But it’s blue, and that’s what counts.”

He swiveled his head. “Is Mr. Pisotto here?”

“No, he chaperoned homecoming, so he got out of this. Mr. Reynolds isn’t here, either.”

Yuri tossed his cup in the pressed-metal trash can at the end of the table. Dovie put her hand on his back and began to push him gently forward. He turned and held Dovie’s elbow, her flesh warm under his fingers. He could feel the pulse in her brachial artery.

“We are going to dance,” she said.

“I don’t dance.”

“Not even for me?”

He hesitated. He didn’t know any of these people and would never see any of them again.

“I guess I can sway awkwardly.”

She led him past a dozen gawky, angular guys leaning against the wall under the caged windows. They looked like they’d been put together from a kit of irregular parts. Dovie stopped at the edge of the crowd, where it thinned into space filled with pastel
dancers with tuxedoed dates, all in irregularly shaped orbits. It would have driven Kepler mad.

He put his right hand against her warm fingers, placed his left palm on her lower back and pressed her close enough that her dress brushed over his shoes, back and forth, and he wished he had sensory receptors in his footwear. Then he realized he didn’t need them. He was aroused just thinking about her hem swishing rhythmically over his shoe leather. And that couldn’t be normal.

He risked a sideways step, and after a brief hesitation Dovie followed. Problem was, her legs were covered by billowing pink silk, so any move she made looked graceful. Who knew what her feet were doing under there? She could get away with virtually anything. He stepped back to where they’d started. Figured he could get away with the side-to-side thing for a while.

“I can’t talk about my work,” he said, “but I’m having problem with two colleagues. I don’t know what to do about it.”

“The guy who wants to make you stay?”

“No. Guys I’m working with.”

“Hmm. Can you tell me more?”

“Not really. I shouldn’t have said anything at all.”

She bit her lip and it rose around the glistening bottom edge of her teeth. She narrowed her eyes at him, thinking.

“So I have to give you advice without any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes.”

“In that situation, I always turn to Immanuel Kant.”

He blinked.

“Kant said, ‘Do what is right, though the world should perish.’ Of course, he said it in German, which probably sounded cooler.”

“Except if he got it wrong, world wasn’t really going to perish.”

“The world perishes for everybody, Science Boy. That concept is the foundation of religion and cosmetic surgery.”

She twirled away from him, still holding his right hand with her left. He reeled her back in and caught the scent of the flowers in her hair.

“I was thinking about that other guy,” she said. “The one who wants you to stay.”

“Who wants to
make
me stay.”

“Yeah.”

They shuffled in a small arc, surrounded by other couples, Yuri trying to avoid bumping into anyone. He wasn’t superstitious, but he thought it best to avoid collisions.

“Would it be so bad to live here? I mean, it’s a big country. You could find a good place to work.”

“I used to think about living in America. That maybe I would someday. But they should
ask
me,” he said, leaning forward so he could talk directly into her ear. “It should be
my
decision.”

“You’d stay if they asked?”

“No. I don’t have much of life in Russia, but it’s still my life.” He thought for a moment about Fyodor Laskov in his office and pushed the image from his mind.

Dovie nodded, and her hair brushed the side of his face. He wondered if he should kiss her ear. Tiny, soft hairs, almost invisible, rose from its pink curve.

“Dovieee!” Mary and another girl stood there in shimmering fabrics, their dates—James and another guy—shifting awkwardly behind them.

Dovie hugged the girls, then the guys. It occurred to Yuri that he should have practiced some other expressions in the bathroom mirror. How did you move an eyebrow to convey
your hands are a little too low on my date’s back and also this hug is taking too long
? Still, they’d stopped dancing in order to talk, and that was worth something.

“Yuri, you know Mary and this is Rique, and this is Jen, and of course, James.”

“Hey, Crash,” James said, sticking his fist out. Yuri bumped it.

“I have gym with her,” Jen said. “I am so sorry I missed Jake Bortell’s crash. I skipped to get a manicure.” She waggled silver nails at them.

“So are you going to come here?” James said to Yuri.

It took him a moment to realize what James meant. “Oh. Um … no.” How could he explain what he did, and why he was there, without sounding pretentious? James needed to work on his speed-hugging skills, but Yuri had no need to flash his credentials in the guy’s face.

“Oh.”

“I’m so glad you brought Dovie,” Mary said, twirling a finger at her. Dovie obediently turned to display her dress from all angles. “We couldn’t believe she didn’t have a date.”

“I couldn’t, either,” Yuri said.

Dovie shrugged, and the pink silk rustled. “Guys think I’m weird.”

Yuri hesitated for a moment, and she punched him lightly in the shoulder.

“Oh, crap. We gotta go,” Mary said, looking over Dovie’s head. “Maybe we can all dance later or something.” She dragged her date off, and Jen grabbed James’s hand and pulled him away, too.

“Dovie Collum,” a woman’s voice said.

Dovie stiffened beneath Yuri’s palm, as if she’d suddenly dehydrated. It was the principal she had pointed out earlier, a small woman with a severe mouth. Yuri wondered what the tensile strength of her vocal cords was. Probably pretty impressive.

“Who is your date?”

Dovie wriggled out from his palm and dropped his hand.

“Um, this is Yuri Strelnikov. He’s a friend.”

Mrs. Cronick looked at him but spoke to Dovie.

“And is he a student here?”