Disappearing Earth

SEPTEMBER

Olya came home to an apartment that smelled the way it always did when her mother was gone: a little sweet, a little rotten. Maybe Olya didn’t empty the trash enough. She opened the windows in the living room, so a breeze could clean the place while she changed out of her school clothes. Then she lay on her back on the futon. From that angle, she could see nothing but sky.

Blue bleeding up to heaven. Forget the news reports, the stricter curfews, the posters of the missing girls—today was a perfect day to spend outside with someone. After the last school bell rang this afternoon, Olya had tried to get Diana to hang out in Petropavlovsk’s city center, but Diana said she couldn’t, that her parents were still worried, that they wanted her home. “It isn’t safe,” Diana said, with her voice high and cold in an imitation of adulthood. Diana’s mother’s voice oozing out of Diana’s mouth.

Besides, best friends, Diana reminded Olya, didn’t need to see each other constantly. This had been Diana’s refrain for the month since the sisters’ kidnapping. Olya couldn’t tell from Diana’s intonation, which these days gave every pronouncement a grown-up spin, whether this was Diana’s idea or her mother’s, but Diana certainly stood behind it. After those girls got lost, Olya and Diana saw each other just about never. Even now that the school year had started, Diana insisted: best friends had to put hangouts on hold, understand if there were sudden foolish rules in place, and bite their tongues instead of getting into another looping argument about danger.

Olya’s own mother was not worried. She trusted Olya to look after herself. An interpreter, she was up north with a tourist group from Tokyo, turning their official guide’s speech from Russian to Japanese so the peninsula’s rich visitors could learn how to spot brown bears, pick late-season berries, and bathe in thermal springs. Whenever Olya’s mother left, there was less music, less perfume, no lipstick-marked mugs in the apartment. Before the sisters vanished, Diana would come by Olya’s during solo weeks like this one to waste away their afternoons together, but now summer vacation was over and everyone had become paranoid. Olya had no one to make noise with until her mother came back on Sunday with foreign candies as secondhand gifts.

Strands of hair brushed Olya’s face. It was fine enough here by herself, anyway. Familiar, sun-warmed. Last spring, their year-seven history teacher had called Olya’s hair a rat’s nest in front of the class, and she had boiled with humiliation. But over this summer tourist season, as Olya turned thirteen years old, explored the city beside Diana, and felt her tangles tickle her neck, she thought again and liked that—a rat’s nest. She was a beast. This was her hollow.

She sniffed—even the smell had stopped bothering her.

A truck honked outside and another one answered. She rolled over to scroll through the news feed on her phone: selfies, skate parks, classmates in short skirts. Someone’s girlfriend had commented on his status with a heart. Olya clicked on that girl’s profile, looked through all its pictures, and moved on, finding mutual friends, scrolling, clicking, skipping. She went back to her feed and refreshed. She stopped.

A girl they knew had just posted a picture of Diana. Diana’s smile suspended between gleaming cheeks. Diana in her home clothes: that ridiculous red T-shirt, rhinestones lining the Union Jack on her chest, and those pink leggings cut off at the knee. Diana sitting cross-legged on her bed, and one of their classmates lying down beside her, and another leaning over in her school uniform while flashing victory signs with both hands.

Olya sat up. Texted Diana: What are you doing? Couldn’t wait. Sent another. Can I come over?

She shoved off the futon, found her jeans, grabbed her jacket, filled her pockets with her wallet and lip balm and headphones and keys. After class, Diana had told Olya she had to go home, but maybe she meant Olya should come with her. Maybe both of them had misunderstood. Olya looked again at the picture. There were four of them together? The girl who posted it didn’t even live in Diana’s neighborhood. Olya refreshed. Nothing new. She made sure she had her bus pass, slammed the apartment doors, then ran down the stairs.

Outside, the sun was bright enough to make her wince. She hadn’t been at the apartment for more than an hour, but already she had turned fully rodent, blinking at the light. As she hurried, she pulled fingers through her hair to smooth it out. Strands dropped behind. Olya had suggested they go to the center this afternoon—did Diana think she wanted to go only there? Nowhere else? Olya would’ve agreed to any other plan; Diana knew that. Diana knew Olya didn’t want to be alone. Best friends did not abandon each other.

Olya’s building’s long parking lot was pitted under her feet. She tried leaping over the biggest potholes so she wouldn’t lose her pace. Through her sneakers came the warmth of the asphalt, the pinpricks where gravel crumbled. In sunshine like this, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s bad roads softened as if to heal themselves. Even the billboard over the traffic circle looked like new; the model in its center grinned with her hands in a foaming sink. Residential buildings around the intersection showed off their many colors on squares of apartments outlined by dark concrete seams. There were flaking pink and peach façades on the units with owners who once had money, navy reclad balconies on the units with owners who had money now. In the gaps between buildings, Petropavlovsk’s hills lit up with yellow leaves.

Olya’s mother was somewhere far north of that foliage. She was on a tourism agency’s helicopter over the tundra. She was repeating arigato in the sun.

Hearing herself, the desperate noise of her shoes slapping, Olya slowed down, felt the light stroke her face, then hopped when she saw her bus rounding the traffic circle and had to dash to catch it.

The bus lurched as she went down the aisle. On either side were rows of people dressed in uniform after uniform: coveralls, scrubs, police dress blues, and blotted military greens. The workday was already coming to a close. Most of the men Olya passed looked like potential kidnappers. Useless, Olya’s mother said about the whispers flying through Petropavlovsk in August, which described someone heavyset, anonymous. Olya’s mother said the police’s witness probably hadn’t seen anyone at all. All that description did was make half the city’s population seem sinister. Olya found a seat and checked her phone.

Diana hadn’t responded. Quickly, Olya typed ???, sent it, locked the screen, and shut the phone between her hands like that would undo her message. To keep herself from anything else, she looked out the window.

“Golden autumn” her mother called this time of year, brief and beautiful as a picture. All the trees on fire. And the air still inviting. More summery, really, than it had been all summer. Way off on the horizon, the Koryaksky volcano was capped with its first snow. Cold weather was coming, but it wasn’t here yet.

By now Diana must’ve figured Olya had seen the picture. Olya crushed the phone between her palms. Were they all over there laughing at her?

This was how it went: the closer you were to someone, the more you lied. With people she hardly knew, Olya could say whatever she wanted: “That hurts” to the nurse giving her an injection, or “Put it back, I can’t pay” to the grocery-store cashier. On her own, Olya was honest. Even more distant classmates couldn’t constrain her—when the kid who sat behind her bragged about getting the highest score on their first exam of the year, Olya acted on the urge to turn away from him. Swiveling in her seat was enough to send a flare up her rib cage. Telling the truth was a thrill not found with her mother, who needed Olya to take merry care of their household, or with Diana, who made Olya measure herself out by request.

Just this morning, before the first bell, Diana had required that Olya be sweeter and softer-voiced. “My head aches when you talk like that,” Diana said, face buried in her arms on her desk. Olya didn’t say Like what? Instead she touched Diana’s shoulder and whispered when their teacher entered the room. Olya was nice even as the words piled up like pebbles in her throat.

Comparing their math homework at lunch, Olya nodded along with Diana’s corrections, though in that moment her best friend was ugly. Smug. As a little girl, Diana had been stunning; Olya, darker, rougher, used to admire the back of Diana’s head in line as they were led from class to class. Now that they were in year eight, Diana was still pale blond and oval-faced, and her mouth was red, bright red, exciting like the lacquer of a new car, but she had a belt of acne across her cheeks. Her eyelashes had faded from startling white to transparency. In one minute she was lovely and in the next she was a ghost.

Olya pried open her clapped hands to look at the phone. Nothing.

During gym this afternoon, they had jogged together like always. Olya made sure their feet matched. She could have run faster, but love meant making compromises. With the people that mattered, Olya did not want to be free.

Traffic gathered under Olya’s window. Lining the street were fiery orange and red leaves, bleached birch trunks, the sooty sides of buildings that had not seen new paint in decades. The bus’s walls were covered in block-letter safety warnings from its Korean manufacturer and fat-marker graffiti from its Russian riders. It rolled her steadily downhill.

They slowed at the outdoor market on the sixth kilometer, where old women sold trinkets and pastries beside the cinema, then turned left toward Gorizont. Olya sank in her seat. Next to her, the plastic window shook in its frame. She hated to picture buzzing Diana’s apartment without an invitation. Didn’t best friends still need to be told they were wanted? She shut her eyes against the day, opened them, and called Diana, but the phone only rang.

She called again. She called again. They were getting close to Diana’s stop. Phone pressed to her cheek, Olya squeezed past people’s knees, showed her pass to the driver, and stepped off on the corner she knew so well. The phone rang in her ear. Olya hung up.

All Olya’s rushing had made her a little too hot. Standing beside the bus shelter, three blocks from Diana’s apartment, she dropped her jacket back a little so the breeze could hit her shoulders.

The buildings in this part of the city seemed cleaner. The neighborhood was called Gorizont—horizon—because it did look, poised above a golden forested gully, like it was welcoming the dawn. Olya usually liked coming here. She refreshed her news feed, now crowded with music videos, and went to the search bar to type in Diana’s name. When the phone buzzed, Olya almost dropped it.

“Hi!” she said.

“This is Valentina Nikolaevna,” said Diana’s mother.

Olya pulled her jacket up. “Hello.”

“Listen, Olya, we can’t have you over,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. No girls’ voices rose in the background. The four of them must have been hanging out in a different room.

Olya squinted up. “I’m actually nearby already,” she said. “I can just stop in.”

Valentina Nikolaevna sighed. “Please go home. You should not be nearby. Isn’t anyone concerned about you? We’re frankly not comfortable with you two contacting each other outside of school anymore.”

“What?” Olya said.

“Diana won’t be able to talk to you outside of school.”

That exact way of speaking Diana’s mother had. Diana had imitated it, crisp, clinical, only this afternoon. Impossible to reconcile what Valentina Nikolaevna was saying with how she was saying it. A couple was walking toward Olya, and to give them room, she stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, where the pavement fell away into grass. “But why?”

Valentina Nikolaevna said, “You’re not a good influence.”

Olya wasn’t a good influence. “How?” she said. “Why?”

One of the girls in that picture with Diana didn’t wear underwear beneath her school skirt and got her first boyfriend in year five. Compare that with Olya, who had never even smoked a whole cigarette. All Olya ever did was attend to Diana, and copy her new music onto Diana’s player, and keep a box under her bed of the cheap translated romance novels Valentina Nikolaevna didn’t allow Diana to read. As a joke, Olya sometimes kicked Diana’s ankles under the kitchen table when she was invited to Diana’s for meals. She copied Diana’s math solutions. That was it—that was all.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. “Your behavior this past month has been frightening. When Diana told me today you suggested going to the center, I could not believe it.”

“But—it’s okay. It’s fine.”

“It certainly is not fine. You know that. And your family structure—the lack of discipline. It’s uncomfortable to watch.”

Olya pressed a hand over her eyes. A dog barked behind one of the clean buildings uphill. “Family structure…you mean my mom?”

“Who else could I mean?” Diana’s mother said.

Olya was well disciplined. By her excellent mother, by the needs of her best friend, and by her own daily efforts, she had actually become so disciplined that her mouth refused to form around the right response, which was that Valentina Nikolaevna was an overbearing bitch. Instead, Olya said, “Don’t talk about her like that.”

“We’re talking about you and my daughter.”

“Because that’s not right. That’s not fair.”

“That’s how it’s going to be. You can see each other in class, under supervision, but please do not bother her anymore outside of that. All right?” Olya could not answer. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Olya said, because that was the only way the conversation was going to end.

“All right,” Diana’s mother said. “Thank you. That’s all.”

After Valentina Nikolaevna hung up, Olya wiped her phone off on her shirt and looked at the smeared blackness of it. Unlocked it. She scrolled to her own mother’s name and stopped.

What would Olya say to her mother? Valentina Nikolaevna thinks we’re a bad influence. And what could be the response? Olya’s mother couldn’t fix what had already gone wrong.

Valentina Nikolaevna had always looked hard at Olya’s family. Since year five, when Olya and Diana started their friendship with nightly phone conversations, the woman had had something to say. An administrator at one of the city’s elementary schools, she took information from student files to use in little strategies. The last time Olya came over, Valentina Nikolaevna had interrupted dinner to point with the television remote to the evening news, which was again going through the endless cycle of the police’s comments and the civilian search party’s plans and the missing girls’ school pictures. “This never could have taken place in Soviet times,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. Diana sipped her soup. “You girls can’t imagine how safe it used to be. No foreigners. No outsiders. Opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake our authorities ever made.” Valentina Nikolaevna put the remote down. “Now we’re overrun with tourists, migrants. Natives. These criminals.”

Olya should have kept her tongue behind her teeth. But she asked, “Weren’t the natives always here?”

Valentina Nikolaevna’s face, the same oval as her daughter’s, tipped up toward the screen. She wore mascara to make her eyes look more alive. “They used to stay in the villages where they belong.”

The sisters were last seen in the center, the reporter repeated, which meant nothing in a city of two hundred thousand people and a peninsula twelve hundred kilometers long. These warnings had already faded to background noise. When the missing girls’ mother appeared on-screen, Valentina Nikolaevna said, “There she is.” She pressed her manicured hand between Olya’s and Diana’s place mats to make sure she had their attention. “It’s awful, isn’t it? Tragedy. That poor woman…it’s only her, no husband, and she works all the time. I read in the younger one’s class records that she didn’t come a single time to meet our teachers.” She glanced at Olya then lifted her chin. “No father, and the mother gone. That’s how such situations happen.”

And Olya did want to say something then, to say how dare you or shut up or I know you’re talking about me, but she didn’t try. Diana would not permit it. Instead Olya stirred the soup in her bowl. Valentina Nikolaevna left her job every day at three; she sat in her renovated kitchen, with her dumb husband stuck at his research in the volcanological institute uphill, and made up her mind that Olya had a flawed family structure—because Olya’s mother had a skill, because she had to travel, because they didn’t have the money to hang around painting their lashes and watching the evening news and fretting over two random little girls.

Olya’s apartment was different. Olya’s mother was fun. When home, Olya’s mother took the best clothes—a Red Army garrison cap, a silk robe bought in Kyoto during student months studying abroad, a leather pencil skirt—out of her closet for the girls to try on. If another friend followed Olya and Diana over, Olya’s mother greeted them in Japanese. Her cheeks rose as she spoke, smiling but trying to hide her smile, so Olya always associated the language’s swinging sounds with her mother’s flickering happiness. A couple months ago, Diana, full of phrases she learned from anime, tried to answer, and Olya’s mother propped one hand on her hip and chattered away. Diana tried for ten seconds to look like she understood. Then her mouth stretched in distress. Olya’s mother smiled and said, “I’m joking, sunshine.”

Silly and clever and trusting and fun. Olya could not ruin that by calling her mother now.

She crouched and hid her face in her elbow. On the other side of the street, trees rustled. Wind was passing through the gully. Cars kept going carelessly by.

Diana was Olya’s friend. Her best friend. They had known each other since the first year of school. No matter how odd Diana could be, distant in one second and overeager the next, Olya loved her, and for all Olya’s rattiness, her fidgeting during lessons, the sharp things she said sometimes to their classmates, Diana loved her back. Diana used to sleep over when Olya’s mother was out of town. She combed out Olya’s hair and braided it into one brown tail that became skinny as a chewed-up pencil at the end. Every so often she borrowed Olya’s T-shirts to wear to school, the less laundered the better, because she enjoyed having their intimacy pressed against her back—and Olya did not influence her to do those things. Diana tried hard with Olya for the same reasons Olya did with her: out of history, out of desire, out of care.

The sleeve of Olya’s jacket was warm from tears. When she straightened out her arm, she found a starburst pattern in the crook of her elbow, the folded place where the fabric had stayed dry.

She stood and texted Diana again. Can you talk? Watched the screen. No response.

Even if Diana were allowed to text right now, she wouldn’t have anything new to say. Another excuse. The missing girls, Olya told her at least once a week, had nothing to do with them: they were little kids, bobbleheaded, the older barely into middle school.

After their last class today, when Olya mentioned going to the city center, Diana had brought them up again. As if that place were responsible for their absence. Olya said, “Can’t you just call home and ask if you can go?” So while the other kids were shoving toward the street, while the teachers were shouting at everyone’s backs, Diana said into her cell, “Okay, Mama. I know she is. I will.”

Diana hung up and Olya said, “You didn’t even try.” Diana shook her head. “I tried,” she said, and Olya said, “You didn’t.” Diana dipped her head so her pupils were covered by blond fringe. She looked albino in those moments. “She told me she doesn’t want us going there. I listen when people tell me what to do,” Diana said. The I was made to sound like an accusation.

I listen, Olya had not said. Olya was an excellent listener.

For example, Olya heard the truth behind what Valentina Nikolaevna was saying. That the missing girls were strangers—they didn’t matter. That Valentina Nikolaevna just hated Olya, hated her mother, for no reason, because they were brave enough to survive on their own.

Another bus chugged to a stop in front of Olya. The wooden board propped in its front window announced its route: this one went not back to Olya’s apartment but toward the other end of the city, the repair yard district and Zavoyko. She touched the pass in her pocket. She could get on it. She could do anything she wanted. She was alone.

So she did. The bus took her down past the police station, the hospital, the lines of flower stands and bootleg DVD vendors, the brand-new grocery store with its apples imported from New Zealand, the lower campus of the pedagogical university. Pressed on all sides by grown-ups, Olya held on to a hanging strap. It was too crowded to take out her phone so she imagined the picture instead. Diana didn’t look good in it. Rounded shoulders and high-contrast whiteheads. A classmate tipping into the frame with her skirt riding up one leg. All of them shiny from the flash.

An old lady down the aisle was staring at Olya. Probably thinking about Olya’s so-called frightening behavior. Olya shook her head so tangles fell forward and hid her face.

When the bus pulled over next, Olya got out, elbowing against late commuters. She emerged from their bodies to find the city center still busy. There was the statue of Lenin, his jacket billowing out and high school boys on their bikes around his feet. The wide municipal building, the brilliant burning hills. The volcano—only its peak was visible from here. To Olya’s right, a pebbled beach sloped into the bay. St. Nicholas Hill stood to the side. Car exhaust mixed with the smells of grease and salt water. The missing sisters had been imbeciles to get themselves lost from this place.

Olya checked her wallet and turned toward the food stands.

“I have eighty-six rubles,” she told a vendor, who nodded toward the posted price list. “Can I get a hot dog, though?”

“That’s a hundred and ten.”

“Can I get a hot dog without the bun?”

The vendor rolled her eyes. “You said eighty-six? A soda and a tea are eighty-five.” Olya slid her money across the counter and took back a coin, a handful of sugar packets, a can of Coca-Cola. After a minute, she got her soft plastic cup of tea. Drinks in her fists, one hot, one cold, she picked her way across the stone-covered shore to a bench.

Cars passed behind her. Tiny waves lapped the rocks. Olya drank the soda first, while she listened to the current and the engines and the back-and-forth shouts of teenagers by the statue. Then she shook three sugar packets in her tea and drank that, too, tipping her head back until the sludge at its bottom slid to her tongue. Sweet grit in her throat.

People thinned out on the sidewalk. Birds swooped toward the hill. Ahead of Olya, the water twinkled with sunlight. The rows of cranes farther down the coast were motionless. Their operators were long home, with family, with friends.

The phone lay heavy in Olya’s jacket pocket. She did not want to check her news feed. She might discover more pictures of the four of them, temples pressed together, hands cupping each other’s faces, and the captions underneath: best friends! More of a threat than any stranger.

Though there might be no new posts at all. After today’s conversation, maybe Valentina Nikolaevna had taken Diana’s cell away. Maybe she kicked the other girls out. Maybe Diana, hearing what her mother had said, was going to cry all night.

And tomorrow before their first class, Olya would ask, “Why did you let her talk to me that way?”

Diana would say, “I couldn’t stop her. She grabbed my phone and pushed me away while she called.”

“You never stop her. She’s sick in the head.” Olya would have permission to speak plainly because she’d been treated so wrong, and Diana, after years of pretending she had the ideal family, would finally have to agree.

Together they would come up with a plan. Diana could say she joined a club so they would have two afternoons a week to go to Olya’s apartment. No one else would have to know. Olya’s mother would not tell. Olya ripped open another sugar packet, poured the crystals into her mouth, and chewed. The sugar dissolved on her teeth. The club could be called the Everybody Hates Valentina Nikolaevna Group or Escape from Mother Monster.

Swallowing, Olya brushed her trash onto the ground and lay across the bench.

The bay made such soft noises. Its ripples appeared a meter or two from shore. Far across the water was the dark opposite coast, the lights that marked where nuclear submarines docked, the layers of mountains that grew paler all the way to the sky.

The club could be called the Olya-All-Alone Brigade because Olya knew Diana wouldn’t do it. She knew that. No club was happening. When it came to love and lying, Diana put Olya last every time.

The yellow in the sky was leaching into the ground. Lights across the bay flickered. Behind Olya, traffic passed without a break.

Her temples grew wet and cold from tears. Olya wiped her eyes. Someone’s big hand closed around her right ankle and she sat up, terrified.

The detective from the news stood at the foot of her bench. He was tall, wearing sunglasses, imposing in his uniform. He let go of Olya’s ankle and said, “Alyona Golosovskaya?”

Olya drew her legs back. Her breath was quick. “Do I look like that girl to you?”

“Surname, name, and patronymic.”

“Petrova, Olga Igorevna.” Was this how the police conducted their search? Bench by bench where the girls were last seen? No wonder the Golosovskayas were still missing. “I’m older than they are. I’m in year eight. And I don’t look anything like her.” Olya wiped her face with both hands before staring up at the detective’s sunglasses to show him. The Golosovskaya girls had been tiny things, small-boned and fragile. Not teenage rats. Not Olya.

The detective evaluated her, then waved in dismissal toward the street. A police car, engine humming, sat at the curb. “How long have you been here?”

“Maybe an hour.”

“Have you seen anyone suspicious?”

“I haven’t seen anyone. I’ve seen you, that’s all.”

“No one else approached you? No man in a dark car?” Olya shook her head. “Don’t roll your eyes while I ask you questions,” the detective said.

“I didn’t.” It felt surprisingly good to lie to a stranger.

“I hope you understand the risk of being out here by yourself.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Olya said. She smiled up at him. “My mother just got out of work. She’s coming to get me—she should be here any minute.” On her lap, under her folded hands, her phone vibrated. Olya started. “That’s actually her calling right now.”

The detective shifted his feet. Though his glasses and clothes made him look authoritative, his face behind them was smooth, young. He pulled a business card from his back pocket and handed it to her: LT. NIKOLAI DANILOVICH RYAKHOVSKY. A number below and a shield embossed in the corner. “Call if there’s anything you want to tell me,” he said. “And let your mother know when she arrives that this is no place to leave a little girl.”

Nodding, Olya lifted the phone to her ear. “Hi, Mama. Yeah? Soon? Great.” She watched the detective leave, rocks shifting under his weight. The phone kept vibrating against her cheekbone.

After the detective climbed into his car, Olya lay back down. She looked at the glowing screen. One missed call from Diana. Unlocking her phone, Olya cleared the notification, opened their text message thread, and waited for Diana’s explanation to arrive. She pictured its letters, its sloppy dashes. Nothing appeared. She locked her screen again.

To tell the truth, Olya did not want to call back.

Olya all alone out here. She liked it more than she knew she would.

In the sunset, the pebbles on the shore shifted their color from black and gray to honey. Amber. They were brightening. Soon the stones would glow, and the water in the bay was going to turn pink and orange. Spectacular in the city center, where people feared to have their pretty daughters go.

When Olya turned her head on the bench slats, electric white and yellow lines appeared in her peripheral vision. Her hair had caught the light. Her jacket, too, was sun-soaked. Saturated.

Golden Olya. She concentrated on that light in the air. Even if Diana came to the apartment to explain things or arrived at school with a written apology from Valentina Nikolaevna, or if Olya’s mother, home next week, announced she found a new job, well salaried, teaching grammar in the university, so she would never have to leave for long again, or if the kidnapped girls returned, or if the police stopped patrolling, or if Petropavlovsk went back to normal…even if all of that happened, Olya wouldn’t tell them how the colors changed here. She would share nothing. They would never find out they missed the most beautiful day of autumn, while Olya, alone, had been in its very center.

How good Olya would feel to keep this secret. How safe it was inside herself.