I knew it was him even before I saw his crouched figure.
I came upon a vague silhouette of a male high school student, squatting beside a few bushes that grew off to the side of the asphalted sidewalk. He wore the same uniform as me. It was midday and so I deduced he was skipping classes, just like me. A wisp of smoke wafted up into the air above his head and dissipated before it hit my nostrils.
You didn't have to second-guess what Yuri Karamov was doing. He was coughing in that tell-tale way of new smokers. The sound bounced off the concrete walls of the tunnel, and reached my ears before I'd even set eyes on him.
His profile was extended to me as I approached him. Although the tunnel reverberated the echoes of my footsteps, he didn't glance my way until I was close enough to inhale a lungful of the smoke from his mouth.
He looked up at my towering figure.
- Konstantin? He hid the cigarette out of sight, a sheepishly smile decorating his face. He sounded cheery, even slightly apologetic.
I cocked an eyebrow at him.
Yuri Karamov had cut his hair into a buzz cut some years back and had kept it in that style ever since. It pronounced the angles of his face; his sharp jawline, prominent cheekbones, and thick eyebrowsâone of which was slashed through by a precise cut. Over the years his face had shed some of its baby fat and what stared back at me now was the face of a sixteen year old young man.
I contemplated my next move. I knew I should have ignored him and gotten along with my business, but something about his smile made me reconsider.
I shook my head at him.
- You're doing it wrong, I said.
His eyebrows drew together in response. I squatted comfortably beside him, despite it being the first time I had spoken to him since we graduated middle school.
I motioned for him to pass me the cigarette. He did, hesitantly, only for his eyes to widen in surprise when I placed it to my lips.
- Waitâ
I took a small inhalation of the toxic stick. The smoke burnt its way down to my lungs. I blew it out through the side of my mouth. Yuri's expression was suspended in disbelief.
- Where did youâ
- You need to hold against your reflex to cough, I said, cutting him off.
- Fill your mouth first, and then slowly guide it down. It's easier in the beginning if you don't pull on it all at once.
I demonstrated one more time. -Do it in steps, I said while exhaling. I had to take my own advice and stifle the urge to cough as I pushed every last trace of toxic air out of my lungs. My eyes watered. I handed the cigarette back to him, and fisted my hands, aware that they had started to shake.
His blue gaze scorched the side of my face as I got up.
- You know...this, Yuri said, holding the cigarette up to me, - I'm not serious. I don't actually plan on finishing it.
As if to prove his intent to me, he put out the flaming stick on the ground beside his feet.
- I was just bored.
I held his gaze. - I don't really care, I said. - Whether you smoke it or not. Whether you're skipping class or not. Just...Don't tell any of the professors you saw me when they catch you.
I heard Yuri get up at the same time I turned my back to him and started to walk away. Two long strides, and I felt his presence stand in the shadows of my heels.
- I'm not planning on getting caught, he said.
I cast him a glance over my shoulder.
- Really? I couldn't have faked my disinterest if I so tried. Nothing about the sight of seeing Yuri skipping class and smoking a couple of hundred meters outside of the school entrance surprised me or made me want to engage in a conversation with him.
- Where are you headed off to?
His words robbed the poise and posture from my spine. My step faltered. Sure, I had broken my longstanding rule of ignoring Karamov like the plague, but what right did it give him to suddenly start inquiring about my life? It wasn't the sort of thing we did. The 'we' who hadn't spoken a word to each other in over a year and a half.
The unwritten rules which upheld our coexistence mandated that we stay as far away from each other as possible. If I saw Yuri in the hallways at schoolâwhich I rarely didâI didn't even so much as give him a nod of acknowledgment.
Four years, and no more than obligatory words had passed between us. And now, this.
How easy turning around and addressing his question seemed in my mind, but the thoughts refused to translate into action. I couldn't do it. What would I even say? I no longer knew how to speak to him in a civilized manner. So, out of cowardice, I picked up my steps and put more distance between us.
- I saw you in one of Katka's magazines! Yuri called after me, - I hear you're a model now.
It was neither a statement nor a question.
My steps gradually faltered until they came to a complete stop. I turned around and met his eyes, filled with mirth. His words were so out of place the only way I could explain them in their right context was to assume he was mocking me. Why else would he have mentioned that of all things?
Deep down I knew what they said about me, the Flatlanders. I pretended not to hear the rumours in the hallways, but I did. And if I had heard them, then surely Yuri could be no stranger to them.
We were grown now and our small world had unwound like a skein of yarn, revealing that which words were unable to explain. Things that we had started to become aware of, but which lay entirely out of our control. The distance between us had never felt vaster. I was staring at a stranger, and so was he. It was this realisation, more than anything else, that lit my insides like a fuse. A volcanic anger started in my throat and frothed down to my fingertips.
- Tell your friend, Millin, to stay away from Adriana, okay? I hissed at him, - And don't ever speak to me again.
Yuri laughed a short burst of air in surprise.
- Ru.
He was smiling.
- We haven't spoken in so long, do you perhaps find me...repulsive?
- What's your deal? I asked, stepping closer. My hands fisted by my sides. I felt my blood pressure skyrocket. The rush went straight to my head. There was a time when I would have shaken like a leaf at the thought of physical confrontation. But I had grown up. A new part of me welcomed the anger, the violence that was like a constant presence tingling on my fingertips. I straightened my back and tried my best to stare him down despite the differences in our height. I let Yuri know that I wouldn't back down if he kept up his sarcastic undertone.
The air was practically crackling between us when he defused the situation by saying, - My mother still asks about you sometimes.
It was a low blow, knowing, as he did, the guilt I felt towards his family for suddenly treating them like strangers.
I froze up.
His smile was held in place with the least amount of force from his facial muscles. His eyes searched mine. I built walls around myself; four white walls, shutting out the slow release of emotions that seeped into my chest.
My smile was strained, barely there when I said, - Tell her about my well-wishes.
Yuri nodded. He put his hands in his pockets and kicked a patch of rubble on the side of the pavement.
- Ru, about that day...
I didn't want to hear the rest of it. I turned on my heel and walked away. Yuri didn't call after me again, nor had I expected him to. We weren't that close anymore. We hadn't been in years.
It was better this way.
Even if Yuri Karamov had been about to fall to his knees and apologise to me (something I doubt he would have done), I don't think I knew how to forgive him. Years of my time and energy had been dedicated to blocking out his existence. I didn't know how to let him in without an onslaught of repressed emotions drowning me. The mere thought induced a panic attack.
I wasn't the same person as I had been at eleven. I didn't trust as easily anymore. I wasn't nice. I wasn't as desperate for a friend as I had been back then. Besides, we had grown into polar opposite people. We didn't have much in common to begin with, but there was even less of a common ground now.
Yuri Karamov seemed to drift about on a light cloud, breezing his way through life. He was rarely ever in school. Our professors cut him some slack since he passed all of his exams, but he was a hair's breadth from getting expelled, and he walked the hallways like he knew it. He had some intellectual capabilities, his professors understood that, but they did their head in trying to understand why the boy couldn't be kept in a classroom.
I wasn't all that surprised when, some weeks prior, Yuri had placed in the top thirty of 200 students on our first midterm exams, but his teachers were. To some degree, it gave him the appearance of an enigma when in reality Yuri Karamov wasn't all that complicated. He was just under stimulated in school, just like I had been. If anything, it made our peers idolize him where they had mocked him before. Not that Yuri cared about changing their perception. Everything, from the way he refused to tighten his uniform tie to how he walked and talked, was a middle finger to the institution of higher education.
He was an easy going, boisterousâat times, even a bit of an obnoxious teenager in high school. He and Millin could most often be seen in different cafés downtown after school, with a rotating selection of girls. There were few and far between who could draw the attention of both Brommian and Arash, Yuri and Millin both possessed that ability.
Karamov lived his life uncomplicated, without a sense of duty or an obligation to anyone but himself. Whereas I was up to my chin, barely able to keep myself afloat against the currents of school work, and the responsibilities placed on me as a brevidije mal.
Last year, a month before my fourteenth birthday, Eline had dragged me off to Rujga with her. I had visited my mother while she met people for a networking event. It wasn't something we did often, me and Eline, and I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed getting away from Ljerumlup, and my stuffy room.
When Eline came to pick me up, she made a round-trip to her friend's studio apartment. Eline, like my mother, had grown up in Rujga, and every time she returned she got a slight dialect. I overheard her talking with her friend, who I later found out was an agent for a model agency. The older female had been smitten with me and had tried to convince Eline to sign me up to do a campaign shoot for a sports brand. Two glasses of wine later, and I heard how Eline caved and agreed to talk to my father about it.
Eline mentioned it to me on the train home to Dronesk. She explained what I would have to take photos, and film a short commercial film with other kids my age. I shrugged at the prospect, as she probably knew I would have. I was apathetic, nothing held my interest.
Eline, through a miracle, convinced my father to go along with it. To this day, I still believe that she must have put something in his food. My father had never been as docile as he was when he'd agreed to send me off to Rujga to partake in my first modelling opportunity. This, despite how often he talked about the moral degeneracy of city folk.
I didn't think I was cut out for modelling, and initially I wasn't. I was stiff and I harboured an innate will to appease the staff and the photographer. However I turned and twisted, and followed their orders, it never felt natural because, in the back of my mind, I was envisioning myself through the lens whilst trying to predict what the photographer wanted to see. I had no confidence in my own ability. The girls and boys I was working alongside with had been modelling since they could walk, and they had this professionalism about them that made me feel unseen and unwanted in comparison.
I don't know why I continued to keep at it. In the end, although it wasn't anything I was jumping up and down to do, it was better than staying at home. Rujga was a welcoming transition away from the near-empty residence I had grown up in. I got to see my mother and my half-brother more than twice a year, and I enjoyed staying in their apartment in the inner-city. I enjoyed the vibrancy of city life; the people, the traffic, even their perculiar dialect.
Soon enough I started to forget how lonely I was in Dronesk. I threw myself head first into the modelling world. I got involved in castings, walk-ins, fittings, and catalogue and campaign shoots. There were times I had to stay in Rujga four days out of the week. I relished those days because the chances of bumping into a certain blue-eyed devil back home in Dronesk were zero.
I was so wrapped up in my profession, that it didn't become apparent to me that I was lacking a social life until I started noticing more and more of my classmates going out on dates, and to house-parties, and sitting at cafés after school with friends. It had become a 'thing' to do at school, but by the time I realised it, my peers had already formed groups and cliques.
We were on the threshold to adulthood, an age when dating and becoming couples separated you into two categories; desirable and undesirable. Cool and uncool. Which inevitably ended up ruling the social hierarchy at school.
I put myself in the undesirable category as soon as I had caught on to what was happening. It was easier that way. I wasn't interested in the girls at school. When word got around that I was modelling, several of them approached me. At the time, I told myself that I had to focus on school because my father had plans on sending me abroad after high school (yet another stress-inducing responsibility to fulfil). In retrospect, it sounds ridiculous that I, for so long, kept insisting that that was the reason I turned them down. I spun myself in a cocoon of white lies which lulled me into conformity and denial.
I thought about kissing girls and going on dates with them, but there was no romantic element attached to those thoughts. I examined them much like a physician would a surgical wound. It aroused my interest and I wanted to try it, but I wasn't in love. If I tried to push those thoughts away, I found that they did so with leniency and didn't resurface, unless I went digging for them.
I suspected a part of me must have gotten damaged from my anticlimactic first kiss. Something was wrong with me. I couldn't pinpoint what, but I knew it. Why else wouldn't I have had multiple crushes like all the guys in my class? Why did I feel so disconnected to my peers when they talked about who was prettier than who, and how far they had gone with so and so?
Yuri Karamov hadn't suffered nearly as much as I had. It was clear that he had moved on. He had gotten new friends; he had gone out with multiple girls. His life was uncomplicated. He had won life's lottery, whilst all I had fuelling my movements were the coping mechanism I had set in place to deal with the trauma of what had happened four years ago.
I was falling behind in my social life. I found little enjoyment in school, or at home. Deep down I was miserable, and I blamed him for it. Whenever I thought of what he had robbed of me, I had to fight the urge to punch through a wall. There was a permanent scream lodged in my windpipe that wanted out.
I had no intention of forgiving Yuri Karamov. On the contrary, I made sure to curse his name and spit it on the ground as I walked away from him.