#slavoeofimagination

A tile of dark clothing wrapped around a rail of a boy drops into the seat next to him. It’s the first pair discussion that hasn’t filled Stan with dread since September. In the sole class he has without a single friend in it, the prospect of talking literature with people who would shove or strike or stare right through him if they could, has never appealed. Sulky, with unsettling dark eyes, and an air of gloom he’s only heard discussed in a low voice once or twice, Boris  Pavlikovsky  is the best Stan could hope for in a paired discussion.  

He looks like he’s killed a man, and Richie wasn’t sure he hadn’t, but he’s yet to call him anything technically classed as hate speech. He’ll take his chances, he supposes. He was a loser, and people had to take a chance on him, too, at the end of the day.  Put into the world what you want out of it,  and all those things that feel wise when no one is making it hard come to mind.  

It’s the kid’s first day, his book so new he can barely have cracked it open. “Odyssey.” His voice is disarming, an accent Stan can’t place, and it has a bounce to it that makes him want to hear more as he continues. “Is Greek gods and men with swords, yes?”  

He supposes helping the kid catch up isn’t the worst way this could have gone. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s--uh, after the Trojan war.”  

Boris nods, thinking a moment. “Know a little about Greek gods. Read books about it in New Guinea.” Stan doesn’t have time to ask about that, because his face is changing, sharp brows  raised  and he leans forward from his slouch.  

“In English, you have word, ‘panic,’ yes ?”-- Stan nods, but Boris is already on a roll--“Is Greek word. Or was. Used to believe their goat-god Pan would creep along forest and leap out at you.” He pauses  onl  for a second, and when he speaks  again  he lurches forward a little. “Wah!”  

Stan feels  really stupid  for the jump he makes, and he should have seen it coming. Despite himself, he’s laughing through the start, and Boris’s wan face has cracked a smile, reaching his dark eyes and giving them a shine that makes him seem less like a knife.  

“Pan can leave me the hell alone.”  

Boris nods. “You seem nervous. You shake like  k olibri .” Stan can’t, for the life of him, guess what that is, but he’s imagining a chihuahua or a leaf or something nervously vibrating through its fragile life. Fair enough, he supposes. “Whatever is scaring you, make it think you can bite deeper. Punch harder.”  

“I don’t think that’s my—uh, skillset.”  

A shrug. “Doesn’t have to be true. Just have to stand up tall enough.” A beat as he looks at his own slouch, feat dripping from the edge of the chair, back barely touching anything. He’s as close to supine as a person can be in a school chair. “Or whatever’s scary.”  

Stan smiles a little at that again. He’s the weirdest person he’s ever met, and Stan understands, now, why Captain Kirk approaches each new planet of aliens with a wonder and curiosity, rather than sinking away or bracing for a blow. Whatever distant star breathed Boris  Pavlikovsky  into his orbit, he wants to wish on it, ask if to keep them in this strange little moment.  

“So,” he clears his throat. “Do you, uh, know the Trojan war? This is after it. Odysseus is trying to get home.”  

“I know Trojan war,” Boris nods. “King of Greece had tiny prick. His woman got sick of it and went away. Instead of drinking or kicking other man’s kneecaps himself, he starts war.” A snort. “Stupid man. Plenty of other women with lower standards out there.”  

In this manner, AP English, one a slog of a dead-eyed teacher and students just as unmotivated became something Stan looked forward to.  

He caught himself counting down the minutes through algebra, shuffling quicker through the hallways, knowing when he came through those doors, he had a seat saved, Boris’s beaten-up backpack with a smattering of keychains thrown into the seat next to him, while he cleaned his nails with a pencil, or doodling in his books. Hummingbirds, and hammers-and-sickles, and notes in Cyrillic, strange birds (Stan wants so badly to ask about them), pairs of glasses, pills, cigarettes and half-finished figures with curly hair, letters that could be initials or something from his brain.  

“Kolibri,” the greeting is always the same, the slack form of a boy perking up some, dragging his backpack from the chair. Stan wonders if he even remembers his name, because he uses nothing else but Kolibri.  

When he asked that it meant, Boris simply gestured. “Is what you are,” he says. “Don’t know word in English,” he confesses by way of explanation. Stan’s face must read more legibly than he likes, because Boris told me once, “Don’t worry, is good thing. They’re cute little fuckers.”  

He feels his face turn its heat dials up, and never asks what it means again, not sure he can hear the word ‘cute’ from his lips again and survive the blow.  

As the weeks ticked by, Stan might have expected the pull he had to lessen, for something ordinary to pull away the almost magical veneer he carried. Even if Boris didn’t make him  laugh, or  say things that would stick in his mind at night, or light up any time Stan brought his own thoughts to their stolen back-of-class conversations, it wouldn’t have been true. The more they learned about one another, the tighter the pull between them became.  

Boris, in so many ways, was a baffling creature, one Stan would never have sought. He did homework in class, ten minutes before he handed in crumpled paper next to Stan’s neat, paper-clipped stacks. He was crass, words Stan’s mother would wash his mouth for passing his lips daily. He was a communist, or something like it, which scandalized Stan more than he would have guessed. On one memorable Socratic seminar, he had railed against systems that made people poor, made families property, ruined the earth—he’d dragged out a beaten copy of Thoreau to prove a point.  

Stan found himself backing it—after all, if he learned one thing from his father, it was that everything should be questioned, examined, considered. He went down these rabbit holes to enthusiastic prodding from Boris, and the more they were paired, the more the two of them took schoolbooks to a level where they almost felt real.  It became a time to leave his shell, and Boris let him get out of his head and into a moment, private despite a class full of people who didn’t get either of them. Mrs.  Aernis  gave up on separating them, since Boris didn’t shout with Stan to contain him, and Stan didn’t melt into the wall with Boris to encourage him.  

It wasn’t until a rainy presentation day, that he realized it went both ways. He watched Boris’s eyes light up when Stan presented on the reason the Odyssey proved that people shouldn’t have an endgame, that Ithaca would be changed without him after years of chasing, that living life with an end in mine can stifle the moment and create sea monsters and storms where they weren’t. Boris had sat there, lips slightly parted, and staring at him like Galileo at Saturn’s rings, and Stan stumbles over his conclusion, once he notices.  

--  

He starts finding notes slipped into his locker. Postcards, each other a photo of a hummingbird on them, scrawled with something random each time.  

The first one has a quote from the Odyssey on it, in a sharp hand that  he’s seen in notes passed in the middle of droning conversations, inane things said by classmates neither of them will bother listening to .  It’s a hand that learned to write in a different alphabet, that knew what it was doing, but still had the character of a tongue far away.  

The next, simply “This is  kolibri .  Your word for it is stupid,” with a word (kolibri?) in cyrillic, and an arrow to the front side. It makes Stan’s heart lurch a little.  

Cute little fuckers.  Boris knew he liked to watch birds, and  all of  those hummingbirds in his notebook flashed before Stan’s eyes. Stan would never  guess that Boris  Pavlikovsky  thought about him half so much as he haunted Stanley Uris when he wasn’t there .  But Boris, with his hummingbirds and postcards, had been braver about it than Stanley would have dared. Derry isn’t a place where you can give away too much about yourself. He’s spent ages worrying that someone will somehow see the way his heart speeds up when Boris hands him a note, that if he just gets too close, they’ll both end up bloodied.  

This note shows an abandon, a lack of fear that he wishes he could take into himself.  

The notes keep coming, sometimes quotes from Tolstoy with translations by hands, sometimes the lyric to a song, sometimes something absurd. Without fail, every Thursday, Stan has a new bird.  

--  

Somehow, Room 211 became its own little world. Outside of it, Stan could count the ways they interacted on one hand, for all the times they spoke for an hour he wished would never end.  

At lunch, they shared glances across the  lunch room , where Boris sat slumped in a corner, thick volume in Russian on his lap, while Stanley  sat with the Losers, thread between eyes cut eventually, by something absurd from Richie’s mouth, making him laugh.  

It was the same in the library, catching a glimpse of black hair to match an oversized blazer, and he always wants to catch him, say something, but he’s held back once, Bill softly whispering how weird that guy is, what a bad feeling he gives him, that he’s probably bad news. Stan loses the nerve to approach him where people might see.  

There was one trick of Fate, or some  maniuplator  of circumstance, that turned the winds, and blew Stan and Boris to one another and away from the schoolbuilding.  

One day, Stan’s caught between   Hockstetter  and the wall of his locker, timing working against him in a busy hallway after the final bell of the day. In what could have been ugly, there’s a thin body rushing in, grabbing  Hockstetter’s  hand by the wrist as it was raised, pulling it back and around until the boy crumples, a near-miss  with a fractured femur. Stan will have dreams about it going differently, imagining the snap, maybe a spurt of blood. The way Boris had moved showed an ease in the art of force that chilled him, but gave him feelings he would admit only to his dirtied bedsheets.  

“Told you, Kolibri. Don’t have to be big. Just scary,” he’s almost smiling, eyes a little wild with confidence and something darker. “You hurt?”  

Stan shakes his head. He’s a little shaken, more by this wisp of a boy’s strike taking down someone who had seemed, in the moment, a giant. “I’m good.”  

“Good.” A comforting arm around his shoulder. “You want ice cream, Kolibri? You need ice cream.”  

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”  

He didn’t think, when he agreed, that Boris would be stuffing a box of  klondikes  under the side of his shirt, throwing in a few bottles of beer liberated from their box, and strolling out of the corner store like it was nothing. His long fingers were light, slighting everything free from the kinds of things that set off alarms.  

“You’re not going to—pay for those?”  

He laughs, head tossing back, and claps Stan on the back. “Kolibri, life is hell. Is bad enough without paying capitalist pigs for simple pleasures, eh?”  

Stan’s brows knit. “But--what if we get caught? Do you know what kind of trouble we’ll be in?” He’s more afraid of Boris, tenuous and aloof, going down, than he is upset at a few loose ice cream bars or bottles. Even so, the anxiety knots his stomach, he’s already seeing Boris in handcuffs, knowing he’ll talk back to the officers, knowing they will hurt him for that, for his foreign accent, for the whispers that he’s a freak. He knows the  Toziers  have a connection to him, that they’ll be called, and for all Maggie’s goodness, she’ll have no idea what to do.  

Boris takes hold of both Stan’s shoulders, looks him level in the eye. “Kolibri, will be fine. Can take care of myself. If things go wrong, drop goods and leave. Can replace them.”  

Stan’s breathing is uneasy, and he nods, but if he’s convincing at all, Boris is all the wiser.  

“Nothing will happen to you, yeah?  I know what to do.”  

Stan doesn’t have the words to say that it isn’t himself he worries for. But he puts his faith in this boy, who had nearly broken a bone to save him.  

He doesn’t tell his mom that  the  boy he brought home smokes, that there’s stolen beer in his backpack, that he’s not a virgin and has said so at more than one turn. In fact, as far as Mrs. Uris knows, Boris is a foreign exchange student from the Ukraine, who absolutely loves America.  

He’s gracious enough, however. The warm food on the table he  savours  and compliments, skinny body packing away second helpings of everything, keeps his head bowed through Rabbi Uris’s prayer before eating, smiles at landscapes on the wall and talks about the time he’d seen the same beach in Australia that decorated the sitting room.  

In Stan’s bedroom, Boris cracks open the beers, and Stan doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s his first. It tastes like plastic and bread, but after a few sips, the aftertaste is almost spicy. He wants to throw up, and he wants to have ten more.  

They were open, in the way only people with nothing to lose could be.  “My dad still hasn’t forgiven me for my Bar Mitzvah speech,” he found it spilling out. “We’re close, don’t get me wrong. I love him, but I think—he'll never get over the being the Rabbi whose son dropped his mic and saying ‘fuck’ in front of a whole congregation.” A wry smile. “Most badass I’ve ever felt.”  

“You’re not your father. Could not be. Don’t beat yourself so much for it—is probably good thing.”  

“I doubt he agrees.”  

A shrug. “If he forgives, accepts even what he doesn’t get? Is good father. If not? To hell with him.”  

Stan thinks for a moment. “I guess he will. He’s weird about stuff, but he’s not angry. I can’t remember being yelled at in the past year.” He sees Boris smile, a little sad, and a hand reaches over, briefly cuffing Stan’s shoulder.  

“Good man, then. You are lucky.”  

“I guess. I mean, he’s my dad.” A shrug. “He should, you know?” Stan knew there were bad parents in the world—knew people who lived with them daily. He’d never particularly questioned what it was he had, the ways he could be lacking.  “You know?” Boris is in thought for a moment, eyes cast down to his third ice cream sandwich.  

“My dad’s in Australia. Or was, last I knew.”  

“When does he get back?”  

“Back? Is no ‘back,’ Kolibri. Ditched him in Vegas.  Big fight,  almost died. Everything else went to shit.” He shakes his head. “Got brought here by social worker. Ward of state,” he raises his fingers in quotes. Boris says nothing more about it, and his voice is flatter than he has ever heard it.  Emotionless, almost, the way he talks about the plot of movies he watched years ago, he shrugs away his own scars.  

Stan realized, though he couldn’t articulate at the time; he wasn’t lucky, because everyone should have a family who, despite whatever ways they broke apart or didn’t grasp one another, pulled one another up, not tearing them down. People needed someone to go home to, not shrink from.  

“Fuck.” His heart’s going faster. “I’m sorry. Oh god.”  

“Life. Is what it is, huh?” Boris takes a huge bite of his sweet, cheeks bulging with effort to hold it all as he chews. “By the way, Kolibri, is silent as grave  in  here . What music you like?”  

“I have a lot. I try and switch it up, you know?”  

“What,” he swallows, clearer afterwards, “is favorite today?”  

Stan plays a record for him, and they lay on the floor of his bedroom listening. As Stan explains his favorite song, a hand reaches out,  slopply  taking his as the singer croons feeling like Jesus’ son on heroin.  

“I’ve taken hit before. Am more of an upper kind of man. Cocaine maybe.”  

“You take drugs?” Stan raises his head above the floor to look over him.  

“When I have some to spare. More useful to sell, though. Everyone is best friend. Is why it was a shame to twist the arm of Hockstetter.” He’s looking at the ceiling, free hand reaching for his beer, taking a drink.  

“So why did you do it?”