I was in love with a classmate named Artem when I was in first grade. He had a beautiful, kind mother. Whenever she bent down to talk to me, her thick, wheat-colored hair would fall forward. And she always wore heels, which completely won me over. One of Artem’s legs was significantly shorter than the other, so one of the heels on his shoe had to be cut down.
In the early grades, he gave me a red carnation for International Women’s Day. In fifth grade, it became obvious that my sister and I stood out quite a lot at school. Because we were poor and couldn’t afford the things everyone else wore, we wore clothes our relatives sent us from America. Our classmates were jealous. Once, our grandmother was called in to speak with a teacher because the mother of a classmate named Vika had complained that the Ogneva sisters were showing off and wearing colored jeans that she couldn’t afford to buy for her daughter, who was jealous of us.
And yet, at the time, I dreamed of having jeans with the worn patches on the butt and thighs that everyone in town was wearing, but my mother couldn’t afford to buy them for me because of our financial problems.
We were well-read, and my sister and I didn’t want to submit to the unfair rules at school, so we came to be regarded as strange. In fifth grade, during recess, I slipped a little box into Artem’s backpack. Inside, I put a beautiful stone and a note saying that it should be a piece of my heart and that he should always keep it with him. I hoped he would find it in his backpack when he got home, but he found it before recess was over. He read the note, laughed, and threw the stone out the open window.
One day, my grandmother came home from a walk in the park with her coat covered in spit. She said they had run into Artem and a friend of his on the street. Because my grandparents were walking through the park with my aunt, who had a severe disability, Artem decided it would be funny to follow them around and spit at them.
At school, we started being treated as a disgrace because there was a severely disabled person in our family. We stopped talking to each other.
In high school, that idiot started pursuing my friend. She decided to fall out with me because she was convinced that I still cared about him and that I would get in the way of their happiness. Ah, women.
He treated her demonstratively horribly, and she put up with it. I remember that once he even spat near her while she stood there, blushing, whispering something tender to him. One day, his friend came up to me and explained that Artem was only trying to make me jealous. I told him that I didn’t play games and wished them happiness.
At the beginning of tenth grade, exhausted by the bullying from my classmates and teachers, I stopped going to school and started learning to drive a beat-up Volga with my uncle on an empty lot. A little later, my sister joined me because she couldn’t stand what was happening at school either.
Artem started calling our home phone and crowing into the receiver. He mostly did it at night. My grandfather was usually the one who answered the phone.
After a few years, he started calling and speaking normally. My uncle would answer because I refused to talk to him. He would ask what he could do to make amends and offered me chocolate and bouquets of flowers. I told him that nothing would help.
I ran into him a few times in town over the years, and he would give me a cowardly little smile as he walked past.
At school, he gave me a nickname that stuck with me: "Mop." It was because one day, at the end of a lesson, I let down my tight low ponytail and my thick hair spilled beautifully over my shoulders.
As an adult, he married a girl who looked like a model. He posted a photo of the two of them on vacation by the sea. In the photo, he was holding her by the neck as he hugged her, so tightly that it looked as though he was about to throw her overboard.
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