made herself calm and was able to press her finger over the door-bell forthright.
“Hi!” she blurted out as soon as she saw his face in front of her after he had opened the door.
“Hi!” he answered falling into the depth of her eyes. Time came to a sudden standstill. Both of them seemed to fall out of the reality going on beyond the world and time. But the enchanting moment was ruined.
“Hi, Lika!” Emily shouted from the corridor, “Why have you stuck there?”
Vlad and Lika smiled at each other.
“Why are we standing here, indeed? Come in, please,” said Vlad and took Lika’s hand in his one, “Make yourself at home.”
Along a wide corridor they went into a large bright lighted room. There were seven people there – most of them were their classmates. Vlad’s best friends, Oleg and Malik, were talking with Ariana and Angelica, pretty girls from another eleventh grade. Anton, another classmate, was speaking on the phone aside. Vlad brought Lika closer to the armchair in which a lad looking a bit older than themselves was sitting. He might be nineteen or twenty. He had an attractive and very kind face, but his big eloquent eyes were hiding sadness. When Vlad introduced Lika to the guy, he smiled, but his smile was full of rue as well. Lika was about to recognize that smile when Vlad said that Sergei (that was the guy’s name) was his cousin. It made her recollect the fact that Vlad’s aunt who must have been Sergei’s mother died in winter. Lika smiled in return. She did not know why she felt some kind of solidarity with him. That was, probably, because she, having grown up without a mother, was able to feel the same pain as he did. And though her mother was alive, she sometimes forgot about it.
They had a little chat with Emily who had just come up to them. Emily was beautiful, tall, and slender. Her eyes were so black that you could not say whether they had pupils or not. The strange magnetism they disseminated embraced and hypnotized everyone who dared look into their depth. And at the moment, she was trying to catch Sergei’s eye to enchant him with her magic.
Somebody turned on the music. It made it difficult to keep on talking. Ariana and Angelica stepped into the centre of the room coiling in a dance. Somebody drew the curtains, and it got almost dark. The girls’ bodies turned into a weird game of light, shades, and crimson glitters, which was added by Angelica’s bright dress.
As Lika did not want to dance, Vlad offered to show her around the flat. She was happy to leave the room, which was trembling with the loud rhythms she had never been fond of.
Vlad’s room surprised her with its orderliness and minimalism. There was just a sofa, a wardrobe and a table with an armchair near it. On the window sill two flowers in pots seemed to look out into the yard as if they felt lonely in the almost empty room. A photo frame on the table looked lonely as well. Lika picked it up to view it more closely. It was definitely well-turned. A twelve-year-old Vlad and his parents, a happy smiling family, were looking at her from the picture. Love, bliss, warmth and something else, which seemed to be quite familiar but completely forgotten, emanated from the photo and made Lika’s heart ache. She remembered her mother. She often called her to mind but did not allow herself to think about her for too long. So this time she did the same sweeping those thoughts away and looked around at Vlad.
“Where’s that?”
“Crimea. Sevastopol. Look,” he started explaining pointing his finger at the back scene behind the image of his father, “This is the monument to scuttled ships. You can see a small part of it.”
“Oh, yes, I can. It’s a very beautiful photo. You’re so happy here…”
“Yeah, I like it too.” Vlad nodded, and his smile became much warmer as if the southern sun from the photo could really warm him. “Have you been to the sea?” he asked.
“Only in my dreams,” Lika smiled.
“The sea is magnificent!” he uttered with inspiration, “Nothing compares to it. You should see it by all means,” he added looking into her eyes and moving his face toward hers, “It’s like your eyes…”
Lika closed her eyes and felt the same lightness and desire for flight as she had in her dream at night. His breathing so close to her face reminded her of the touch of the white butterflies’ wings.
Lika was about to pull the bathroom door when she heard Emilie’s voice coming from there. The talk was about Rita. What Lika heard plunged her into shock. She stood there rooted to the spot; something cracked deep inside her. It was about her hopes and dreams that were collapsing. A minute ago she was the happiest girl in the world; her dream being so close to coming true befuddled her. Happiness had been so close that she had almost caught hold of it, and now it was spilling out just like sand through her fingers. Poor thing, she wanted to go down the drain, to vanish, to stop being not to hear what she had got to hear but could not make herself get under way. She could not even make herself release the door knob clasping it so hard as if she wanted to force all her pain inside it. Tears went pouring from her eyes, and somehow it made it difficult to breathe.
“Does Lika know?” brought her to life. “Do you think we should tell her?” made her let the knob out and withdraw. She did not even remember to pick her bag from Vlad’s room. She ran away without saying goodbye to anyone.
In the yard she breathed in evening chill, and it turned her to breathing normally. What she could not do at the moment was to come back home with her eyes being red from crying. She had to be back with a happy expression on her face at any price otherwise she would never dodge Aunt’s persistent questions; and her aunt was quite skillful at getting answers to her questions.
Lika looked up at her own window. It was dark whilst the neighboring window had a clear cat’s silhouette pictured in the bottom of its illuminated frame. “Coco?” she asked herself recollecting the talking cat at once. “I might’ve died… Everything that happened today wasn’t real, it can’t have been real! I must have died,” she ingeminated looking at the window.
“You can say so,” it overblew inside her head.
“Coco?” she asked.
“Oh, you get used to recognizing me. Well done.”
“So I’m really dead?” Lika inquired and the placidity spilling all over her body surprised her.
“Every single day is a short life, and every single night when you fall asleep, you die. Today you differ from yesterday you, and it won’t be today you who’ll see the light of dawn tomorrow. It’ll be another person, another you, a new you. Surely, you’ll have the same face and the same body, but your look will never be the same again, your smile will change, your gestures will transform because today you’ve got some new experience, you’ve filled your heart with some new content, and at night you’ll die to meet a new you in the morning.”
“And pain? Will it go with the night?”
“Is pain that bad?”
“I don’t know… It’s sometimes unbearable,” Lika said and remembered once again how it felt when the world she lived in collapsed. The pain’s clingy grip on her was still tight. “Tomorrow, when I wake up, will it still hurt?”
“Only if you want it. It can be different. Lots of people want pain. They can’t live without it.”
“People don’t
