cw: some (mostly non-descriptive) underage sex, drinking, drug use, and homophobic slurs

Ilya is thirteen.

Alexei feels generous that night and lets him tag along to the party under the condition that he keeps his mouth shut and, more importantly, covers his ass for their father. 

“Tell him I took you to the cinema.” 

“That’s fucking stupid. Am I eight years old?”

“Do you want to come or not?” 

They bike to a cluster of flats just east of their neighborhood, in a part of town Ilya has only ever passed through. Inside, Alexei confidently greets strange men with bloodshot eyes and loses Ilya in the crowd. 

Ilya finds that it’s easy to fit in if he just has the conviction, the same as hockey. Quick turn and a breakaway, soar right up to the crease and shoot. He introduces himself around and pretends to be older, and it works. The barbed hooks of puberty had dug into him that summer, stretching him out and cracking his voice down the middle, and no one is wise to the baby fat around his hips. He smokes a cigarette, really draws it into his lungs, rather than just his mouth, and he doesn't cough even once. He drinks straight from the bottle and ignores the urge for some cola to chase. He makes new friends and shapeshifts to fit perfectly inside their conversations and interests. They laugh at his jokes. They draw fake tattoos on each other with markers, and someone kisses him on the cheek while they all sing along to the music fuzzing through the speakers.

Later, they invite Ilya to a nearby park, to meet a guy who might have some speed to sell them. Ilya tries to find Alexei, takes a lap around the party, to tell him that he's going, when he realizes that this is impulse is all wrong—Alexei is not his keeper, Alexei will tell him so.

He keeps step with a girl while they walk, and she asks him about what he likes, what he does. He thinks her name is Varya, maybe. He is too intimidated to confirm. But she shares her cigarette with him, bumping her hip with his, and she’s very pretty. Her lip gloss glows under the streetlights. 

“I play hockey,” he tells her. She thinks he’s in a league above, the same age as her goaltender cousin, and does Ilya know him? Do they play against each other? Does he have a game coming up? 

Outside, a thin breeze carries the smell of mushrooms and butter from some restaurant on the corner. It smacks of his childhood, and his mama, so he scoops Varya up onto his back, running full speed ahead, howling and laughing while she directs him around as if on horseback. If he runs fast enough, if his arms start to burn from the weight of carrying his new friend, maybe Irina won’t come to him. 

The night blurs. He takes a bump of gritty, bitter powder off someone’s house key and lies on the soft, soggy mulch underneath a play structure; his mama appears anyway. Her face when she discovered that pack of cigarettes in Ilya’s room, the Camels that Sveta brought back from the States that summer, which they'd smoked behind the rink after Ilya’s practice, which had made him spit isotonic lemon and stomach acid on the asphalt. Mama had cried, a complete breakdown in the kitchen, slumped over the table with her own cigarette burning away. Why did you do it? My little baby, Ilyushka, my little baby. Why did you do it? You are supposed to be my baby. Ilya had been incised by shame. Lacerated. 

That feeling creeps in now, a twinging scar, as his heart pounds and the drugs sober him up a little. The group has disappeared. Just Ilya and Varya are left, in hiding, in the dark.

“You okay?” She touches his eyebrow. 

“I’m good.”

He kisses her, to prove this, except she is better at it than him. She tilts her head to invite him closer, and glides through the movements like an expert swimmer. All his practicing with Sveta has made no difference. He feels like he’s drowning. 

She laughs into his mouth when he loses his breath and has to gulp for air in the crook of her neck. He chases the swampy arousal, the blunted excitement of touching her chest through her sweater. She plays with the fly of his pants, getting her hand inside, and there’s that shame again, aching like a tender ankle.

It happens quickly after that, just a few minutes of trembling, of tacky skin, mushy wood chips under his knees, and the tiny implosion at the end, momentarily whitening the horizon of his thoughts into a clean nothing.

Afterwards, he offers to walk her home and frets, as all that lovely emptiness starts to fill back up with fresh concerns. His knees feel muddy, his tongue scummy, his dick feels dirty. His hands stink like human brine and the come that he barely caught in time when she slithered out from under him. He halts in the middle of the deserted street to ask her, "So was that…was I okay?”

She is texting on her Motorola. She's pulled the furry hood of her jacket over her head, even though it's warm for October. She won't look him in the eye. “Yeah, yeah, that was really sweet. A lot of men are too rough.”

The idea that she thinks of him as a man feels more illicit than anything else he's done tonight. It steals his breath. 

What had he said to mama, before? With the cigarette smoke so thick and grotesque in the air of their kitchen. I am, I am your baby. I'm sorry, I won't do it again. I'm sorry, mamulya. Mamulya. I'm sorry, I love you, I'm sorry.

He starts to cry, but not just a few stray tears hidden by a hockey helmet or a pillow. It’s a violent, nauseating everything. He covers his face, turns his back, but God, it's too much. Worse even than last year, the afternoon he found her in her bed, when he saw the meat of her body and felt the hinge of her jaw unfastened beneath his fingers, like she had left her mouth open on her way out and forgot to close it behind her. 

The girl hesitates to comfort him. Her arms tighten around his shoulders for just a moment, stiff and distant, like how Alexei touches him when their aunt makes them pose for photos. She has to go, she has to go, sorry, she has to go. She is embarrassed, maybe a little mean, her mouth squirming to fight an awkward laugh. 

He goes home, to his house that stinks of paint fumes. Polina only moved in only a month ago and has already buried mama's mural in living room under a wash of ugly burgundy, her infection now spreading to rest of the house. Ilya lies in his bed and oscillates between getting hard from the smell of wood rot on his clothes and worrying that Varya will tell everyone about what happened. Some time around dawn, he remembers that she's several grades above him, and they don't even go to the same school. 

It's as if it never happened. Ilya never sees her again. He does not even tell Alexei that he had sex, which means Alexei continues to call him a virgin faggot whenever he gets the chance. Ilya finds this so comforting, like a kiss to his temple.

The secret memory of that night at first lives inside him as a broken, crumbling shard, too delicate and dangerous to hold. But it starts to wear down and smooth into a blunt object, easily hidden as he gets older, and he wets his dick often. Hardened by the pressure, the squeeze of his own thighs, the way he pounds into bodies like a chisel on an anvil, filing it down into something he can wield. He even takes it out sometimes, presenting it to his friends when the subject of first times comes up:

“Oh, man, the pussy was so good, I cried like a baby.”