Content Warning: abuse, sexual Content
Alexei and I spent nearly seven summers working at the Slavic Village Grocery. The shop owner, Mr. Ivanov, always gave us Sundays off. I tried to persuade Alexei into calling them Fun-days, casually dropping into conversation “So, we going down to the pond next Fun-day?” in hopes of needling the term into his vernacular like some sort of benign parasite, but he caught on and told me to cut the kid shit, quick, or else he might have to smack me a good one.
The reason we got Sundays off was because Mr. Ivanov was dead religious and made us say grace every day before our lunch break. He had two very thick eyebrows that screwed together to form one long, furry ridge on his forehead when he was deep in prayer. After the Lord’s prayer, he would transition into muttering requests at the ceiling in Russian, so I never knew exactly what it was he wanted, only that he must have wanted it very, very badly.
Alexei always hated saying grace and hated Mr. Ivanov. The man was his uncle, too, so his hatred ran deeper and better than mine ever could. When Alexei was thirteen, Mr. Ivanov decided that he was old enough to lead the table, but in his defiance, he’d always mess up the words to the Lord’s prayer and earn himself a beating.
I begged Alexei over and over to just say the right words in the right order– he always fucked them up with intention, so I knew he could do it correctly. Maybe he’d replace “Thy will be done” with “Thy will be dumb”, or “Trespassers” with “Shit-gassers”. Whatever the case, he just couldn’t help himself. I’d always end up in Storage with him, icing his black eyes. We’d pass the minutes:
“Ow! Fuck!”
The summer he learned how to use the F-word was an exciting one for us all.
“It fucking hurts when you do it like that,” he’d wince, clutching the side of his head. Then, “I fucking hate that fucker, Mal. Like, I really fucking hate him.”
“I know, Alexei.”
“Like, I hate him so much that if me and Uncle Pavel were trapped in a room, and I had a gun with one bullet, I would shoot myself just to avoid being fucking stuck with his dead body.”
“I know, Alexei.” The air inside Storage was dusty and warm. I liked to anchor my fingers inside the knots in his hair. “Just … try and hold still.”
That’s part of the reason I got it wrong: Saturdays, not Sundays, were the real Fun-days, the funnest of days. Saturdays, when we ripped off our shirts in the stifling heat of the slavic grocery, when we finished labeling our last box of Uvelka and bootlegging our last episode of North Shore, when Mr. Ivanov paid us our week’s salary in $10 bills and warned us not to tell anyone where they came from, when we burst through the foggy, plastic doors of the shop into the open air, when we kicked rocks and stubbed toes and ate shit knowing we wouldn’t have to get up for work the next morning, represented freedom. An escape from a hell we felt was otherwise inescapable. A reminder of the limitless potential of our otherwise short and reckless lives.
We went to the lake a lot that summer; a little stock pond out in front of an abandoned office building, emerald-green and glistening with algae and fish. I was eleven and Alexei was thirteen, but people were already starting to notice him. He was beautiful like a Greek god is beautiful, all split dimples and tanned legs and a smile that just made you want to go ahead and do whatever he told you to. Everywhere we went, fathers shepherded their daughters away from him, though neither of us knew why, Alexei least of all. He never cared for girls, not the whores at the bus-stop or the college clerks at the corner store or Hana, our pretty coworker who always wore her hair in braids. I was the only girl he could ever seem to stand, but that was because I acted like a boy.
He said it himself; I was his brother in everything but name, I was his brother in arms, his blood brother. We spat and swashbuckled and swapped shoes just like bonded warriors would on the battlefield. So, when he helped me over the link-chain fence to the stock pond every Saturday, I knew he wouldn’t try to sneak peeks up my skirt. Knew he’d catch me when I fell. I was not a girl to him, and there was power in that. Girls couldn’t do the types of things I did, I thought. Not in a million, trillion years.
During the daylight hours, the stock pond was like a paradise; a smooth, unbroken pane of glass tucked into a thicket of kudzu and overgrown Bluestem. Irresistible to Alexei and I’s overheated brains. We cannon-balled and hand-standed and Marco-Poloed, letting the water form a film over our skins. My favorite was the back-float. I could spend entire days staring up at the sun, impervious to gravity, letting my lungs collapse and then inflating them again.
Grandpa Lou never liked to take me swimming. I was a sickly kid; he thought the pool, with all its sights and sounds and noises, would be too much on my delicate constitution. What he didn’t know, though, was that the water was a cure for all my ills. With its cool touch, it revitalized everything weak inside me; it replenished everything that the world had taken away.
The antithesis of the back-float was the birdie-dive. When Alexei decided he’d had enough of whatever he was doing, he’d climb onto the bank, shout “BIRDIE DIVE!” at the top of his lungs, then sprint towards the water as fast as he could, spraying mud behind him. I’d only have a few seconds to prepare before he’d come smacking down on top of me, pulling us both underwater in a confused tangle of flailing limbs.
At first, the pain would be so sharp and shocking that I’d forget who I was, and which direction I needed to swim. But, eventually, we’d both break to the surface, choking and spluttering, and limp to the mud-bank where we’d collapse in the cold.
Alexei, panting, would say something like “That was a good one! Almost cracked a couple ribs there.”
And I’d say something like “Yeah, my ribs you fucking dickhead!”
And he’d say, “Don’t swear, it’s unbecoming. Plus, you know you love birdie-dives. You couldn’t live without them.”
And, even though I never once admitted it to Alexei, he was sort of right. My whole childhood, there was always something to worry about. I was too short for my age and I had a weird, crooked-footed walk. My name, ‘Mallory’, was an ugly grandma name and not a little girl one. My mom only called twice a month, and it was just to cry into the receiver, and Grandpa Lou, who was tasked with taking care of me, never cleaned his shower– it had a black mold problem.
But with birdie-dives, I always knew what to expect. Even though they hurt like hell, I came to anticipate, even enjoy the pain. It was renewing, that full-body sting; like getting my skin ripped off and replaced with new skin. Which was something that I always sort of wanted. It was cleansing. It made sense.
So, when Alexei backed up onto the banks and dug his heels into the mud and shouted “BIRDIE DIVE!” at the top of his voice, I didn’t scream. Never screamed. I just held my breath, splayed my limbs, and made myself as big of a target as possible. And, after everything came crashing down, I’d crawl onto the banks, dizzy with laughter, and let the sun cook the shit out of my milky legs.
Even then, I always sort of wondered what would become of us. The signs are clear to me now; in my clearest memories of the banks of the stock pond with Alexei, there was always a triangle of light between our reflections, wedged between us and preventing our visages from becoming one. Perhaps my younger self should have recognized it as an omen, but it’s hard to conceive of what might have happened if she did. In the presence of a person like Alexei, one couldn’t help but be devoted. When he rose from the banks of the pond, cracking his shoulders up around his ears like a Roman statue coming to life, there was no other option but to abandon your fears on the shore and follow after him.
And so, I followed. And when he launched me back over the link-chain fence on those white summer evenings, when we walked back to the city, there was nothing more I wanted than to be his favorite friend, padding along at his heels.
About the Author
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. An undiagnosed autistic kid, I remember feeling very out of place in the world, so I found it necessary to develop my own means of communication in order to make sense of it all. ESCAPIST, the story this chapter is from, is, in essence, about neurodivergence and the compulsion to escape into fiction. I think Mallory, the protagonist, is based a lot on my own experiences of childhood, and feeling lost and confused in a world I already knew wasn’t designed to meet my needs. Alexei embodies a sort of ease and assuredness that Mallory desperately wants for herself, and so she’s drawn to him in that way.
I’ve been working on ESCAPIST on and off for about a year and a half now, and it’s gone through a lot of changes during that time. Perhaps too many changes … Honestly, I’m not even sure it’s going to end up as a novel anymore! It’s a story that’s very important to me, and I want to make sure I’m able to capture it in the most effective possible way. The title of this excerpt was inspired by “Stove’s Favorite Friend”, a wonderful alternative album that remains criminally underrated.
Instagram Account
@annielee_23
