Chapter Seven
SEVEN
You don’t remember when exactly the lessons started, but you remember where you were: a Perkins Family Restaurant off the highway, across from a car dealership.
It had a broken claw machine, green vinyl booths, and a crew of chain-smoking servers who came mostly from a nearby halfway house.
It was the place Diana took Sean to do homework over bottomless pots of coffee and Mammoth Muffins, and the occasional cigarette in the parking lot.
After she’d spent enough time sitting around Sean’s room, watching him play video games and doing other things with him you preferred not to think about, she would kiss him good night and walk across the hall to knock on your door.
“You fly. I buy,” she’d say each time, and you would grab the keys to the ancient Toyota Corolla you and Sean shared.
Diana didn’t have a car, and though she explained it away by saying she was scared of driving, eventually you figured out that she just didn’t have the money.
Your family wasn’t exactly rich either, but you were middle class enough to have an extra beater car for you and your brother.
It had a passenger-side door that wouldn’t shut all the way, and a tire pressure light that was always on, but it could make the two-mile drive to an American casual dining chain that never closed.
The first time you went without Sean, it was a little weird.
He was a big presence in any room, and it was his steady commentary and running jokes that usually kept the party going.
He was effortless with people and always had been.
He even developed an unlikely bond with a server there named Geoff who was at least fifty-five years old, had long stringy brown hair, and always read sci-fi novels on his breaks.
Once, while you were finishing Sean’s problem set, he and Geoff had a twenty-minute conversation about the painter Hieronymus Bosch, a person, as far as you knew, who Sean had never heard of.
“Maybe you should be dating Geoff,” Diana said when they finally came up for air.
It was a ridiculous joke, and the smile on Diana’s face was a playful one. But Sean immediately responded with:
“Maybe you should be dating Case.”
His face gave away nothing, and it was hard to tell if it was just a friendly jab or if there was some tender spot lurking behind the comment.
It was true that you and Diana seemed to have more in common sometimes.
You were both on the quieter side, happy most nights to laugh at Sean’s jokes and listen to his half-baked fan theories about TV shows he liked.
You were both more academically minded. Diana, despite her retro punk-rock image, was gunning for a scholarship due to her financial situation.
And for you, school was the only thing you’d ever been good at.
If anything, the two of you were too similar.
The key difference, of course, was that old problem of genetics.
In short: Diana and Sean were beautiful.
They were beautiful together. They were beautiful separately.
If you put them in designer clothes and walked them around Los Angeles with a small dog, people would easily believe they were famous.
That wasn’t true for you in quite the same way.
You weren’t bad looking, but things were only just starting to arrange themselves into a pattern that another person might find attractive.
If anything, you were a work in progress.
So even though there was some truth to Sean’s suggestion, both he and you knew it was absurd on its face that Diana would choose you over him.
Which is why he didn’t care that you escorted his girlfriend to get a greasy breakfast a couple of nights a week.
He was even happy, he told you once, to see you spending time with a girl, something that didn’t happen all that often.
And because of this lack of tension, you also felt unusually comfortable around Diana.
At first there was silence to fill, and you tried half-heartedly to sub in for Sean, making jokes about the names of menu items and mufflerless cars roaring by on the highway.
But eventually, you realized you didn’t have to spout nonsense all the time and things got easier after that.
You did homework. You drank bad coffee. You listened to the pop hits of the nineties that were piped into the dining room at the request of no one.
I don’t wanna be a fool … in your game for two!
And you occasionally asked questions, including one night when you saw her writing something in her notebook in an unfamiliar language.
“Whoa. What’s that?” you said, pointing at the flowing cursive script.
Diana picked up her pen and looked down at what she was writing, like she was surprised anyone had noticed.
“Oh. Just Cyrillic,” she said.
You waited for more, but that’s all she said. The word was vaguely familiar, but you weren’t sure if she wanted to talk about it. So you just said:
“Oh.”
She started writing again, and you watched her pen dip and scrawl over the page. It was kind of mesmerizing, and eventually you couldn’t help yourself.
“Okay, but why are you writing in Cyrillic? And how did you learn it?”
She sighed, and put down her pen before you could say anything else.
Then she looked at you for a second like she was wondering if she could trust you.
It was very obviously an assessment: How many two-egg combos did you have to have with someone before you could tell them about your actual life?
Eventually, she poured herself a cup of coffee from the almost-empty pot, and you watched the dark grains swirl to the bottom.
“I’m living with my baba right now…”
“What’s a—”
“Baba is Serbian for grandma. Anyway, she’s super big into our heritage, and she said she’ll get me a new phone if I learn the Cyrillic alphabet. So here we are.”
She gestured to the page.
“Ah,” you said. “That’s cool. But why can’t you just ask for one for your birthday?”
She emptied two packets of stevia into her coffee and stirred it with her finger. Then she licked the coffee off.
“Baba grew up in northern Minnesota on the Iron Range, okay? She killed chickens with her bare hands. She lost two husbands to mining accidents. She doesn’t believe in birthday presents, Case. She believes in hard work … and drinking brandy.”
Diana started in on a letter that looked like an O with an I in the middle of it. She smiled to herself.
“I’m kind of getting into it, though. She teaches me swear words if I can learn to spell them right. And it’s like a whole new universe opening up for me.”
“Okay,” you said. “Let’s hear something.”
“What?”
“Swear at me,” you said. “Hit me with your best shot.”
She barely hesitated. She furrowed her brow and pointed a finger right at your face.
“Idi u kurac!” she yelled, and then started laughing. A few people from other tables glanced over at you, clocking the disruption. None of them appeared to be Serbian.
“What did you just say to me?”
“It’s the best.”
“Tell me!”
“It’s actually the best.”
You waved your hands impatiently.
“Okay, so there are some technical differences in translation, but it basically means: Go back in your dad’s balls!”
Right as she said this, Geoff set down the food, a tattered copy of Dune poking out of the pocket of his baggy black pants.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry, Geoff!” she said. “Not you. You can stay outside your dad’s … I mean … you don’t have to crawl back in there.”
She started laughing again. Geoff grimaced and backed away and did not check on the two of you for the rest of the night.
It became a tradition after that. Each time you went to Perkins, she would teach you a Serbian swear.
Which is how, in time, you learned to tell people to have sex with their mothers, their dogs, their goats, their ponies, and oddly enough, their bread.
Oh, and the sun. Go f#$% the sun! You also learned how to tell people where to go: to the devil, back inside their mother, to hell, and any other terrible place you could think of.
And on one memorable night, when it was snowing and the highway was deserted, you told an unsuspecting man who cut you off in the parking lot that he must have boned a hedgehog’s back last night, making Diana snort with laughter.
“Your pronunciation is so bad!” she said, and collapsed against your shoulder, where she stayed for the rest of the drive home, falling asleep as you steered the Corolla slowly through the falling snow.
When you got to your house, you drove around the block two more times before waking her up.
You told yourself it was so she could get more sleep, but you suspected, as you passed your house for the second time, that it might be about the feeling of her head against your body.
She reached into your pockets sometimes to take things, and once she had grabbed your hand when a car honked at her.
But something about this was different. And for the first time on one of these nights out, you thought of Sean asleep in his bed.
So you closed your eyes, took a breath, and gently woke her.
She didn’t seem bothered by where she was, but it was past her curfew, so she immediately called her grandmother on her old cell phone.
Whenever this kind of thing happened, there was always one phrase she said over and over again.
Molimo vas. As in: “Molimo vas, Baba. Another half hour and I’ll be home.
” Or: “Molimo vas. I don’t want to hear about this anymore. ”
It was the word please, she finally told you.
But the way she used it—it was always an urging for something.
For her grandmother to show some leniency.
It was a rare time when you heard her get emotional, a window into something a little darker in her home life.
And on this night, when she hung up the phone and an awkward silence fell over the car, you finally asked her why she didn’t live with her parents. Where were they?
At that, she reached out and grabbed your hand and said the words softly.
“Molimo vas.”
As in: Please, Case. Don’t ask me about that.
And just like that, the closeness she’d just shown you was gone.