Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The Message
The first friend I make at Yale is German. I don’t mean in a casual way. I mean he’s literally fresh off a plane from Düsseldorf and looks like he’s been personally wronged by American air quality.
I’m sitting on the steps outside the athletic building when he stomps across the quad, muttering angrily in German at a map that clearly offended him.
“Nobody mentioned there are two science buildings,” he snaps, voice sharp as a slap. “Or that Americans label things with letters instead of logic.”
“That’s just Yale,” I answer.
He startles, then flicks his gaze to me. Brown eyes. Jaw like a geometry proof. Posture like the prince of Bavaria just discovered dust.
“You understand German?” he asks.
“Ja,” I say. “I speak it.”
“And English,” he says slowly, measuring. “Without an accent.”
“Yes.”
He squints at me. “Where are you from, then? Your face says Slavic. Your posture says I don’t care. Your clothes say I escaped something.”
I stare at him. “You’re observant.”
“I’m nosy,” he corrects.
I shrug. “Russia.”
He raises his brows. “Ah. Poverty adjacent.”
I snort. “And you?”
“Oligarchy adjacent,” he says. “So practically the same thing.”
I blink. Then laugh. Actually laugh.
He grins. “I’m Lenzin Faulker. But call me Faulker. Everyone does.”
“Aleks,” I say.
He looks me up and down, not rudely—curiously. “Scholarship?”
“Yes.”
“Same,” he sighs. “Though my family insists on pretending I’m here for legacy reasons. As if my father is some titan of industry instead of a man who peaked in his twenties.”
I tilt my head. “You hate rich people?”
He throws his hands up dramatically. “I am rich people, unfortunately. But yes. I hate us.”
I like him immediately. We fall into step walking toward the dining hall. He talks fast, switching languages without noticing: German, English, then French when he swears at a cyclist. I answer back fluently each time.
Faulkner stops mid-step. “Wait. You speak French too?”
“Yes.”
“And Spanish?”
“Yes.”
“And Russian, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
He points at me. “I don’t trust people who hoard languages.”
“My father taught me that if you understand everyone, they can’t lie to you.” In life lessons, of course.
He whistles. “Dark. But I respect it.”
We sit in the dining hall, plates untouched.
Faulker rants about American wealth, New England nepotism, and the absurdity of legacy admissions.
“They’re all the same,” he says. “Rich in Russia, rich in Germany, rich in the U.S. All convinced the sun shines out of their trust funds.”
I stab my fork through a piece of chicken. “Most of the time they’re right.”
Faulker leans in. “You and I, Aleks—we’re outsiders. Infiltrators. We pretend to fit, but we survive because we don’t.”
I grin. “You talk too much.”
“And you talk too little,” he says. “It’s perfect. We’ll balance out.”
We do. For weeks, he has become the closest thing I have to a brother. But not that brother. Not the one buried under Moscow’s expectations. The one I left behind with hands that weren’t his own, gripping his shoulders.
I don’t talk about Mikhail. Not yet. But Faulker sees something anyway.
“You look at the ice like it stole something from you,” he says once after practice.
I shrug. “It did.”
The message comes on a cold November morning. I’m sitting in the dining hall again. Same seat. Same view of the window. Same plate of eggs I’m pretending to eat.
Faulker is across from me, complaining in three languages about an economics professor who “clearly hates joy.”
My phone buzzes. I glance at the screen. Unknown Russian number. My stomach drops before my thoughts do.
I open the text. It’s short. Five words.
Unknown:
Mikhail is gone. Training accident.
The world tilts quietly. Silently. As if sound has been removed from the room.
Faulker keeps talking. Students keep moving. Forks keep scraping plates.
Inside me, something detonates. I stare at the words again.
Gone. Training accident.
Not alive. Not coming back. Not skating. Not laughing. Not calling me peasant or complaining about his hair freezing or asking me to hit him harder.
Gone.
My hand curls into a fist on the table. I don’t notice until the pain registers.
Faulker stops talking mid-sentence.
“Aleks?”
I don’t look up.
“Aleks.”
His voice softens. “What happened?”
I swallow once. Twice. The third time doesn’t go down right.
“My friend,” I say. “He’s dead.”
Faulker goes still.
“How?”
I shake my head. “Training.”
Military training. The cage finally shutting.
Faulker’s face shifts—anger, sadness, confusion, all in one breath. “Do you need—”
“No.” The word rips out of me. “No,” I repeat, quieter. “I don’t.”
I force myself to take a bite of eggs.
They taste like nothing.
Faulker watches me for a long moment. Then he nods. Not approving. Not condoning. Understanding. The same kind Mikhail once offered without asking for anything back.
I finish breakfast. Stand. Walk to the rink.
I skate alone until my lungs burn. Until my legs shake. Until the cold numbs the part of me that can’t hold the news.
I hit the boards over and over. Shoulder-first. Hard enough to bruise. Hard enough to break if I tried.
Each impact is a sentence:
He. Is. Gone.
And when I finally collapse onto the ice, sweat freezing on my back, breath shallow—
I whisper, barely audible. “You got out. I didn’t.”
I feel the ice under my palms. Cold. Unyielding. Honest.
It is the only thing left that still answers me. In my chest, something seals shut. A door I will never open again.
Mikhail is gone.
And the part of me that belonged to him dies quietly in that empty rink.