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The thing about Vegas at night—at least the part of Vegas where we lived, which was nowhere near the Strip and full of those low stucco houses in drab, outdated colors—is that it never really gets dark the way it’s supposed to. There’s always this weak, orange haze hanging over everything, a sort of permanent late dusk. You can walk out into the yard at two in the morning and still see the outline of the cinderblock walls and the brittle tufts of grass. The air smells like hot dust and, if the wind is wrong, the highway.
That night my father wasn’t home. I knew before I opened the front door. The house had its own sound when he was there—TV too loud, the thick glug of beer bottles set too hard on the counter, his voice carrying sharp from the kitchen even if I couldn’t make out the words. When he wasn’t, there was just the hum of the refrigerator and the faint buzz of the pool filter outside, a sort of vacant, rented silence.
Boris was awake, of course. He sat cross-legged on the living-room carpet, back against the couch, TV flickering blue and green across his face. Some late-night infomercial was on, the volume turned down low. A woman with frighteningly white teeth held up a juicer.
“Amigo,” he said, without looking away. “You are slow. I thought maybe coyotes ate you.”
“I just went to get the mail,” I said. I dropped the handful of crumpled flyers and a grim-looking bill envelope on the kitchen counter. I didn’t have to look at my father’s name on the outside to know what it was. They all looked the same, those letters that made his jaw go tight.
Boris reached behind him without turning around and pulled something out from under the couch. A bottle, cheap vodka from the greasy store a couple blocks over, the label peeling at the edges.
“Come,” he said. “I was lonely.”
On the table there was an ashtray, the overflowing, improvised kind—an old bowl gone gray with repeated use. The air inside the house was heavy with smoke; it lived in the curtains, the carpet. Sometimes I thought even if I opened every window, every door, it would never fully go.
“I thought you said we were saving that,” I said, nodding at the bottle.
“Saving for what? Christmas?” He laughed. “We are teenagers. Maybe we die tomorrow of lung cancer or sunstroke, who knows. Drink.” He patted the carpet beside him.
I dropped down next to him, legs stretched out. The carpet was rough and a little sticky under my palms. My father’s jacket was thrown over the back of the recliner, his keys gone. Somewhere out there he was driving fast with the radio up, doing whatever it was he did that we weren’t supposed to ask about.
“Cigarette?” Boris tipped his head sideways to look at me. His eyes were red around the edges. “You look like you need one.”
“I look like I need sleep. It’s called being tired,” I said, but I took the cigarette anyway when he held it out, let him cup his hands around the lighter and lean in to shield the flame. Up close he smelled like smoke and cheap detergent and the sour tang of the vodka he’d already started on.
We sat like that for a while, passing the bottle back and forth, the TV rolling through commercials for exercise equipment and miracle knives that could cut through coins. It was the sort of late-night haze where everything felt half real, like we were in some strange aquarium—just us, the smoke cutting through breathable oxygen, and this greenish-blue light washing over the walls.
“What is it you are thinking?” Boris asked finally. He had slouched sideways so his shoulder was resting against the couch, his knee bumping mine. “You get this face.” He squinted, then exaggerated my expression, mouth turned down, brows drawn. “Very tragic. Like in every Russian novel. You are unhappy and in love and also maybe your mother is dead.”
“My mother is dead,” I said. It came out more flat than I meant it to.
He made a little wince, almost comical, hand to his chest. “Yes, I know. I am saying—” He hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay, bad joke. But you see? This face. Always you are far away.”
“I’m not far away,” I said. But I was. Some part of me was forever elsewhere—New York, the museum, the first time I saw Pippa. There was always this split, like my body had stayed but some part of me was still back there, trapped in dust and glass. “I’m right here.”
“Liar,” Boris said, but there was no bite to it. He nudged my shoulder with his. “Maybe I should hit you. Bring you back inside your skull.”
“Please don’t,” I said.
He laughed and tipped his head back, hair falling into his eyes. There was ash in his lap. He flicked it carelessly onto the carpet and dragged from his cigarette, then handed it back. His fingers brushed my knuckles, slow, like the contact was deliberate, a tiny experiment.
Some part of me is always here, though. With Boris.
I didn’t know where my father was. I didn’t know what would happen if he came back and found us like this, vodka bottle, smoke, the static flicker of the TV in the dark. I felt that familiar tightness in my chest, the sense of everything precarious, balanced on the thinnest ledge. Yet at the same time there was the strange, low hum of safety that came from Boris simply being there, as if his sheer existence—loud, impossible, reassuringly unbothered—meant nothing too terrible could happen, at least not yet.
“You ever been to the Strip?” I asked, mostly to say something.
Boris snorted. “What, to see Eiffel Tower, Las Vegas version? To ride roller coaster on top of hotel? No. Why? You want to go, little tourist?” His accent thickened as it does with teasing. “You go, you lose all your money, then your father really kills you.”
I pictured the Strip the way I’d seen it from the car sometimes: the neon, the stacked billboards, the fake castles and pyramids, all of it like a theme park for adults. It seemed as unreal to me as a movie set. Our neighborhood felt more like the real part—the empty lots, the chain-link fences with bits of plastic snagged on them, the barking dogs and bone-white sky.
“Maybe sometime,” I said, though I didn’t mean it. It was one of those idle future fantasies we rolled around occasionally, right up there with leaving Vegas altogether, taking a bus somewhere with trees.
Boris took another pull from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His shirt rode up a little as he moved; his skin was pale under the tan, that odd sickly paleness you only got from too much sun and never enough shade.
“There is better places,” he said. “Kyiv is better. Even Moscow. Even—” He spread his hands. “Anywhere. But here it’s okay. Because you are here.”
He said it casually, almost offhand, like he was commenting on the weather. Still, something in my chest gave a small, startled jump. It was always like that with Boris. He could say the most cutting, flippant things, and then, out of nowhere, drop a remark that set off an entire avalanche of feeling.
“That’s not true,” I said. “You’d be fine without me.”
“Sure,” he agreed easily. “I’d be fine. I am cockroach. Bombs fall, I live forever.” He made a little insect scuttling motion with his fingers across the carpet. “But it is more fun with you. Less boring.”
I didn’t know how to answer that, so I didn’t. My throat felt oddly tight. On TV, three women in identical blue dresses were demonstrating a blender. Someone applauded wildly for chopped ice.
Boris shifted again, closer now, his shoulder pressed against mine. “Hey,” he said suddenly. “You want to go to the pool?”
“The pool’s empty,” I said.
“So? We go sit there. It is like—” He searched for the word. “Like amphitheater. Maybe we hear coyotes sing.”
“I don’t think coyotes sing.”
“Everything sings if you listen,” Boris said, and got to his feet, swaying a little. He held out a hand. “Come, Potter. I’m bored.”
Outside, the air was cooler than inside but still thick, the heat of the day radiating up from the concrete. The pool, as promised, was empty: a white, peeling basin in the ground, the water line stained a faint, moldy ring. A plastic lawn chair had fallen in at some point and never been hauled back out. It lay on its side at the deep end like a skeleton.
We climbed down the shallow end, shoes scraping on the rough surface. Down there the world felt muffled, the high walls of the pool cutting off the view of the street. Above, the rectangle of sky was a flat, purplish black, haloed at the edges with distant casino light.
Boris flopped down at the deep end, back against the sloping wall, one knee hitched up. I slid down to sit beside him. From the house you could see the tops of the palm trees over the wall, fronds rattling dryly.
“What are we doing down here?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Same as up there. Only now it is interesting.”
I laughed, despite myself. Sound bounced around strangely in the empty pool, echoing back in a thinner version.
He passed me the bottle again. I took a swallow. The vodka burned all the way down, blooming hot in my stomach. I felt pleasantly floaty, disconnected from my limbs, like they were attached by strings I could cut at any moment.
“You are less sad now,” Boris observed, peering at me.
“I’m not—” I started, then stopped. It was useless to argue with him about what I was or wasn’t. He seemed to see straight through every defense, every lie I told myself, and accept them all with the same lazy affection. “I’m fine.”
“Fine.” He mimicked my voice, then snorted. “Always ‘fine.’ You sound like my father when he would be bleeding from his nose and my mother asks if he is okay.” He squinted at me in the dim light. “You think too much.”
“You don’t think enough,” I said.
“Exactly.” He grinned, sharp and sudden. “That is why we are perfect match.”
It occurred to me then— fleetingly, uncomfortably—that in some ways Boris knew me better than anyone alive. Not because I told him things outright. I didn’t. There were whole sections of my life, of my mind, I never spoke about. But he saw me in all the in-between spaces, in the stupid small details of daily survival. He saw me stealing cough syrup from the drugstore, saw me watching the window for my father’s car, saw me flinch at a raised voice. And somehow, without turning any of it into a big conversation, he arranged himself around me so those moments hurt a little less.
He was watching me now with that same strange, measuring lightness, one elbow propped on his knee, his fingers loose around the neck of the bottle. His hair stuck up in all directions. There was a smear of ash on his cheek.
“What?” I said. My voice came out faint, half-laughing, half-defensive.
“Nothing.” He tilted his head. “You have funny face tonight, is all.”
“Again with my face.”
“Yes. I like it.” He said it bluntly. “You are like—” He waved his free hand, searching. “Like little monk who has seen ghost. Very serious. Very haunted.”
“That’s not exactly comforting,” I muttered.
“No?” He leaned closer, so close I could see the tiny freckle at the corner of his mouth. “I think it is cute.”
The word hung there, ridiculous, too bright, as if he’d thrown something fragile into the air between us. My heart started to pound, stupidly, for no reason I could admit.
“Whatever,” I said, looking away. The wall of the pool had a hairline crack running down it, yellowed at the edges. “You’re drunk.”
“Little bit,” he agreed cheerfully. “You are also drunk.”
“I’m fine,” I said again, automatically, and he laughed, low.
When I looked back, he was still close, closer than he needed to be. His knee pressed against mine, warm through the fabric of my jeans. There was that look on his face—half a dare, half something softer, unreadable.
“You know,” he said lazily, “in Ukraine, boys sometimes kiss boys. Their friends. Just to practice. So they are not terrible with girls later.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said, though I had no idea. The thought made my face go hot. “You just made that up.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? You will never go there and find out.”
I rolled my eyes, but my mouth had gone dry. “And?”
“And nothing. I am just saying.” His hand drifted, knocked gently against my wrist. “Maybe you should practice more, Potter.”
“Oh,” I said. It was all I could manage.
He watched me for a beat longer, the humor in his eyes flickering into something else. Then, with the same offhand decisiveness he applied to everything—stealing, skipping school, jumping fences—he leaned in and kissed me.
It was brief, at first. His mouth was chapped, tasting of smoke and vodka. The world seemed to narrow down to the point of contact, to the press of his lips on mine, the faint scrape of teeth. His mouth was parted, as if expecting. My brain, unhelpfully, supplied a dozen irrelevant images at once: Pippa in the museum, the painting, my mother’s hand on my shoulder. Yet here, now, none of that fit. This was a different kind of wrong, another aisle in the same department of Bad Ideas, and I had walked into it without realizing.
I froze. Then, before I could stop myself, something in me jerked forward—some lonely, reckless piece that had had enough of silence and grief and wanted, for once, to move toward instead of away. I kissed him back. Just for a second. Just long enough to feel him make a surprised, pleased sound in his throat, his hand tightening a little on my wrist.
Then it hit me what I was doing. The knowledge came crashing down like cold water.
I pulled back so fast my head bumped the wall behind me. Pain sparked at the back of my skull. “Ow—”
Boris laughed, breathless. His eyes were bright. He seemed delighted, like a kid who’d knocked over a display in a store and was impressed by the destruction.
“Careful,” he said. “Stupid American. You will break your head.”
My heart wouldn’t slow down. The night felt too loud, the air too thin. I could still feel the shape of him against my mouth, a ghostly outline.
“I—” My tongue felt thick. “That was—”
“Practice,” he said easily, as if we’d agreed on it ahead of time. “Relax. You look like priest who has done terrible sin.”
“It was—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Wrong? Strange? Exactly what I wanted? I had no vocabulary for any of it, not one that didn’t open up a door I was terrified to look through. “We shouldn’t—”
“Who says?” he interrupted. He tipped his head back against the wall, exhaled smoke toward the sky. “There is no one here. Only you, me, empty swimming pool. God has left Las Vegas, no?”
He made it sound so simple. Maybe for him it was. For me, the simple fact of it—the reality that it had happened, that I had let it happen—sat heavy and electric in my chest.
On the other side of the wall a dog barked, snapping me back. I imagined my father’s car pulling up, the door slamming. The sharp clink of keys. The thought made my stomach lurch.
“We should go back inside,” I said, too quickly.
Boris glanced at me, taking in my stiff shoulders, the way I was clutching my knees. For a moment I thought he would push, make a joke, lean in again just to see me flail. Instead, to my surprise, he only shrugged.
“Okay,” he said, as if I’d suggested changing the channel. He got to his feet with his usual careless awkwardness and held out a hand. “Come on, monk. TV is waiting. Maybe now they are selling something even more stupid.”
I let him pull me up. His fingers curled around mine, warm and sure. If he noticed the way my hand shook, he didn’t mention it. By the time we’d climbed out of the pool and crossed the patchy yard, our shoulders bumping, he was already talking about something else—a story about a boy he’d known in Australia who’d broken his arm trying to jump from a roof into a pool.
Inside, the house swallowed us again, the cold hum of the air conditioner, the glow of the TV. We sat back down on the carpet as if we’d never left. Boris lit another cigarette. On the screen, a man was demonstrating a miraculous new mop.
We didn’t talk about the kiss. We never did. It slid into that strange, hazy archive where most of Vegas lived for me—half-dreamt, half-denied, as if by not looking at it directly we could convince ourselves it wasn’t there. Still, for a long time afterward, whenever we sat too close, whenever Boris laughed and tipped his head back just so, I would feel it again, like the echo at the bottom of an empty pool.