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“Nastya Kolenchik wags her tongue a lot, everyone knows it. She makes up shit.” I shrugged, trying to look calm, even as everything inside me screamed.

Mama left weeks ago, and no one was looking for her. No one ever would.

People disappeared sometimes. Both men and women. It must be normal, I assumed, since no one particularly worried about them or searched especially hard. Vera’s grandpa, for example, had gone fishing five years ago and never came back. They said he must’ve fallen into the river drunk. They said Mama might’ve found a new lover and left with him, but some said she was dead. Either way, no one would investigate it. The onlymeliciastation was two villages over, and they had a lot to do as it was.

The villagers would gossip for a while, then they’d settle on a version of the truth that suited them the most and move on. And so it would remain, unless my mama came back one day and proved them wrong, or her dead body was found.

“Whatever. Let’s just do it. It’s dark enough outside already.” Vera dripped some hot wax from the burning candles on two chipped saucers, then stuck the candles into the wax. “Or I’ll just go home.”

Tanya glanced at our curtainless window in a wooden frame with peeling white paint. “It’s really dark out there. If you leave, I’m coming with you, Vera. I’m not walking at night alone.”

Vera smirked, like a badass that she really wasn’t. “What? Are you afraid to get raped or something?”

“Aren’t you?”

“It’s not rape if you don’t fight it,” Vera said flippantly. “Like my mama always says, ‘If it happens, just lay back and enjoy.’”

Tanya cringed. “What’s there to enjoy?”

Vera lost her virginity last year. How and with whom, she wouldn’t tell. But by her own brazen admission, she’d been with a lot of men since. Villagers shook their heads, lamenting she grew up to be a whore just like her mama. Like Tanya and I, Vera was only thirteen, but people had already labeled her a whore, blaming her for the actions of the men she’d been with.

Tanya told me in secret that she’d also already had sex with the boy she was dating. The boy was also seeing an older girl, who would “give him what he wanted,” and Tanya was hoping that now that she gave him that too, he’d stop seeing that other girl.

I hoped for Tanya’s sake that he would. But then what did I know? I was still a virgin, and the more I learned about sex, the less I wanted to have anything to do with it, if only it was up to me.

“If you fight them,” Vera continued with the practicality beyond her age, “you’re gonna end up with a black eye, like the one that Ilyinishna is sporting. Have you seen her lately?”

I rubbed my upper arms. “She said she fell.”

“Yeah right, fell and landed on her eye.” Vera smirked. “It’s a good thing you wear glasses, Ira. Boys don’t like girls with glasses, anyway. That’s why they don’t bug you.”

Except that they did “bug” me. My thick, cheap glasses might’ve deterred boys from asking me out, but they didn’t make me immune to being groped behind the school building or being spied on in the bathroom. I hadn’t even been kissed yet, but Ihad already fought my way out of a few situations where the boys wanted far more than just kissing.

“So,” Vera prompted. “Are we doing it or not? Because if not, I’m leaving.”

If they left, I’d be alone. During the day, I didn’t mind it, but nights could be scary, especially after the drunk older boys had broken the glass in my bedroom window two weeks ago. They scared me so much that night, I’d been sleeping on the couch in the living room ever since.

If I could keep Vera and Tanya here longer, hopefully, I’d be tired enough to fall asleep quickly, instead of lying on the couch and listening to every noise this old log house made at night.

“No, guys. Stay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

I propped the smaller mirror against my shoulder while Vera and Tanya held a candle on each side of it.

“Now make a corridor and wish to see your future,” Vera instructed.

I straightened the smaller mirror, making it reflect in the bigger one. The reflection bounced from one mirror to the other, back and forth to infinity, forming a long dark corridor of shadows lit by the two candles on each side.

“What do you want your future to be like?” Tanya asked.

“I...I don’t know. I just want to be happy, I guess?”

Except that I couldn’t even define what “happy” meant. To me, happiness was just an abstract idea, where I wouldn’t be cold, or hungry, or alone. My imagination didn’t reach far beyond that. In the thirteen years I’d been alive, I hadn’t seen a single example of true happiness.

My parents weren’t happy. They screamed at each other when they were together and couldn’t care less if they were apart. Everyone in our village had their share of problems that they tried to drown in drinking, or fighting, or both.

The only adult I enjoyed having around was Natalia Borisovna, my Language and Literature teacher. She was young, just out of university. She came to our school through a contract with the government that had granted her admission into the university under the condition that after graduation, she’d work a year in a rural area like ours, where few teachers wished to live permanently. But Natalia Borisovna’s year was up. She left at the end of May and returned to the city.

Maybe that was where happiness resided? In the city?