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 bea 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, butwhyare 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—”
“Babais Serbian forgrandma. 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 anOwith anIin 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.”
