Page 5 of You + Me – Against the World

His deep voice stirs something inside me. I’m discovering how much I like provoking him.

“And you’re spouting bullshit, Arcadi. We still haven’t found a topic.”

“Hey, Alma! What are you doing out here?” Tim’s voice interrupts our conversation.

I get up to kiss him, then greet his friends who are clustered around him.

He drapes his arm over my shoulders and continues questioning me, his eyes fixed on Vadim, who is still sitting on the grass. “Don’t you have class?”

“Yes, we’ve got to go back in half an hour. We were trying to find a topic for our first-semester project.”

“Don’t they give you a classroom in film studies?” Tim jokes, playing to his audience.

“You know that students are free citizens who can roam around this beautiful country as they please, right?” Vadim shoots back with a forced smile.

“Arcadi, Arcadi… now that doesn’t sound very American, does it? I reckon it must be much nicer here than in Poland.”

“Tim!”

“I’m of Russian descent,” Vadim corrects him. “And I was born in the United States. But it’s nice of you to care, Wallace.”

Everyone calls each other by their last names here, even friends. I’ve mostly stopped taking offense at it. But the tone these two are using with each other is far from friendly. At best, it’s contemptuous, at worst lethal. I sense danger.

Ignoring Vadim’s last remark, Tim tightens his grip around me. “Well, if you don’t have anything to do for the next half hour, I was going to grab a bite with the guys. Do you want to come?”

“I’d love to, but I don’t know if I have time.”

“We need to work, Alma,” Vadim reminds me.

“Do you mind? I was talking to my girlfriend,” Tim hisses, growing increasingly irritated.

“Your girlfriend just told you she didn’t have time.”

“Don’t you dare speak for her, Arcadi.”

“I’m just repeating what you seem to have trouble understanding.”

“How about my fist in your face? Do you think you’ll understand that?”

“Tim!”

My head swings back and forth between them, as if watching a tennis match in fast-forward.

With his usual nonchalance, Vadim gets up, picks up his bag and runs a hand through his hair, dislodging a blade of grass. “Forget it, Lancaster. If you need a bodyguard and you don’t want to put time into this, we can each work on our own. You can tell Abrams that all the ideas were yours. Or that you want to change partners. I really don’t care.”

3

Vadim hasn’t come back.

No one is rocking on the abandoned chair at the back of the class, and the one next to me remains stubbornly empty, too. All the other students are sitting in their pairs: excited, sulky, satisfied, scowling, rowdy—but all feverish after an intense hour. I spent half of my time sparring with my partner, then the second half wondering where he was and what I was going to present to the teacher.

All in all, it’s a lively atmosphere in the classroom when Mr. Abrams appears once again, the nauseating scent of coffee and stale tobacco trailing behind him. Perhaps it’s the smell, or maybe it’s the professor’s aura, but the room immediately falls silent. His imposing presence makes me even more uneasy.

I stare nervously at the door and pray that it will soon be opened by a sullen Vadim, muttering something inaudible as an excuse for being late. But there’s nothing. Not a single sound or movement, not even a few distant footsteps in the hallway to give me hope. Just the silence of zealous students, eager to be called upon, and the teacher drawing out the suspense as he sizes us up with a curious and deliberately cruel eye.

We’re all going to crash and burn, starting with me. And I don’t even have an ally by my side.

Abrams begins doing the rounds with the unlikely Lee-McPherson duo, who take the first hit but don’t fare too badly overall. “You’ve got an idea there, but no substance. Dig deeper.” The Scott-Perkins pair is cut short due to Nicki’s simpering. “Batting your eyelashes is not a theme. Less posing, more substance!” Clémentine almost passes with flying colors after letting her partner, the brilliant Hannah Goldberg, speak. Hannah is five years older than us and has already been nicknamed Spielberg by the entire class. “D’Aragon, you’ve distinguished yourself by your lack of contribution, which is something, I guess!”