“You want Infini to go well?” Sergei asks me.
“Yeah.” I nod, a little dizzy from drinking and from Luka. He ruffles in his jean’s pocket for something, and then he places a handful of Jolly Ranchers on the table.
I’m a little worried he stole them, but I’m also used to Luka shoplifting candy and then sharing most of the loot.
He pushes the green apple towards me. My favorite flavor.
I pick up a piece while he unwraps a blue raspberry one.
Waving his bottle at me, Sergei tries to seize my attention again. When he’s successful, he says, “Then you should tell my brother to start answering my emails.”
I go cold. “He’s ignoring you?” It’s weird having to talk like Luka isn’t right beside me, but it’s not like him to carry a grudge like this. He loves everyone but the company hierarchy.
Maybe he’s changed.
No. I still don’t want to believe that yet.
He feels the same.
“For months he’s been giving me the cold-shoulder,” Sergei says. “And we’re brothers. It’s kind of unbelievable, right?” Whatever exists between them must be deep-seated.
And I can’t side with Sergei like he wants me to. I’d defend Luka for millenniums. He’s not just my secret ex-boyfriend. He’s the boy who my dad called, “Poignant.” Luka moved my father to near tears because…he was there for me.
For as long as I can remember, I have days where I just lie in bed, feeling weighed down, empty. My dad would nudge me to go to a Mets game, and the thought sounded worse than work. It seemed lifeless and then painful. All the things I love have felt pointless at some moment in time.
I hate the feeling. Because it’s unshakable. It grips every bone in my body and tells me not to move, not to dance. Not to live.
That all joy is joyless. That all love is worthless.
That happiness is too far gone.
Before my parents passed, people would tell me “don’t be sad” and “you have so much to be happy about”—and I did. Yet, my sadness doesn’t listen to these pleas. There’s not a switch that I can pull to turn it all off.
So my mom brought me to a doctor. I was diagnosed with clinical depression. I met Luka around the same time I began taking antidepressants. The pills help a lot now. It doesn’t eliminate depression, but the medicine subdues these miserable feelings. Pushing them back into the crevices of my body and mind.
At first, way back then, the side-effects exacerbated my sad, disheartened thoughts and feelings. My dad was afraid of the warning label on the pills. Suicidal thoughts in teens.
At the beginning, it was hard.
Luka would come over while I lied on my couch, moping, and he’d lie on the other side, our legs tangled. We’d eat candy and popcorn, and he’d just keep me company. The kind of company I needed when I felt so completely hollow and alone inside.
My dad saw someone that was there for me in the simplest but most profound way.
Poignant.
“Why are you dragging her into this?” Luka asks his older brother. “You just met. You didn’t even know her name.”
“I like her,” Sergei says, “more than I honestly like you right now.” His glare grows hotter on his brother. “If you responded to me at all, you’d realize that we’re supposed to be partners.”
“What are you talking about?” Luka shakes his head.
“The Wheel of Death. It takes two people. Who’d you think you were working with?”
In my peripheral, I see Luka’s jaw muscle tic.
“You’re stuck with me whether you like it or not,” Sergei continues. “We have to work together, and our act depends on communication.” He finishes off his beer with a grimace. “At least be better than Timofei.”
Oh shit.
Luka’s back arches at the sound of his little brother. “What do you know about Timo?”
Sergei rips the label off the bottle. “He called me a traitor and said I wasn’t to ever step into his room unless I wanted a broken kneecap.”
“You’re rooming with him?”
“Yeah.” Sergei pauses. “He didn’t tell you? I thought you were close.” They are.
We’re all silent. Even over the bar’s loud commotion, I can hear the crinkle of the Jolly Rancher wrapper between Luka’s fingers and the green apple one that I set down.
“Sweet children of mine, what the fuck are you doing?” Dimitri Kotova appears, and I go cold like solid ice. He’s a part of Infini’s cast, and he’s most likely been inside the bar for a while now. I wonder how long he’s been watching us.
“Talking,” Luka rebuts and gestures from his chest to Sergei’s. Emphasizing that the conversation is not between us. Dimitri is too loyal to his family to snitch on Luka to AE’s figureheads.
So I try to keep calm about us breaking the contract as we sit next to each other. As we cast furtive glances. As we even speak.
Water bottle in hand, Dimitri sidles next to his cousin Sergei. One quick look, he studies the candy along the table, plus our stiff postures.
“Aren’t you performing tonight?” I ask him, trying to sound casual and not tense.
Dimitri swishes his water bottle in affirmation, not drinking alcohol. He’s in Aerial Ethereal’s Amour along with Nikolai, Nik’s girlfriend Thora, Timofei, and others. It’s almost unheard of to pull double-duty in shows. To be in two at once.
Not only because of scheduling conflicts but because it’s tiring. It’s not that Dimitri is a scene-stealer or that they need him for gasps and awes.
It’s more simple: Dimitri is really good at assisting the hardest apparatuses. He performs in large group acts, always ensuring that no one gets hurt on Russian swing and teeterboard, and in Infini, he has always assisted my juggling routines.
Dimitri is the one who throws me extra clubs and balls. We work well together, even if he’s absolutely unequivocally crude. When I was thirteen, he called a corndog a fellatio stick. Which really, when you think about it, makes no sense.
“You’re cool with Sergei?” Luka asks Dimitri. The air thickens, their familial divisions raw, like an open, infected wound.
Before he can reply, Sergei says, “Dimitri is mature.”
I let out a laugh. I can’t help it.
Sergei’s brows knot at me, confused. Dimitri cocks his head in my direction, not surprised by my outburst.
“Sorry,” I say into another muffled laugh. Dimitri mature. He may be older than us and professional when it matters, but he’s been to jail for peeing on the street three times. And he constantly draws penises and balls on foggy locker room mirrors.
“Go ahead and laugh,” Dimitri says, “at least I know which dicks I can and cannot touch.”
Low blow. I’m used to them from him. I force a smile. “I didn’t realize you planned on touching your cousin’s dick.”
Luka laughs under his breath, and my chest rises, lungs expanding. I made him laugh—and I want to hear him laugh again. And again.
Dimitri shakes his head at both of us like knock it off. He traveled down this disastrous road first by bringing up Luka’s dick.
Now I’m really imagining his dick. What it used to look like—what it might look like now. Great. I need to stop. I know I need to stop, but it’s like a snowball effect. I can’t slow down enough to just…leave him. And this situation.
I can repeat no minors policy a million times, and it’s not helping enough. It’s not forcing me off my stool and through the exit.
I feel like a terrible person. Maybe I really am one.
Dimitri hasn’t physically separated Luka and me yet, and maybe he’s uncertain on what action to take since we’ve never been this close before. At least not after we signed those contracts. Almost five years ago.
Sergei’s confusion escalates, and he suddenly motions between me and his little brother. “Are you two together?”
“No,” we say in unison.
My bones ache; I’m so rigid.
“What are you drinking?” Dimitri asks me, grabbing my empty glass. He sniffs. “Alright, Baybay”—I hate when he calls me that, and unfortunately, he knows it—“you’re cut off.”