The push only made him wobble a little, but he immediately stepped aside. Iskra grabbed Stameskin’s hand and pulled him away.

“Watch out, butterball. You’ll regret it if we get hold of you!”

“Don’t turn around!” Iskra shouted, dragging Stameskin away. “They’re all miserable cowards.”

“If only you knew,” Sashka sighed.

“I do know!” she cut him off. “Only those with truth on their side are brave. Those without truth on their side are just insolent, that’s all.”

Despite the victory, Iskra was sincerely upset. She exercised daily and systematically, played basketball with great passion, loved running, but the buttons on her shirts needed adjusting more and more often, her dresses were bursting at the seams, and her skirts filled out so much from year to year that Iskra was filled with despair. And the stupid word “butterball" - said in front of Sashka, no less! - was far more offensive to her than any curse.

Sashka fell in love at once, with the strict club supervisor, with light-winged gliders, with the very name “airplane model club”. Iskra’s calculations had been correct: Sashka had something to lose now, and he clung to school with the stubbornness of a drowning man.

Moving on to stage two, Iskra came over to Stameskin’s place every day not just to help with homework, but to catch Sashka up on that which had been lost in the halcyon days of his freedom. This was, so to speak, extracurricular, more than she had promised: Iskra was steadily molding Sashka Stameskin into her hypothetically constructed ideal.

Half a month after meeting Sashka’s former friends, Iskra met them again - this time without Sasha, without help or support, and not even in the street, where if worst came to worst, she could at least scream, though Iskra would have rather died than called for help. She had run into the dark and echoingly empty entryway, when she was suddenly seized, squeezed, dragged under the staircase and thrown onto the dirty cement floor. It was so unexpected, swift, and silent that Iskra only had time to curl up, bending in an arc, her knees pressed against her chest. Her heart froze, and her back tensed in expectation of blows. But for some reason, she was not getting hit. She was getting grabbed, groped, shoved, with wheezing and getting in each other’s way. Someone’s hands pulled off her hat, yanked at her braids trying to pull her face away from her knees, someone roughly pushed up her skirt, pinching her hips, someone was squeezing in down her shirt. And all of this was spinning, colliding, breathing loudly, puffing, hurrying...

No, they were not at all intending to beat her up, they simply meant to feel her up, squeeze her, grope her, “get handsy”, as boys would call it. And when Iskra realized this, her fear immediately evaporated, and her fury was so fierce that she choked on it. Digging her hands into someone’s arm, kicking away the one crawling under her skirt, she managed to leap up and fly up the staircase, three steps at a time, into Sashka’s long corridor.

She burst into the room without knocking: red-faced, disheveled, with buttons torn off her coat, still clutching her schoolbag with her textbooks to her chest with both hands. She burst in, closed the door, and sagged against it, feeling sure that in just a little bit, in just a moment, the persistent trembling in her knees would drop her to the floor.

Sashka’s mother, glum and skinny, was frying potatoes on the kerosene stove, while Sashka himself was genuinely trying to solve a word problem at the table. They stared silently at Iskra, and Iskra clarified, smiling assiduously: 

“I got held up. Downstairs. Excuse me, please.” Pushing away from the door with her whole body, she took two steps and collapsed onto a stool, in desperate tears from fear, hurt, and humiliation.

“Oh no, Miss Iskra, what is it?” Sashka’s mom generally addressed her as an adult, out of respect. “Good god, what did they do to you?”

“Pulled my hat off,” Iskra muttered, dazed and pathetic, stubbornly smiling and smearing tears across her round cheeks. “Mom will be upset, she’ll scold me for the hat.”

“Good god, how can this be?” cried out the woman. “Drink some water, Miss Iskra, drink some water.”

Sashka got up from the table, silently moved his fussing mother aside, and went out.

He came back half an hour later. Put Iskra’s blue knit hat in front of her, spit out blood and two front teeth into a basin, spent a long time washing his beat up face. Iskra was not crying any longer and was watching him fearfully instead; he met her glance and smiled with difficulty:

“Let’s study, or what?”

From that day on, they went everywhere together. To school and to the ice rink, to the movies and to concerts, to the reading room and just walking around for no reason. Through the streets. Always together. But it did not so much as occur to anyone to poke fun at this. Everyone at school knew how good a friend Iskra could be, but no one, not one person, not even Sashka, knew how she could love. Iskra did not even know herself. It was all called friendship, for now, and that which was contained in the word was quite sufficient for her.

And now, Sashka Stameskin, after so much effort and perseverance put into believing the reality of his own dream, having caught up, and in some areas having overtaken many of his classmates, was leaving school. And this was not just an injustice - this was the collapse of all Iskra’s hopes. The conscious and the not yet conscious ones.

“Maybe we can get that money together for him?”

“You’re so smart sometimes, and such an idiot other times!” Zina threw up her hands. “Sure, we can try to get that money, you thought of that. And will he take it?”

“He will,” Iskra said without a moment’s thought.

“Yes, because you’ll make him. You can even make me eat milk skin, even though I know for sure that I will die if I do.” Zinochka twitched her shoulders in revulsion. “That’s just charity, is what it is, and that’s why you’re an idiot. An idiot, and that’s it. As in, an unintelligent woman.”

Iskra did not like the word “woman”, and Zinochka was teasing her a little. The circumstances were unusual: Iskra did not have a solution. And Zina had found a solution and was therefore quietly rejoicing in her triumph. But she could not rejoice for long: she was impetuous and generous and always blurted out exactly what she thought.

“He needs to go work at the aircraft factory!”

“He needs to get an education,” Iskra said uncertainly. But her resistance was just inertia, born of the usual feeling that until now, she had always been right about everything. Her bright-eyed friend’s solution turned out to be so simple that she could not even argue. Getting an education? He could get an education in evening school. The club? Silly to think about; at the factory they weren’t playing with models, they were building real airplanes, gorgeous ones, the best in the world, ones that had set unbelievable records of length, height, and speed. But Iskra could not give up so easily, because this solution, a solution that would make Sashka’s eyes light up again, was not hers this time.

“You think it’s that easy? It’s a completely secret factory, they only take people who have been thoroughly checked out.”

“Is Sashka a spy?”

“You have to fill out forms, stupid. What will he write under “father”? What? Even his own mom doesn’t know who his father is.”

“Oh, really?” Criminal curiosity flared up in Zinochka’s eyes.