The Witness

mall?”
    “It sounds so silly, doesn’t it? My first real taste of freedom, and I went to the mall. But I had a fantasy about roaming the mall with a pack of girlfriends, giggling about boys, helping each other try on clothes. And I ran into Julie. We’d gone to school together for a while. She was a year or so older, and so popular, so pretty. I think she spoke to me that day because she’d broken up with her boyfriend and was at loose ends. Everything just happened from there.”
    She told him about shopping, how it made her feel. About the hair dye, the plans to make fake IDs and go to the club.
    “That’s a lot of teenage rebellion in one day.”
    “I think it was stored up.”
    “I bet. You could make passable IDs at sixteen?”
    “Excellent ones. I was very interested in identity theft and cyber crimes. I believed I’d have a career as an investigator.”
    “It wouldn’t surprise me.”
    “It’s flattering you’d say so. It mattered so much once. That day, in the mall, I took Julie’s picture, and I took my own later. I cut my hair, and I dyed it black. Very black, and I bought makeup, used it the way Julie showed me. And I’d studied the other girls in college, so I knew how to apply it.”
    “Hold on a minute, I’m trying to picture you with short, black hair.” He studied her, narrowed his eyes. “A little Goth, a little funky.”
    “I’m not sure, but I looked very different from the way my mother wanted me to look. I suppose that was the point.”
    “Sure it was, and the other point is you were entitled to it. Every kid is.”
    “Maybe that’s true. I should’ve stopped there. It should’ve been enough. The clothes, the hair and makeup. And the program she’d assigned me to started that Monday, and I’d made up my mind not to go. She would have been furious, and that should’ve been enough. But I didn’t stop there.”
    “You were on a roll,” he commented. “You created the fake IDs and got into a club.”
    “Yes. Julie picked the club. I didn’t know anything about them, but I looked up the one she wanted, so I knew it was owned by a family rumored—known, really—to be Russian Mafia. The Volkovs.”
    “Rings a dim bell. We didn’t deal with the Russians as a rule in Little Rock. Some Irish, some Italian Mob types.”
    “Sergei Volkov was—is—the
pakhan,
the boss of the Volkov
bratva.
He and his brother owned the club. I learned later it was run primarily by Sergei’s son, Ilya. His cousin Alexi worked there—ostensibly. Primarily,again, I learned later, Alexi drank there, did drugs and women there. I didn’t know or understand any of that when we met him.
    “We drank Cosmopolitans, Julie and I. They were popular because of the television show
Sex and the City.
We drank and danced, and it was the most exciting night of my life. And Alexi Gurevich came to our table.”
    She told him everything, how the club had looked to her, sounded. How Ilya had come, how he’d looked at her, talked to her. How she’d been kissed for the first time in her life, and by a Russian gangster.
    “We were so young, and so foolish,” she continued. “I didn’t want to go to Alexi’s house, but I didn’t know how
not
to go. I felt ill, and when Ilya had to stay back, promising to meet us later, it was worse. Alexi’s house wasn’t far from my mother’s, really. I imagined just going home, lying down. I’d never been drunk before. It had stopped being pleasant.”
    “It’ll do that.”
    “Did you ever … when you were a teenager?”
    “Russ and I got drunk and sick together a few times before we hit the legal age, and a few times after.”
    “It was my first and last time, and I’ve never had another Cosmopolitan. Even looking at them makes me vaguely ill.” And a little afraid, she admitted to herself. “He had a beautiful home with a river view. Furnished with too much deliberation, I thought. Too consciously trendy. He made more drinks, put on music, but I felt ill, and I used the bathroom off the kitchen to be sick. Sicker than I’d ever been in my life. All I wanted to do—”
    “Was curl up on the floor and die?”
    “Yes. Yes.” She laughed a little. “I suppose it’s something a lot of people experience at least once. I still didn’t feel well when I came out, and I saw … Julie and Alexi were having sex on the sofa. I was fascinated and horrified at the same time, and so embarrassed. I went out through the kitchen to the terrace. It felt