ANYA. Shut up.
MAX. I know, not many boys would want to date you now. Well, that’s not what I meant. But I would. What do you…
ANYA. Shut up! You won’t become a saint at her cost!
MAYA. Max drops the cigarette and leaves, offended. Yana is still standing, leaning over the windowsill. Glances down a few times, the discarded cigarettes fall slowly, gleamingin the dark. Yana pulls out her phone, shoots the sky, the horizon, the ground. The night is bright, enough that you can see through the camera. Some kids passing by see Yana and whoop.
KIDS. Jump! Do it! C’mon, kill yourself already! Kill-your-seeelf!
MAYA. They leave. And down below, there are trees, bushes. Yana keeps filming. It’s dark and you can imagine for a second that there’s no ground below, but a huge black hole instead. Yana imagines herself slowly falling into it and drifting so beautifully, as if in space. And there’s just infinity below… She zooms in on the darkness. Quietly enter Cumberbatch. He says nothing. Leans on the windowsill. Carefully looks at Yana, then down, then back at Yana. He seems to understand. He stands behind her back. Doesn’t touch her hands or waist. She wouldn’t want to be touched there, for sure. Still he resolves to carefully put his hands on Yana’s shoulders. She doesn’t break away. He presses a bit harder. She feels the weight of those hands and it’s as if they’re tying her feet to the floor. Cumberbatch is breathing into the back of her head, whispering something. Yana keeps looking down.
16.
ANYA. Sometimes it gets so sick, that you lose control, dreaming of the worst, of the most dreadful things to happen. Just to feel all of the possible pain to the last drop, to explode into a thousand pieces and just lie there in a bloody mess. So no one would no longer have doubts that you really deserve compassion. So that everyone would finally see and believe.
YANA. The exams are over. I’m almost a full-on adult, just need to wait for the results of the enrollment tests. It is my birthday. And also Mark’s parents will be getting divorced. Eventually. Mark gets plastered like a pig that night, I’m no better. Beautiful summer night. Pretty cold though. He takes me to a kids’ playground, there’s a booth there that says “Fire-hazard”. Presses me against it, in the lamp shadow. He’s my boyfriend, he’s in university now, he’s older and smarter, he won’t do me wrong. He speaks.
MARK. I want to take care of you. Trust me.
YANA. He kisses me, touches me, lifts up my skirt, can’t hold himself back. He mumbles that we’ve already made up our minds, all that wedding-living together-car buying fuckery. I’m now eighteen. And for forty five minutes. No less than that. I think I was counting in my mind. He’s fucking me.
YANA. No, no.
ANYA. Quiet.
YANA. Maybe that’s how it works? I don’t know how it works.