She thought of her two friends, of Marik and Andrei and their constant competition, of how they exchanged punches and bragged about what one could do better than the other. Andrei could do a lot of things well, but Marik was good at something no one else was, not even Grandpa. Marik knew how to fish. “Where did you learn to be such a first-rate fisherman?” Grandpa had asked him when Marik brought home a pike big enough for a whole pot of soup. “My father taught me,” Marik had mumbled, embarrassed by the attention from the commander himself. Now everyone, including Andrei, was envious of Marik’s secret. The secret Marik had tried to teach Sasha last August, when they took an old rowboat out onto a small lake.

As the principal’s funereal speech droned on, Sasha thought of the rod Marik had handed to her, with a round bobbin painted half-red and half-white, of how he’d hooked a worm for her because it had been wriggling in an inch of water on the bottom of the boat and she didn’t want to impale it. He’d cast her line without getting up, without tipping the boat. The line had whistled in the air in a perfect arc and plunked down ten meters away. Then he’d hooked a worm on his own rod, his fingers black from digging in the compost pile, and cast it on the other side of the boat. They’d sat and waited, silently, because fish, as he’d explained, could hear the slightest sound you made, even your clearing your throat, even a dripping oar. The brown water around the boat had been swirling in small ripples, until the red half of her bobbin plunged beneath the surface and Marik whispered, “Pull.” She had pulled, astonished by how heavy the rod had become, leaning back so far that the boat tipped and the oars grated against their metal casings. He’d guided her arms until she could see the fish sparkle just a few centimeters below the surface. In a precise movement, he’d whipped the line, and the fish vaulted through the air and thumped to the bottom of the boat. It was small, too small for the force of the tug. She’d watched it thrashing against the boards, with a comb of spikes on its spine. Marik had grabbed the fish by the head, and she saw the hook in its open mouth as it gasped, gleaming down its perforated jaw. He’d yanked the hook down and out, and the fish stopped gasping and lay still. “A perch,” Marik had said. “Your first catch.” She’d picked up the perch and held it between her palms, its scales hard and glistening, its eyes like glass.