The boy is a year younger than they are, and Sasha has seen him in the hallways of their school, always with a runny nose and scabs on his elbows. She knows it is not a noble thing to strike someone younger than you, but this boy surely deserves it. She lunges to the stoop and pummels him with her schoolbag, on the head, right and left, and then a few more times on his shoulders and his chest. Luckily, the schoolbag is heavy, since they have a lot of homework today, and it thumps against the boy’s head, two times for each of the uglies and some extra pounding for the kike.

From the boy’s widened eyes, she knows that he did not expect this: he has heard and uttered the insult so many times before that to his ear, the word may have lost its pungency and now sounds just as bland as anything their principal may say in their monthly Pioneer meetings. After a little arm flailing, he scrambles up and escapes inside the house, but when he is out of her reach, when he knows she can no longer whack him, he yells “crazy bitch” and thrusts his arm in her direction, as if he were throwing a rock.

Sasha is not proud of beating up a seventh grader, but Marik is grateful. He looks at her with admiring eyes, as if she’d just single-handedly defeated a battalion of Germans. “You’re a real friend,” he whispers, blinking and squeezing her hand, not daring to trust his changing voice. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

She is not sure Marik is right that she is his real friend. More and more often, she finds herself being a buffer between Marik and Andrei, whose resentment of one another seems to be growing together with their muscles and bones. What happened to their games of Cossacks and Outlaws, when the three of them outwitted the other team of local kids and found the most unexpected places to hide, or to the game of War, where Marik and Sasha were heroic partisans, ready to withstand the most hideous threats from Andrei, the Nazi commandant? What happened to their Three Musketeers promise, the vow of “one for all and all for one” they took shortly after Marik’s mother gave her the volume by Alexandre Dumas for her birthday?

She searches for answers in Kolya’s journal.

February 21, 1942