“Be a man and face your defeat,” says Andrei, a phrase he undoubtedly lifted straight from The Three Musketeers Sasha gave him last summer so that the three of them could play the story out together. “And don’t whimper on devchonka’s shoulder.” He adds a sliver of his own wisdom. “Maybe you can catch a fish, but you skate like a girl.”

After a fifth grader with skinny braids bangs a Tchaikovsky étude on the keys of the school’s untuned piano, after a seventh-grade ballet group stomps around the stage in a Ukrainian folk dance, it is Sasha’s turn. She can feel her armpits drip with sweat and her stomach contract with cramps. The audience of students is noisy and resentful: they were detained after classes, herded into the auditorium to hear the principal’s speech about the achievements of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. The concert is a perk, but at this point, no one cares. They all want to escape into the frosty sunshine of December, into the brilliant winter day that is already dimming into evening. None of them has a shred of interest in her acting, and except for first graders, all have seen the proverbial scene from Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet performed by the previous crop of the school’s drama club, the scene staged every year without fail. The only person who wants to see her act, she knows, is Marik.

She concentrates hard on being Juliet. As she speaks the lines, immersing herself in the text, a new sensation brushes against her, a feeling of lightness, of escaping the confines of her body. This new sensation is intoxicating, and she tries to capture it and gently hold it in her hand like a bird. The words she speaks—the words she believes—seem to weaken the pull between her body and the floor, making her feel weightless, as if she could defy gravity and float above the stage and soar. Becoming someone else has emptied her body of fear and pain; she no longer feels stomach cramps. The students’ whispers, the shuffling of resentful feet, the bursts of snickers in the audience have now stopped.

“Well, do not swear,” she orders her acting partner, Vova, to the auditorium’s dead silence. She doesn’t see the rows of chairs, or the windows pasted with garlands of frost, or the eyes aimed at her. She only sees the boy she loves standing beneath the balcony; she only tries to grapple with the passion that is pushing her toward him, overwhelming and conflicting. “It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden. Too like the lightning,” she confides to the audience frozen in rapt silence.