When she opens the front door, she sees Grandma, who usually sails around the house, running from the kitchen with her mother’s speed. Her face, normally soft and wrinkled, has become sharp and angular, and her eyes behind round glasses burn with an anger Sasha has never seen. Grandma locks the door behind her and orders her to sit down.

It turns out that Andrei was not the only one who witnessed her forbidden ride on the back of the streetcar. A neighbor saw it, too, probably peeping between the boards of the fence, and, being nosy as their neighbors are, ran to their house to tell Grandma. So now Sasha is forced to stay in until her mother and Grandpa come home, and then who knows what punishment such reckless disobedience will get her. Grandma shakes her head and walks up and down the room, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Do you know what could have happened?” she asks in a shrill, unfamiliar voice. “Do you understand how dangerous it is, to jump onto a moving streetcar?” The word dangerous hisses out of her mouth like an explosion.

Sasha knows she is guilty because she broke the rules, but she has also done something that made her fearless and proud, like her mother must have felt before she was born when, despite the military order that forbade treating civilians, she cut into the belly of a nine-year-old wounded boy with her surgeon’s scalpel and pulled out pieces of shrapnel, one by one. She and Marik did it, a small revenge for the bruises from the guard who took away her friend’s father, the bruises she never revealed to anyone at home.

“But nothing happened,” she pleads. “The streetcar is so slow here, right before the end of the route. It’s so slow, I can walk faster,” she says, stretching the truth so Grandma’s face will lose its sharpness and become soft and wrinkled again.

She wants to tell her about Andrei’s admiring stare and about Marik’s tense shoulders in front of her on the tail of the streetcar; she wants to brag about their accomplishment and newly earned respect, but Grandma paces back and forth, not listening to any of this. She blames herself and says she is an old fool who didn’t see what was happening because she was too busy in the kitchen boiling buckets of water for a load of laundry and wasn’t looking out the window as often as she should have been.

“Such a reckless thing to do,” she keeps saying. “And what if Andrei decides to jump off a cliff. Will you follow him, too?” she demands. “Mama was right when she refused to let him into the house. And what about Marik?” she asks. “Did he ride on the back of the streetcar, too?”