No one has ever said they loved her before, either outside her family or within it. In their house, they don’t talk about love. Days are filled with more pressing matters: sheets needing to be boiled, chickens needing to be fed, wood needing to be split for their furnace. Every day, they stand in lines for milk and bread and carry buckets of water to Grandpa’s beds of potatoes and dill. In July, they make jams from strawberries and currants; in September, they shred head after head of cabbage and layer them with salt and cranberries to fill a barrel for the winter. There is no time for talking about love. So she feels guilty lying with Andrei in this field swarming with grasshoppers and ants, talking about love, instead of digging up radishes for salad or lugging water from the well for Grandma’s nettle soup.

She feels guilty because she loves Andrei’s love. It feels good being loved by an older boy, being admired and touched reverentially, as if she were an ancient Greek vase on display in the Hermitage. It feels a lot like Turgenev’s orchard scene or Nina’s part in Chekhov’s Seagull she is rehearsing in the school drama club. But even though she loves Andrei, she also loves Theater. The one thing she knows for certain is that she must go to Moscow, and it is time to tell Andrei about this, even if it makes his coal-like Mayakovsky eyes turn white with anger. She takes a breath and tries to release what has been stuck inside her for too long, but the words still refuse to clothe themselves in sound. She sits with her mouth open, silent. She knows that what she is not able to utter yet will catch him as off guard as an expert solar plexus strike and will be just as devastating. She also knows that soon—despite the pain it is bound to inflict on both of them—she will have no choice but to tell him she is leaving.

Andrei peers into the wall of grass before him, as though the ants crawling up and down the thick blades hold the key to what he senses she cannot yet say, as though if he stares long enough into the yellowish thicket, their future would reveal itself in its entirety. Yet their future is still opaque; she is not ready to say what she has to say.

She turns away from him. From the angle of the sun above the forest, she knows that Grandma has already started to prepare for supper, so she has a perfect excuse to extract herself from the thicket of this uncomfortable silence. “It’s getting late,” she says. “I have to go home.”

As she gets up to leave, she looks down and sees Andrei grab a lime-green grasshopper pulsing on its spindly legs by the stem of a bluebell flower and crush it between his fingers.

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