“That’s awful for people on the bottom. We, my brother, are not on the bottom. Dad and I busted our asses so we wouldn’t be there, and while you sink back into academia, we’ll continue to hustle to keep it that way. Tell me why I should care about a bunch of entitled assholes crying over money they gave away in a scam of a system, assholes like you.”

“Your blasé attitude tells me two things,” he stated, taking a bite of his bacon as I leaned against the countertop, regarding him impassively. “One, you skipped too many days of school. Two, you believe all the pieces of this machine can work independently when they’re useless on their own.”

I rolled my eyes. “What I understand is Dad left one fractured country for another. He ran from Russia to dodge the Revolution and brought us here to the land of broken promises and thug rule.”

“You enjoy the freedoms of this land, freedoms you would have never had in Russia. You remember it romantically because you were too young to know it realistically.”

“You’re two years older than me. Did you know it so well at seven?” I laughed at the assertion. “And what freedoms do I enjoy, Ig? Is it answering to Vlad or to Dad? Which one is liberation?”

“Liberation is making a mint selling whiskey to the ethels you don’t mind visiting,” Igor huffed.

I laughed harder. “Oh, dry up, Mrs. Grundy. You were so worried about belles hitting on you that you backed your ass out of a ton of dough. The only people who give a shit about the fags being fags are people like us.”

“What are we? What are we like?”

“Outsiders, Ig,” I replied. “People who came through Ellis Island with backward minds. People who will always be behind the rest of them if we do things the way they’re supposed to be done.”

“You have a victim complex,” Igor chided, preparing to make the same argument he defaulted to every time we sparred.

“You want the America you read about in fairy tales, not the dirty version we live in, that you pretend to be above,” I retorted, “with your college degree, living off mine and dad’s broken backs.”

“And you don’t think my doctorate will be gainful for us when I earn it, that maybe you’ll be able to leave Vladimir and the outfit behind?”

“All I think about is the fact that you ran the ultimate racket becoming a professional student.” Nothing enraged me more than Igor parlaying a couple of high test scores into a one-way ticket out of the mob’s hold. The smart fucker had somehow convinced the bosses that he’d be more valuable to them in the future if he walked the straight and narrow.

“You should try expanding your mind then,” Igor suggested.