The one time I had a chance to join forces with another Russian in childhood, I passed, fearing the stigma of belonging to a weird group would be worse than being without a group at all. In seventh grade, I briefly attended a Dallas-area middle school that had the social dynamics of an overcrowded prison. At one point, we got a kid directly from Russia. I discovered this in gym class, when some of the popular kids began relentlessly teasing a round boy with a heavy accent.

The boy—whom I’ll call Feodogroup r, because I don’t remember his name—had come over with his family just a few months prior. He spoke in broken English, and I rarely saw him during the day because he was in the regular classes while I was in “pre-AP” with the rest of the nerds. Gym, though, was the grand bazaar, the place where all the kids were pelted equally with harassment and dodgeballs, regardless of class or creed.

While the teacher was taking attendance, Feodor slid his polyester-clad thighs a few inches in my direction. We commenced what I can only imagine is the conversation covert CIA agents have when they encounter each other in the field.

“Olga?” he whispered in our shared mother tongue. “Are you Russian?”

“Shut up!” I hissed in English. “Of course I am.”

He made entreaties toward friendship, and I considered it. It could be nice, this, uh, Soviet union. I’d finally have someone to sit with at lunch. Though I was not the thirteen-year-old version of sexually attracted to him, I could have made him my boyfriend—thus leveling up to the clique of “ugly girls with boyfriends,” who had so far rejected me for failing to meet their terms of membership.

But Feodor and I would need at least one other person to form a proper middle school posse. And who would we recruit? The Chinese girls had already made it clear they wanted nothing to do with me, and that was, realistically, the next most welcoming immigrant group. There was one Iranian kid, but he wore acid-washed jeans, and it was not one of the two fashion eras during which that was acceptable (early 1990s and 2010s). No, I thought. I had already shimmied one rung up the ladder and dug in my nails. There was no way I was slipping back down.

God be with you, Feodor, I thought. For the rest of the year, I ignored him.

I didn’t meet many Russians my age until fourteen years later, when I was at an outdoor concert in Silver Spring, Maryland, and was introduced by some friends to a compact Jewish man wearing a polo shirt. I had interacted with so few Russians in my life that when he told me his name, I almost didn’t understand him. “Anka?” I asked.