Tatiana Gromova

Her gridded notebook wasn't just a thing. It was her secret, quiet refuge. A place where the damp smell from the entryway and the constant arguments behind the wall couldn't penetrate. A place where she could still breathe.

On the one hand, words lived there. But not recipes or lists. Tanya copied poetry there. In her best, most painstaking handwriting, she wrote lines by Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. These weren't just pretty words. It was the language spoken by her own heart, hidden from everyone. Each letter fell quietly and precisely on the paper, as if she were afraid to frighten the feeling she was trying to capture and preserve on the page.

And on the other side was color. A real, bright, sticky color from another world. Her little herbarium of shards of happiness. A lilac flower, dried to a transparent state, which she found in the yard in May. A bright chocolate bar wrapper, whose wrapper smelled so sweet it briefly took her back to childhood. And her greatest treasure—a gum sticker.

When the expensive glue tube ran out, Tanya wasn't upset. She found her own way. She'd take a pot of jelly from the refrigerator. Thick and starchy, it would harden like a stone. She'd spread it thinly on a piece of paper—the sweet aroma momentarily filled the kitchen—and press her treasure to the page. It was her own quiet ritual.

Sometimes worlds collided. A stern, measured poem about melancholy might begin on one page, while a crumpled caramel wrapper would be stuck to the back. The mark of a torn sheet of paper with an unfinished line would remain next to a bright sticker.

This notebook held the colors of her childhood and home. What was real and warm before the world turned gray. It was her fortress, a place where the world's melancholy would never penetrate, unless it was hers.

Tanya's childhood, before the world turned gray, was vibrant. She remembered the market as a fairytale kingdom, buzzing beneath the vaulted ceilings, filled with the scent of melons and damp earth. Her mother laughed easily back then, and Tanya could ask for any toy.

And then the film in the slide projector began to fade. First, her mother's face changed. The smile didn't disappear overnight; it simply thinned, and then disappeared altogether. In its place appeared pursed lips and a stern, appraising gaze. Tanya remembered that gaze best. It appeared after she, at ten, drank her grandmother's dried fruit compote. Not because she was thirsty, but because she liked the pattern on the skirt of the girl next door. She drank the entire three-liter jar, imagining herself in that skirt. That evening, her mother silently placed a bowl of empty soup in front of her and looked at her with such a look that Tanya choked on her own saliva. There was no scream in that look. It was coldly mathematical: "You drank what could have fed us all winter."

That's when Tanya acquired a small, squared notebook. It was her only luxury and her archive. She pasted into it everything that reminded her of her old world: a candy wrapper from a randomly purchased Kis-Kis toffee, a perfectly shaped dried maple leaf, a children's movie ticket. And one day—a brightly colored gum sticker you gave her. That sticker was the most treasured page in her notebook. It was like a window into another world—bright, sticky, and completely out of reach.

Food ceased to be a pleasure and became fuel. Tanya began to notice a greasy film on her borscht and lumps in her porridge. By giving it up, she wasn't rebelling but cleansing herself, creating a sterile, white space of emptiness within herself that neither the squabbles outside nor the chaos of the 1990s could touch. Her thinness was a shield of sharp bones behind which she hid from the world.

In their class, as everywhere else, there were hierarchies, loud leaders, and outcasts. But for Tanya Gromova, there existed a separate, secret sisterhood.

This wasn't the kind of friendship one flaunts. There were no movie nights together or gossiping throughout the school. It was a code of silence and action.

This manifested itself in small things that seemed ordinary from the outside, but for Tanya were a lifeline.

• During gym class, in the echoing locker room, filled with the smell of sweat and cheap deodorant, Tanya always tried to hide behind the farthest locker, trying to cover her angular figure with an old towel. And then, without a word, Katya Sverlovskaya would approach her. She didn't ask, "Can I help you?" She simply took Tanya's lifeless lock of hair, tossed it over her chest, and began braiding it. Her fingers were warm and a little clumsy. Katya would chatter about nonsense—about a new lipstick, about something she saw on the bus—and this ordinary stream of words created a protective dome around Tanya, shielding her from prying eyes and ridicule.

• In winter, when the cold outside was chilly and the only uniform for outdoor training lasted the entire season, Sveta Lebedeva would simply approach her as she left the locker room. She didn't explain anything. She simply took off her jacket—a little newer, a little warmer—and silently draped it over Tanya's shoulders. "You'll freeze," she said matter-of-factly, looking away. There was neither pity nor condescension in this gesture. It was a simple statement of fact and immediate action to remedy it. The jacket retained the warmth of Sveta's body and its scent—the light aroma of perfume and clean linen. Tanya froze, afraid to move, lest she frighten this moment of sisterly closeness.

• During the long break, when everyone was getting out their breakfasts—sandwiches in waxed paper, apples, cookies—Tanya was simply sitting at her desk. And then someone’s hand (usually Olesya’s) would quietly push half an apple or a gingerbread cookie towards her. Without a word. Just like that.

Her secret, almost unbearable pain was rooted not in hunger, but in the closet. In their classroom, in their yard, femininity still existed. It was worn, altered, but it was there. The girls came to class in their mothers' dresses made of crimplene or tricotine. The dresses were too big for them, and they pinned them at the waist with huge safety pins or belted them with their mothers' sashes. It was a kind of chic, a sign that the family had something "pre-divorce," something from a past, better life. These dresses smelled of someone else's "Red Moscow" perfume and mothballs, but they were bright, they had pleats, bell-shaped skirts, and puffed sleeves.

Tanya looked at them and died of envy. Not of the dresses, but of the very opportunity to wear them.

Her own wardrobe consisted of shapeless sweaters and stretched turtlenecks that hid everything. Taking off a sweater for her was tantamount to going outside naked. Beneath it, there wasn't the soft, rounded girlish figure those maternal dresses suggested. There was nothing underneath.

Only sharp angles. Protruding collarbones, like coat hangers. Elbows that seemed too big for her slender arms. A belly sunken so deeply that she could cup it in her palms. She knew that beneath the shapeless fabric, her body looked like a living anatomical diagram.

But the most terrible and humiliating thing was something else. Her mother. Despite all this scarcity, the perpetual fatigue and the dreary everyday life, Tanya's mother retained her figure. She had large, soft breasts, which Tanya had grown accustomed to considering a kind of pillow since childhood. She had rounded shoulders and heavy arms. Her mother was the embodiment of that very femininity, carnal and warm, which Tanya had renounced and lost.

The thought of putting a dress on her bony, sexless body filled her with panic. She wasn't afraid of the cold. She was afraid of the contrast. She was afraid of looking like a parody of a woman next to her real, living mother. Her weakness was that she had voluntarily given up being a girl.

For Tanya Gromova, the school world wasn't a place for learning, but rather a backdrop in which she tried to become invisible. She sat at the back of the class by the window, and her presence was felt only as a cloud of silence. But into this silence, another, bright and bustling world constantly intruded—the world of her friend Olesya.

Every morning it began the same way. Olesya, glancing furtively at the teacher, pulled out a handful of multicolored rubber bands. — Look, Gromova! New ones! "Mint Gum" and "Caramel." We'll whip you up something.

For Olesya, it was just a fun thing. A trifle. A way to occupy a boring algebra lesson. For Tanya, this moment was akin to meditating on jewelry. She picked up the cool, springy, caramel-colored elastic and slid it between her fingers. It was a color from another world. A world where you could easily buy a set of a hundred. A world where girls bragged not about who ate the least at lunch, but about the pattern on their wrists.

She watched Olesya's nimble fingers tie knots, creating a simple fishtail stitch. She wanted to ask her to weave one like that. She wanted to feel that light, almost weightless pressure on her wrist. A friendship bracelet is a promise. A promise of what? That you're not alone. That you're part of something bright and warm.

But she remained silent. Tanya looked at her own hands—thin, pale, with visible blue veins and bitten nails. She could physically sense how ridiculous and terrifying such a bracelet would look on her bony wrist. It wouldn't beautify her. It would only emphasize her ugliness. It would be a blatant advertisement of her illness.

That's why she only smiled weakly in response to Olesya's proposal.

• No, thank you. You braid it yourself.

And she turned to the window, where the November day was graying, hiding in the pocket of her oversized sweater the hand that had so longed for a simple bracelet made of cheap rubber bands. A small piece of a normal, girlish world that had been denied her.