### CHAPTER 19 - VIDEO CALL
My mom calls on Thursday night.
It's 9 p.m. here, which means it's 4 a.m. there, and she never calls at 4 a.m. unless something is wrong, unless someone is in the hospital or the police are at the door, and my stomach drops before I even pick up.
The phone buzzes on my desk and vibrates against my textbook. *Mama* on the screen in Cyrillic. Roman looks up from his game on his bed, his controller pausing.
"You gonna get that?" he asks, quiet.
I nod. Pick it up fast. Walk into the hallway so I don't wake the whole floor with Russian at 9 p.m.
"Privet, Mam," I say, keeping my voice low, pressing my back against the cold cinderblock wall.
Her face fills the screen and she looks tired in a way that makes my chest hurt. Hair pulled back in a messy bun, no makeup, dark circles under her eyes. The kitchen behind her is the one in our new apartment in the city, the small one with the yellow cabinets we moved to after— after we left the old house, after everything fell apart. Not the kitchen I grew up in.
"Vitya," she says, and her voice cracks on the second syllable like she's been crying or trying not to. "I miss you so much, my boy."
"I miss you too," I say, and my Russian feels strange and thick in my mouth after weeks of only English, like a muscle I haven't used. "So much."
"How are you? Are you eating? Are you sleeping?" she asks, the same three questions she has asked me since I was six years old.
"Yes," I lie about the second one without even thinking. "I'm good. School is good. Skating is good. Coach says my turns are better."
She nods, wipes at her eyes with the sleeve of her robe. "Good. That's good, Vitya."
She's quiet for a second, looking down at something off camera, and I can hear the old fridge humming behind her, the same sound from my childhood. Then she looks back up, and her mouth is a tight line.
"Your papa saw the video," she says, and her voice is flat, tired. "The one Maya posted. Of you two skating. Someone from the club sent it to him to be cruel."
My whole body goes cold.
"He watched for maybe ten seconds," she says fast, like she wants to get it over with. "Then he threw my phone down on the table. He said..." She stops, swallows. "He said the same things he always says, Vitya. That you're a traitor. That you shamed this family. That you should be ashamed."
I don't know what to do with that information, where to put it in my head. Ten seconds. Not even a full program.
"How is he?" I ask because I have to, because she's my mom and she's still there with him.
She looks away from the camera, toward the dark window. "He's the same, Vitya. Drinking. Angry all the time. Still telling people at the rink that you ran away and stole money. He hasn't changed. Not one bit."
She doesn't try to make it better. She doesn't say he loves me in his way. She just tells me the truth because we're both too tired to pretend anymore.
"Vitya," she says, and her eyes are wet. "I'm sorry. I wish I had something better to tell you."
It's not her fault, but she says sorry anyway.
She smiles then, sad and small. "I'm proud of you. For being brave enough to go. For skating anyway."
I want to tell her I'm not brave, I want to tell her about the pills on the floor of my dorm and the counselor with the plant and the word *safe* I wrote in my journal in English because I was too scared to write it in Russian. I want to tell her I'm scared all the time, that I wake up at 4:29 every morning with my heart racing. I want to tell her I miss her so much it feels like a bruise.
I don't. I just say, "Spasibo, Mam," and my voice cracks too.
We talk for ten more minutes about safe things. About Dima and how he's doing at university. About Lev's school play. About the snow in Saint Petersburg being heavy this year. She doesn't ask why I left and I don't tell her, we both pretend around the big hole in the middle of our conversation like we always do.
When we hang up, I stand in the hallway for a long time with my back against the cold wall and my phone dark in my hand, just breathing.
Roman opens our door a crack and peeks his head out, his hair messy. "You good?"
I nod. It's not a lie this time, it's not the truth either, it's somewhere in the middle. "Yeah. My mom."
He steps out fully and closes the door behind him soft so it doesn't slam. He stands next to me against the wall, close enough that our shoulders almost touch, but he doesn't touch me, he doesn't crowd me. He just stands there with me in the quiet hallway.
"She okay?" he asks after a minute.
"She's tired," I say, and my voice sounds small.
He nods like he understands completely. Maybe he does. His dad left when he was twelve, he knows what tired moms look like at 4 a.m.
"You want to walk?" he asks, looking down at me. "Get some air?"
It's 9:15 and it's January and it's freezing outside, the kind of cold that hurts your lungs. "Yeah," I say anyway. "Yeah, okay."
We put on hoodies and our big winter coats and walk around campus in the dark. We don't talk much, we just walk, our breath making clouds in front of our faces. We pass the library with all the lights on inside, the dining hall dark and locked, the Oval with the lights off, the ice empty and ghostly under the emergency lights.
My hands are in my pockets and they're shaking a little, not from cold.
"She said my dad saw my video," I say finally, my voice loud in the quiet. "He turned it off after ten seconds."
Roman looks over at me, his hands shoved deep in his pockets too. "What did he say?"
"The same thing he always says," I say, kicking at a chunk of ice on the path. "That I'm a traitor."
Roman stops walking right in the middle of the path under a streetlight. Turns to face me fully. "He still hates you, huh?"
I nod, because there's no point lying to Roman. "Yeah. He hates me. He always will."
Roman's jaw tightens, a muscle jumping there. "Then he's an idiot."
"You don't know him," I say, and I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just stating a fact.
"I know you," he says, simple, like it's the most obvious fact in the world, like it's math. "That's enough for me to know he's wrong."
We start walking again, back toward the dorm, our footsteps crunching in sync on the salted path.
Inside, the room is warm after the cold, almost too warm. I go straight to my desk without taking my coat off. I open the drawer and take out the journal, my hands still cold.
Roman watches from his bed as he pulls his hoodie off, but he doesn't say anything, he doesn't ask, he just gives me space.
I open to the page with the four words from the other night. *Safe. Roman. Mom. Maya.* They're still there, small and true.
Underneath them, I write a fifth word. My hand shakes a little, making the letters wobbly.
*Papa.*
I stare at it for a long time. It looks wrong there with the other words, it doesn't belong with *safe*, it feels heavy and dark on the page next to the light ones. It feels like a bruise next to clean skin.
I don't cross it out. I don't scratch it out like I used to. I leave it there, black ink on white paper, true even if I hate that it's true.
I close the journal and put it back in the drawer and shut it soft.
Roman is still watching, his elbows on his knees. "Five minutes?" he asks, quiet.
I nod, pulling my coat off finally. "Five minutes."
"Good," he says, and he means it. He turns his light off and flops back on his pillow. "Night, Viktor."
"Night, Roman."
I get into bed and pull the blanket up to my chin. My phone buzzes on my nightstand and lights up the dark room. It's Mama, she sent a photo. It's me at maybe eight years old, in my very first skating costume, a little blue velvet thing that was too big, missing a front tooth, grinning so wide my eyes are squinted shut.
The caption underneath in Russian says *my brave boy.*
I save the photo to my favorites. I turn the phone face down on the wood.
In the dark, Roman's breathing is steady and even across the room, a sound I've learned to fall asleep to. My chest doesn't feel tight like it usually does after I talk to home. My head isn't noisy with the usual loop.
I think about Papa turning off my video after ten seconds. I think about the word I just wrote in my journal next to the word safe. I think about Dr. Amara saying last week that I'm allowed to carry more than one feeling at once, that I don't have to pick just one, that hearts are big enough for contradictions.
I'm sad and I'm angry and I'm homesick and I'm safe and my father still hates me.
All of it fits. All of it is true at the same time.
I fall asleep holding that thought like it's a new edge I'm learning to trust, wobbly and scary and mine.