“Try everything once, Nicholas,” Arthur advised. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime. I wish I’d had the chance to do this at your age.”
“Call us when you get there,” Stella said. “Maybe we should have gotten you a cell phone.”
“Mom, I’ll keep in touch. I’m sure the Sokolovs have a telephone. It’s not like I’m going to the Amazon or something.” Nicholas crawled his way out of the huddle. “I’ll see you guys in December.”
* * *
Nicholas had been hoping to catch his breath on the drive to the airport. His mother had insisted on coming down to the street to see him off, and he’d been embarrassed when she pulled back from the hug that had lasted a few beats too long to see tears shimmering in her eyes. He reminded Stella—again—that he would only be gone for four months. But once the driver of the shiny black Town Car deposited his suitcase in the trunk, he was surprised to feel the tiniest lump in his own throat. He’d even gotten a little emotional the night before, hanging out with Toby and his wrestling buddies. In the den, Carmine’s eyes were already glazing over from the pot he had smoked before arriving at Nicholas’s house. He was a large, lunkheaded boy with an exceedingly good nature. From the moment Nicholas had met him, he’d reminded him of Lennie from Of Mice and Men.
“Hey, Lefty, you gonna wrestle over there?” he asked Nicholas, prodding him in the side with his elbow.
“I don’t know,” Nicholas said. “Paavo said his school doesn’t have a team, but that he thinks there are club teams around the city I could join. Though I gotta say it doesn’t seem worth it.”
“I bet your coach would be happy if you kept it up,” Toby pointed out. He grabbed a handful of potato chips and fed them to himself one at a time somewhat daintily, rubbing his hands together to shed the excess grease. “Though in a country of a million and a half people, the odds of finding another left-handed wrestler in your weight class are pretty slim.”
“Forget wrestling; I bet the girls are smoking,” Chen said.
“What about the sister?” Carmine asked. “Didn’t you say she’s a model or something?” He tried to sit up slightly but his heavy shoulders pulled him back into the sofa.
“That’s what Paavo said. But that doesn’t mean she’s hot,” Nicholas pointed out.
“Lefty, please,” Toby said, grabbing another handful of chips. “Of course she’s hot. Estonia has more models per capita than any other country.”
“Why and how do you know that?” Nicholas asked.
“Common knowledge,” Toby shrugged. “And Maxim.”
“Yeah, but Estonia has like, a million people,” Nicholas said.
“Exactly. And with that statistic, it means that a higher percentage of them are hot. The odds are in your favor.”
“Yeah, go give up your V card, tiger.” Carmine growled, and the boys joined in, ribbing and poking him.
“How do you know I still have it, jackass?” Nicholas shot back. He still did, of course. Though he’d dated a modest number of girls, he hadn’t gotten anywhere near losing his virginity. He had to admit, the prospect of starting new in a place without a shared history was exciting. He’d be the new kid, an exotic American. He could use that to his advantage.
Nicholas looked around at his friends and felt a pang of sympathy that they would be left behind in the drudgery of the eleventh grade at the Manhattan School of Science while he went forth into the world to learn new things and gain invaluable experiences. Who knew if they would ever be the same together again—shrewd, calculating Chen; sharp but lazy Carmine; and affable, overachieving, ever-loyal Toby. Even saying goodbye to them had been a strange departure from their straight-faced, unemotional relationships. Nicholas felt tears pricking at the corners of his eyes and turned his head away to take a long swig of soda, but the bubbles released up his nose and pressed upon his tear ducts even harder. Chen had even hugged him properly instead of issuing the closed-fist punch trademarked by adolescent boys who refused to show any form of emotion.
* * *
But Nicholas had to be strong. He couldn’t walk into this new experience weak-kneed and watery-eyed. He stepped into the car, welcoming the time and the space during the ten-hour flight to Tallinn to gather his thoughts and expectations, but he realized he wasn’t alone.
Barbara Rothenberg was pressed compactly behind the driver’s seat, her stilt-like legs crossed at the knee. Her perfectly coiffed static helmet of silver hair curled just beneath her chin and neckline, defining her as one of those women people called “handsome,” especially with her judicious use of pantsuits. She reached over to Nicholas and pressed his biceps with her hand, as if assessing him for a fight. It was a strange greeting: a cross between a hug and a handshake. Despite having met her a few times, the director of the Hallström program remained a complete mystery to Nicholas.
“Aren’t you excited?” Barbara asked, her keen gray eyes glistening. “Aren’t you positively bubbling over? How are you? How are you feeling?”
After that setup, Nicholas thought, you weren’t really allowed to feel anything else. “I’m good,” he said. “I think it’s going to be great. I’m really stoked for the experience. But I didn’t realize you were taking me to the airport.”
“I escort all students on the first day of the semester,” she said, using her index finger to scrub at some lipstick that had strayed onto her incisors.
The last time Nicholas had seen Barbara had been at the home visit this past June. He had skipped wrestling practice and headed home to find Stella frantically tossing throw pillows into what she hoped would appear to be an intentionally haphazard pile, collecting magazines into two teetering but thoughtful towers flanking the coffee table and slicing lemons into circles before the doorbell rang. Barbara not-so-surreptitiously gave Stella a startlingly disparaging once-over from head to toe before she stepped inside. The home visit, she had told Nicholas, would be a mere formality since his grades had already been vetted, he’d passed all three of his one-on-one interviews, and now they just had to meet the members of the family who would host one very lucky boy from either Estonia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic or Russia. Nicholas would go to his home for four months, and then he would come to stay with the Grands for the remainder of the school year.
It had been clear that Barbara was trying to remain solemn, but the pretense fell immediately after she walked through the entryway that led from the elevator into the apartment. Nicholas always steeled himself when friends visited his home for the first time. He knew that the apartment that his parents had purchased many years ago, when New York City was considered a den of iniquity, had been a wise decision. The soaring ceilings took breaths away, the cavernous foyer was the size of most people’s entire apartments, and the fact that his home had three living rooms awed most visitors to the Grand home into silence. When the elevator door opened to deliverymen, Nicholas watched them peer past him into the living room as though they were taking in a Victorian room replication in a museum. Nicholas watched Barbara’s eyes travel the length of the molding along the edges of the ceiling and into the center, where they stood.
“This is lovely,” Barbara said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Thank you,” Stella said. Nicholas could anticipate exactly what his mother would say next and nearly mouthed the words along with her. “We bought it a long time ago and we got lucky. Who knew Flatiron would blow up like it did? You should have seen this neighborhood when we first moved in. We were scared to walk down the street.”
“Indeed. Our fair city has come a long way.” Barbara stared, quite unselfconsciously, even though this was against one of the tenets of the program. We’re all different, Nicholas had heard Barbara chant on more than one occasion, and there’s no reason to stare or to wonder. So ask the question rather than keeping it in. It’s why we’re all here—to learn about one another,