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Only, in the case of the Yards, the secret wasn’t anything terrible or awful or lewd—it was just smelly and boring. In the ‘50s, the Yards were shipping yards, where all the city’s commerce came from, and the neighborhood was full of eager, young immigrant families. But since then, the buildings stayed the same and the neighborhood degraded, to the point where not even immigrant families would live there—unless they had absolutely no savings, no self-respect, and basically no hope.
    Ask me how I know.
    As the scenery changed from houses to dilapidated shacks, we both grew uneasy, the way we always did when we took the bus home. I scratched at the ghost of an itch on the back of my neck. Vadim touch-typed with his fingers onto an imaginary keyboard on his knees.
    â€œSo,” Vadim piped up, restless. “Want to come over?”
    Want to come over? Hadn’t this been our pattern for the past seven years? Since we’ve been in America—since we’ve been each other’s only friend—nothing’s changed but the verb. Want to come over and play? Want to come over and chill? Want to come over and hang out?
    And all this summer, as soon as the factory let out for the day, more often than not I’d rip off my heat gloves, throw on a fresh T-shirt, and run over to Vadim’s.
    Oh, shit. The factory.
    â€œOh, shit,” I said. “I can’t. I promised my parents I’d try to keep helping out in the factory after school.”
    â€œCome on, Jupiter. Just because your social life revolves around your parents’ pathetic excuse for an immigrant job doesn’t mean the rest of the world should have to suffer with you.”
    I gave him a look, half ire and half fire. One of the cardinal rules of being friends with me was not joking about the factory.
    Vadim knew that. But he also knew that sometimes I needed to be pushed over the edge. There was a glint in the little eyes behind those heavy frames that flashed insecurity, flashed fear, but also flashed a canny intelligence. “Jupiter, give me a break, ” he half said, half whined. “Give yourself a break. You go home every day and help on the assembly line. And you’ve said yourself, you’re usually too worn out from school to make much of a difference. Sometimes the bus gets caught in rush hour and takes twice as long, and you might get there too late to be of any practical use anyway, so why force yourself to succumb when your estimation might not be of any quantitative value by the time you get there?”
    I gaped at him, not sure how to argue against that—in fact, I wasn’t really sure what his argument was to begin with. Still, Vadim was smarter and thought faster than I did. I always figured the U.S. government would come and take him away to a secret underground base for hyperintelligent kids one day. So, I decided, why not trust him on this one?
    The bus screeched to a halt at Vadim’s stop, still half a neighborhood away from my house. Vadim glanced back over his shoulder. I took a breath, wrapped my backpack strap around my hand, and hopped off after him.
    As soon as Vadim and I were in private, we switched to Russian. That big, glazed-over curtain, which half blotted out the rest of the world when I was in public, fell away with the Americans and the bus stops and the rest of the world. This was the only place I really felt safe—and I didn’t even with my parents, anymore, those people who loved this country so much they’d named me names from English magazines, who wanted everything it offered—the wealth, the language—so much that they tried to be normal. And, in trying, made me feel like even more of a three-legged space alien, so much that I had to run away to Vadim’s to function.
    Hanging out in Vadim’s room was something of an enigma. Every time I came over, I wondered: What exactly is it that we’re doing? Today was no