Free The Scent of Pine by Lara Vapnyar

which scenes to choose, which characters or events to bring forward, which to omit altogether, but how to transform images into words. Because in her head, the story ran like a movie. A movie that would randomly jump from one image to another, depending on how she felt or what was on her mind. Sometimes she would even see the same image over and over again, a little differently each time. And since she had been thinking about this story for years, she could no longer tell which of the images came from memory, which from her interpretation of the memory, and which purely from her imagination.
    She closed her eyes and tried to evoke the exact image of how they’d sat at the picnic table.
    “We sat at the picnic table outside our unit,” she said. “The four of us. Inka and Andrey sat on one side, snuggled against one another, staring into each other’s eyes, engaged in happy banter, laughing at each other’s jokes or sometimes for no reason at all; and Kostik and I sat opposite them, about two feet apart, silent, dumbly smiling as Andrey and Inka joked. I didn’t know why Inka wanted me there at all. By then, I began to doubt that I understood Inka at all. Ever since she had hooked up with Andrey (which was only three days before, I wanted to remind her), she’d behaved as if she had always been popular, as if the whole lifetime of her loneliness and insecurity had never happened. I noticed that she’d become drawn to Dena, the slutty, pretty, popular counselor. Suddenly, it seemed like Inka’d rather spend time with her than with me, and she even subconsciously mimicked Dena’s words and expressions. Which didn’t suit a fat pig like Inka at all, I would think, and then become surprised at the nastiness of my thoughts.”
    Ben chuckled, and Lena became momentarily embarrassed, but she continued the story anyway.
    “Well, okay, Inka’s reasons for inviting me on this date weren’t clear, but my reasons for accepting were even foggier. Could it be that I thought that even this humiliation was better than staying in the room alone while Inka was on a date?
    “Kostik had brought a bag with sunflower seeds, and Inka brought out a jar with sour cherry jam that she had confiscated from Sasha Simonov. They were all eating the jam, taking turns sticking their spoons right into the jar. I hated jam, so I concentrated on the seeds.”
    Lena paused and looked at Ben. He was looking at the road ahead, but his expression was pensive. Did he even know what sunflower seeds were? Lena wasn’t sure if she was telling the story right. It still ran in her head like a movie, brighter and louder than ever, and now in first person, like a movie addressed to Ben. But the movie was happening in her head, her words were a pale voiceover, they couldn’t possibly convey everything that was there to convey. She wondered how much he saw or understood.
    “ ‘Hey,’ Inka said, ‘you’re shelling the seeds the wrong way!’
    “I knew I was shelling them the wrong way. I could never shell them the right way. You’re supposed to put a seed in your mouth and bite on it, and then it’ll somehow get out of the shell and you’ll spit the shell out. I couldn’t do it the right way, because when I bit on the seed, the seed just turned to mush and didn’t come out of the shell. So I shelled them one by one with my hands.
    “ ‘You look cute like that, Lena,’ Andrey said. ‘With a seed in your fingers, you look like a little squirrel.’
    “ ‘Yeah, you do look like a squirrel like that!’ said Kostik.
    “Furious, I wanted to grab a handful of seeds, throw them at Inka, and leave. But then Andrey took out his new watch, and everybody forgot about squirrels. It was a beautiful imported watch that showed the date and the year as well as the time. ‘It’s June twelfth today,’ Andrey announced. June twelfth! It was my grandfather’s birthday, and I hadn’t called him yet.
    “I stood up and said that I had to go to the phone