Free The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian

was only twelve.
    Maybe I just should have given away all those Barbies to the girls in the classes behind me at school. Maybe everything would have been different.
    But maybe not. Maybe I was just destined for badness.
    You’ll see.
    …
    This is how insane things were for me and how quickly my life changed: one afternoon I was walking like I did most days each week from my school to the dance studio. I had a little canvas dance bag with my ballet slippers and toe shoes inside it over my shoulder. The next afternoon I was on an airplane for the first time in my life. I was going to Moscow. Now my ballet slippers and toe shoes were in a handsome black suitcase that Vasily gave me. He called it a “rollie” because it had wheels, and we both laughed.
    I stood for a long time at the big windows by a gate at the Yerevan airport and looked at Ararat, thinking how maybe when I next saw the mountain I would be on my way to becoming a ballerina at the opera house. Maybe I would
be
a ballerina at the opera house. I thought this to myself: someday I will bathe in the footlights like a star.
    And maybe it was the word
star
, which is just a sun, but then I thought of Icarus and I had a little shudder of fear. Maybe I was more like Icarus than Velvet Bird, and my wings were just wax. Maybe they would melt in the hot lights and I would fall.
    …
    Vasily’s assistant and I boarded the plane together. His name was Andrei, which is very common Russian name, and he had been with me since picking me up at my home in a black stretch limousine. (He called it a “stretchie.” Looking back, how innocent does a world seem where grown men use words like
rollie
and
stretchie
?) We sat in the very back of the car, but in the very front of the airplane. I only saw the face of our stretchie’s driver when he took our rollies and put them in the trunk, and when he opened the back doors for us. In the car, I focused on the refrigerator built into the seat, which was no less glamorous to me because it was empty, and the side or the back of Andrei’s massive neck as he looked at the streets and casinos and the clubs with the strippers—neon versions of naked women over their entrances—on the way to the Yerevan airport.
    Andrei was not a big talker. But he was a big smoker. You can’t smoke inside the airport or on an Aeroflot jet, which he understood going in, but he was still not happy about it. He kept taking his Jackpot Golds out of his black suit pocket and fingering the box like it was an actual gold brick. Opening and closing the cardboard lid. He was thirty years old, with a shaved head and no mustache or beard. His shoulders seemed the size of a couch, his neck a pillar at the temple at Garni. He could barely fit into his airplane seat and complained lots. But I loved my seat. I had a window. I tilted the seat back almost like chair in my dentist’s office.
    I figured I shouldn’t ask Andrei too many questions: this was a gift, after all, and you do not look a gift horse in the mouth. (I first heard that expression before going down on an American telecommunications executive in his hotel room in Moscow. He had expected a blonde, which I am not, and he was disappointed. I made sure he got over it. At the time, however, and for many months afterward, I believed the expression was this: you do not look a gift in the mouth because it will make you hoarse. I believed the expression was some old superstition about being grateful for all gifts. Speak bad of them, and maybe you’d lose your voice.) Besides, Andrei worked for a wealthy brandy factory president, so I figured he was important, too. Finally he fell asleep on the plane. I stayed awake all the way to Moscow, listening to the sounds of the engines and enjoying the colas and apple juice that the flight attendants kept bringing me. I read the book and the magazine I had carried with me. I watched other people watching movies on their computers or their tablets. This was the most