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[The right to want]
Yana does not ask for much. She is not stupid enough to. She knows her parents too well for that; she knows she can only get away with so much, within a narrow band of acceptability.
Yana gets a pretty good weekly allowance. She does not ask for more than this. She spends it carefully, and never spends it all. She has a small savings account, one that grows incrementally by the week. She knows the importance of being careful with her money.
It's not that she never spends it. She gets herself makeup and clothes when she needs them, she'll buy herself drinks when she's at the club. She wouldn't call those wants, though.
Yana's not sure she remembers what it's like to want something.
[The right to see]
Yana does not watch foreign news.
Her parents watch it, she thinks. But never around her. She is too young, too impressionable, perhaps, too naive, too easily swayed.
In other words, they're afraid that if she has the chance to see, she won't shut her eyes again.
Yana is a bird in a cage that has never seen the sky.
Her sister saw the sky. Her sister saw it and she immediately wriggled out of her cage and took flight. A short-lived flight, quickly shot down, but one that can never be repeated.
Yana's cage is locked, and it is forever kept inside.
[The right to hear]
Most of the time, Yana hears what her parents want her to hear.
They feed her careful words about her sister, about the state of the country, about her duties as an adult. They preapprove every class she signs up for at uni, vet every professor. She does not hear dissent. Her life is encircled by the chains of her blood.
Most of the time, anyway.
At the club, at least, Yana can hear whatever she wants to hear. Even if those things are mostly shitty hardbass and strangers moaning. Sometimes it feels as if the overblown speakers would blow her eardrums to bits, but she'll take the risk any day, if it means she gets a choice in the matter.
[The right to speak]
Yana must watch her words.
Speaking out of turn earns her a scolding, and oftentimes a slap across the face (though never harsh enough to leave a mark that could be seen by others). Words are a dangerous currency. They are the very thing that got her sister imprisoned.
Yana knows the right words to say to placate her family. The right mix of affection, patriotism, intelligence, leadership, and complacency. They burn into her tongue like fire, like acid.
One of her parents' favorite words is "daughter". So Yana says it, and she does not think about how nauseous it makes her.
[The right to walk]
Yana is often accompanied by bodyguards.
Always on visitations to her sister. The prison is in the bad part of town, after all, and therefore, it's dangerous. Often, too, they will walk her to university, particularly after an uptick in protests. When she goes on shopping trips, or going to the library, she knows she's being followed. Yana is used to eyes on her.
The seizing tightness in her chest eases so much more when she's alone.
The rough and uneven pavement feels as classy as a ballroom floor when nobody's around to see. Something as simple as stepping outside without a tail is freeing.
If only she could do this all of the time, Yana thinks, knowing full well it's a pipe dream.
[The right to run]
Milica ran.
When the police came, Milica ran like her life depended on it. She gave them chase for a full hour before they brought her back in chains. It was a small victory, she's told Yana, to which Yana has absolutely nothing to say.
Yana runs too, sometimes. When she's late for the classes that were handpicked for her by her parents. When she's rushing around, trying to get ready for a party among government officials. When she's about to break her curfew. It's not really running, she thinks, because she's allowed.
Sometimes, after visiting Vanya's dad's shop, Yana stops by the twisted forest. She stands and stares at the warped trees, at the spatters of light in its shadowy depths. Yana struggles to tear her gaze away from the forest, and she imagines running in, and never coming out. They would never find her, never confirm her death, and she would never be buried under the name so lovingly gifted to her by her parents.
It's silly, and Yana does not run anywhere at all.
[The right to claw]
There is very little of Yana's body that is safe to cut.
Often, her usual cover-it-all-up style will be overridden when she's told to dress nicely for events. Her arms are not safe, nor her shoulders, nor her stomach, nor her legs. Her thighs and hips are not safe too, because her tailor sees her naked, and her parents see no ill in walking into her room at any hour of the day, never mind if she's in the middle of getting changed.
Yana could cut herself more before Milica was dethroned, and yet, paradoxically, she didn't need to as much. It's funny. It's so funny, she wants to laugh until her throat begins to bleed.
Yana stopped cutting herself a long time ago. She smokes, instead. The smoke stings her lungs, it makes her cough. She's giving herself cancer and she doesn't even care. No, she wants it.
Yana looks in the mirror at her pristine body, and she wants to claw her skin off.
[The right to beat]
Out of her friends, Yana is not the one who gets into fights — it's Vanya and Sanya who share that hobby. She watches from a distance, instead, cheering them on, pretending she could be in their places.
Fights mean injuries and injuries mean problems. It's because Yana has been careful to never get more than a scratch at the club that her parents still look the other way when she sneaks out. So much as the barest of bruises and that's it, her one means of escape dead in the water. She can't afford that.
She finds Vanya one night and says, "Let me hit you."
Vanya loves her. He looks at her like she hung the stars in the sky. When she says jump, he says how high.
"Okay."
"It's not really about you," she says, winding up her fist. "I just need someone who won't fight back."
He yells, when she punches him in the face, and she wishes she could say that it feels good. But instead it just feels empty.
She doesn't hate Vanya, so he's a useless stand-in for her parents.
[The right to cry]
Crying means red around the eyes, and noise that can never be fully muffled. Crying means admitting weakness. Crying means she's a failure.
Yana does not cry. Not at home.
She's a sad drunk. Incurably so. If she gets too much alcohol in her system she's reduced to tears in the arms of whoever's willing to hold her pathetic self together. So, really just Vanya.
It's embarrassing. Embarrassing isn't a heavy enough word for it but it's all Yana can muster up. She feels like a stupid fucking baby. She should be able to hold it all in. She has to be able to hold it all in. Why can't she hold it all in?
She lets all the tears drain from her body before she head home for the night. Better to be a dry husk than to be a target.
[The right to sing]
For the daughter of diplomats, the arts are a high priority subject.
Yana started piano lessons when she was six. She's damn good at those classical pieces. Mozart and Bach are names as familiar as her own.
She does not enjoy the music she plays.
No, rather, Yana has gotten attached to the shitty music they play at the club. Vulgar pop, tinny techno, migraine-inducing hardbass. When she manages to perfectly straddle the line between too sober to let loose and too drunk to be happy, she sings along to some of the most popular tracks, her voice blending in with the bass.
Piss-poor music for street rats. She loves it.
[The right to stay]
Yana doesn't fucking want to go to those stupid parties. She doesn't. She doesn't want to dress up and be paraded around like a doll. She doesn't want to watch her speech like she'll set off a bomb with the wrong words. She doesn't. She doesn't!
She doesn't want to go, and it doesn't matter.
Her mother does her hair tonight. Coos about how pretty her silver streak is. Yana's going gray from stress, not to look pretty, but it's not as if her mother cares. God, imagine her mother caring!
She wears a dress that is pretty and sparkly and attention-drawing and she smiles at every figurehead that looks her way. All the while wishing she could just be left at home.
When will she learn to give up on wishing? She's no child.
[The right to leave]
While sitting through another boring lecture from her parents, Yana sneaks longing glances at the front door.
Oh, what she would do to just walk out. To leave it all behind. What would her life look like if it was the kind of life where she could waltz out that door without leaving everything behind for good and burning every bridge she has?
No use on ruminating over pointless hypotheticals.
Yana knows the cues to nod, to say okay, to say that's right, to say yes, to say sorry. She knows to only glance at the door when both her parents are busy looking at each other. She knows the rhythm of these one sided "conversations" well.
The door is not locked, but it might as well be.
[The right to jump]
Molodyozhny is only two stories tall.
Two stories isn't high enough to kill. Yana knew a girl, daughter of a local official, who tried to off herself. That's how Yana learned it — that two stories won't do you in. All they'll get you is a one way ticket to the psych ward, and even Yana isn't that desperate yet.
With her vision blurred by the evening's beer, though, the streets look a lot further away than two stories. Yana indulges in fantasies of taking the leap. Of splattering unceremoniously on the ground. A bird flown into a window, a foolish, ugly, sensational death.
But when she feels her balance slipping she steps backwards. No, no. If she is to die, then it has to count.
[The right to hang]
Yana knows how to tie a noose.
It's not hard to learn. Even a simple Yandex search can yield the right results on the second page, if not the first. The first chunk of results is, of course, just a cloying, performative link to suicide hotlines. Yana has never once tried them. She has no intent to do anything besides imagine.
She practices the tie of a noose with everything. Spare thread. Hair ribbons. Bits of trash. It begins to become second-nature.
There are a few ways that hanging can kill. Asphyxiation, for one. Or, of course, the simple snapping of a neck. The former sounds too painful. The latter sounds too hard to pull off.
Not that Yana ever would try. Her suicide notes all lay crumpled at the bottom of her trash bin. She won't kill herself. She couldn't if she wanted to.
[The right to cut]
Yana stands in her bathroom, eyes bloodshot, holding a pair of scissors in the air.
It's as if she's daring herself. Do it. Just one snip. Come on.
She brandishes the scissors like a weapon, and she does not move a centimeter.
Who had short hair? Milica, that's who. And Yana knows what happened to Milica. Milica is her example, her what-not-to-do, her photo negative.
Slowly, she lowers the scissors to the counter.
It's midnight. No, past. Good decisions aren't made past midnight.
Metal clatters against porcelain.
Yana's hair is so, so pretty, her mother always told her. It would be a shame to cut it.
[The right to—]
Yana was raised Eastern Orthodox, but she stopped believing in God after the hundredth prayer to be reborn into a different body.
She likes how she dresses, really, she does. When she goes out to the club in her tops with the sheer sleeves she feels confident and alive. It's once she's at the club and being looked at the way that one looks at a girl who dresses like her — that's what stings. That's what suffocates.
She sees the scar tissue on Vanya's knuckles and she aches for some to call her own. She sees a cute pair of earrings in a shop window and can't resist buying them. She hears a low-voiced singer and wishes to sound like him. She hears a family friend call her willowy and she beams.
Yana is a walking contradiction, she is made of nonsense, and she knows it. If there is a God— If there is a God, no wonder her prayers have been ignored. If it were her, she wouldn't take any pity on herself either.
Yana is not suicidal, she tells herself as she reaches suicide methods. Jumping, hanging, overdose, poisoning, drowning. She imagines them all with a dreamy sigh and keeps on living like always.
She looks at her parents and sees killers. She looks at her house and sees a cage.
Yana can't remember the last time she breathed.