It was dark outside, so I didn’t notice them until we got to the crosswalk on Mosholu Avenue. They walked under the streetlamp. Two men. They both had suits on. One was in front, the other trailing behind, both of them following us, but not together. 

“KGB or CIA?” I said automatically to Yrena, like I always did to Todd. 

She looked over her shoulder at them.

“You can tell by their shoes,” she said.

I looked at the men’s shoes. 

“The black ones, KGB. The sneakers, CIA,” I said. 

“Yes, I think so, too,” she said. “They are not interested in you. It’s normal for them to follow us. It is not a big deal.” 

“Is that why you climbed through my window? To evade them?” 

“I thought perhaps we had escaped them by going through the window,” she said. “It’s fun to try to escape them.”

“Will we get in trouble?” I asked. I wasn’t too worried. More curious than anything else.

“Only if we share state secrets,” she said.

“Well, it’s best to take the price tag off the bottom of a toe shoe,” I said. “Otherwise, when you perform, it’s distracting.” 

“That’s it,” Yrena said, throwing her arms up in the air. “We’re certainly on a watch list now.”

“What a drag,” I said.

Then we laughed. Because at the time it was funny. I mean, what would two girls like us ever be on a watch list for? Exchanging microfilm in our sugar cones? 

When we got to Zips, I ordered a mint chocolate chip ice cream sundae and Yrena ordered a strawberry one. 

“What is your high school like?” Yrena asked. “Do you have a boyfriend? Is there a football team? Do your parents let you wear makeup?” 

“I go to a special school,” I said. “A school for performing arts.”

“For dance?” Yrena asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “So it’s not like a regular American high school. We don’t have gym class.”

“No cheerleaders?” Yrena seemed saddened by this.

“No,” I said. “Dance class, academics, and the occasional hot lunch.”

“I was hoping you could tell me about cheerleaders. And football.”

“I don’t know anything about that. We don’t have anything like they do in a normal high school. I mean, I guess maybe I’m missing out on a regular high school experience.”

“Will you feel strange later on in life?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I’m kind of glad. Besides, isn’t every school a bit different?” Yrena shrugged.

“Well. At least we have a senior prom.”

“That’s a dance,” Yrena said.

“Yes.”

“We have dances. Although they try to keep it the same, my school here in America is different than back home.”

“So I guess every school is different and the same.”

“Yes,” she said.

I thought about that for a minute. It was comforting to know that you could always find something in common with someone else.

“How long have you been dancing?” I asked.

“I took ballet class because all little girls take ballet,” Yrena said flatly.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked.

“I do not have a boyfriend.” Yrena sighed. “My father says I am too young to go on dates.” She took a spoonful of her ice cream and sucked on the spoon thoughtfully. “I will tell you a secret. I am hoping that because my breasts have grown so much — they are really quite big — that they will not take me back at the ballet school.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“You have some of the best schools in the world.”

“How long have you been dancing?” she asked.

“Since I was four.”

“Me, since I was three. But I do not want to dance. I want to quit.”

“I thought for you Russians, dancing was in your DNA.”

“I thought for you Americans, every girl was a cheerleader in love with a football player.”

Sometimes it takes someone saying something stupid to make you realize that what you said was stupid.

“I quit dancing once,” I said. “But it didn’t stick.”

“You are lucky,” Yrena said. “My ballet master says that if you want to know if you are really a dancer, you should try quitting. If you can’t, then you are a dancer.”

“I didn’t want to quit because I hated dancing. I quit because I just wanted to fit in more than I wanted to dance.”

Yrena reached across the table, took my hand in hers, and squeezed it, as though she wanted me to know how much she understood what I was saying. It felt good to be so completely understood, so completely trusted.

“I want to be a normal girl,” she said. “Do normal things. Not be special. Just a normal Russian teenager.”

It was true — Yrena didn’t seem typical. She was living in America, climbing into people’s windows, wanting to go to Todd’s D&D party. I wondered what a normal Russian teenager looked like, because it didn’t seem like one was sitting in front of me, any more than a typical American girl was sitting in front of her. 

I went back to the question: Aren’t we all different and the same?

“I told myself that I was over ballet,” I said. “Not serious about it anymore. Tired of the endless repetition.”

“Tired of the discipline,” Yrena said.

“Tired of the aching muscles.”

“Of the broken toes. The swollen feet.”

We both said it. And in a way, despite our being from different places, Yrena kind of got it.

But I couldn’t tell how Yrena felt about dancing. She seemed to love dancing as much as I did. But she seemed to hate it more than I did, too. 

It was funny how two such different things could be true at the same time. I was tired of those things.

“I told myself all that and it made it easier to quit, and when I did, I had friends,” I said.

“I don’t have many friends since we moved to America,” Yrena said. 

She said it kind of matter-of-factly. And I thought about it, and how it must be hard for her, only having the other Soviets that were here in New York to socialize with. Just enough to fill an apartment building. I could barely find anyone to fit in with at school, and that was a building full of kids. 

I brought the subject back to dance. “I don’t think I’m very good. There is always someone better than me in dance class,” I said.

“There is always someone better,” Yrena said. “Anywhere.”

I wondered if I was better than anyone in class. From the way Ms. Zina barked at me, it didn’t seem possible.

“I am always so relieved when I meet someone who is more talented than I am,” Yrena went on. “I am like, ‘Go! Win the competition, I will gladly come in second place!’ Sometimes, I do come in second place, and my parents and teachers are disappointed. But secretly I am so happy. Unless I get competitive and I push myself harder. Then I get angry at myself for trying and succeeding.”

“I’d give anything to go to one of those schools in Russia,” I said. “Maybe it would give me an edge.”

“You would do well there. They like passion. I can tell that you dance with passion.”

“How do you know?”

“From your shoes,” she said. “And I can see it in your walk. In the way that you are sitting.”

The little bell over the door rang, and when I looked up, I noticed that those same two men had come inside. First one. Then the other. They were probably bored standing outside waiting for us to finish up. They ordered ice cream. They didn’t sit with each other. Each sat at his own table, equally looking at each other, eyeballing us, and licking their cones. The KGB guy looked at Yrena and jutted his chin out at her as if to say I’m watching you.

“Creepy,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “They will make sure that I go home soon.”

“Are you afraid?” I asked.

“Not today.”

I could see myself inviting her over to my house to hang out for the rest of the night. Or another night. We could order our own pizza. We could talk more.

“Well, maybe we should go home,” I said. 

I was a little bit wigged out by the suits because they were watching us and it was kind of intense. It made me aware of my every action. It felt weird putting the spoon in my mouth, so I finally just pushed my plate away from me. 

Yrena, though, liked to take her time. It was a few more minutes until she’d finished hers and we went outside.

“I never believed that those guys hanging around our street were really KGB or CIA,” I confessed. “Todd, my brother, always says that our neighborhood is so safe because of that.”

“It is true,” Yrena said. “That is why I’ve never had a real American night out. Not that I even want one. They are always watching us — where we go, who we talk to. My parents more so than me.” 

The two suits watched us through the glass window and we watched them back as they got up from their respective tables. They were now hanging back a little. They sort of looked sorry about the fact that they were tailing us. 

“Well, I will walk back to the house. Have fun at your party,” Yrena said. “I’ll wait with you for the bus.” 

She walked me to the bus stop, and as we were standing there, I tried to figure out a way to tell her that I wasn’t going to go to the party. I was going to step back into the shadows.

“You are exactly as nice as I thought you would be,” she said.

“Maybe we could hang out again sometime,” I said.

Yrena got a weird look on her face that I didn’t understand. She was struggling with something.

“That would be very nice if it could happen,” she said.

“Sure it can,” I said. “We can make it happen.”

The bus pulled up right there in front of us. And as the doors opened, I turned around to tell her that I wasn’t going to the party and that she should just come over to my house right then so we could watch some TV together or something. 

But instead, something else happened. Yrena pushed me onto the bus with her and reached over me to put in some bus fare as the bus pulled away.

“What are you doing?” I asked. I was totally flummoxed.

“Carpe diem?” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“Your party, is it far downtown?”

“Miss,” the bus driver said to me, “you have to put your fare in.”

“I’ve never been downtown without my parents,” Yrena said. “Only once, on a school field trip to the United Nations.”

“Miss, you’ll have to get off at the next stop if you don’t pay your fare,” the bus driver said.

The light had changed and the bus was pulling away and we were going. There was no getting off now until the next stop.

“You could take me to the party,” Yrena said. “That way I can see one for myself.”

Once there is a crack in you, it’s so easy for just a little bit of light to seep in. That’s how I felt, as though little bits of light were brightening up the dark corners inside. Once light gets in, things start to grow. Feelings ripen — a tingling in my chest, a flush of excitement, a bubbling up of happiness. 

I dug into my pocket and put the seventy-five cents into the fare box. 

I was on a bus going to a party that I hadn’t planned on going to with a girl I didn’t really know, and I was glad. 

Yrena grabbed me and we laughed and shouted and ran to the back of the bus and plopped down on the back bench seat like friends. Like best friends. 

It was while I was laughing that I noticed through the back window that the suits, who had been lazily leaning against the wall of Zips ice cream store, were now running behind the bus, waving at it, trying to tell it to stop. 

The two men became tiny as we moved away from them. I poked Yrena, but she just kept looking at me. She didn’t even look back. Maybe it should have struck me right then to be worried. To maybe wonder if they had radios to contact other agents. But that didn’t even cross my mind. Yrena seemed calm as anything.

“I’ve only gotten to live in Riverdale,” she said matter-of factly. “That’s not the real city.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “You have to see New York City. It’s the best city in the world.”

“One of the best,” Yrena said, teasing me. I was about to say something like Maybe we shouldn’t go to that party. Yrena got this look on her face. A look that said Don’t.

“Who will be at the party?”

“People from school,” I said. “Callisto and Caitlin.”

“Is Callisto a boy?”

“No. She’s a girl.”

“But there will be boys?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

We got off at 231st Street and climbed the stairs for the subway downtown.

We were really doing this.

The train arrived in the station and the doors slid open.

I looked over my shoulder, but there were no suits following us.

From that moment on, there was no turning back.

Excerpted from ROSE SEES RED © Copyright 2011 by Cecil Castellucci. Reprinted with permission by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.