Miss Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Stefanovic

Author:Sofija Stefanovic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

6

The Tempest

When I was twelve, a week before I was to start high school, we came home from buying my school supplies to discover that Dante (now a fully grown but still very small dog) had pulled down the new living room curtains and shredded them into ribbons, in protest for being left alone. Dad chased him down and kicked him, and in unison with our little dog, my mother, sister, and I yelped. Dad’s anger wasn’t a surprise—both my parents had tempers—but it was usually confined to yelling (at each other, and less frequently, at us). So my heart started beating rapidly as we watched Dante run behind the couch because Dad had booted him, as my mother shouted, “You could have broken his ribs!” While we crowded around Dante, Dad shouted about the price of the curtains, how we weren’t rich, how this dog was ruining his home, and as he shouted, he stalked up and down the room. As this scene was unfolding, I kept thinking about more pleasant ones instead, like how Dad would pick Dante up and lift him into the air saying, “Look, it’s Laika, the first dog in space!” And undaunted by the great height, Dante would wag his shoelace-thin tail.

When we looked back on it later, we realized that kicking our little dog in the ribs wasn’t the first out-of-character thing we had witnessed Dad do. He had been rude to our family friend Lina at her own birthday party a week before. She’d made a dumb comment, and Dad had called her a moron. My parents called people morons all the time, so the sentiment wasn’t unusual, but they did it behind people’s backs, and this was said point-blank with venom. My mother apologized to the hosts, saying that Dad had had too much to drink (though actually, he’d only had one beer), while Dad, Natalija, and I waited in the car. Something was up with Dad, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.

• • •

On the first day of high school, Alicia and I stood around the front entrance in our ugly new uniforms, big blue dresses that belonged not to 1995 but to the olden days, when women wore belted frocks, long socks, and shiny black shoes. That first morning, we tried to contain our excitement, looking furtively at the other students entering the school grounds, the older kids with their navy school sweaters stretched painfully into a grunge aesthetic, some of them sticking their thumbs through a hole they’d poked in the cuff. Watching those cool students, I thought of when Grandma Xenia and I once walked past a guy wearing a massive nineties sweater, the sleeves of which hung past his hands, and she said without a trace of irony, “Look at that poor young man, he’s lost his hands. Maybe he was a soldier.”

Alicia and I stared at certain girls who exuded style despite having the exact same uniforms as we did, and

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