Baby Blu

1: Welcome to Miami

It's 7 PM and I've already burst into tears five times today. 

Scratch that. Six times.  

"Are you almost done, Blu?" Teva, my best friend since childhood and the only reason I haven't gone clinically insane, pounds on the door of our bathroom. 

I scramble to make noise, opening random drawers, anything to cover up the sound of uncontrollable sobs racking my body. 

"Uh, yeah, one sec!" 

Teva jiggles the door knob. "Let me in, bitch. I'm drunk and I need to piss!" 

I grab a Kleenex and dab at the black mascara running under my damp eyes. Teva bangs on the door, her drunk laughter on the other side. 

When I open the bathroom door, she stumbles inside, her breath reeking of vodka. 

"Ты выглядишь потрясающе, любовь моя," Teva cries, kissing my cheek. *You look amazing, my love*. 

I giggle as she sits on the toilet, red lipstick smudged around her lips. 

"Where's Mickey?" I start fixing my makeup, hoping Teva is too drunk to notice how destroyed it is now that I've cried it all off my face. 

"Taking shots in the kitchen," Teva says. "Which, by the way, you should be doing instead of crying your eyes out." 

I pause and look at her, my hand curling around the mascara wand. 

"Oh, come on, Blu. You really think I haven't noticed all day?" 

Nothing ever gets past Teva. She sees right through me. Growing up, she and I were the only girls with Russian immigrant parents at our elite NYC prep schools. She defended me on the playground against snobby Upper East Side girls who made fun of how we spoke, deeming us 'Soviet Sisters'. We became more like sisters as the years went by, especially because both of us only had tough older brothers to look up to. The more people bullied us when we were younger, the stronger our friendship became. It was us against the world. 

 In middle school, all of that changed. I began to notice the way the parents of my classmates stared at Teva and I. They feared us. I overheard one mother tell her son, "Always be nice to Blu and Teva." At first, we believed it was because we were the children of immigrants--Russian ones at that. Russians tend to make people nervous. Maybe it's the harsh accents, or the blunt language, but we tend to intimidate. 

We soon learned, however, that it was what our families did, not our ability to speak fluent Russian, that scared the parents of our classmates shitless. Teva and I's families were, and still are, in business together. The Petrov family and the Kozlov family. In high school, my older brothers, Anton and Alexei, sat me down and explained the family business to me.

To put it shortly, my father ran the East Coast Russian mafia syndicate.  Teva's father worked below him. 

For the most part, Teva and I were kept out of the family business. We lived in luxurious apartment complexes in the city, most of them filled with men who worked for our fathers. We were driven to and from school in bullet-proofed, expensive cars driven by professional bodyguards. Our bodyguards accompanied us everywhere we went--even school dances. 

Other than that, we preferred to turn a blind eye to the fact that our families ran illegal businesses. 

In high school, we felt the pressures of being from Russian mafia families. Teva and I didn't like to stand out. We hated being treated like fragile glass by our peers, like we were seconds away from breaking if one wrong word was said. So, instead, we did everything we could to fit in. We tried to blend in like normal high school kids. We made friends, went to parties, made out with boys, shopped on the weekends, studied for SAT's, got internships, went to college, stressed about boys, cried about boys, laughed about boys, lived in dorms.