“Light Year,” by Maria Kuznetsova appears in the July/Aug 2017 issue of KROnline.
Some stories catch my eye because I don’t recall having read anything like them: they wear their novelty or strangeness or ambition on their sleeve. They feel like stories no one else is even trying to write. “Light Year,” by Maria Kuznetsova, grabbed me for the opposite reason: it’s a story a lot of people try to write. A semester in the life of a smart, athletic high school student grieving the death of her father, worried about her mother and younger brother, anxious about the SAT, and caught between a boyfriend and a troubled older man—“Light Year” incorporates many familiar elements, from the protagonist’s bookishness to a romantic triangle to a coming-of-age arc.
Many authors submit stories to KR that juggle these elements. I have tried to juggle them myself, without much success. Most of us have attended high school; all of us have been (or are right now) teenagers. The familiarity of certain experiences, both in life and on the page, make them tempting but difficult material to render compelling. A story like “Light Year,” in which the high school protagonist’s world and inner life are rich, convincing, and totally involving, is a rare find.
The story’s specificity is part of its magic. The setting is not “High School, USA,” but Edison, New Jersey, in the winter of 2003. The calculus teacher hasn’t updated his tests since his son’s death on 9/11, and students pass around old copies to memorize the questions. The new assistant track coach lives with his mother, but was once a star student at this high school. The protagonist, Oksana Konnikova, investigates: “It didn’t take long to find Benny Gold in an old yearbook, though most of the students were white back then, instead of Indian or Asian with a handful of Russian immigrants like me.” The changing racial diversity of the school and town is not the subject of the story, but nor is it mentioned and dropped. It shows up throughout, in realistic touches: the Italian restaurant where Oksana and her boyfriend Koz had their first date is being replaced by another new Indian restaurant, which Koz bemoans and Oksana shrugs at.
Much later in the story, in an attempted peace offering, Oksana praises the vanished tortellini. Koz either misses or dismisses her true intention—he can’t believe she’s talking about tortellini, after everything that’s happened between them. Like the setting, the dialogue is richly layered, with the reader hearing simultaneously what the characters are saying, what they’re not quite able to say, and what they hope the other person will hear without them having to say it. Seemingly simple gestures can take surprising turns. For example, what the track coach does after telling Oksana, “Here. Let me help you,” is one of the story’s most shocking moments.
Oksana is a believable, coherent self on every page. She is also a collection of different selves, even responding to different names (her track teammates, including Koz, call her Calf, Calfzilla, or Calfnikova for her muscular legs). She is both kind and inadvertently cruel, and her choices affect not just her but the people around her. The story covers several months, and much of its final impact comes from the way various tensions play out—I don’t want to spoil anything here, but I appreciated the way the characters’ actions had consequences, emotional and otherwise.
The feeling of those months passing is another thing Kuznetsova manages extraordinarily well. There are various ticking clocks throughout: the approach of the SAT, Christmas decorations finally coming down, the “Never Forget” posters the math teacher periodically places on the 9/11 memorial, and the progress of the track season, with the prospect of warmer weather making it harder for the coach to hide part of his past under his sweatshirt. But equally effective is the way time seems to eddy and slow even as it passes: Oksana knows her father’s death has changed her life irrevocably, but she is still working out how, uncertain about what comes next or who she wants to be. She both is and is becoming. That uncertainty, its combination of stillness and movement, is hard to capture. Kuznetsova captures it beautifully in “Light Year.”