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KRISTIN EVANS
PLASTIKA

Chapter 1: The Perfect Reflection?

The melodic chime of crystal glasses merged into a single, harmonious ring, a symphony of success. The air in the loft of one of Moscow’s trendiest galleries was thick and sweet with the scent of expensive perfume, champagne, and collective excitement. Svetlana stood at the center of this swirling vortex, smiling, nodding, accepting congratulations. And why wouldn’t she? She, Svetlana Orlova, a brilliant literary agent, had just closed a seven-figure deal for her young protégé, transforming his debut novel from a raw manuscript into the subject of a bidding war between major publishing houses.

«Sveta, this is phenomenal!» Simona, the gallery owner, air-kissed her cheek, leaving behind a trace of coolness and the scent of sandalwood. «You’re a true sorceress. That boy was a nobody yesterday, and today you’ve made him a star.»

«He made himself a star, Simona,» Svetlana parried softly, accustomed to and skilled at gracefully deflecting flattery. «I merely helped the world see him.»

Her voice was calm and confident, exactly how a woman holding the reins of such events should sound. She wore a simple yet impeccably tailored black dress that accentuated her slender figure. Her chestnut curls were swept up into a deliberately careless but perfectly calculated bun, with a few artfully escaped strands framing her face. To an observer, she was the picture of composure, success, and unattainable elegance.

Inside, it was a different story. Every laugh that echoed unnaturally in her ears, every handshake, every met gaze — Svetlana filtered it all through the dense internal sieve of her own insecurity. Her mind, honed on winning the most complex negotiations, now worked against her, picking up the subtlest nuances in people’s behavior and interpreting them in the worst possible light. That group of men by the bar glanced her way and smiled. Not because she’d just given a brilliant presentation, but because one of them had probably cracked a joke. That woman, touching up her makeup in a compact mirror, held her gaze for a second. Not out of admiration for her style, but to scrutinize and mentally criticize that particular feature of her face.

She caught these glances like infected viruses, and each one, subtly yet surely, brought her closer to the state she had so carefully hidden for years — the state of that teenage girl from a provincial town who was teased as «hook-nose» and «bird-face.»

To distract herself, she sought out Denis in the crowd. He stood slightly apart, by a huge panoramic window overlooking the evening lights of Moscow City, ablaze with millions of lights. He was looking at her, and his eyes held such boundless, almost paternal tenderness and pride that it took Svetlana’s breath away for a moment. Denis. Her anchor, her quiet harbor. He disliked these noisy gatherings, preferring the silence of his workshop that smelled of wood and varnish, where he created his astonishing, lifelike sculptures. But he always came to her events to support her. Catching her eye, he raised his glass and offered a faint, almost imperceptible smile. She responded in kind, feeling the nagging anxiety retreat for a fleeting moment.

Her author approached her, beaming, drunk on the sudden fame that had fallen into his lap.

«Sveta, I don’t know how to thank you!» he exclaimed, hugging her. «You… you’re just a genius!»

«Thank you, Lyosha,» she extricated herself from his embrace, patting him on the shoulder. «But remember, you are the genius. I’m just your humble, hard-working agent. Now it’s your turn to deliver and write the next bestseller.»

She said all the right, encouraging words, behaved like the perfect, collected professional, but her eyes were already searching for an escape. She needed a minute to flee, to catch her breath, to be alone with herself and verify that everything was still… under control.

«Excuse me, I need to make an urgent call,» she lied to Simona and Lyosha and, with an apologetic gesture, made her way through the crowd toward a distant balcony.

The balcony was empty. The fresh autumn air smelled of smoke and cold, a sharp contrast to the stifling atmosphere inside. Svetlana leaned on the railing, closed her eyes, and took several deep breaths, trying to force the rising nausea of anxiety back down. Get a grip, she ordered herself sternly. You are not that girl anymore. You are the one in charge here. You just won. Everything is fine. Everything is absolutely fine.

She opened her eyes and instinctively turned toward the glass door leading back to the gallery. At night, the tinted glass had become a perfect, if slightly darkened, mirror.

And she saw her.

Not Svetlana Orlova, the successful woman in a black dress with a champagne flute. She saw the girl. That same one. With eyes too serious for her age, frozen in a perpetual question: «What’s wrong with me?» Svetlana slowly straightened up, unable to look away from her reflection.

Her fingers, almost against her will, rose to her face. They didn’t touch the perfect makeup or the smooth skin of her cheeks. In a gesture practiced and painfully familiar over the years, they went to the bridge of her nose and gently traced a familiar, hated curve. The very hump she mentally referred to as her «family curse.»

The noise of the party faded, turning into a muffled, distant hum. The lights of Moscow City vanished, Simona, Lyosha, even Denis disappeared. Only she and her reflection remained. Twenty years in the past.

Summer. The dacha. She was twelve. Sitting on the porch steps, immersed in a book, lost in a world of adventure. Older boys from neighboring houses walked past.

«Look, Hunchback is guarding her treasure,» one of them, Kolya, the oldest and the nastiest, said loudly.

She pretended not to hear, her cheeks burning.

«Hey, Bird-face!» he persisted. «Who’d you get that nose from? Your dad the mountaineer or your mom the skier?»

Laughter. Her eyes welled up with treacherous tears. She jumped up and ran into the house, stumbling on the step, and heard them shout after her:

«And she’s got chicken legs too! A total chicken!»

She locked herself in the bathroom, climbed into the empty cast-iron bathtub, and sobbed, staring at her tear-streaked, ugly — as she thought — reflection in the shiny faucet. She hated it. Hated her nose, her freckles, her thin, matchstick legs. She hated herself.

The memory hit with such force that Svetlana physically recoiled from the glass door. Her heart hammered wildly in her chest. She gripped the cold balcony railing, trying to stay upright. Twenty years had passed. She lived in the most expensive capital in the world, was loved by a wonderful man, and her name commanded respect in professional circles. She could afford couture dresses and vacations in the Maldives. But it took just a second of lowered guard for that girl from the past, bruised by her own insecurity, to break through, sweeping away everything she had managed to achieve.

She looked at her reflection again. Now she saw both the successful woman and the frightened child simultaneously. The woman had money, status, power. But the child held a different kind of power — the power of memory, power over the soul.

«Sveta? You out here? Everything alright?» Denis appeared in the doorway, his face etched with mild concern. «You’ve been gone awhile. You must be freezing.»

He stepped onto the balcony and, without waiting for an answer, took off his soft tweed jacket and draped it over her shoulders. It smelled of him — wood, varnish, his warmth. It was the smell of home, of safety, of real, unpretentious love.

«I’m fine,» her voice sounded hoarse, and she cleared her throat. «Just… a bit dizzy from all that noise.»

Denis looked at her carefully. He saw more than others. He always did.

«Let’s go home,» he said softly. «The main event is over. You won. Time to call it a night.»

He put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him, greedily absorbing his warmth and calm.

«Just a little longer,» she whispered. «I need to say goodbye to a few more people.»

«Okay,» he didn’t insist. «I’ll wait for you inside.»

When he left, Svetlana was alone again. But now his jacket on her shoulders felt like a protective cocoon. She made one last attempt to look at her reflection as a winner. As Svetlana Orlova.

But the shadow of the girl from the dacha didn’t vanish. It hid in her eyes, in the slight tremble of her lips, in that same, painfully familiar curve of her nose.

She slowly turned her back to the mirror, to the party, to her success. She looked out at the lights of the night metropolis, this cold, soulless city that could give her everything except one thing — freedom from herself.

And in that very moment, gazing at the endless, indifferent beauty of nighttime Moscow, where every light was someone else’s separate, perhaps equally tangled life, Svetlana made a decision. A quiet, clear, long-suffered decision.

It didn’t come as an epiphany, but as the only logical conclusion to her entire life. Like a key that was finally meant to unlock the door and set that very girl free, allow her to grow up at last.

She would hide it no longer. She wouldn’t compensate for it with success, money, brains, or Denis’s love. She would fix it.

She would go to a plastic surgeon and get rid of her nose. Once and for all.

And only then, perhaps, she would finally be happy. Or at least stop feeling like an ugly teenager at an adult party.

She shrugged the jacket off her shoulders, straightened her back, and with a new, icy calm, walked back into the noise and light of the gallery. Denis was waiting for her. Life was waiting for her. But now she had a secret. And a purpose.

Chapter 2: The Ghost from the School Album

The silence in their apartment after the noisy party was thick, almost ringing. It pressed on their eardrums like the pressure change in an airplane. Denis, having kicked off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt collar, went straight to the kitchen to put the kettle on. His movements were calm, measured — the ritual of creating coziness after external chaos. Svetlana, however, stood in the middle of the living room, still in her elegant black dress, like a frozen wax figure. The noise of the gallery still echoed in her ears, mingling with the intrusive echo of her own anxious thoughts.

Denis’s jacket still lay on the back of an armchair. She reached for it mechanically, draped it over her shoulders again, seeking comfort in the familiar scent. But today, even that didn’t help. The decision made on the balcony burned inside her like a hot ember. It was both terrifying and liberating. Now she just had to take the first step. But first — to finally convince herself of its necessity. To confirm her pain, to reopen old wounds to justify the need for the future operation.

«Mint tea?» Denis called from the kitchen. «Or maybe chamomile? I thought you said your head was hurting.»

«Mint,» she answered automatically. Her gaze fell on an old, time-tarnished brass box on the bookshelf. It contained what she had avoided for years. Her past. Photographs, letters, a few trinkets. The box was a kind of ark where she had locked away her demons, hoping they would sleep forever.

Her heart began to beat faster. Her hand reached for the box on its own. It was self-flagellation, masochism, but she couldn’t stop. She needed to look. To see it again. To feel the full depth of the old pain, so that the present, muted, adult version would seem a sufficient reason for such a radical step.

She took the box from the shelf. A thin gray layer of forgotten dust settled on her fingers. She lifted the lid. It smelled of old ink, dried glue, and time.

Right on top lay it. The school album. Navy blue, with gold-embossed numbers «1998—2002» — her high school years. She barely remembered how it had ended up with her. It seemed she had left all that back there, in her provincial town, along with her prom dress and the tears of her first unhappy romance.

She took the heavy album in trembling hands and sank into an armchair, wrapping herself in the jacket like a cocoon.

«Tea’s ready,» Denis emerged from the kitchen with two hot mugs in his hands. Seeing her with the album on her lap, he stopped. His face showed mild surprise. «Oh, what’s this relic? I don’t remember you ever going through old photos.»

«Nostalgia,» she lied, attempting a smile that came out crooked and strained.

Denis put the mugs on the table and perched on the arm of her chair, peering over her shoulder.

«Haven’t opened it in a while? Let’s see what you were like at sixteen. Probably a cute little braid, ribbons, the whole deal.»

He spoke lightly, unaware he was approaching a minefield. Svetlana silently opened the album. The first pages were class photos. A sea of young, spirited, slightly silly faces. Her gaze skimmed over them, barely recognizing anyone. Then her finger slowly crept down to the row where she stood.

And there she was.

Svetlana Orlova. 16 years old.

She looked at herself, and a wave of icy cold ran through her body. The girl in the photo wasn’t smiling. She stared into the lens with defiance and fear simultaneously, as if expecting to be hurt. Her hair was pulled back into a tight, awkward ponytail that only accentuated her face. And on that face… on that face was that nose. Her personal curse. Not ugly, not crooked, just… different. With a hump. Unruly, prominent, drawing the eye like a magnet. At sixteen, she thought it was the only thing people saw in her.

«Oh, God,» Denis laughed quietly with genuine tenderness. «You were so serious! A real little professor. And look at that fashionable fringe! And those freckles!»

He saw a cute, slightly sullen girl. He didn’t see the main thing. He didn’t see it.

But Svetlana no longer heard him. She was falling into a black hole of memories. The album ceased to be a book of photographs. It became a portal.

She is standing in a school hallway, her back pressed against cold tiled walls, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. She just got her algebra test back — a big red B. She knew the material perfectly, but got nervous and made a stupid mistake. A group of her classmates, her age but seeming much older and more confident, are discussing the upcoming weekend. In the center is Kolya Semyonov, the king of their neighborhood, the ringleader and chief bully. His gaze slides over her, appraising, mocking.

«Orlova, what’s with the long face?» he shouts across the hallway. «Going to climb your hill again? The snow’s already melted!»

Laughter. A girl from his group, Alina, whom Svetlana quietly and hopelessly hated for her perfect straight posture and upturned nose, snorts:

«Leave her alone, Kolya. She’s smart. She’ll help us during exams. We can forgive the nose for that.»

The words burn like boiling water. Smart. That was the worst insult from her mouth. It meant — ugly. Uninteresting. Not like us. Svetlana clutches her notebooks, her fingers white with tension, and tries to walk past, to leave, to disappear. But Kolya doesn’t let up.

«Come on, I’m a nice guy. Listen, Svetka,» he pretends to think. «If you’re so smart, tell me: if you sled down a hill on your nose, does that count as a sled or is it considered a vehicle now?»

The laughter becomes deafening. Someone slaps Kolya on the back, admiring his «wit.» Svetlana feels hot, treacherous tears crawling down her cheeks. She turns sharply and