To Max and Alex: keep chasing your dreams.

Max picked me up. We ate, smoked shisha, and drank at his apartment, pre-gaming the reunion until the room blurred. Then we headed to the station to wait for Alex. He and I hadn’t spoken in over six years because of some spectacularly stupid argument, but the moment he stepped off the train, none of it mattered. He set down his sleek Samsonite suitcase, and we hugged.

We had graduated eleven years ago. Now, we were tearing through Kharkiv’s most expensive, decadent spots, burning through cash as if we were trying to buy back our youth. We won, sort of. That was the unspoken, drunken mantra as we sat under the heavy cloud of hookah smoke. Max told us how he’d managed to bribe his way out of a military boot camp. Alex talked about sending money to his mother while his brother drank the remittances dry. I talked about burying my sister, about dragging myself out of a financial shit-hole. Over my vegan plates, the boys cracked jokes about whether swallowing semen counted as a dietary violation. "Pure protein," I shot back. We were survivalists masquerading as tourists.

Then came the strip club. Alex, who had about five hundred dollars in cash burning a hole in his pocket for private dances, flatly announced: "Sorry, but I don't pay for a woman's entry." Patriarchal economy is a funny thing. I hit the ATM, pulled some cash, and we entered a hazy, cramped labyrinth of techno and red lasers. Max claimed he spent every weekend here doing "sociological research" – tracking which girls were displaced HR managers trying to pay rent. Alex took the theatre even further: he spun a myth to the staff that he’d moved to Canada after the third grade and barely remembered his native tongue. So, inside a gritty Ukrainian strip joint, three kids who used to share cheat sheets in trigonometry talked to each other exclusively in English.

Max shoved a 500-hryvnia note into my hand. "Want a private? My treat for a childhood friend." A girl slid onto my lap. Listening to our English back-and-forth, she looked at me and said in our native tongue, "Wow. And you guys stayed close all this time?" "Yeah," I lied. I kept my hands carefully on her waist because the boys had warned me that touching wasn't allowed. She tried to upsell me. We don’t get many women here, but when we do, they love the VIP rooms. As a retail network manager, I mentally gave her a D-minus for a lazy, head-on sales pitch. I stuffed a 200 bill into her thong anyway. On her next lap, she looked closer at me, trying to decode my vibe. "Are you an IT girl? An artist? Something creative?"

I hadn’t written a line of prose in years. I was a corporate machine running on fumes, yet this girl in a G-string was playing the oracle. The only other person who knew Alex wasn't Canadian was the senior, hardened stripper smoking her own shisha near the bouncers, waiting for the real whales. She knew we were fakes, but she didn’t give a shit. We all knew.

Nobody got a private dance. The girls stayed empty-handed; the boys kept their dollars. Under the neon glare of 4 AM, we stumbled into a gritty Arabic joint where women in burqas sat quietly while their men played PlayStation. Max told me it was a place where wishes came true. I didn’t ask for a million bucks. "I want a job where I’m respected," I said into the smoke.

Back at the apartment, the high-roller armor completely dissolved. We ate cold Ossetian pies on the floor and stared at a trash TV reality show about a girl who hides zucchinis under her pillow. Before I closed my eyes, I took a photo. There they were – the big spenders, the fake Canadian and the sociologist – sleeping soundly next to each other, tucked under a single blanket covered in tiny cartoon hearts.