A week later, Lena returned to school. There she felt as if a circle appeared around her that no one dared to cross. Even her closest friends didn't want to talk to her and, what is more, every time she approached them they hurried to suppress their laughter. The teachers stopped calling her to the blackboard. During breaks, she sat all alone. In time, the steel rod inside her dissolved and left a void in its place. Lena stopped feeling anything at all. Every day she was simply performing the same mechanical set of actions - stood up, squeezed the paste onto the brush, crammed something for the upcoming classes, watered her phalaenopsis. Gradually, her senses came back to her. At first she began to distinguish smells - whether it was aroma of vanilla buns, burned to a crisp in the oven by her mother, or fragrance of poplar fluff, washed to the ground by the rain. Then she began to feel the surfaces, be it a smooth wooden table, a scratchy sweater or rough elbows. And finally, the began to hear anew - once again Lena could distinguish sounds, be it the broken tap running in the kitchen or the swing swinging in the yard. That year, against her own will, she learned to see death everywhere - on the marble staircase in the theater, at the doors in the subway train that you should not lean against, in the clean-shaven brute living next door. Her parents had always been a bastion that protected her from an insecure, chaotic world. Now one of its walls collapsed. The killer was never found. After the death of her father, her mother never pursued any new relationships, although men were still eyeing her mother with interest. One day, their neighbor - a neatly looking 50-year-old divorced engineer - asked Lena for her mother’s phone number. And after Lena gave it to him, he began to persistently call, trying to invite her mother out. Among other places, he invited her on an excursion (?a trip?) to Kuskovo, then to 'Sovremennik', then to the planetarium. But her mother always refused. What is more, she even scolded Lena: “Why did you give him my number? How could you? Don’t you understand that this is an insult to your father’s memory?”And so Lena's mother remained married to her anguish, to her pain.