The first thing to go was friendship…Suddenly, everyone was too busy, they had to go out and make money. Before, it had seemed like we didn’t need money at all…that it had no bearing on us. Suddenly, everyone saw the beauty of green bills—these were no Soviet rubles, they weren’t just play money. Bookish boys and girls, us house plants…We turned out to be ill suited for the new world we’d been waiting for. We were expecting something else, not this. We’d read a boatload of romantic books, but life kicked and shoved us in another direction.
