Before putting the plot into motion, before the five-year masquerade, before the honors and the scholarships and the arrests and the deportation, before any of that, he rode into town on a Greyhound bus on a sleepy spring afternoon, marveling at how smooth the roads were all along the way. He’d come a great distance—5,000 miles from Nova Kakhovka to Harrisburg. But it was a distance he’d collapsed in his mind time and again from his boyhood bedroom in the south of Ukraine, where he’d dreamed of the limitless opportunities he figured he could find only in the U.S. of A.

In America, Artur Samarin was sure, he could change his life forever—but he only had three months to pull it off. As a sophomore at his local university in Ukraine, he had interviewed for a slot in an American exchange program that permitted foreign university students to work summer service jobs in the U.S. Artur had always been an extraordinary student in un-extraordinary circumstances. And though his English was thin, he parroted his way through the application process and landed a coveted post manning the fryer at a Red Robin in South Central Pennsylvania for a few months.

The America Artur discovered after that initial buzzed-up ride into Harrisburg had its perks: clean buses, foliage in full bloom, delicious flame-broiled burgers. But it wasn’t all that he’d hoped—at least not right away. It was expensive, more expensive than he’d expected. He was making $9.50 an hour, good money for home but less good in Harrisburg. The work was grinding. And it took a fair amount of time each day to get to the restaurant, over in the shadow of the Lightning Racer roller coaster at Hersheypark.

But in his rare slivers of free time, he would remind himself that this was the place where he might be able to pivot his fate for good. When he’d dreamed of America, it hadn’t been so much for the movie stars or the big-box shopping as for the higher education, the academic opportunities, the engineering labs that gleamed in his visions. All his life it had been easy for Artur to pick up new material; his brain just seemed dialed up a little higher. But he’d felt himself limited in the classroom at home. And so an American university? American graduate school? He wanted to work for NASA someday. He wanted to be the first someone somewhere in the universe.

The way he’d envisioned it, he would show up to the States and save some money and enroll in a university that very fall. But he’d assumed the local colleges would cost what they do in Ukraine, a couple thousand bucks a year. He couldn’t believe that they were asking for 10, 20 times that amount. That was more than he could make working full-time. And if he had to work full-time, where did school fit in? The paradox left him cold. The impossible bind left him panicked. He was already so lonely—no friends, work all day—and for what? The summer was flying, he was expected to depart in September. By mid-July, he realized anxiously, he was rapidly running out of time…”

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