As the months, and then years, passed, the student known as Asher Potts grew into himself, an ever more notable presence on campus. He got straight A's. He ate cafeteria lunches like anyone else. He became a Color Guard Commander in Navy JROTC. He trained a swim team of 10-year-olds at the YMCA. He whiled away cool evenings cruising around town with the close friends he had no trouble making, tagging along to his first football games. But downtime was sparing, there was so much work to be done.

He spent summers in the Upward Bound science and math program at Penn State, working in the university labs he'd long fantasized about. He sat on the school board as a junior representative. He took supplemental classes at the local university downtown. He received awards for academic achievement and community service and posed for pictures with local politicians. His sophomore fall, the mayor of Harrisburg even named a crisp October Sunday "Asher Potts Day."

“I loved America from the moment I heard a flight attendant say ‘Welcome to the United States, we’re really happy to see you,’ ” Artur said. “And I was like: YES.”

He took dates to dances. He finished third runner-up in homecoming court. He met a girl he said he loved. He aced standardized tests and added pins to his ROTC uniform. His GPA ballooned, and he rose to the top of his class. His mailbox filled with admissions materials from around the country. He visited Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and took a liking to its warm-weather campus and the scholarship package on offer. He was an academic standout, and funding found Asher like filings to a magnet. He was set on making contributions to the field of aerospace engineering. B.A. M.A. Ph.D. NASA. His was a gravity-defying ambition. He focused on slipping the bonds of his circumstances like a rocket to Mars.

The days and months and years of high school ticked by with acceleration. Just like that, he felt so much older, so very much on the verge of the thing he'd dreamed about for so long. One day you're slunk low in your seat on the first day of freshman year, the next you're preparing to put the whole thing in the rearview and head off to college. After all, he didn't have much use for classrooms filled with kids anymore.

Then, on a freezing afternoon in late February 2016, three months short of graduation, his speech class was interrupted by two members of the Harrisburg Police Department, who entered his classroom and walked a wordless line to the desk belonging to the young man in the blue suit.

Lying awake in Nova Kakhovka, he'd promised himself that if he ever got the chance to reach the United States, he would never leave—he'd find a way. And for four years, he'd done just that. But he had always known there was a chance they'd come for him.

"Artur…," one of them said.

Which confirmed it for him. This wasn't a mix-up. He had questions—ones that the cops wouldn't answer. Not even as they cuffed him outside and lowered him into the back of their cruiser. And though he understood the shape of the trouble he was in, he couldn't have known the extent to which his actions over the previous four years—the things he'd knowingly, and unknowingly, done—would land him in a rare and consequential kind of American hell.

Michal Chelbin Michal Chelbin

The arrangement between Artur and the Pottses had started out reasonably enough. He moved in with them. He changed his name, as anyone might after being adopted. He slipped into the fabric of the school and city without much trouble. The grades, the community achievements, the ROTC accolades, the extra coursework at the university. He had been a candidate for valedictorian. From the view of his teachers, administrators, and friends, he was a rare student succeeding beyond his circumstances, and shone as an outlier of true promise from a high school that was counted among the worst in Pennsylvania.

His home life, however, had been more complicated. At first, when his academic achievements began yielding informational materials from colleges, Artur says, Stephayne and Michael were concerned about drawing such attention. They asked him not to send away for additional mail, and Artur explained it was coming unsolicited. When Stephayne and Michael learned that some of the colleges and programs were offering scholarship money, their scorn softened and they accompanied Artur on out-of-state trips for campus visits. Sometimes things were good—a teenager and his adopted parents. But often things were less good.

There was a suggestion that a sort of transference had occurred, a blurring of the lines between the real person and the fake, a sense that Artur Samarin actually was Asher Potts.

Artur says that he slept on a couch in a walk-in closet, "probably a little smaller than Harry Potter's." He made it his home, but sometimes he wanted out of his home, wanted away from Stephayne and Michael. If Artur didn't do their laundry, wash the dishes, or have dinner on the table, he says, he was casually threatened: Well, how 'bout we call immigration? He felt trapped, and simply turned toward his schoolwork. He says the passport and documents he handed over when the adoption process was under way were confiscated by Stephayne. He says when he failed to complete his chores, Stephayne and Michael would sometimes hit him. And when things got especially hot, he would run away. When he did, they'd double down on their threats to expose his true identity to the police. So he'd return home, tail between his legs, succumbing to the realities of the arrangement and recognizing the living conditions as a necessary compromise until he was on his own at college.