Secretly, she followed the young man’s every move as he put on an apron and moved inside the alcove behind the pizza ovens in the narrow space that fronted the floury counters with their bins of yellow and white cheese and big, red vats of sauce until she could barely make him out. A sense of irrational loss welled up in her heart. Subtly changing places behind the counter, she got a much better view.

Her heart beating furiously, she watched as his graceful hands turned white with flour, conscious of their strength and competence as he kneaded the dough, then pommeled and flattened it mercilessly with a lethal-looking rolling pin. But there was delicacy, too, in the long fingers as they stretched the dough thin without tearing it. And just as she thought he had finished, he lifted the whole disc on his palms, tossing it thrillingly in the air, then catching it deftly just as it seemed it might fall.

“Maybe stop showing off already?” Moishy shouted at him.

A sudden, irrational hatred welled up inside her, filling her eyes with tears as they narrowed in hostility toward Moishy. How dare he speak that way! She looked anxiously at the young man to see if he’d been wounded, but his face was turned away from her. It was then she noticed it: his feet. Even though he was standing in the same place, his feet were moving endlessly with a sure, jazzy rhythm—right foot forward, left foot back and behind, then right foot over and back, responding to music only he could hear.

She lifted her eyebrows. Where does a yeshiva boy learn how to dance? Where can I learn how to dance? Her whole body tingled, thrilled.

From then on, she could not pass Moishy’s without slowing down, her heart pounding faster even blocks away at the very thought that he might be there, that she might catch a glimpse of the long, dark bangs, the tiny triangle of tanned flesh beneath the open collar. Of course, she did not even dream of speaking to him, the very idea making her quiver with helplessness. What would she say to him, the principal’s son, the brother of her nemesis, the insufferable Freidel?

But Duvie-leh (as she thought of him—in her heart of hearts, they were on the most familiar of terms) was nothing like his snobbish family, she told herself, determined not to allow the scantness of the information on which such a conclusion was necessarily based to interfere in any way with her daydreams. No, Duvie-leh was a sensitive soul, too sensitive for the brutal yeshiva world that demanded total dedication, total commitment.