He made this pronouncement very seriously. Mina was impressed.

“Which are the other three?” she asked.

“Venice, New Orleans, and Hong Kong. One day I’ll take you to them. Maybe.”

“You know all those places?” Mina said, but he turned away as if suddenly bored.

“Sure,” he replied. “I’ve been around.”

Mina could tell she was dismissed. She was learning about Star, and one thing she’d learned was that his moods changed very suddenly. One moment he gave her this fierce attention, so it felt as if his blue-black eyes read her mind like a printout; the next moment, something happened: he blanked off, and his face closed.

She went out onto the landing, found the bathroom, washed, and combed her hair. It was a primitive bathroom, but then, this house was old. They were right at the top of it, on the attic floor, and the house itself was at the summit of a hill. Opening the window, she could see a dazzling roofscape, domes and slates and chimneys and spires. Star said this was a friend’s pad; he said they were in the student quarter, he said they were on the Left Bank, which was the best part of Paris, and they were near the Sorbonne.

Mina took her new blue scarf, which was so fine, like a scrap of summer sky, and tied it carefully over her red hair. She fixed it the way the traveler women fixed theirs, gypsy fashion, so it fastened at the back and came low on her forehead, just above her brows. It looked pretty, and she smiled at her reflection. She had washed off that silly hawk transfer, but she’d left the last of the gold paint on her eyelids, and she was still wearing Cassandra’s old black clothes. A skirt that was long and loose, halfway down her calves; an Indian shirt Cassandra bought in a thrift shop; a heavy jacket, also black, with black embroidery, that Cassandra’s mother had brought back from somewhere abroad. She looked so different now, so much older—and she felt older, too, as if in one day and two nights she’d come of age and traveled around the world.

She could not wait to tell Cassandra what had happened, where she had been. She could imagine the scene at school; she could hear her own voice: Yes, we left at midnight, we drove all through the night. When we came to Paris, it still wasn’t dawn. We stayed at a friend’s place. Star has friends everywhere, he told me. He’s always traveling, Cass. I could have stayed there with him. He asked me to stay. He said—if we wanted, we could go right around the world… She checked herself. Star was calling to her. She thought of her mother then, and her father, and the doubts resurfaced. She felt jittery, a little anxious and afraid.

Star took her to the café he knew, and they sat in the window. She began to feel calmer as she watched Paris go past.