He was frozen, momentarily stunned, but after a second, his brain caught up, shoving three observations into his consciousness. The first was that she was hugging him. She had come over here with the express purpose of hugging him. The second was that it was merely a friendly, triumphant hug. The third was that if he kept standing there like an idiot, he was going to miss it. So he wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up, letting himself notch his face into the crook of her neck. She smelled like salt and sunscreen, and he never wanted to smell anything else. He never wanted to be anywhere else.

It was only a few seconds before the world intruded in the form of . . . applause? He set her down, her face mirroring the bewilderment he felt. A group of middle-aged women stood maybe thirty meters off, smiling and clapping. “Nice job!” one of them called. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” another shouted.

He smiled and bowed. “Thank you!”

“Oh my god, we looked like such idiots!” Dani said.

“No, we were glorious. They’re applauding us.”

She swatted his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

At that moment, he would have followed her anywhere.

“Have another, Max.” Dani’s mom pushed a plate of brownies toward him.

“I can’t. I’m positively stuffed. But thank you.” They were in the backyard of Dani’s parents’ house, where they had feasted on clams Dani’s dad had caught—collected? Max didn’t know the correct verb—and grilled, locally raised Atlantic salmon, potato and green salads, and gooey chocolate brownies. “Everything was so delicious.” It might even have been the best meal he’d ever had, but that was probably as much to do with the company as with the food. He already knew Dani’s mom was a delight, but her dad was great, too, regaling Max with tales of clamming adventures and life at the UN. Max even got to practice his Spanish a bit, which wasn’t as good as his French, but Mr. Martinez, who had insisted on being called Carlos, was patient.

“What about Italian?” he asked. “I’m slightly better at Italian than Spanish.”

Carlos answered him effortlessly in Italian, and Max whistled. “Exactly how many languages do you speak?”

“My parents bought a little hotel on the beach before I was born,” he said. “They worked on it gradually over the years and eventually it became kind of fancy—almost by accident. It drew people from all over. I was always interested in the languages everyone spoke, and I turned out to be pretty good at picking up bits of them. That’s why I applied to the Model UN program. And the rest”—he gestured at Val—“Is history.”