“So that’s how I know how to live: motorcycles, or the jungle life, hunting tapir for food and fighting jaguars.” Sad and serious, his face in partial shadow from a passing cloud, he took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “This is who I am. The truth, okay? What about you? The truth.”

My stomach tightened down. I wasn’t roaming the Boston streets with my backpack, blowing off school and feeling sorry for myself. I was facing a grown man who had taken the time to tell me about himself, to be respectful, to show a genuine interest in me. Plus, he was beautiful.

Panic. “What do you mean?”

“The truth. About you.”

I flushed, a headache surging in, the wine buzz already turning. “I already told you.”

“Yes, the big house. The surgeons. Harvard.”

I found my sweatshirt and put it on. I wasn’t cold, just stalling. “There’s nothing else to tell.”

He smiled, and I crumpled inside.

Why am I such an ass?

He took my hand and held it between his warm ones. “Come on, Lily, it’s all right. I’m not going to run away.”

I took my hand back, swirled the sugary wine in my tin cup. “I don’t get it, Omar. My girlfriends are pretty. Why’d you choose me?”

He cupped my face gently in his hands, did his laser-focus thing on me until I almost couldn’t bear the sweetness of it. Before that moment, I was convinced that lust was something I was already done with. I’d had my share of encounters, at least the kind where you look up at the zitty high school boy sweating above you and leave your body. Sex was nothing, or it was a violence, a currency; love a ruse. My heart—a flinty thing, bloodless, shriveled up—was stored in a tiny box in a locked room for which I believed there was no key. But it was my own dead heart, and I guarded it fiercely.

He said, “I was behind you when you three were walking through the market. I saw you stop and watch the shaman. Your friends didn’t. You want to know about magic, about the jungle, don’t you?”

I shivered with pleasure, with the thrill of being seen, observed, appreciated; especially since the best pickup lines from the Patagonia-clad boy trekkers had been no better than, “So, you’re American?” or, “When’s breakfast?”

I held Omar’s gaze. “Are they the same thing?”

“Sometimes.”

“Have you ever met a real shaman?” I wanted to ask, Could one cure me of myself?

“There was one in Ayachero while I was growing up. She was called Beya.”

“Tell me about her.”

“A shaman’s bag is sacred, like all their tools. She used to carry this little cloth one that was always moving. She kept it filled with scorpions and small, poisonous snakes.”

“Jesus, why?”

“Nobody was really sure. Maybe to scare us away. Maybe she used them somehow.”

“For what?”

He smiled again, and I almost wept with desire. “I’ve said enough about her, and about me. It’s your turn.”