“Do you have a smoke?” the girl asked.

Gaspar pulled a pack from his hoodie pocket and offered it to her. She looked at it suspiciously.

“Le Mans?”

“I ran out of money. They’re my uncle’s girlfriend’s. She doesn’t notice when I steal them. He does.”

“Does he smoke something better?”

“No. Jockey.”

The girl let him light her cigarette. Gaspar looked at her legs. She had visible muscles. The lighter had illuminated her very dark eyes, lined in blue like a punk Cleopatra. She said her name was Marita, and when he told her his, she said she thought Gaspar was a great name. One of the Magi.

“That’s what my dad used to say, that’s why my mom chose it. Because of the wise men.”

Marita peered at him through the smoke and Gaspar hastened to explain, because he didn’t like uncomfortable questions.

“I don’t have parents. They died a while ago. I live with my uncle.”

Her face showed no pity or sorrow, she only nodded and murmured, that sucks. She held the cigarette between her lips when she knelt down to tie her boots. And just like that, feigning nonchalance, as if it were as casual as fixing her long shoelaces, she told him she had seen him go by some nights, running to the bus stop. Do you live far? No, Gaspar replied, in Villa Elisa. I stay around here until nighttime, sometimes.

“Come dancing whenever you want,” said Marita. “We have parties on Saturdays. I don’t imagine you like poetry.”

“I don’t know how to dance but I love poetry,” replied Gaspar.

“That’s weird,” she said. “The poetry part. Because no guys know how to dance. Except for gay guys, of course.”

Marita handed him the cigarette for him to finish. The filter was sticky with her lip gloss, but Gaspar didn’t mind. He liked the world of girls and women, though he didn’t fully understand it. He liked how girls giggled behind their hands, how they wrote on their clothes and shoes and preferred things to be shiny and silver, how they worried about combining colors and decorated folders with stickers of their favorite groups, or with photos of actors protected by strips of Scotch tape. He liked that they cried and worried about smells, the good ones and the bad, and the intensity of aromas, if this girl wore too much perfume, if the imported scent they’d bought at duty-free was incredible or a wasted expense, if boys’ skin had a smell and whether damp underpants smelled like peaches or fish. He liked that Julieta cursed more than his uncle and that she spent hours at the beauty parlor, and although he didn’t understand why a bad haircut made her cry, he felt sorry when he saw her sad, it didn’t irritate him (as it obviously irritated his uncle, who would grumble, I really don’t get that shit). He liked that Julieta noticed when his jacket zipper broke and that she knew how to fix it; he knew it was better not to argue with her when she’d had a bad day in court. He liked that Vicky would call him up and tell him: I know how to avoid being teased at school. You have to either be good-looking or you have to be weird. That’s why no one makes fun of you: you’re good-looking and weird.