I had plenty of time because we were just pulling out of Brig into the Simplon tunnel and wouldn’t be in Stresa for an hour. I knew this because we had taken this trip every year since I could remember. I could even tell by the sound of the train if I shut my eyes where we were on the trip. In fact, I had done that last year on the ride home. I had kept my eyes shut from Milano to Brig. For four whole hours I kept track of where we were by counting the stations we stopped at and by the sound of things like the Simplon tunnel and the arcades the train goes through before it gets to it. Dad said it was remarkable. And Mom looked pleased with me and said, “We have a very bright child in this one.”

No one asked me why I wanted to walk in the train and if they had I would have lied. I wanted to go for a walk to see if Jennifer happened to be on our train.

Once years ago she had been on the same train as us because she and her parents had taken the boat train from England, via Paris, to Lausanne, Switzerland, changed trains, and then boarded ours by coincidence. Mom had seen them and waved out the window to them on the platform and said, “Look, there are the Bazlintons!” They had boarded the first-class car and Mom didn’t say any more because we were in second class and not even with reserved seats because that cost more. We had all been a little embarrassed when Mrs. Bazlinton had come to our car after Domodossola to say hello because we knew she was thinking to herself how crowded our part of the train was with Italians who worked in Switzerland as manual laborers who were now going home for their summer holiday. And how it smelled more of people in our part of the train than in first class. And how we were not all sitting together because there were only a couple of seats still unoccupied when we had got on the train in Lausanne so we were all spread out through the car.

I didn’t mind if Jennifer knew we rode in second class. If she was on the train I wanted to see her anyway. On the last day of our vacation last summer Jennifer had given me a picture of herself in her English school uniform standing with two friends of hers from her girls school. They held field hockey sticks and had short plaid skirts on with high gray knee socks and what Jennifer called “cardigans,” she meant sweaters, on top. I didn’t care about the other two girls in the picture, but Jennifer looked very pretty. I kept her picture in my Bible in Exodus. I looked at it a lot when I was alone.