When Lucy covered her mouth with her hand, before she spoke, Elliot and I just assumed she didn’t want us to see her missing teeth. (Fernando wasn’t the one who’d knocked out the girl’s teeth, Elmira had told us; Lucy’s father had done it.) “Don’t talk to me—you don’t even want to look like you know me, or anythin’,” Lucy said into her hand, to the snowshoer and me.

The cops were usually in pairs; Mr. Barlow and I now noticed that two of them were looking at us, or they were checking out someone in our near vicinity. “Don’t look at the cops when they’re lookin’ at you,” we heard Lucy say, but we couldn’t see her, and her voice sounded farther away. The two cops were threading their way through the crowd in our direction, but Elliot and I stopped watching them.

“Do you know that girl?” one of the cops asked the snowshoer and me, when they were suddenly standing in front of us.

“What girl?” I asked, looking all around. As expected, Lucy was nowhere to be seen; she’d slipped away.

“The officer must mean the girl who showed us to our departure platform,” the little English teacher told me patiently—as if he were used to speaking to an inattentive child. “We asked a girl if she knew where the track to Boston was, and she brought us here,” the snowshoer said to the policemen.

“Oh, that girl,” I said, with steadfast indifference.

“Come on, let’s go,” the second cop said to his partner—the one who’d asked us if we knew Lucy. It was clear they weren’t going to find the girl, nor would they try very hard to look for her.

“Never mind—thanks,” the first cop curtly said to us. Then they moved on; we didn’t watch where the cops went next, as if Lucy were still instructing us not to look at them.

Five years later, Mr. Barlow would be living in New York City. One day, I would try living there, too. But that Sunday in 1968, we were both beginners in Penn Station. On the station platform, we didn’t know which train car we belonged in; one of the conductors had to show us where to board.

Then there was the awkwardness of all my luggage, from Austria—the giant duffel bag with my winter clothes, and the two heavy backpacks with my writing notebooks. When the well-built young man in the business suit spoke to me, the snowshoer and I were laughing. Mr. Barlow had been teasing me about the Canadian stickers I’d plastered both backpacks and my duffel bag with. If you were an American in Europe at that time, you knew you would be better treated by the Europeans if they thought you were Canadian. The Vietnam War was increasingly unpopular in Europe, if not yet as unpopular in the United States. “I hope you’re an actual Canadian,” the fit-looking young businessman said to me. The snowshoer and I were struggling to lift my giant duffel bag onboard the train. “Or are you just another fucking draft dodger?” the business guy asked me.