“I know we have not,” Maria replied. “I… I’m glad I came to this dance.”

“So am I. You know, I was just leaving. Then I saw you, and I got the message.”

She was puzzled. “What message, please?”

Thinking was one thing, expressing it another. He wet his lips, then began slowly. “I don’t know. Last couple of months I’ve been sort of going around asking myself who I am? What I was doing? Where was I going? Was something big ever going to happen to me? Sometimes I get so low my… excuse me,” he stammered. “I mean, I’d feel so blue, wondering if I wasn’t kidding myself about the thing that was gonna happen. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

“I think so.” Maria was grave. What wonderful eyes this boy had. She had never heard it explained better by anyone. “Of course I understand,” she added, hesitated, and decided to continue. “I felt that way on the airplane.”

“I’ve never been in a plane,” he said. “It must be wonderful.”

Conscious that the music had ended, Tony was glad that they had danced toward a corner where there was a bench. “You know,” he began, after they were seated, “you seem to know what I’m gonna say even before I say it.” Her fingers rested on the edge of the bench, and he covered them with his hand. “They’re cold,” he said.

“Yours too.” Gently she raised her free hand to touch his cheek, as she had done earlier that evening to Chino. The skin was rougher, no warmer, but her fingertips felt as if they had touched a live electric wire. “Your cheek is warm.”

Tony dared to touch her chin. “You’re warm too.”

“But of course,” Maria smiled. “They are the same. And it is warm. It is—”

“Humid?” he supplied the word and was pleased that she nodded.

“Yes,” she thanked him. “But still it is not the warm of weather.”

“You know what I just saw when you said that? Fireworks,” he continued, after she nodded. “Great big pinwheels and rockets. But no sound, only lights. There”—his forefinger traced a trajectory—“see them?”

“Yes,” she said. “They are beautiful.”

“You’re not kidding? Not saying it to make me feel foolish? You really see them?”

Maria traced a cross above her heart. “I have not yet learned how to joke that way, and now…”

“… yes?”

“I think I never will.”

The rockets were rising, joining together to explode in hearts and stars before they descended in a waterfall of light. Impulsively, because her hand was almost at his mouth, Tony moved his lips to kiss her palm. And as he did, he felt her tremble.

He leaned forward to smell the lovely sachet of her hair and the fragrance of light perfume, and to kiss her lips, so gently the boundaries of the magic land were not violated. Then he felt a rough hand on his shoulder that almost flung him from the bench.