“I didn’t do anything,” Lily said a bit sharply. “But, yes, he asked me.”
“What did you say? You didn’t say no, did you?” Shirley sounded aghast.
Lily sighed. “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.”
Shirley’s eyebrows rose. “Yes! You should have said yes.”
“But I don’t—why can’t we all go together in a group, like always? He said there was going to be a group dinner at Cameron House before the dance. Are you going?”
“No, I have to be at school early to set up. You should go with him.”
Beyond Shirley down the hall, Lily saw Kath hovering by the main doors. They had taken to walking home together, but during school hours they also made sure to act like they barely knew each other. They hadn’t discussed this strategy, but had fallen into it so naturally that only now, with Shirley pressing her about Will, did Lily notice how strange it was.
“Don’t you like him?” Shirley asked, bewildered. “You two make the perfect couple. I know you can be shy about these things. Do you want me to talk to him?”
Lily couldn’t tell if Shirley was being kind or condescending. It was probably a little of both. “No, don’t talk to him,” Lily said. She saw Kath take a seat on a bench near the main office, waiting for her.
“Well, you’d better talk to him, then,” Shirley said. “It’s not right to make him wait for an answer like that.” She glanced at her watch and said, “I have to go now. Talk to him, Lily.” She hurried off down the hallway toward the student council room.
Lily finished packing her book bag and went to meet Kath, who stood up as she approached.
“What’s going on?” Kath asked as they exited the building together. “You don’t look happy.”
“It’s nothing.” Lily didn’t want to talk about Will; she didn’t even want to think about him. It made her antsy, as if she didn’t quite fit in her skin. “Do you have to babysit today?” she asked Kath.
“Not right away. My brother and sister are at our nonna’s today. I’m supposed to go get them in a couple of hours, though.”
“Let’s do something,” Lily said impulsively. The sky was bright blue above and the scent of the ocean nearby made her restless. She had to distract herself from that conversation with Shirley.
“What do you want to do?” Kath asked, sounding amused. “Don’t you have to go pick up Frankie today?”
Lily had nearly forgotten her own plans. She groaned and looked at her watch. “Yes, but not for a little while—not if we hurry. Let’s get ice cream.”
“Where?”
They discussed the possibilities as they walked up Francisco and down the steps at Leavenworth, and finally decided on Ciros in Washington Square Park, where Kath promised her fancy Italian flavors. When they arrived at the park, it was full of young mothers pushing babies in strollers, old men in fedoras dozing on benches, and children chasing each other with their ice cream cones dripping onto the grass.
Inside Ciros, the stainless-steel-and-glass ice cream counter took up half the small space, and two Italian men in white aprons and caps were doing a brisk business with those young mothers and children. Behind the glass were gallons of chocolate and vanilla, strawberry and mint, and long rectangular tubs of gelato in flavors that Lily hadn’t tried before: bacio and hazelnut, stracciatella and fior di latte. Along the right was a rainbow of pastel sorbetti in lemon yellow and mandarin orange and pale lime green.
After consultation with Kath, Lily settled on a cup of lemon and strawberry sorbetti, and Kath ordered a hazelnut gelato cone, which they took back out to the park. They found an empty patch of grass beneath a tree, and Lily ate her sorbetti with a tiny wooden spoon while Kath licked her gelato with a slurping sound that made them both giggle.
“I’ve never had sorbetti before,” Lily said, carefully pronouncing the unfamiliar word. “There’s an ice cream shop in Chinatown, Fong Fong’s. They have ginger ice cream. That’s my favorite.”
“Ginger! How does that taste?”
“It’s delicious. Little bits of candied ginger are mixed into the ice cream. You should come to Fong Fong’s with me sometime and try it.”
When Kath finished her cone, she leaned back on her elbows, stretching her legs into the sun. Her shins were bare between the hem of her skirt and her short white socks. “Sure, I’ll come.”
There was a distant droning sound, and Lily saw Kath look up at the sky. A wistful expression came over her face, and Lily followed Kath’s gaze upward until she spotted an airplane flying overhead.
“Have you only been up in an airplane once?” Lily asked.
“Yes. But I’ve gone out to the airfield in Oakland with my cousin a few times. She was a WASP during the war, and afterward for a while she worked as an airplane mechanic.”
“Really?” Lily remembered the Flying article about the two women who owned their own airfield. “Does she still do that?”
Kath made a face. “Nah, she got married and moved to Mountain View. Now she has children and no time to fly. Sounds like a raw deal to me.”
Lily laughed. “I take it you wouldn’t have gotten married and moved to Mountain View?”
“Are you kidding? When I get my pilot’s license, I’m never giving it up. I’ve only gone up that one time and it was the best thing I’ve ever done.”
“Why?” Lily asked curiously.
Kath sat up and looked Lily in the eye. “Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to have nothing keeping you attached to the ground? When we were taking off, the plane was rolling along the runway on its wheels, right? You could feel every bump and every jolt. And it went faster and faster and then all of a sudden—nothing.” Kath snapped her fingers, the excitement of the memory suffusing her face in a rosy glow. “The wheels lift off the ground, and you don’t feel it anymore. There are no more bumps. Everything is miraculously smooth. You feel like—well, like a bird! Nothing’s holding you down. You’re floating. You’re flying. And the ground just falls away below you, and you look out the window and everything becomes more and more distant, and none of it matters anymore. You’re up in the air. You leave everything else on the ground. It’s just you and the wind.”
Lily was transfixed by the expression on Kath’s face: the sheer joy of her memory, the longing to fly again. “That sounds . . . incredible,” Lily said, her voice hushed.
Kath seemed to come back to herself all of a sudden, and she ducked her face shyly, plucking at the blades of grass on the ground. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go on like that. My brother’s always telling me I talk too much about airplanes.”