Walking to school Monday morning, Annarita thought Gianfranco seemed quieter than usual. Had Eduardo talked to him? If he had, what had he said? Annarita didn't want to come straight out and ask. She tried a different question, a safer question, instead: "You all right, Gianfranco?"

He blinked. He thought it over. She watched him doing it. "Well, I'm not sure," he said at last, quite seriously.

She eyed him, exasperated and curious at the same time. "What's that supposed to mean?"

He looked around to make sure nobody was paying any special attention to him. In the Italian People's Republic, that kind of glance was automatic for anyone older than seven or so. Annarita suspected it worked the same way all over the world. Gianfranco said, "Wouldn't it be nice if there were no Security Police?"

"Sure it would," Annarita answered. "And it would be nice if everybody were rich and everybody were beautiful, too. Don't sit up nights waiting, that's all."

He said something rude-rude enough to startle her. Then he turned red and said, "Scusi. But I'm serious. I really am."

"That's nice," Annarita said. "No matter how serious you are, though, what can you do about it?"

"By myself? Nothing," Gianfranco said. "But if all the people united…"

"The Security Police would throw everybody into camps." Annarita finished the sentence when Gianfranco's voice trailed away.

He shook his head. "They couldn't do it to everybody, not all at once. There aren't enough camps for that. Not enough Security Policemen, either."

"Well, in that case the Russians would say we're trying to overthrow Socialism, and they'd invade," Annarita said. "Either they'd build more camps or they'd kill enough people so the ones who are left would fit into the camps they've got."

"But what if the Russian people united, too?" Gianfranco said.

Annarita stared at him. "You weren't drinking wine at breakfast. I saw what you had: cappuccino, just like me." Like most Italian kids their age, they did drink wine with dinner. Nobody here fussed about it, though people from northern Europe and America sometimes squawked.

"I was thinking about… freedom," Gianfranco said. "That gets you drunk like too much vino, but you don't come down again afterwards."

"I guess not, to look at you," Annarita said. "Be careful you don't get in trouble once you're in school."

"I'll try," Gianfranco said.

A car went two wheels up on the sidewalk in front of them to let somebody off. It still blocked traffic. All the drivers behind the offender leaned on their horns. Some of them yelled at him, too. He ignored them. Annarita wasn't much impressed. She saw things like that almost every day. Keeping Gianfranco out of trouble was more important-and more interesting. Now she could say what she needed to say: "All this talk about freedom. You must have been listening to Cousin Silvio." In public, she wouldn't call him Eduardo.

"Well, what if I was?" Gianfranco said. "He likes to talk, you know."

He does not! But the hot retort never came out. If Annarita said something like that, Gianfranco would be sure she was sweet on Eduardo. And she wasn't, not really. So all she did say was, "What else were you talking about?"

"Oh, stuff," Gianfranco answered vaguely. Annarita wanted to clout him. She kept quiet and waited instead. It wasn't easy, but she did it. When Gianfranco spoke again, a few steps later, he sounded almost like a gruff old man: "He said he wasn't going to run off to Sicily with you."

"I should hope not!" Annarita exclaimed. "It's too hot down there in the summertime, and I wouldn't want to have to try to understand that funny dialect." She paused, too. "I suppose they think we talk funny, too."

"Wouldn't be surprised." Gianfranco took a deep breath. He seemed to look every which way but right at her. "Maybe we could go to a movie or something one of these days before too long."

"Maybe we could," Annarita said. Nothing wrong with a movie. "It might be fun."

Gianfranco lit up like a neon sign. He hopped in the air. He seemed so happy, Annarita wondered if he would come down. He did, of course. "Wonderful!" he said. "How about Friday night?"

"All right," Annarita answered, and he lit up all over again. He didn't seem so worried about freedom and overthrowing the Italian People's Republic any more. He didn't seem so worried about Eduardo, either, which was also good.

Would he have blamed Eduardo if Annarita told him she didn't want to go out with him? She hoped she hadn't said yes to keep him from blaming Eduardo. That was no reason to go to a movie with somebody.

What would 1 have done if Eduardo asked me? she wondered. After a moment, she shrugged. She didn't know, and she didn't seem likely to find out, either. Eduardo made a point- even stretched a point-of being a gentleman. And he was playing the role of her cousin.

Was that just as well, or was it a shame?

Before she could come close to finding an answer, they got to Hoxha Polytechnic. Then she had to worry about Russian prepositions instead. At least with Russian prepositions, you knew when you were right and when you were wrong. This other stuff? It wasn't nearlv so obvious.

Gianfranco wanted to use the bathroom mirror to comb his hair. He'd already used it twice, but that didn't matter to him. He wanted to look perfect, or as close to perfect as he could. He was unhappily aware of the distance between the one and the other.

He couldn't use the bathroom right now because Annarita was in it. His mother saw his glance toward the door and smiled at him. "She'll be out soon," she said. "She wants to look nice for you. That's good."

"Is it? I guess so." To Gianfranco, Annarita already looked nice. Why did she need to do anything more?

But when she came out, she looked nicer. Gianfranco couldn't have said how, but she did. He ducked in there, ran the comb through his hair again, and wished he wouldn't have picked this exact moment to get a zit on his chin. He couldn't do much about that, though.

He stuck the comb in his pocket and went out again. "Shall we go?" he said, trying to sound like someone who did this all the time.

"Sure." Annarita seemed to take it for granted. Maybe that would help him do the same. He could hope so, anyway.

"Have fun, you two." Eduardo sounded as if he meant it. Gianfranco hoped he did.

"Grazie, Cousin Silvio," Annarita said.

She and Gianfranco walked down the stairs together. He wondered if his feet were touching the ground. When they got to the bottom, Annarita said, "It would be nice if the elevator worked. Coming down is easy, but going back up, especially when you're tired…" She shook her head.

"If somebody could make a nice profit fixing elevators, it would have been fixed a long time ago," Gianfranco said.

She looked at him as if he'd just told a dirty joke. His ears got hot. Profit was evil-everybody learned that in school. But then she sighed. She looked around to make sure no one could overhear, then said, "Cousin Silvio tells me the same thing. It still feels wrong, though-know what I mean?"

"Si," he answered. "But what we've got doesn't work the way it's supposed to. If it did, the elevator would run. So shouldn't we think differently?"

"I don't know if we should think that different," Annarita said.

"Why not?" he asked.

She gave a perfectly practical answer: "Because we'll get in trouble with the Security Police if we make too much noise about profit. Look what happened to The Gladiator."

"Somebody ought to do something about the Security Police," Gianfranco said. "They just hold us back."

Annarita stopped, right there outside the apartment building. "If you keep talking like that, I'm going back upstairs. It's not safe to be around you. It's not safe to be anywhere near you. Cut it out, all right?"