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At Elm Park, I was totally taken by the magician-mime, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Her long black hair framed her face, as white as moonlight, and when she smiled, I could see the heaven Nonna often talked about after Sunday Mass. She stood on a blanket near us, a bunch of kids forming a semi-circle around her, a white rabbit resting in her upside-down top hat. Then, in an instant, the rabbit vanished, only to pop up a moment later to loud applause. It was a simple trick, I’d once read, a redirection of attention, a manipulation of data. But to me at least, it also hinted at an undiscovered world beyond the ordinary, a world of connections where one or many could change everything.

   The magician-mime, MM in my head, was about a year older than me, maybe seventeen. Right from the start, I saw her as kind, compassionate, intuitive, and capable of seeing and understanding my thoughts without me saying a word, though I’d come to believe words were overrated. How a person treated you mattered the most. The kindness and compassion she brought into the world made all the difference. In the shortest time, I convinced myself MM had to be the smartest girl in Worcester, capable of holding and shaping massive amounts of knowledge, like a secret library filled with hidden wisdom or an AI-enhanced human who would naturally fall in love with a boy genius. I just knew she could see the big picture, like world leaders three times her age, like a chess master anticipating moves well down the game, like God watching over my family.

   When she finished her performance, she scanned the crowd slowly, and, for a few seconds, her eyes locked with mine. In that instant, my breath caught, and the world around me faded to background. I thought I might burst and had little choice but to look away and toward the stage off in the distance.

   From there, the mayor spoke about unity and a shared vision— “Together, we can make Worcester an economic powerhouse…” His amplified words searched for an audience out in the park, but they dissolved into thin air and were probably unheard by the murmuring crowd, my family included.

   On our worn family blanket, my ten-year-old sister, Iaia, mouthed along to what had to be Taylor Swift, her eyes closed and head swaying slightly, her over-the-head earphones blocking out everything else. Of my three siblings, she was most like me. Next to her, my twelve-year-old brother, DP, was well into a Spider-Man comic book while munching on the last slice of Anthony’s Pizza, some tomato sauce smeared on his cheek. He thought the pizza was the best in the city, even though I’d proven to him once that Giovani’s should have been higher rated based on the sauce-to-cheese ratio and crust density. Next to him, my seventeen-year-old sister, Lulu, dressed in cutoff jeans and a halter top, smiled at passing teenage boys clearly taken by her looks, much to my father’s dismay. She was his favorite. Next to Lulu, my mother stared into middle distance.

   But, not surprisingly, like a black hole, my father pulled in most of my attention. He sat at the front of the blanket scanning the park for, well, something, his forehead furrowed and his eyes narrowed, his finger drumming on the blanket. My mother had dragged him here, for once vetoing his favorite pub and the Sunday morning Serie A football he’d rather be watching with his buddies. Probably because of it or some other reason I would never figure out, another blowup was on the horizon. I couldn’t help but wonder if, when it came, it would come my way.

   I turned back to MM’s blanket, and for a short moment, my father disappeared again. MM was on one knee talking to a little girl with red hair and freckles, maybe five years old. At one point, she held her finger up, as if to say wait a minute, then reached into her pocket and pulled a button from it. She looked up at the little girl’s mother standing behind the girl, also red-headed. The mom nodded. Then MM pinned the button on the girl, and only then could I make it out. Peace.

   The May Festival came to a close. As we packed up, I heard other families doing the same and an old man playing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622. He was good. Once we were packed, we headed toward the park exit. When we reached the old man, Mom and I stopped to listen for a minute. Then she gently tossed a few coins into the plastic can at his feet. I glanced back into the park, hoping to find MM coming our way, but she was leaving in a different direction, surrounded by friends, mostly girls. For the rest of our walk home, about a mile and twenty minutes, she was all I could think about.