Free Listening for Lucca by Suzanne LaFleur Page A

with me, so it will be okay. I just want to dance. Dance and dance and not think.”
    “Let’s ask Mama.”
    At first she wasn’t sure whether I should go, but she said okay in the end. She asked how we would pay for it, and Joshua said he’d earned enough money this week to buy two tickets. The money raised by the dance went to buy blankets for troops, so Mama knew it was a good cause. When Joshua went to take a bath, Mama brushed my hair out until it was shiny and soft and helped me put on my navy-blue dress, my special dress for parties. Then she found my wide white hair ribbon, one of the few nice ones left behind by my cousin, and tied it so my hair would be held back from my face a little but still be mostly loose. Oh, would Jezzie be jealous that I went to the dance!
    “There, now you look angelic.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Like an angel. Let’s go downstairs and meet your date.”
    Joshua took longer than me to get ready, so I waitedin the living room, sitting up on the sofa so I wouldn’t get wrinkles or rumples. Dad kept looking at me over his newspaper, and he smiled a couple of times, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t interrupt my waiting
.
    When Joshua finally came downstairs, he was so handsome!
    “You look beautiful,” he told me. All the sad and worry that had been on his face in the afternoon was gone; he smiled and lowered his arm to me
.
    “Have fun,” Mama said as we walked off the front porch and headed for the summer trolley
.
    We rode the trolley to the community center and Joshua paid for our tickets at the door. There were no other children my age, but there were kids Joshua’s age and up. Everyone seemed to take interest in my being there and asked who the little lady was, even though they’d all seen me a million times at church and the library and school. There was dancing for about an hour and then dinner: chicken with peas and carrots and potatoes with watery gravy. Then they brought around coffee. I tasted the coffee and made a terrible face; the grown-ups at my table laughed and one of them got me a glass of milk instead. Some lady from the community center stood up and thanked everyone and said that we’d raised enough money to send twenty-three blankets! Joshua got that look on his face just for a moment, but then everyone clapped and the band started playing again and everyone was pulling each other up to dance some more. Joshuawas right; I didn’t think of anything else, just how fun it was to be swinging around and swishing my navy-blue dress. It was still a hot night and the back of my neck got sticky under my loose hair, but you could even forget about that when the music was good and your feet were going. Some slower music came on and Joshua stooped to dance with his hands on my waist and my hands on his shoulders. A man from the newspaper with a camera asked if he could take our picture, and we turned to smile for him
.
    I pulled out of Sarah’s mind, suddenly back in the windowsill, clutching my pen and notebook, stunned.
    I’d recognized him, Joshua. He was the boy I’d seen on the beach. Which made Sarah the girl. So that had definitely been a vision.
    And I remembered where I’d heard the name Jezzie before.

9
    I woke in the morning after a dreamless sleep.
    I was disappointed; I’d wanted to have another of those dreams, the war dreams. Sarah’s story was taking place during wartime; the rationing and the radio and the fundraising dance made me pretty sure it was the Second World War. Were the dreams of the same war?
    Maybe it was best that I hadn’t had one of the dreams. I always woke from them feeling kind of sick.
    Even though I’d definitely slipped into that summertime sense of days without names or numbers, it had been a couple of days since we’d put the little butterfly hair clip in the lost-and-found box. I could go get it and then come back and see what else I could learn from Sarah.
    I got dressed and yelled to Mom that I was walking