Astrid, for her part, was not of a mind to give Flavian the time he needed to sort himself out and come to grips with the enormous challenge that her interest in him had created. The young woman had other things to do. She was deeply involved in Agronomy and Microbiology, and her interest in World Literature was escalating. She loved to swim, enjoyed long walks in all directions and on the walks that took her into the woods she collected pine cones of all varieties. Her native Venezuela was rich in flora, but not rich in conifers. And this explained her fascination with them. If you were a particularly daring Vandal who decided to break into the beautiful Astrid’s room and steal a certain prized item of underwear, you would definitely get a surprise upon reaching into her top drawer and finding barbs and sap instead of lingerie.
To say that she was completely oblivious to the debilitating emotional turmoil that Flavian had been experiencing is to say it exactly right.
Apart from Flavian’s underdeveloped confidence, two things accounted for this. The first is that she’d grown up the lone sister among four brothers and though none of them were mean to her, they suppressed her vanity and intimidated any boys that advanced an interested in her. The second is that she was something of a late bloomer. Not that she’d ever been homely, but it was only as she was finishing high school that she became dangerously well-contoured, as it were. She merely thought herself fortunate that her appearance would not be an impediment to her social life.
Perhaps, too, there was a cultural buffer. When American young men would make whispered exclamations in her wake, she was not familiar with the slang. True, at the pool in March, a lifeguard had pretended to faint as she walked by, dripping wet, on her way back to the dressing room. He was twirling his whistle at the time, and had simply flopped backwards into a stack of kickboards that cushioned his fall. She thought it strange, and heard the laughter, but did not stop to investigate.
That sweet line in his note, “I often think of your smile when it rains,” had more or less sealed Flavian’s fate. Of course, she had no idea the anguished hours it had taken him to come up with something to say, even in writing. To her it confirmed her sense that he had charm and depth. And that was that. It was settled. She was going to see him. They were going to talk, and she was going to get to the bottom of things. Gathering up Flavian for a good exploration was now on her list of things to do. This week.
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