Frannie Zapolski poured over atlases in the public library the way other kids her age devoured the latest X-Men or Batman comic books. She collected sightings of out-of-state license plates in the parking lot of her parents’ Econo-Lodge like a birder tallies up rare species in a wildlife sanctuary. While the birder might thrill to add a Carolina chickadee or a mountain bluebird to his life list, Frannie delighted in checking off Carolina (North and South) and Mountain State (that would be West Virginia) plates on her license list. She fantasized about the world outside Hershey, the hometown where she’d never felt at home.

“Frannie,” her mother would say whenever she got that faraway look on her face. “Hershey’s good enough for your grandparents and your parents and your aunts and uncles and cousins. It was good enough for Mr. Milton S. Hershey himself, and look how far he got. Why would you want to live anywhere else?”

“Well for one,” Frannie would remind her mother, “I hate chocolate!”

Her mother would sigh and shake her head, wondering how her only child, a beanpole of a girl who so strongly resembled her on the outside — wavy red hair, green eyes and all — could be so very different on the inside.

In “The Sweetest Place on Earth,” as billboards and bumper stickers proclaimed, a distaste for chocolate bordered on sacrilege. And, despite Frannie’s penchant for pastels and puppies, no one would ever call her sweet. Intelligent and insightful, maybe, but never sweet.

Intelligent and insightful and independent would pretty much sum her up. If she lived in Vermont, she’d hate maple syrup. If she lived in Florida, orange juice would make her gag. But in her Pennsylvania hometown, Frannie’s favorite breakfast was a stack of her dad’s buttermilk pancakes smothered in maple syrup, with a tall glass of O.J. to wash them down.

It’s hard to avoid chocolate when you live in Hershey. The streetlights are shaped like giant kisses. The main drag is called Chocolate Avenue, which is intersected by Cocoa Avenue. Some people swear the whole town even smells like chocolate.

Before Frannie proclaimed her distaste for the stuff when she was eight, her mother always tossed a Hershey’s bar or a handful of foil-wrapped Kisses into her lunchbox. While her mom viewed the chocolates as a treat, Frannie regarded them as currency (or, when she was going through her Sacagawea phase, wampum). Her mother didn’t have much time to bake, and Frannie coveted her classmates’ homemade goodies.

“What am I bid for this delicious chocolate bar?” she would ask, a skinny arm waving the candy above her head in the elementary school cafeteria while other third-graders unwrapped chewy, raisin-filled oatmeal cookies or chunks of carrot cake topped with cream cheese icing.

Frannie didn’t take it personally when the kids ignored her pitch. Even at that young age, she recognized a Hershey’s bar was not exactly a delicacy in Hershey. Lots of her classmates’ parents worked at the chocolate plant, and they often toted home factory seconds — the caved-in Kisses, the crushed Kit Kat bars. But occasionally she’d have a taker, some Krackel-head who’d rather eat chocolate than any other dessert in the universe.

More often than not, that kid would be Johnny McNabb, a bookish, bespectacled lump of a boy who, like Frannie, never quite felt he fit in. Apparently, a distaste for his hometown’s lifeblood wasn’t the issue. The main reason Johnny traded his desserts for Frannie’s was because he was dazzled by her red hair, not by the thought of yet another chocolate bar.

On the playground one day when they were eight, while their classmates were preoccupied with the usual games of four square and tetherball, Johnny revealed to Frannie the secret that set him apart, the secret that occupied so many of his waking moments, the secret that made his heart pound almost as much as Frannie did.

They were alone on the edge of the asphalt, engaged in their favorite recess pastime: searching for four-leaf clovers among the clumps of weeds. Not that they’d ever found one, but their youthful optimism spurred them to keep looking. Spying a promising bit of greenery, Frannie squatted to get a closer look and then, finding that her eyes had deceived her, popped up, not unlike the “Frog Hopper” at Hershey Park, although, of course, Frannie the contrarian hated silly amusement park rides.

Squatting was not in Johnny’s repertoire. Instead, he bent from what would have been his waist if he were twenty pounds thinner. Then his glasses, prescribed for an extreme case of nearsightedness, slipped off, and he toppled as he lunged to retrieve them. The other kids would have laughed at the sight, but Frannie simply helped him up with one hand and grabbed his glasses with the other.

For reasons he could not yet explain, Johnny continued to hold Frannie’s hand for a few seconds after she’d helped upright him. Then he pushed his glasses back up his nose, his normally pasty face pink from exertion and embarrassment, and brushed off his pants.

“Not too graceful for a dancer, huh?” he said, kicking a pebble.

 Frannie looked puzzled. “A dancer?”

“Well, I’m gonna be. And an actor and a singer, too.”

Johnny had never before told anyone that beneath his quiet exterior beat the heart of a thespian. A singing, dancing thespian in the mold of Donald O’Connor. A hoofer, although that word had fallen out of favor decades earlier.

Most of Johnny’s classmates would have found his desire to dance even more uproarious than his tumble into the dirt. He had never shown any interest in playing soccer or baseball like other boys his age, and, since a horizontal growth spurt at age four, he had been wearing clothes from the husky rack at Sears. Even at his fleetest, his gait was more of a waddle than a run.

No biggie, thought his parents, who themselves were quite big. After all, the most exercise they ever got was a little wrist action when they twirled ice cream cones upside down in chocolate coating or multicolored sprinkles (or sometimes both) at their Dairy Queen on Chocolate Avenue. Obesity being an occupational hazard for DQ franchisees, they each weighed more than two-hundred-fifty pounds.

Frannie, bless her, didn’t giggle one bit when she heard about Johnny’s theatrical aspirations. She smiled and threw her arms around him, turning the apples of his cheeks nearly the shade of a winesap. “Wow, Johnny. That’s great! I can’t wait to buy a ticket and come see you in a show. Do you take dance lessons?”

“Umm,” Johnny said, his eyes glued to his dusty red Keds. “I haven’t actually asked my parents yet, but I think my mom’ll be excited.”

He leaned against the metal railing that ringed the playground, tired, yet relieved to have finally shared his secret. Frannie sat next to him, rapt, as he recounted how his mother would scan the TV listings in the Hershey Chronicle for classic movies, especially musicals, circle them in red, and awaken him in the middle of the night, if necessary, to watch them. Sometimes she would even make Jiffy Pop. Johnny’s father never joined them. He preferred action flicks to movie musicals, Springsteen to show tunes. So his mother kept the volume low, even though her husband was such a sound sleeper and hearty snorer it would have taken a full orchestra at his bedside to rouse him.

“You’re so lucky!” Frannie said. “My parents never let me watch TV during the week or stay up late.”

 Johnny replied if his parents were that strict, he might never have seen the movie that changed his life. While his peers adored Toy Story and The Lion King, his favorite was Singin’ in the Rain, which was released in 1952, nearly 40 years before his birth.

“Did you know that Gene Kelly’s from Pennsylvania, too?” he asked, still amazed at the coincidence.

Frannie shook her head. She didn’t even know who Gene Kelly was, let alone that he hailed from the same state she did.

Johnny was too excited to notice Frannie’s bemusement. “Yeah. My gramma has a friend who took dance lessons with him a long time ago in Pittsburgh! Can you imagine?”

Frannie made a mental note to look up this Gene Kelly in the encyclopedia.

“Mom bought a VCR, and I saved the five dollars my gramma gave me for my birthday and a whole lot of my allowance to buy the fortieth anniversary video at Wal-mart. It cost almost thirteen dollars! But it was worth it, ’cause now I can watch it whenever I want, as long as Dad’s at work.”

Gene Kelly, the star, was fantastic, of course, but Johnny assumed early on that his plain looks — his limp, dirty-blond hair, his Charlie Brown-ish bone structure — destined him to play second banana, like Donald O’Connor in the movie. And that was okay with him.

 Fortified by Frannie’s enthusiasm about his dream, Johnny worked up the courage to broach the subject of tap dance lessons with his parents that very evening. They sat at the kitchen table, digging into their dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, Johnny’s favorite, although for once, he wasn’t that hungry.

Except for breakfast, the McNabbs rarely ate together. Usually, either Johnny’s mother or his father had to keep serving up the soft-serve at the Dairy Queen. But Mondays were kind of slow, so his parents left the shop in the hands of a Lebanon Valley College student who helped out three or four evenings a week in exchange for minimum wage and all the caramel sauce he could eat.

They had just started on dessert when Johnny blurted it out. He was so nervous he hadn’t touched his Peanut Buster Parfait. Its signature curl of soft-serve ice cream on top puddled, lank as Johnny’s own locks.

“Mom, Dad, I’d really like to take tap-dance lessons!”

As Johnny had expected, his parents nearly dropped their Dilly Bars — chocolate for his father, strawberry for his mother. But they quickly regained their composure and polished off the ice cream novelties. His mother shot her husband a pleading look, eyebrows raised, which meant “be nice,” and asked gently, “How’d you come up with that idea, honey?”

“Well, Mom, you know how much I like Singin’ in the Rain. I wanna dance on the furniture like Donald O’Connor.”

Now it was his father’s turn to shoot his wife a look, eyebrows arched, lips pursed. He knew he should have taken Johnny to see some Hershey Bears hockey games or played catch with him more in the backyard. But running a Dairy Queen was a seven-day-a-week job.

“Johnny, honey,” said his mother, who had surreptitiously usurped her husband as head of the McNabb household long ago, “if you’d like to take tap dance lessons, I think we could arrange it. As long as you take off your tap shoes before you dance on top of the new sofa.”

Johnny grinned and shoved a heaping spoonful of hot fudge, peanuts and ice cream into his mouth. It had never tasted so good.

When he awoke the next day, the first thought that popped into his head was about how he couldn’t wait to tell Frannie what his mother had said. The second thought was about whether there was any Dairy Queen left in the freezer. Sometimes, on very special occasions, like the morning after he sang “God Bless America” in the school talent show and didn’t forget any of the words, his mother let him eat ice cream for breakfast.

***

For most kids, the middle school years are a time of changing bodies and changing friendships. Frannie and Johnny quickly realized that they would never wear the mantle of “popular,” a distinction that seemed to have more to do with one’s athletic prowess and stylish wardrobe than anything else. Not that Johnny cared what the so-called popular kids thought of him. He was too focused on his art. And, of course, Frannie, the individualist who didn’t know a Nike from a New Balance, an Aeropostale from an Abercrombie & Fitch, a puck from a punt, ignored the middle-school caste system. She gravitated toward the quirky, the oppressed, and they toward her.

Take Cecilia, the soft-spoken girl in Spanish class who lisped. “Buenoth diath, Thenora Thmith,” Cecilia stammered to the teacher as she entered the classroom the first day of seventh grade. The “popular” kids burst out laughing and started teasing Cecilia, who cowered in a corner behind her notebook . “Thilly Thethelia,” they jeered, making themselves laugh even harder.

When the period ended, Frannie decided she needed to set the mean girls straight. “People who speak Castilian Spanish pronounce the language just like Cecilia,” she said, following the popular clique as they ducked into the rest room to check their hair. “For example,“ Frannie said as she strode with them to math class, “everyone knows it’s ‘Barthelona,’ not ‘Barcelona.’ “ And, Frannie added, Spaniards really would call Cecilia “Thethilia.” “Why,“ Frannie concluded, “she should get an ’A’ in Spanish just on the basis of her excellent pronunciation!”

Frannie also stood up for Johnny, whose obsession with tap dancing had earned him a reputation as a bit of an oddball. More than once someone would scrawl “sissy” or “fairy” or some similarly juvenile insult on his locker door, and Frannie would stay after school to help him scrub it off. Then they’d sneak into the gym, one of Johnny’s favorite places to practice, even though you weren’t supposed to wear hard soles on the wooden floor, let alone tap shoes. Johnny probably would have been suspended if he’d been caught. Now, this was a boy who always addressed his teachers as “ma’am” or “sir,” who always handed his homework in on time. He was an honest-to-goodness Boy Scout, merit badges and all. But the echo of his taps on the basketball court was so enthralling he couldn’t resist breaking the rules and stealing a few minutes every now and then when the coast was clear. At home, his parents, their ears ringing from his stamps and cramps and clicks and rolls, had asked him to stop practicing on the laminate floor in the kitchen. The carpeted living room was so much more spacious, they pointed out.

After one particularly exhilarating tap session in the gym, made even more thrilling by the fact it was forbidden, Johnny sat thigh to thigh with Frannie in the bleachers while he changed out of his tap shoes. When he wasn’t tapping, he’d taken to wearing Converse high-tops, which he’d seen Savion Glover sport in a Dance Magazine photo layout, so it took awhile to lace them up. He felt flushed, partly from his tapping, partly from his proximity to Frannie. He gazed into those green eyes, the irises flecked with gold, and it was as if the force of his roiling hormones had knocked out every last iota of reason in his brain. He leaned in to kiss her.

Frannie, fearless except when it came to matters of the heart, executed her “Frog Hopper” move off of the bleacher. “I could really go for a milkshake right now!” she said, grabbing a flummoxed Johnny’s arm. Fortunately, his years of plugging away at tap dancing had taught him volumes about patience, and he followed her out of the gym.

Sometimes Frannie accompanied Johnny to his weekly lessons at the Broadway Dance Center downtown, where stocky Johnny brought new meaning to the word “stomp.” She’d plop down on the floor in the back of the studio and fold her long legs into the lotus position. Although Johnny faced away from her and toward his instructor, he couldn’t take his eyes off Frannie’s reflection in the mirrored wall at the front of the studio. When he tried to leap, he cleared the floor by only a few inches. Often, his feet would fail him, and he’d land in a heap. He never fessed up about how much she distracted him. She attributed his missteps to inexperience.

“Johnny, all that practice is paying off. It really is,” Frannie said one day over post-lesson Dairy Queen Blizzards at his family’s shop. “You have to audition for the eighth-grade musical next week.”

Johnny rolled his eyes and slurped up the last of his Heath Bar Blizzard. “I don’t think there’s much call for tap dancers in Fiddler on the Roof.”

“Oh, right.” Frannie grinned and slapped her forehead with her palm.

Frannie was a star in her own right. She put her hours studying atlases to good use and clinched the Hershey Middle School Geography Bee by answering “Sydney” to the question, “Which major Australian city, located on the Port Jackson inlet, was threatened by fires in January 2002?” Johnny clapped louder than anyone and blushed when she blew him a kiss. So did she.

Occasionally they studied together at Johnny’s house since Frannie’s was located within screaming distance of Hershey Park’s Wildcat roller coaster. Most days, the sound was nothing more than a loopy white noise, but when it pierced her consciousness, there was no way she could focus on her homework. She’d toss her binder and books into her bike basket and pedal the mile or so over to the McNabbs’.

Johnny found Frannie to be even more distracting in his own home than at school or in the dance studio. He tended to stare more than study, but Frannie never noticed, so engrossed was she in her distributive equations.

***

By his senior year of high school, years of tap dancing — plus a six-inch upward growth spurt in tenth grade — had slimmed Johnny down. He no longer bought clothes off the husky boys rack, and, thanks to contact lenses, glasses no longer obscured his hazel eyes. He was surprised to find that cheekbones had been hiding beneath his baby fat. He still didn’t like sports, but he was student director of the Glee Club and vice president of the International Thespians Society at Hershey High. His father was much relieved to see that he was interested in girls. Or one girl, at least.

Frannie, on the other hand, had filled out — in all the right places. But she still was one of those rare beauties oblivious to her ability to make boys’ hearts pound with a toss of her wavy red hair or a glance of her eyes, green as the pastures in which Hershey Company cows grazed. She never did acquire a taste for Hershey’s, the chocolate or the town. On Valentine’s Day, instead of candy, she preferred a heart-shaped Strawberry CheeseQuake Blizzard cake from the McNabbs’ Dairy Queen. In her senior year, she edited the school literary magazine, which had the unfortunate name of Chocolate Chips.

They had long ago (in teenage time, that is) moved beyond the blown-kisses stage, taking advantage of their parents’ lengthy working hours and their only-child status, but they had not yet progressed to what their peers so coarsely described as “doing it.” Johnny somewhat reluctantly respected Frannie’s desire to go slow, a desire born of shyness more than anything.

It was during winter break their senior year that Frannie finally discovered the main advantage of having a motel in the family. Business was pretty slow, so on the Saturday before Christmas, her parents left her in charge for a couple of hours and drove to the mall to finish their shopping. Frannie sent Johnny a text asking if he could come over and keep her company. It hadn’t snowed yet that winter, so Johnny shoved his arms into his parka sleeves and jumped on his bike.

When Frannie opened the Econo-Lodge office door to greet him, she leaned into his kiss and then dangled the universal room key (the Econo-Lodge was among the last of the Hershey motels and hotels to switch to key cards) she wore on a chain around her neck. Before he could take off his parka, she grabbed her down jacket and pulled Johnny out of the office, making sure the door locked behind them.

Johnny was surprised but more than a willing accomplice as Frannie stopped at room 214 and turned the key. Ever prepared, she had turned up the heater in the room as soon as her parents left, so it felt pretty toasty when they entered. She locked the door and fastened the safety chain, closed the drapes, tossed her jacket on one double bed, and pulled down the faded floral bedspread on the other. She sat on the blanket and pulled her scratchy turtleneck sweater over her head. Johnny, a lover of the fine arts as well as the performing arts, thought the static electricity made her hair look like that of Botticelli’s Venus. She shimmied out of her jeans and lay down.

“Are you sure?” Johnny asked as he whipped off his Penn State sweatshirt. “I’m not prepared.”

Frannie smiled, reached over, and pulled a couple of condoms out of the nightstand drawer. She had placed them there, next to the Gideon Bible and the Hershey phonebook, when she had come in to turn the heater up.

***

Come spring, they both finally obtained their tickets out of Hershey. They weren’t going far, 101 miles to be exact, but they were going as far as their parents could afford to send them: State College, Pa., home of the main Penn State campus. Frannie planned to major in anthropology. She figured the many hours she’d spent observing the Econo-Lodge guests was a good start to a career in that field, which promised endless opportunities for a fulfilling life far from Hershey. She dreamed about studying the cultural politics of the Navajo Nation in Arizona or, perhaps, Swahili ethnoarcheology in Tanzania.

Johnny, of course, planned to major in theater. Although he was still a huge Donald O’Connor fan, Johnny told Frannie he now aspired to be the white Savion Glover. The white Savion Glover who also could sing. To please his parents, who had heard that struggling actors often had to support themselves by waiting tables, Johnny planned to minor in accounting. At least, they figured, he could earn more by taking care of a restaurant’s books than waiting on its tables.

Both Frannie and Johnny recognized that their career goals most likely would force them to separate, at least geographically, at least temporarily. Frannie, ever the optimist, pointed out that cell phones and email and jet planes had shrunk the world, enabling couples who were truly committed, like they were, to maintain their relationship. They would survive.

But Johnny, who, unbeknownst to Frannie, had always felt she was out of his league, wasn’t so sure. When no one was looking, he’d sit in the grass in his backyard and pluck petals out of the daisies that sprang up despite his parents’ neglect. “She loves me, she loves me not,“ he’d say to himself, yanking another daisy out of the ground if the first didn’t yield the right answer. He’d sometimes strike a bargain: best three out of five, or five out of seven, or however many daisies it took to get the reassurance he sought. Where were lucky four-leaf clovers when you needed them? he’d wonder, flashing back to that day on the playground a decade earlier when he shared his dream with Frannie. Despite his twenty-eight inch waist, despite his years of dance training, in his mind he was still that fat, awkward eight-year-old.

And yet, he and Frannie were about to graduate from high school. A few days before the ceremony, the young lovers sat in the stands of the deserted Hershey High stadium and toasted their future with a couple of French Vanilla MooLattes from the DQ. Johnny gently wiped a smudge of whipped cream off the tip of Frannie’s freckled nose with his finger as she slurped up the frozen coffee drink. “We’re going to live in Pollock Halls, right?” he asked, his hazel eyes locked onto her green ones.

Frannie, who was pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth to counteract a severe case of brain freeze, could only nod. Her apparent lack of enthusiasm sent a slight chill down Johnny’s spine. He felt like he was back in elementary school or middle school, back in a time when he was too shy, too insecure to reveal the depth of his feelings, certain that there was no way the beauteous Frannie Zapolski would reciprocate. And just as Frannie hadn’t a clue about Johnny’s feelings back then, neither did she realize that her simple nod in response to his question about residence halls could trigger such angst.

The last summer before college, Frannie helped out her parents at the Econo-Lodge, while, for the third year in a row, Johnny worked at Hershey Park, which paid better than the Dairy Queen. When their schedules allowed, they’d sneak into an unoccupied room at the motel or stroll through the zoo next to the amusement park.

Econo-Lodge guests found Frannie to be an excellent source of information about Hershey attractions. She had plenty of time to study the assortment of brochures displayed on a rack next to the motel’s front desk. They advertised everything from the Hotel Hershey spa to Chocolate World to the Good ’N Plenty restaurant to the Tanger Outlet Mall.

Housekeeping at the Econo-Lodge, an excommunicated Amish woman named Mary, didn’t leave mints on guests’ pillows or provide turn-down service. But Mary did deposit thin, paper-wrapped white bars of Ivory soap on the bathroom vanities and even thinner almost-white (but clean) towels on the plastic bars next to the plastic bathtubs.

Occasionally, customers asked Frannie whether the Econo-Lodge rented rooms by the hour (it didn’t) or whether she’d like to supplement her salary by performing a little under-the-covers work (she didn’t). At the other end of the customer morality spectrum were Bible-toting “proselytizers in pedal-pushers,“ as Frannie thought of them. Frannie knew pedal-pushers was an old-fashioned term for cropped pants. It made her think of Laura Petrie in those black-and-white “Dick Van Dyke Show” reruns she loved to watch late at night on channel 57.

At the amusement park, Johnny played Hershey Bar, one of the costumed candy characters who roamed the grounds dispensing hugs and posing for photos. It wasn’t his first choice of a job there. He would have preferred a more demanding role, one with more of an opportunity to develop his acting and singing and dancing chops, but, for the second year in a row, he failed to get cast in the review at Hershey Park’s Chevrolet Music Box Theater. Even Reese’s Cup, with its yin of peanut butter and its yang of chocolate, would have been more of a challenge than Hershey Bar, Johnny told Frannie, who held his hand and nodded sympathetically.

As Hershey Bar, Johnny wore a costume made of chocolate-brown felt and shaped like a candy bar. It was emblazoned with HERSHEY’S MILK CHOCOLATE and had a silver foil collar like a turned-down wrapper. A perpetually smiling headpiece completed his ensemble. Each day, when he first slipped it over his head, the combination of sweat and chocolate that permeated its felt lining assaulted his nostrils and made him gag.

 Hershey Bar, Reese’s Cup, Hershey Kiss and the gang were about as close as you could get to Mickey, Donald, and Snow White and the seven dwarves at Hershey Park. The little kids trailing their parents didn’t seem to care that the characters parading around this amusement park had never starred in their own movie. They swarmed after Johnny and his ilk as though they were rock stars, not high school and college students sweating their asses off in felt and foil and foam.

Sometimes days passed without Frannie and Johnny getting a chance to see each other, although they would frequently text. Johnny feared their missed connections might be a sign of things to come. Some 80,000 students attended Penn State. It would be so easy to lose one another, especially with majors as disparate as theater and anthropology. Too bad Penn State had nothing comparable to Hershey Park’s Lost Children’s Corral, the site of many relieved reunions.

Johnny had plenty of time that summer to ruminate on how their relationship would change once they moved to College Park. He might have been a dreamer, but, he assured himself, he wasn’t delusional. He knew Frannie would have her pick of big men on campus, any one of whom would be more attractive than a pale, pudgy tap-dancing accountant-to-be, which is how he saw himself. For quite a while, he’d been having doubts about whether he was talented enough to ever make a living as a performer, but he would never tell Frannie. That dream, he was sure, was one of the main reasons she’d fallen in love with him. But dreams, fragile as soap bubbles, are a flimsy foundation for a relationship. He’d rather end it now than see it die a lingering death in college.

Before heading off to work one especially hot and humid July morning, the daisies in his back yard wilting under the blazing sun, Johnny took a detour over to the Econo-Lodge. He knew it was checkout time, and Frannie and her parents would be busy. But if he didn’t tell her now, his resolve might fade. By the time Johnny biked over to the motel, his t-shirt was stained with sweat, which did not bode well for an afternoon in his Hershey Bar costume.

Frannie had just handed an invoice to the father of a family of five from Frederick, Maryland, when Johnny walked into the Econo-Lodge’s office.

“Johnny! Aren’t you supposed to be at work? We’re kinda swamped right now.”

She loves me not.

Johnny waited for Frannie to print out a few more invoices. She looked fetching even in her official work uniform: a crisp beige shirt with the red Econo-Lodge logo just above her name tag. Meanwhile, perspiration coursed down his neck like water down one of the flume rides at the amusement park.

Finally, Frannie grabbed his hand and pulled him out into the parking lot, where she stood on tiptoe and kissed him. She laughed when a tiny rivulet of sweat dove off the tip of his nose and onto hers.

She loves me.

“So what are you doing here? I didn’t expect to see you until tonight.”

She loves me not.

“Umm.” The eight-year-old Johnny was back, staring at the pavement and kicking a stray pebble. He couldn’t look at her lovely face, those green eyes, that red hair.

Frannie, who continued to hold his hand, reached out with her other to touch his face. “What is it, Johnny?” Was it his imagination, or did her voice quaver? Did she know him so well that she could read his mind?

She loves me.

“Um, I don’t think we should see each other anymore, Frannie.”

She dropped his hand and stepped back, nearly tripping on the curb. “What?”

She loves me not.

“I think we should be free to date other people. Penn State’s huge. It’s something like five times the size of this entire town.”

Johnny finally looked up when he heard her sniffle. He saw her eyes fill with tears, which she hastily wiped away with the back of her hand. It had never occurred to him, but in all the years he’d known her, he’d never before seen her cry tears of sorrow.

She loves me.

“Frannie, I know you’ll be a fantastic anthropologist. I bet you discover a lost tribe or a lost language or something. But I’m not who you think I am, and I never will be. I’m not nearly talented enough to be the next Donald O’Connor or Savion Glover. After college I’ll probably move back to Hershey, or maybe Harrisburg, and work as an accountant. Probably the most glamorous job I’ll ever have is a supervisory position in the commonwealth’s Department of Revenue.”

Her tears had stopped, replaced by the unwavering fearless Frannie gaze. “That’s why you’re breaking up with me, Johnny McNabb? Because you might never tap your way to stardom? Do you really think I’m that shallow? No one knows what the future holds.”

She loves me not.

Frannie looked away for a moment, distracted when a boisterous family of six, faces slathered with sunscreen, shoulders weighed down with canteens and cameras, trooped by.

She turned back to Johnny and continued. “But this I know: I loved you yesterday, and I love you today. I love you for your kindness, your passion, your kisses, and your intelligence, although sometimes you can be really dumb. The furthest I can see into the future is tonight, when I see you and me after work, grabbing dinner at the DQ. And then, who knows?”

She loves me.

At that exact moment, the daisies in the McNabb’s backyard stirred.

Maybe it was the breeze, a most welcome visitor on this stifling midsummer’s day in south central Pennsylvania.

Or maybe, just maybe, it was the flowers’ sigh of relief.