Vice President Cynthia's street was much like any other in that part of San Sebastian: cookie-cutter homes, a sidewalk just wide enough for working moms' morning powerwalks, a sea breeze that came from nowhere in particular. These homes weren't on the water: that would be too expensive, and dash many homeowners' dreams of having prim-and-proper backyards. Jessica pointed out Vice President Cynthia's house, which had some citrus trees planted out front.

"They're kaffir lime," Jessica said. "Her mom takes care of them, and they have a bunch of other plants too. Her mom likes gardening, your mom likes gardening, maybe they'd get along."

"How do you know what trees she has? Is this in Jason's dossier?"

"It came up during AP Environmental Science. You must think I really have no sense of personal boundaries."

"But..."

"But what?"

"Did Jason know what sort of trees they grew?"

"Well, yes, but—oh, I think that's Isaac. Duck!"

Marco and Jessica ducked, and the faint glow of headlights above told them that Isaac was driving by. They had parked across the street and a few houses down, the perfect distance for their needs. They raised their heads and turned to watch Isaac, dressed in his Saturday finest and holding a plump cantaloupe, get out of his car and amble toward their front door. He looked side-to-side as he walked, as if he believed himself transported to an alien planet. The porchlight turned itself on when Isaac approached.

"He's so adorable," Jessica beamed. "Carrying a cantaloupe like it's his baby."

"You talk about him in the strangest ways."

"I hope he doesn't get nervous and drop it."

"Nah, I hope he doesn't stand too close to the door and get bonked in the head."

Isaac rang the doorbell and took a step back, holding the cantaloupe in front of him awkwardly. His face shone in the porchlight, backed by the setting sun.

What followed was a silent scene observed wordlessly by them both: Vice President Cynthia's mother opening the door, looking happily at Isaac—a brief flash of confusion at seeing the cantaloupe—then a well-rehearsed smile. Isaac entered, and the door shut.

"Was the cantaloupe the right call? I don't know if I gave Isaac bad advice," Jessica said. "Her mom looked a bit confused."

"It was polite. Better than anything Isaac could have picked for himself. I think it would only have been a problem had she been expecting flowers for her daughter."

Jessica shook her head. "Bosnia-Herzegovina! I should have told him to bring flowers."

"You can use actual cuss words instead of the club-mandated substitutes, we're in impolite company."

"I should've told him to bring flowers."

"I don't think flowers would've been the right call..."

"That's because you're not a romantic. Flowers are always the right call."

"And I thought you hated Vice President Cynthia. You always talk about her like she's personally wronged you."

"Because she has. But I like Isaac. So it cancels out—and are you saying that just because I dislike a girl, I don't want her to be treated with respect?"

"Woah."

"I get worked up sometimes. I'm bored. How long do you think dinner will last?"

"I can paint a picture," Marco said, sweeping out his arms. "If Isaac's mid-century fantasy comes to life, they have about ten minutes before dinner is ready, giving Isaac and Vice President Cynthia plenty of time for genteel chatter on the couch before they all assemble at the dining table, say grace, and tuck in. They'll compliment Isaac on his ability to use chopsticks, ask him embarrassing questions, Vice President Cynthia will try her hardest to save the sociopathy for after dinner, they'll offer him cigarettes and brandy, and then they'll play cribbage."

"What's cribbage?"

"It's a game old people play."

"Oh."

"But that's how their dinner will go."

"That's a very specific prediction."

"Why do you really think Vice President Cynthia invited Isaac over for dinner? You can't actually think it's a crush."

"I have another prediction," Jessica said, gesturing grandly in mockery of Marco. "Dinner is uneventful: her parents are too polite to ask anything difficult. They know that Isaac is a good kid—he's a Beta—and that this isn't the first time Vice President Cynthia has tried something ambitious. She probably invites all her club friends over. They ask few questions and will forget him by the time the next comes around. The night is young—the kids are itching to go elsewhere, and the parents need to clean up. The sidewalk is white with moonlight, and the streets are perfumed with pear blossoms. 'An evening walk?' Vice President Cynthia humbly suggests, wishing to take Isaac away from her watchful parents. And so they depart, fireflies lighting the path, and when they've left the garden of Eden, her hand takes his, and—"

"You've thought this through way too much. This reads like a romance novel."

"I read a lot of them, to be fair."

"And you never answered my question. Unless you think it's exactly what you said."

"I've thought about this, or similar situations, a lot—I know all the words I'd use. They walk under the starry streetlamps into the austere night, hands clasped tight, knowing that if either let go, the other might be blown off by a cold front into the sky—fragile emotions, nursed delicately under steely façades, crumble easily when faced with the winds of fate. Their hands say what many words could say. Their eyes drift toward each other, barely blinking. A blink would be one blink closer to a world where she were vice president, forced to humor the vices of her president. Sinatra plays through a window—'The Very Thought Of You'. They continue walking, resolute, heedless of the moment's temporality. And how they would wish that their feet would leave the pavement, and they would take their place among the stars. The cowherd and the weaver-girl, there till the end of time, as long as stars are in the blue."

"Jessica, that's remarkably poetic, but that makes it all the more disturbing."

"Do you want to go for a walk around the block?"

"After that speech, I'm not sure."

"You have no sense of wonder. Let's go."

Jessica got out of the car, and Marco was forced to follow.

The streetlights were a dusky amber, and Marco could see why Jessica wanted to read something ethereal into the scenery. It was undoubtedly everything like her home neighborhood—or his, for that matter. It was exactly the right temperature to not feel hot or cold, or anything at all, the sort of night meant to serve as a backdrop for greater things. Vice President Juliet lived somewhere out here too, in the outlands. Living in a place like this was the immigrant dream: a second-story bedroom, a house like all the others, a place to call one's own. Her parents—his grandparents—and all the relations of those who'd made a mark on his life must have seen something in the city's errant waterfowl. On the waterfront, they'd pick up a handful of sand laced with seashell fragments and declare it the stuff dreams were made of.

And on that sand, and the paved-over saltmarshes, the foundation had been built for one Jessica Wu and one Jason Wu to take simultaneously divergent and convergent paths. It had started with Jason: perhaps it had gone wrong when his parents decided that the threat of eighth-grade algebra being declared discriminatory meant that Jason had to attend private school. And there at Pemberley he had met a certain Frank Barnes—then their ambitions were bigger than their brains, but they had time to test, and iterate, and while Jason was content to lose himself in idolizing a Soviet past, President Frank had seen the future. Their paths would intersect again in ninth grade, when they temporarily turned their focus from social calculus to mathematical calculus.

But it had been seeded on those sands, and not in the fog-shrouded valley where Pemberley lay, that desire for something more both Jason and Jessica had. While Jason grew hulking in physique and stout in conviction, Jessica lived in his shadow, hearing snippets of her future through shut bedroom doors: "Jason's growing out of his control, his teacher said..." and "We heard from the principal, there was another complaint about him..." But whatever suppositions she had about her dear brother, her own flesh and blood, remained inchoate. Jason grew kinder as his activities grew elusive—one past summer afternoon, before Jessica's first day of high school, they walked through the San Sebastian Mall by the Build-A-Bear.

"I want to get one," Jessica said, to her parents' disapproval. A glint flashed in Jason's eye.

"I didn't know that high schoolers still kept stuffed animals. Certainly they'd be mature enough to not need such fluffy little things," he had said. "But I'll get you one."

"Thanks!" she had said with a hug, and she had her stuffed animal, and did not think twice about encouraging her new high school friends to participate in the tonally surprising Bring Your Stuffed Animal to School Day, and did not notice that hers was the only one returned without sutures in its backside.

Jason had been watered heavily, and was so overburdened with parental care that his roots began to rot; Jessica thirsted for whatever trickled down to earth. This thirst was nurtured with Jason's tales of moral fortitude, and the great President Frank she had not yet to meet—many would have spoken of President Frank's angelic voice or nurturing touch, but instead Jason saw in him nerves of steel and a jeweler's talent at appraising all he met. He was Stalin reincarnate, and only from Jason's mouth was this a point of praise, and such outlandish fantasies that from any other teenage boy would instead have been of anime girls planted themselves in Jessica's brain—in other terms, that heroes walked the earth, and that any moment could become magical with sufficient wishful thinking.

That was the world Marco saw reflected in Jessica's eyes as she talked about everything that crossed her mind. Her ambition was mismatched with the world around her: idealism was welcomed only in the name of a good cause, and if that cause wasn't Heller, it had to be something noble, like tech evangelism (or real evangelism, if you insisted). Certainly not love, or that same cinematic bent that had drawn President Frank to his present position. If he had the opportunity, he would've sung and danced his way to world domination with dance numbers that would've made Busby Berkeley blush—and Jessica would've watched all the way through, her gaze suffused with fairy dust.

"I think they're having a nice dinner," Jessica declared with the same conviction.

"I'm sure they are. Is there anything to see out here, or are we just killing time?"

"We're enjoying the moment. I never get to enjoy these sorts of moments anymore, the quiet and peaceful ones."

"The quiet and peaceful ones..." Marco echoed. "Don't you think we should turn back and return to our observation post before Isaac's done?"

"We should," Jessica said, and they walked back at a leisurely pace, far below club standard, stopping to witness every magical moment that hadn't yet happened.

They arrived just as Isaac, sans cantaloupe, was leaving Vice President Cynthia's house. He stopped, half-illuminated by the porchlight; Vice President Cynthia watched from between the curtains, shrinking only back when she made eye contact with Marco.

"What are the odds? You two, walking out here, down this very street?" Isaac exclaimed.

"It's your lucky day," Marco said.

"It sure is! First I have a lovely home-cooked dinner with Vice President Cynthia, and then I run into you two. The world is a magical place."

"The world is a magical place!" Jessica repeated. "It's lovely weather for a walk—we just went on one. You should go back and invite Vice President Cynthia to join you."

"I couldn't, not after that dinner. I'm stuffed like a pig. And I didn't eat as much as I could've either, just the right amount—wouldn't want to come across as a pig—but I'm still stuffed."

"Less about the food and more about her. What's she like?"

"You know, you've met her," Isaac said unaffectedly. "She knows how to welcome guests. Set the table properly and everything. And she was helping her mom in the kitchen, too. She has a remarkable work ethic. I talked with her dad while they were finishing up."

"And about what?" Jessica continued, undaunted.

"The war. He showed me his father's war medals, and Vice President Cynthia and her mom were very sheepish about it. His father was some sort of general, before he was assassinated by the Americans. That's us."

"He should meet your brother," Marco said to Jessica.

"This is the Vietnam War?" Jessica asked. Marco and Isaac nodded.

"It's nice that you're learning about her family," she said. "And I'm sure her dad appreciated the interest you showed in their roots. Did they appreciate the cantaloupe?"

"Yes—we had it for dessert. Her mom carved it on the table like a Thanksgiving turkey. Butchered it with surgical precision."

"And will you have dinner with her again?"

"Next week she's invited to my humble abode."

"It's romantic," Marco said to provoke Jessica.

"It's a love story unfolding before our very eyes. It's La La Land."

"You two are going to make me blush! It's not like that. It's just courtesy, perhaps the occasional moment that could be taken awkwardly out of context, and it's not any of my business anyhow to think too much about it. Because when the summer ends, it will be President Timon this and that, and surely after enough official photos where his hand's on her shoulder she'll understand her fate. So I don't want to be one of those brightly burning candles that President Frank talked about, a soggy little mess of a puddle."

Isaac shrugged, waited for an interruption that didn't come, and continued: "I'd best be going. Don't want to make my parents worry." He walked back to his car at a mournful pace, humming some sort of melancholy tune.

"We should probably head out too," Marco suggested. Jessica stared at the front door like she saw a ghost in the porchlight's pallor, only returning to reality when the light turned off.

"I think we should go too."

"You think we made him sad?" Jessica asked when they got in the car.

"I think he's enjoying the moment," Marco observed hopefully. "I wouldn't put too much stock in it. He's being a worrywart. And though I don't think he explained it quite right in the moment, he's right. I've always thought it kind of interesting, though I'm sure you know more of the details than I do, how it was Vice President Juliet pursuing President Frank and not the other way around. Because we had President Jamal, who had that scandal with his secretary, and then everyone thought President Haneul was just a bit too off-kilter to sell the 'power couple' vibe with anyone, and then look at us now. I don't really get why they're so dedicated at making this Timon and Cynthia thing work when there's no precedent."

"We're treading new ground."

"You can't possibly believe that."

"I don't. But it's true."

"It is true..." Marco said. "Beautiful night out. There's something portentous about it all."

"I need to fill up the car tomorrow."

"Do you need me to remind you?"

"Nah, not really."

"Cool."

Marco waved Jessica goodbye, and let himself in. His parents were in their usual positions, watching TV. They didn't ask any questions, but they could guess what he had been up to. Certainly not all the details, but they'd get at the heart of the matter.