Vasya Shakulin

Vasya froze, as if he'd run into an invisible wall. Directly in front of him, just a few steps away, stood a girl whose face seemed painfully familiar. He'd definitely seen her somewhere—more than once or twice, briefly, in different places, in different settings—but each time he'd been too late to approach her, and then she'd vanish, and he'd begun to wonder if he'd simply imagined the encounter.

And now here she was, on an ordinary city street, surrounded by hurrying passersby and honking car horns. The wind gently ruffled her hair, and she lifted the collar of her jacket for a second against the cold and looked straight at him—as if she, too, was trying to remember where they had crossed paths before.

"Now or never," flashed through Vasya's mind, and the thought immediately made his palms sweat. He hated approaching strangers like this, striking up conversation out of nowhere. But something inside him insistently pushed him forward: he couldn't let the moment slip by again, letting her simply pass by, disappearing into the stream of people, as had happened before.

He took a step, then another, feeling his insides tighten with anxiety. Gathering his courage, Vasya straightened his shoulders slightly and spoke slightly hoarsely, trying to hide the tremor in his voice:

• Mademoiselle, would you like to meet her?