The place they called “downtown” smelled like dirt and metal and old rain. The sounds were sharp bursts and long hums. The sidewalk felt hard and sticky beneath my sneakers. Going into town with my mother was nothing like this. Josh pressed his hand against the small of my back as we walked, and I enjoyed the warmth that settled there.

We turned a corner, and he guided me to a building beneath a set of railroad tracks. I looked up. I had never seen train tracks above the ground before. Bits of gray sky peeked down from between the railroad ties.

“That’s the el,” Josh said.

I looked at him. “The ‘L’?”

“It’s short for elevated. Do you want to ride it?”

I grinned. “Yes, please.”

“Okay,” he said. “But first we have to do something. Follow me.”

I trotted behind him until we were standing directly underneath the train tracks. People brushed past us, some turning to look, maybe wondering why, in this place, where everyone was going somewhere, these two people were standing perfectly still.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” said Josh. “It shouldn’t be long now.”

I waited, my arms and legs tense. Josh stood behind me, his fingers curved around my elbows. I leaned into him.

Then it started, just a small rumble at first, something approaching from the distance. Then the rumble grew, and a quick breeze shot through my hair, sending it flying around my face. I wanted to leave, felt like I had to leave, fast. Now it wasn’t rumbling anymore. It was roaring and dark. I took a step to get away from it, but Josh’s hands tightened, holding my arms, keeping me in the spot. “It’s all right,” he was saying, but the roar carried his words away.

It got louder, a thunderstorm where the thunder doesn’t stop. It vibrated around and through me until it was all wrapped up inside me—wind and dark and noise and vibration. And then it was gone. Suddenly gone. My hair settled back on my shoulders, and I could hear the coming and going of voices again. Josh’s hands were still on my arms, but his fingers loosened. It had been twenty seconds only, maybe ten. But it was also forever.

Josh was smiling down at me when I turned to face him. I was afraid it would happen again, but more afraid that it wouldn’t.

“That was an el train,” Josh said. “It went by right over our heads. If you liked it, it happens about every five minutes.” His voice had a laugh in it, and I laughed, too. This extraordinary event that took away sound and breath and light—this incredible shaking moment happens every five minutes. It didn’t seem possible.

“Can we do it again?” I asked.

He smiled. “Okay, but don’t try to get away this time.”

I nodded and turned around so my back was against his chest. His body felt warm and solid. I waited for the next train, and this time I wasn’t afraid.

When it came, I was ready for it. The rumble, the clanging, the dark, the wind. I was ready when the other city sounds disappeared and all I could hear was the clanging. This time I looked up and saw the dark underside of the train blocking out pieces of the sky. Everything was the same – the wind swirling my hair, the vibrations racing through me, Josh’s hands tightening around my arms. And the sudden quiet before the city sounds came back into my ears. It was the same, yet it was different. The feelings weren’t as sharp. It wasn’t quite as scary, quite as loud, quite as thrilling. I swallowed back a drop of disappointment, and wondered why nothing was ever as good as the first time.

It took me a moment to realize that Josh was talking. I turned to him.

“So, riding the el. This is a big day for an Amish girl.”

I laughed. “All I’d have to do now would be to fly on a plane, and there’d be a race to get me shunned.” I followed as he led me through a set of heavy doors.

“Great, now I’ll have that on my conscience. ‘What did you do on your summer vacation?’ ‘Oh, I got an Amish girl shunned.’”

We laughed while Josh fed dollar bills into a big machine built into the wall. When a ticket came out, he handed it to me and repeated the process. As our laughter trailed off, I felt a warning trickle through me. I followed Josh through the turnstile, trying not to think about what we had just said. The night before I left home I had shuddered at Annie’s story about her cousin being shunned. But today it had been a joke that made Josh and me laugh together. As I followed him up a long set of metal stairs leading to a narrow platform, I told myself it was okay to make jokes.

Looking down, I could see the spot on the sidewalk where we had stood a few minutes ago under the roaring el train. An assortment of people waited for the train. Prim-looking businesspeople, students with bulging backpacks, and a mother with a small child in a stroller. My attention went to a man sitting on a nearby bench, strumming a battered guitar. Even though it was a warm day, he looked like he was wearing every piece of clothing he owned: a wool hat, jeans with holes at the knees, a faded denim jacket. In an open guitar case on the ground beside his feet were a spray of coins and a few crumpled dollar bills.

“I know,” Josh said, as though in answer to a statement. “He’s homeless. It’s a big problem.”

“Homeless?” It seemed like an impossible word. “Like he doesn’t have a home?”

“Right,” said Josh, lowering his voice. “Richest country in the world. Then you see people like that. It really makes you think.”

“So, if he doesn’t have a home,” I said, “where does he go at the end of the day? Where does he keep his things?” The man continued to strum an unrecognizable tune, seeming not to notice that we were staring at him.

“He probably doesn’t have many things. He just panhandles during the day, and goes to a shelter at night to sleep. Come on,” he said, pulling me to another part of the platform. “I hear a train coming.”

I continued to look over my shoulder as I let Josh lead me. “So, we’re just going to walk away?”

“It’s not just him, Eliza. There are thousands of them. I told you, it’s a big problem.”

Just then I felt a vibration under my feet and heard the rumbling sound of an approaching train. I pulled my eyes away from the man and watched as the el train pulled to a screeching stop. The doors slid open, and I waited as people stepped out. For some, this was where they wanted to be. For others, this was the place they wanted to leave. And for the man playing the guitar, this would be the place he would stay. Collecting stray coins and faded bills.

The crowd waiting on the platform shifted slightly as people exiting the train pushed their way through—a brief mingling of those coming and those leaving. Josh reached for my hand and wrapped his own around it. “Now here’s where you have to be careful to stay with me,” he said.

The floor inside the el train was made of metal, and the seats were a faded tan color. The train lurched and started to move. Trying to keep my balance, I followed Josh to an empty seat, grateful to have something sturdy beneath me. I looked out the window, but the train had already moved past the station, past the man in his bundles of clothes, with his open guitar case. I felt Josh’s eyes on me.

“Don’t let it bum you out,” he said. “There are agencies that take care of them. They all know where to go for help.”

I nodded, but it still didn’t feel right. At home we all helped each other. We didn’t need agencies to do it for us. When my father hurt his back, the whole district flooded through our doors. Women brought steaming casseroles and carried out baskets of laundry to return clean and folded. Men came in the evening after their own work was done to help with my father’s carpentry orders. Daniel was one of those men, I recalled. He finished the bookshelf that my father had started before he got hurt. I remembered how my father, his body still tilted oddly, had run his hand across the wood and nodded his approval of Daniel’s work. Daniel had blushed with shy pride.

I realized that Josh was watching me, his expression thoughtful. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What do the homeless people do where you’re from?”

“There aren’t any,” I said matter-of-factly. “Everyone in the district has a home.”

“But aren’t there any problems? What happens if someone’s house burns down? Or if they lose their business?”

“The district comes together for them and gets them what they need. If a family loses their home, they stay with another family until the house is rebuilt. If they need money, the elders get up a donation until they’re back on their feet.” As I was saying this, I realized with a shock that other people might not live that way.

Josh shook his head. “So where you live, it’s like a utopia, a perfect world.”

“Hardly,” I said. “We have our share of troubles.”

“But you work them out together,” he said. “I live in a place where everyone’s an individual unit. You live in a society.”

I thought of what Valerie had told me, of how Josh had started to distance himself from his friends. Maybe he really was looking for something new, and I was something new.

“I don’t know,” I said with a grin. “How long do you think you can go without your cell phone?”

Josh smiled. “Oh, snap!” he said, and I laughed with him even though I didn’t know what he meant.

Out the window, scenery sped by. Sometimes the buildings were so close that I could peek inside a window and get a glimpse of someone’s life. The next voice I heard was a man’s booming instruction: “Next stop Armitage.”

When the train stopped, the people who had been waiting at the doors stepped off, and a new flood of people stepped on, their eyes scanning the aisles for empty seats.

“Come on,” said Josh. “We’ll get off at the next stop.”

Once again, I followed him, reaching for the silver poles along the way to keep my balance. After the doors slid open we stepped off the train and made our way across the platform. I looked over my shoulder and saw another cluster of people stepping on before the train charged forward again on the tracks.

I thought about how all day and night the trains kept going back and forth. Dropping off some people, picking up others. It was unsettling, a job that was never completed. “Are you hungry?” Josh asked. I nodded. I was hungry and tired and a little bit sad. But I couldn’t tell him that. He wouldn’t understand that I felt sad about a man who didn’t have a place to keep his guitar, and about a conversation where the worst thing that ever happened in my district was a funny joke, and about how you could get from one place to another and totally miss what was in between.

At a place called Demon Dogs, where the smell of grease hung in the air and the el train rumbled overhead, we stood in line for hot dogs and fries served in a cardboard tray dotted with oil. Then we edged our way to a narrow room and perched on red stools that looked out on the sidewalk.

“How do you like it so far?” Josh asked.

I thought for a minute. “I don’t really know. There are too many parts to it to just give one answer.”

“Okay, what parts don’t you like?”

“I don’t like seeing people who have to beg for money. I don’t like being pushed along in a crowd.”

“All right,” Josh said. “Let’s start over. What do you like?”

I smiled. “This.”

Josh’s features turned upward, the look of someone who had just been handed a prize.

“Sweet,” he said, in that drawling way he sometimes had. “I like this too.”

I dipped a fry in ketchup, and a restful feeling settled around me. I wasn’t sure when I had stopped being nervous during my times alone with Josh. He was beginning to feel comfortable, like a new pair of slippers.

“What?” Josh was looking at me, studying me.

“I think I like the city.”

“So do I,” he said. “I’m more urban than my other friends. The city’s a foreign place for them, but I can’t wait to live here one day.”

“What would you do?”

“I’d go to a lot of Cubs games,” he said. “And I’d get into the music scene. I’d go to comedy clubs and the theater. I’d play on a softball league. Some of the bars have trivia contests. I rock at trivia.” He grinned. “I just want to be a part of it all.”

Me too, I thought. I felt a little envious of Josh. He could look ahead to his future and choose it. He wants to live in the city one day, so he will.

“So, what are you doing a week from Friday?” Josh asked. “Do you have to babysit?”

“I’ll check with Rachel. Can we go to a movie?”

“Actually, I was wondering if you want to hear some music. This band I like is playing at an under twenty-one club.”

I was excited to hear music that didn’t burst from a machine. Already the time until a week from Friday was stretching ahead of me endlessly, with too many days to get through. I had that edgy feeling under my skin, the feeling of anticipation.

“Well?” Josh asked.

I didn’t realize that I hadn’t answered him yet. “Yes,” I said.

“All right,” Josh said, looking pleased.

I wondered what I would wear to a club, and I was certain that none of the clothes I had brought with me would be right. I would have to find a way to get more. That thought stunned me for a moment. It was so English.