A 2031 LOVE STORY

Back in the year 2011, twenty years ago, four children lived on a magical island called Utila, which looked like a whale swimming in a blue-green sea.

Maxim, who was four,

and Pai, who was eight months old,

were brother and sister.

Bine, who was four years old,

and Angus, who was two,

were also brother and sister.

All four of these children were friends and played together all the time, except that Pai, being so young, couldn’t talk to her friends, because she couldn’t talk at all. Still, she was part of the charmed circle, or rather rectangle, that these children formed. One thing they had in common was that each of them possessed stunning beauty, as you see. They were also very smart and very nice, which some people think is even more important than being beautiful.

Maxim and Bine, who were the same age, had been friends their whole life. In fact, they loved each other, and it seemed natural to them that when they grew up, they would get married and have smart, nice, beautiful children of their own, although they didn’t yet know how to have children.

But when they started going to school, another girl fell in love with Maxim.

and that made Bine worried and sad. She worried that Maxim would fall out of love with her and in love with the other girl, and that they wouldn’t be able to get married after all.

Maxim didn’t worry about things like that because he knew that he was a prince and Bine was a princess, and that someday he would build a house for her. Besides, he was a boy, and boys don’t worry about things; they just want to get through the day.

But Bine need not have worried. Even though he and his parents and his sister moved away from the magical island to a country across the ocean, Maxim went on loving Bine. Over the years, many other girls fell in love with him because he had the longest eyelashes of any boy they knew. And many other boys fell in love with Bine’s blond hair and brown eyes. When other people fell in love with Maxim and Bine, they would sometimes forget each other for a little while, but then Bine would remember that it was Maxim she really loved, and Maxim would remember that it was Bine he really loved. And last year, in 2030, they got married on the beach of the magical island of Utila.

But what of Angus and Pai? Pai moved away from the island with her parents and Maxim before she and Angus could become close friends, and she only remembered him from pictures of him that her parents showed her. But he remembered her very well, because he had fallen in love with her way back when they were very little.

And when her whole family came back to the island for the wedding of Bine and Maxim, she looked at the handsome young man whom Angus had grown up to be, and fell in love with him. And Angus looked at the beautiful young woman whom Pai had grown up to be, and fell in love with her all over again. For the next year, even though Pai had gone back to America, where she was attending a school called the New York University, she and Angus texted and twittered and e-mailed and telepathed and mind-locked every day, so it was almost as if they were together, except that they couldn’t touch, or go swimming, or eat lunch with each other. But they knew each other so well that they wanted to spend their whole lives together, and one year to the day after Bine and Maxim had gotten married on the beach, Pai and Angus got married on the beach, at the same spot, near the house of Amanda and John, the mother and father of Bine and Angus.

And Danielle and Benoit, the parents of Maxim and Pai, came to both of these weddings.

and so did the old, doddering grandparents of the four now-grown-up children, and everybody ate gooey cake and drank bubbly champagne. And they all lived happily ever after.