I nod, feeling a little wistful that I never got to see it in its prime, with shoppers bustling around the square, buying fabulous leather purses and fresh produce from the tiny shops. I think, sadly, of the sterile outdoor shopping center down the street from my house—a Barnes & Noble, a Starbucks, and a J.Crew arranged prettily around concrete fountains and perfectly landscaped greenery. It’s a pale imitation of this colorful stone square covered in ivy. “We’ve tried to build places like this in America, but they never look the same.”
Giovanni makes a noise at the back of his throat. “You Americans do not understand architecture. Your buildings are so boring.”
I nod, agreeing. “Have you ever been?”
“Ah, no. I do not go to other places.” He picks up a rock and tosses it into the fountain. “I am happy here, in Italy. There is good food, good people.”
“You don’t want to travel?”
“No, not so much. I want to finish school. Get a good job.”
I didn’t know he was in school. “What are you studying?”
“Business, mostly. A little of this, a little of that.” He shrugs with one shoulder. “Cambria is a poor place. It is hard to make money here, except for tourism. That is okay for now, but . . . I want to open a little shop in a piazza like this. Sell things to tourists.”
“In Cambria?”
“Maybe. Who knows? The rest of my family has moved to Florence. I think I will go there, too, someday. That way I can help support them.”
I want to ask him more about this shop he plans to open, but he puts a hand on my arm, nodding toward the fountain. “Sit with me.”
I lower myself to the fountain with him. It might be my imagination, but parts of the stone look darker than others, like they’ve been stained by something rust-colored.
Blood, I think, my mind going back to the catacombs. I shiver and wrap my arms around myself.
“It’s weird that there’s no one else here,” I say, trying to take my mind off those twisting walls of bones. Giovanni gives my hand a squeeze.
“There will be. Tomorrow night is our Festival for the Dead. It is the anniversary of Lucia’s sacrifice. People come to us from all over Europe to celebrate and dance. There is music. Wine. Will you come?”
I peek up at him through the fan of my eyelashes, head tilted toward the ground. “Sounds spooky.”
“Do not worry, bella. I will protect you.” He kisses the skin behind my ear.
“Do the dead crash the party?” I murmur, my eyes fluttering closed.
“No, no. In Cambria the dead are very well behaved.”
His mouth travels down my neck and over my collarbone. I moan, leaning closer. Giovanni wraps his arms behind my back and burrows his face in my hair.
“You are so beautiful,” he says, and it reminds me of the night we met. Our first kiss. I tilt my head up, and our lips meet.
“You are so beautiful,” I say, my words getting lost in his mouth. In an instant, I forget why I thought this place was creepy. The darkness, the seclusion . . . it’s romantic. Our own private hideaway, accessible only by walking through a tunnel of the dead. Giovanni tightens his arms around me. Kisses me harder until, eventually, I forget the catacombs completely.
* * *
• • •
I think about the kisses. I can still feel Giovanni’s arms twisting around my shoulders, the heat of his chest pressed to mine. I touch a finger to my mouth, trying to remember the warmth of his lips. My eyes flutter close, and my breath catches . . .
A fly buzzes past my ear, the sound of its wings a low drone. I flinch and jerk away, and my bad ankle twists beneath me, sending pain up my leg.
“Nice one,” I mutter to myself, cringing. The last memories of Giovanni’s kisses disappear as I hobble the rest of the way home.
It’s late when I finally get back to the apartment. I try the doorknob, expecting to find it locked. Harper and Mara couldn’t have gotten back from Professor Coletti’s yet. But the knob turns easily beneath my hand.
I ease the door open as quietly as possible. I listen for voices but hear nothing. They must’ve already gone to bed. I take my shoes off and place them next to the door and then creep down the hallway, rolling my feet from heel to ball to keep the floorboards from creaking.
I push my bedroom door open, expecting Lucky to leap off my bed and rub his furry body against my ankles. He’s been sleeping on my pillow when I’m not here.
Instead, I’m hit with the smell of something sharp and rotting. I cover my nose with one hand. It takes a second to find the lamp switch, and then a dull, golden glow blinks on.
Someone tore the sheets back from my bed. They ripped my pillows apart, leaving a downy layer of feathers over every inch of my room. A breeze drifts in from the window, stirring them in small drifts.
But that’s not the worst part. Whoever did this left me a message.
Diavolina.
The word is painted across my sheets in thick, spiky letters, written in something the color of rust, only thicker, and tacky. Flies buzz in through the open window and land on the soiled sheets, wings flicking, crawling over each other. Their eyes look iridescent in the glow of my lamp.
I stare at the sheets for a long time, hand still balled at my nose, eyes watering, until I understand.
The flies. The smell. The tacky, rust-colored paint.
The message was written in blood.
CHAPTER 9
Before
Mara won’t come into my room.
She stands near the metal door, hands clasped in front of her so she doesn’t accidentally make contact with the wall. She seems to be trying very hard to keep her nose from wrinkling.
Harper, on the other hand, has taken the opposite approach. Instead of making a face, she keeps her expression perfectly impassive. Like we’re hanging out in her bedroom instead of chilling in my dorm inside a fucking mental institution.
“. . . and then Cassidy texted his girlfriend exactly what he said, and she broke up with him the next day.” Harper pauses to pick a piece of peeling paint off my wall. They’ve been here for twenty minutes now, and she’s kept up a steady stream of gossip the entire time. “I don’t think they’re, like, done done, but shit got pretty real. I wish you’d been there.”
“Yeah.” I nod along, even though I lost track of this story at least fifteen minutes ago. I barely knew Cassidy in high school. She was a grade above me, and I never even saw her at NYU, so I have less than zero interest in her love life. “You guys can sit down, you know. They’re not going to lock you in here with me.”
Mara and Harper glance at each other. Hidden inside that glance is something I’m not supposed to understand, some hint of a conversation they had on the train ride upstate. They take the smallest possible step farther into the room. Seriously, I don’t think either of them even really picked their foot up off the floor to move it.
My cheeks burn. I pull my knees toward my chest and loop my arms around them. It’s like they think that what I have is catching.
“This place isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” Harper dusts off the front of her shirt, even though there isn’t a speck of dirt on any part of her clothing. “I was expecting, like, bars on the windows.”
“I’m not in prison.” I try to keep my voice steady, but it trembles a little.
Harper says, her words falsely bright, “Oh, totally. No, I know that.”
At the same time, Mara adds, “That’s not what she meant.”
“Yeah.” I stare down at my knees. An uncomfortable silence falls between us. It never used to be like this. We used to FaceTime for hours, interrupting and talking over each other in our desperation to break down every detail of our day. We’d tell the same story three, sometimes four times, always analyzing it from a new angle. Tayla had a hard time keeping up, but I loved those c
onversations. It was almost competitive, how you had to fight for your chance to talk, and you knew you’d won when the others fell quiet to listen to you speak.
Mom used to cover her ears when Mara and Harper were over, saying she didn’t know how we understood each other.
I hear Harper take a deep breath, steeling herself to start up the conversation again. Mara shifts her weight from foot to foot, the soles of her shoes creaking. I bet she’s counting the seconds until she can make some excuse to leave.
I can’t bring myself to look either of them in the face, so instead I study what they’re wearing. Pink T-shirt, white cords, and sparkly boots for Harper. Red minidress with tights and silver Doc Martens for Mara.
I sigh, despite myself. Color. I haven’t seen this much color since I was admitted.
I self-consciously wrap my arms around my chest. I’m wearing the same colors as the rest of this place. Grayish blue, faded from too many washings. Next to me, Harper and Mara look like flowers.
I look up and catch my reflection in the window as snow falls outside. I can’t see myself clearly (we aren’t allowed mirrors for some reason that has never made any sense to me), but I see enough to know that my skin has gone dull and that my normally shiny reddish hair hangs around my shoulders in lifeless clumps.
Harper and Mara must look at me and think that I belong here. That I’m one of these girls.
Harper shifts closer to me, breaking up my thoughts. She perches on the edge of my cot, and for a moment, I’m so grateful to her that I could cry.
“So.” She offers me a small smile, like a gift. She straightens the bedspread with the palm of her hand. “I’ve been waiting to tell you . . . I got in.”
“You got in,” I repeat, slowly. It takes me a long moment to remember what she’s talking about, but then I lean forward, my eyes going wide. “To CART?”
Harper nods, her smile widening. “I mean, it’s not like they’re exclusive, but they did say there was an overwhelming number of applicants this year, and I’m only a freshman so it wasn’t totally a for-sure thing. They just emailed all my enrollment stuff last week.”
“Oh, Harper, that’s amazing.” I throw my arms around her neck, squeezing, and for a second everything is like it was. I’m not the crazy girl in the mental institution, and she’s not my former bestie who acts all weird around me now. We’re just two friends, and we could be sitting anywhere. I hold her tighter and say, into her ear, “Cambria’s supposed to be a total party town. You’re going to have a blast.”
Harper exhales, heavily. She’s beaming when she finally pulls away. I haven’t seen her so happy since she got into NYU. “The town itself is supposed to be adorable. All cobblestone streets and crumbling old buildings. Doesn’t that sound gorgeous?”
I nod. “Totally.”
Mara inches into the room. She doesn’t sit down beside us but leans against my dresser, as though she’s still not sure how close she’s allowed to get. “Tell her about the apartment, Harpy.”
“Oh my God, that’s the best part. So, most of the other students are rooming together in this little house downtown. It’s super cute, but obviously I couldn’t stay there with them, so Daddy helped me find this great apartment right next door. It’s inside this old building that used to be a church, and there’s all sorts of creepy art and stuff still hanging on the walls. You would die if you saw it, Berk.”
I purse my lips, confused. “Why can’t you stay in the house with your other classmates?”
“We thought it’d be easier to room together—” Mara stops talking, abruptly, and shifts her gaze down to her shoes. “Shit.”
I frown. “What?”
Harper has suddenly become very distracted by a loose thread on her knee. “Mara decided to apply, too.”
“You guys made it sound like so much fun,” Mara says with a shrug. “I figured why not?”
Harper adds, “It’s no big deal.”
So that’s their big secret. Harper and Mara are spending the summer together, in Italy, attending the art program I told them about.
A memory slams into me so suddenly I flinch. Tayla and I are spread across her bed after school, feet dangling over the sides of her mattress, giggling over the grainy pics of Cambria we managed to pull up on her laptop. We order pizza and spend the night arguing over which neighborhood we’d stay in and which coffee shop would become our regular spot, whether we’d date boys from the program or go after locals. For a second, I find it hard to breathe.
Tayla’s older sister’s best friend did the Cambria Art Institute summer program a few years back, and she was the one who gave us the heads-up that it was worth the hefty enrollment fee. It’s not technically affiliated with any university, so you can sign up to take the course no matter where you go to school. Tayla and I weren’t naive enough to think we’d end up at the same college, but we always promised each other we’d meet at CART.
It’s not that big a deal, I tell myself. Tayla and I told Harper and Mara all about CART after we started hanging with them. We told them they should apply; we said the four of us could go together. The plan had seemed so absolutely perfect when we came up with it. The four of us chilling in Italy, drinking wine, meeting boys . . .
But it’d always been our dream. Mine and Tayla’s. And now Harper and Mara are going together while I’m stuck here. And Tayla . . .
I glance up in time to see Mara and Harper look at each other and then away, clearly not wanting me to see. I shift my eyes back down to my lap, anxiously twisting my fingers together so I don’t have to look my friends in the face.
“I didn’t even know applications were due,” I murmur, almost to myself. I remember looking up the dates with Tayla last year, but I must’ve lost track of it between the panic episode and coming here.
“We should’ve reminded you. We just weren’t sure what your deal was going to be,” Harper explains, after a few minutes of increasingly awkward silence. “With . . . everything.”
“CART isn’t until the summer,” I murmur. It’s not even January. Do they really think I’m going to be here for that long?
“Yeah,” Harper says. Her cheeks have turned pink. Maybe I should feel bad for her, but honestly, this just pisses me off even more. I’m the one whose entire life is going to shit. What does she have to be upset about?
“Obviously Harper figured you’d be out by then. She meant, like, with school and stuff,” Mara cuts in. I look up, sharply. Something about the tone of her voice makes me want to slap her.
She hesitates, frowning at my harsh expression, and then continues, her voice a little softer. “I mean, are you even planning on going back to NYU in the fall? Because you’ve already missed most of your freshman year. I’m not even sure if you qualify for CART if you aren’t currently enrolled in classes. And do you really think your parents would let you travel abroad? After—“
“I was committed?” I snap. Mara swallows and shifts her eyes back to the floor.
The door to the dorm room opens, and all three of us flinch. But it’s just Sofia.
“Oh, look. Outsiders,” she says, mouth twisting in a way that could’ve been a grin if she weren’t showing so many teeth. She looks at me. “You going to introduce us?”
“Harper, Mara, this is my roommate, Sofia. Sofia, I know Harper and Mara from high school.” I pause for a second, then add, “We’ve all been friends forever.”
“Hey,” Harper and Mara mumble in unison. Harper coughs and pretends to be distracted by a spot on her cords. Mara can’t stop staring at the serpent tattoo in the crook of Sofia’s hand.
Can’t really blame her. The tattoo looks particularly disturbing right now, with the harsh overhead lights flickering down on it, making it look like the blue lines are moving. Sofia’s skin has gone all red and puffy—I think it might be infected.
“It’s so nice of you to come visi
t Berkley in here,” Sofia says, voice falsely bright. Her eyes bounce from Harper to Mara, one eyebrow going up when neither of them looks back at her. “You must be really close.”
She starts picking at the scab forming around her tattoo. I think she’s just doing it to freak them out.
Mara stares, a muscle at the corner of her eye twitching. “Yeah,” she says, distracted. “The best.”
I try again. “Sofia’s from Mississippi. Harper, didn’t your mom grow up there?”
“Yeah, but we never go back.” Harper’s nose wrinkles, just a little, before she seems to realize what she’s doing and wipes the expression from her face.
The silence stretches a beat too long. I should say something else, try make this easier for everyone. But I can feel my heartbeat pounding in my ears, blocking out the rest of my thoughts.
“I think . . . probably we should be going,” Mara says, giving Harper a very intentional look. Harper pushes herself off my bed.
“Yeah, we have this lunch thing . . . Anyway, we’ll visit again soon, Berk.” She follows Mara out the door, and the two of them dart down the hallway so quickly you’d think someone was chasing them.
I dig my stubby fingernails into the mattress as I watch them go, feeling more lonely and lost than I have since I first got to this hellhole. I picture them finding the nearest subway on their phones, taking a train into Manhattan, just like the four of us used to on weekends back in high school when NYU was just a dream. It’s not even forty minutes away from here.
They’ll meet one of our old high school friends for lunch, grabbing a gooey slice of pizza from Artichoke or braving the epic Shake Shack line for burgers and fries, like old times. They’ll giggle and gossip—probably about me.
The thought fills me with jealousy, but at the same time, I wish they’d told me who they were meeting. I wish they’d told me where they were eating and what they planned to order. As I much as I hate them for moving on without me, I want to soak up every detail.
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