“You don’t have to come with me,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Really.”
“I can leave you alone if you want,” Ned said.
“No, it’s fine,” she said quickly, not wanting to hurt his feelings. It wasn’t like he was getting in the way or being annoying.
His face broke into a smile. “Then let’s go see us some Rome, dude.”
“Where should we go?” she asked, finding it impossible not to smile back.
“Want me to show you some of my favorite places?” He looked as excited as a little kid about to show her his secret fort or favorite Lego creation.
“Okay. If you’re sure you won’t be bored.”
“It’s impossible to be bored in Rome,” he said, starting along the sidewalk. “Let’s go see this fountain. I haven’t seen it yet.”
“I thought you were going to show me your favorite places.”
“Just because I haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s not my favorite,” he said. “I can already tell it’s going to be a good one.” When they stepped into the piazza and gazed across the cobbled roadway to the marble sculptures bursting from the fountain, Ned took her hand and gave it a squeeze. She was so startled she didn’t react, but darted across the road to the edge of the fountain with him. A horn honked, but she didn’t look back to see the person inside, to know if they were angry or good natured. She was laughing as they reached the fountain.
Ned was laughing, too. He released her hand, and she pushed up her glasses before turning her eyes up to the naked torso extending from the fountain above her. Her hands found her camera without thought, and she brought it to her eye, taking in the shapes of each form, the way the water trickled over the smooth surface, focusing in a way she could only do through a lens. For five minutes, maybe twenty, she kept snapping, working her way around the fountain to find the angles she didn’t see with a naked eye, crouching and stretching and twisting whichever way her camera told her to.
Finally, she stepped back to take a longer shot and remembered Ned for the first time since they’d arrived. He hadn’t distracted her—he’d disappeared to her. But there he was, his eyes drinking in the fountain the way her camera did. She’d almost forgotten that he was an art student. Of course he’d want to see the marble statues as much as she did. The problem wasn’t that he was bored and she’d worried about him too much to get in the zone with her camera. The problem was, she hadn’t thought about him at all.
He must have noticed how weird she was. He must think she was completely bonkers after seeing her go wherever it was she went when she found a groove like that, got into the moment with her camera. She’d probably made all kinds of weird faces as she contorted her body this way and that to get the shots she wanted.
“Sorry,” she said. “We can go if you want. I’m done.”
“Whenever,” Ned said, not sounding concerned at all. Maybe they hadn’t been there very long.
“Did you want to take some pictures?” she asked. “I hope I wasn’t in your way, or hogging all the good angles.”
“I take my pictures with my mind,” Ned said. “I don’t use a camera.”
“Not even on your phone?” Rory tried to imagine not taking pictures, but she couldn’t. It was the only way she really saw what was right in front of her. It became more real through the lens, each part of it something special in its own rite, something to appreciate and marvel over.
“Not even with a camera,” Ned said. When they had hung out a few more minutes, a couple walked up to the fountain, hand in hand. They made their way around it, then stopped and murmured to each other.
“Ready to go?” Ned asked. “Let’s get out of their way.”
They’d started across the cobbled plaza when a car whipped around the corner and honked at them. Ned grabbed her hand and sprinted for the sidewalk. His touch caught her by such surprise that he had to tow her across, but she was laughing, too, and out of breath all over again. She paused to zoom in on the couple at the fountain, who were now caught in a passionate embrace.
“Are you taking a picture of those people kissing?” Ned asked.
“Oh—no.” Rory lowered her camera and turned away, walking up the sidewalk quickly so he couldn’t see her face.
He caught up with her after a few steps. “That’s a bold move,” he said. “But hey, whatever you’re into.”
“It’s not like that.” With her camera in front of her, all the anxiety melted away. It was as if she became invisible when she held it up in front of her face. It didn’t matter what they thought of her, because she wasn’t there anymore. Only her camera remained. Usually, she forgot people were real on the other side. They became part of the composition, part of the fountain and the plaza with the cobbled street and the stone buildings beyond.
They climbed back into Jelly and continued around the city for a while. Ned took her to another fountain, a shop that sold glass made in Venice, and a church. By the time they had finished at the church, Rory had gotten used to Ned’s presence. He was quiet, never speaking while she photographed her subjects or adjusted settings on her camera. He didn’t hover, either, but stood looking at everything while she took pictures. She was able to forget him most of the time, which still unnerved her.
Finally, after they’d left the church, Ned said, “I think it’s lunch time now, right? You’re not going to bite my head off for mentioning pizza this time?”
“I didn’t bite your head off. And you really don’t have to do that.”
“You can stop saying that now,” he said. “Dude, I know I don’t have to show you around. But I wouldn’t be doing my duty as your self-appointed tour guide if I failed to introduce you to Luigi’s pizza.”
“You know the guy by name?” she asked, arching an eyebrow at him.
“Italians are a very warm and generous people,” Ned said, adopting a phony tour guide air. “They welcome you to their restaurants and take your money with great friendliness and…deliciousness.”
Rory laughed and shook her head. “Okay, show me the pizza.”
“It will be worth it,” he said. “And just so you know, I’m only showing you around because Theresa won’t. So I’m really doing it for her, not out of the goodness of my own heart.”
Mostly, this gave Rory a release from her guilt. She was glad that he was doing it as a favor for their house mother and not for her. Now she didn’t feel so bad about wasting his day, not that he seemed to do much besides lock himself in his room and listen to stoner music when she wasn’t around to ask for rides. But a tiny part of her sank with the relief. Because he wasn’t doing it to spend time with her, or even to be nice to her. He was doing it to be nice to Theresa. It had nothing to do with her.
“Because, you know, she’s a generous Italian and would show you around if she could, but I’m a stingy American,” Ned said when she didn’t answer.
“Right,” Rory said, forcing a laugh.
He parked Jelly and they made their way along the narrow, uneven street. She loved just walking in Rome, how everything was so different. So small. The streets were narrow, with buildings crowded up to them. The cars were small. The businesses were small. Everything looked vintage or ancient. This city had been around for centuries, one of the oldest, greatest cities in the world.
What had once been an empire was now this city that was always busy but somehow never in a hurry. Cars puttered along night and day, blasting their horns, but never seeming to drive very fast even when they could. People meandered through the streets, arm in arm, browsing and eating and drinking and kissing near fountains. Cats lazed in the sun on windowsills and crumbling, ivy-draped walls. It made her feel as if she were witnessing something of great importance while no one else realized it mattered.
CHAPTER Six
After walking a while, Rory stopped to photograph some people eating in a café across the street. She zoomed in, snapping a picture of a girl taking a bite of pizza, the cheese stringing from her mouth like taffy. Sudden
ly, the girl turned and waved, and Rory dropped her camera, embarrassed. It took her another moment to realize the girl wasn’t just a random Italian waving to her out of friendliness. It was Maggie. Another glance at the table confirmed it—Kristina, Cynthia and Nick were there, too.
“You know her?” Ned asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, no, not really. She’s one of my study abroad group. Or they are.”
“Let’s go say hi.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to interrupt.”
“They’re waving us over,” Ned said, as if now he was included in the invitation. “I’m going to say hi.” Before she could argue further, Ned had started across the street. She hurried to catch up, sweating in the heat and with nerves. She couldn’t just walk up to the cool girls and act like she was one of them. They knew as well as she knew that she was definitely not one of them. The stink of loneliness hung around her, followed her like a bad fart. No one wanted her hanging around, with all her insecurities and anxieties, ruining their good time. She’d learned that a long time ago, and her few friends, if you could call them that, hadn’t done much to dispel that suspicion.
To her surprise and discomfort, the party inside asked her and Ned to join. It seemed more like a pity invite than anything. They sat and ordered pizza—Ned said it wasn’t as good as the place he’d been taking her, but they’d get a rain check on that—and Maggie talked to Rory like she was anyone else. Rory was so grateful she could almost cry, or hug Maggie, or something equally humiliating. She managed to keep herself from doing either, and ate her pizza as quietly as possible, very aware of the crunch of the crust that seemed to echo inside her head as she chewed.
But no one noticed. Kristina was having some sort of drama with her ex, who had texted her. Rory couldn’t help but think Kristina had it lucky that her ex would want to text her. Jack had certainly never bothered to text Rory after they broke up.
Ned and Nick seemed to hit it off, swapping pizza slices and talking about beer. Rather, Ned was explaining the different kinds of beer to Nick, who apparently didn’t drink. Rory tried to imagine a guy who didn’t drink beer, but the only thing who came to mind was some cartoonish stereotype of a gay guy. Real gay guys probably drank beer as much as anyone else, not that Rory knew any. Her circle of friends was narrow and homogenous.
They definitely would have made fun of her for being shallow and superficial if they knew that she was about to spend some of her time in Rome shopping. Which, it seemed they were going to do. She’d zoned out for a few minutes, too obsessed with eating quietly to pay attention to the conversation around her. But now everyone was paying their bills, talking about what shops they were going to, and Ned seemed to think he was now part of the group.
It was strange how things in Rome were exactly the same and yet so completely different. Most people only knew a couple people in the study abroad class, so they all formed new friend groups and cliques. Cynthia and Nick had joined with Maggie and Kristina, though Rory knew that at home, they weren’t in the same social circle. At college, the groups weren’t as stratified as they had been in high school, of course, and there was more fluidity. Someone could hang out with a few different groups. But most people still made their core social group by the end of freshman year. Even Rory had made friends, though she didn’t live on campus.
Despite all that, she didn’t think she could just join in this group that had already formed. It was too late. Alliances had been chosen on the first day, some even before that, on the plane. Those who had flown together had fallen together naturally. And though she’d flown with this group, she hadn’t gone out with them on Friday. If only she had said yes, maybe she would be one of them. Now that it was over, she could see how truly important that invitation had been.
When they left the café, she and Ned left Jelly and instead took the tram with the others to an area with posh, designer stores. While the girls tried on outfits in the Prada store, asking each other for judgment when they really wanted only approval, Rory crept through the store, afraid to touch anything. They didn’t have racks of clothes to dig through like the thrift stores she and her friend Patty frequented.
Patty was the reason she had made friends outside of Quinn, the reason she’d gotten a job at Claire’s in the mall, the reason she’d met Jack. She’d met Patty freshman year, when they’d had a mind-numbingly boring American history class together. After the first week, Patty had sat down next to her in the lecture hall, her voluminous body, draped entirely in black, barely fitting into the auditorium seat, and asked if she wanted to strike a deal. They would each attend every other week and then exchange notes. Rory had nodded mutely, too startled to think of an objection, and Patty had taken Rory’s hand and scrawled her phone number up the back of Rory’s arm before saying, “Tag, you’re it,” and marching out of the auditorium without a glance at the pimply grad student teaching the class. It was the first time anyone had ever given Rory her phone number.
“Would you like to try it on, mademoiselle?” asked a tall, thin man wearing impeccably ironed grey slacks and a peach colored shirt. Rory had been gazing at a mannequin wearing a trim black pencil skirt and a creamy blouse that probably cost more than her entire wardrobe combined, thinking how different it was from the displays at the mall where she worked, the Forever 21 and Wet Seal stores stuffed to bursting with the hottest fads, a new color each season, the mannequins striped with frayed denim shorts and fringed tiny tops, bare black midriffs separating the pieces.
“Oh—no,” Rory stammered. “I—I’m fine.”
She didn’t know what to do with herself in the store. It was so big, but had so few items for sale. Everything was so clean, so flawlessly wrinkle-free and expensive. In truth, she could have afforded maybe one item. Her parents didn’t make a lot of money, but they were so frugal that they could afford an occasional splurge. She didn’t think they’d mind. But she was afraid to even touch anything. She might get oil smudges on it from her hands, or accidentally pull over a rack, and everyone would stare at her, thinking that she didn’t belong there. She didn’t belong there. She could hardly breathe.
Without an explanation, she fled the dapper salesman and rushed outside.
Ned was standing against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
“Oh, hi,” she said, taking a deep breath of the hot air outside the store. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“Stress habit,” he said. “I’m quitting, though. It’s too expensive over here.”
“Can I have a drag?”
He gave her an appraising look. “Really? You smoke?”
“No,” she admitted. “I mean, once in a while, if I’m drinking, I might bum one.”
Another thing Patty had gotten her started on. Patty had also convinced her to drink her first beer, insisting that anyone who didn’t drink before the legal age was too tragic to live, and then continuing to shove beers into her hand every time they hung out, probably knowing that Rory would feel too self-conscious to set it down or stand there holding it without drinking. Eventually, it worked, and Rory acquired the taste, along with the accompanying cigarette craving.
Ned watched her take a drag and blow out a stream of smoke. “I figured you were lying about that one,” he said. “But you look like you know what you’re doing.”
“Sorry.” Rory’s face reddened and she handed the cigarette back, but Ned held up a hand to stop her.
“Keep it,” he said. “I had enough. And you look like you need it.”
Rory wasn’t altogether sure what that meant. She took another drag, her head going light and dizzy suddenly, so she had to steady herself by leaning against the wall. It was too hot to smoke, anyway, and she wished she’d never asked for a drag, because now she was stuck with the cigarette that she didn’t want and couldn’t give back. She’d just wanted a drag to steady herself, but it made things worse.
After a while, the others cam
e out of the store. “There you are,” Maggie said. “I was wondering what happened to you.”
“Just getting some air,” Rory said. She was all too aware of the irony of that, considering she now reeked of smoke. Not wanting to toss the cigarette butt on the ground, and not seeing anywhere to dispose of it, she was still holding it crushed in her hand, which made her stink like burnt tobacco even more.
They began walking back to the tram stop, Kristina chattering about her awesome new clothes. “You should have bought something,” she said to Maggie. “It wouldn’t hurt you to wear something nice once in a while.”
“Oh, you mean something that leaves my ass hanging out?”
Rory watched the exchange with great interest. She would never rebel against Patty, her own self-appointed mentor and advisor. She never dared contradict the droll girl who had an unexpectedly silly side. After all, if it weren’t for Patty, she wouldn’t have any friends at all. And it wasn’t like Rory knew anything about fashion.
“Not all my clothes leave my ass hanging out,” Kristina said. “But in this case, yes, that’s what I mean. What would it hurt to try out something new while you’re here? I know a boy who might appreciate it...” She sang out the last sentence in a teasing way.
“I think I’m capable of choosing my own clothes, thanks,” Maggie said, rolling her eyes. “And I’m not interested in Italian boys.” Today she wore skinny jeans, flat tan sandals, and a lightweight tank with little boho beads on the straps.
“I think you look cute,” Rory said, overtaken by an odd urge to assert herself in the conversation so they’d remember she was there. Which was so unlike her. But she wanted to be inside their little circle so badly her bones ached.
Kristina scoffed. “You would.”
And that was all it took. Rory was back in junior high, being given the stink-eye when she walked in wearing the new hoodie that everyone else wore. She had asked for it for Christmas, and of course her mother tsk-ed over the price, but she bought it, anyway. Rory had been sure it would work to end her social ostracism, but the other girls had looked at her like she’d developed leprosy. She had been sure that the next day, they’d all stop wearing that brand entirely, but they hadn’t. They just renewed their efforts at tormenting her, as if punishing her for trying to fit in.
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