Wish You Were Italian

by Kristin Rae

  Positano reminds me of the villages of Cinque Terre, but I notice right away how much larger this town is. The hills are steeper so there’s basically one street that snakes through the town, running in zigzag fashion, and the buildings—similar in colors and style—are broader so they appear even more stacked on top of one another.

  We stroll the winding street just as the sun slips behind a mountain, ducking under unruly branches of red and purple flowers and dodging locals speeding by on bicycles. Darren hasn’t said anything, but I take the opportunity to control the conversation before he does. To keep it in the safe zone.

  “So tell me about yourself,” I say, mentally rolling my eyes for sounding like an interviewer. “Where’d you grow up? What’s your favorite color? Biggest fear? All the basics.”

  He laughs, kicking at a cluster of broken flower petals on the ground. “I’d hardly put my biggest fear in the basics category.”

  “You know what I mean. I feel like I don’t know that much about you, in the broad scheme of things.”

  “Well, in the broad scheme,” he begins, “I grew up all over the world, my favorite color changes every day, and I’m terrified of green eyes.”

  I raise my brows and imagine my eyes shooting him with green laser beams. “That’s—” I stop myself from saying weird. “Why?”

  “It’s just this feeling I have.”

  “My eyes are sort of greenish,” I say through a nervous laugh. “Am I that scary?”

  He looks at me and we both slow to a stop. A Vespa shoots past, swirling our hair in the wind. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t blink, so I don’t either. I get the impression he’s trying to subliminally relay his answer to me. That I’m supposed to know what he’s thinking. I don’t.

  Suddenly he brushes my hair off my shoulder before continuing up the street.

  “I mostly grew up in New Mexico,” he says. “Arizona and Nevada too, with brief stints in Italy, Ireland, and a few countries in South America. Now we’re in Texas.”

  “Oh.” That sounds very, very, very far away from home.

  “My parents both work at Texas A&M. So that’s where Tate and Nina go, and where I’ll start in the fall.”

  “And you’re studying the same thing, following in their footsteps,” I say. “Do you want to be a professor too?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe one day. I’d like to travel more first though, work on dig sites in places like Greece or Central America. Ancient civilizations are buried everywhere. It’s, like, no matter where you walk, you never know what could be under your feet. I want a job that lets me see all the things I want to see before I get stuck behind a desk.”

  “I know what you mean. I can’t wait to see the world and document it, photojournalist style.” An image of the two of us traveling together pops into my mind: him digging up the world and me taking pictures of it. I squash those butterflies too.

  “Yeah?” he asks, his smile finally revealing teeth. “I can see you doing that, like for National Geographic or something.”

  “You haven’t even seen any of my pictures,” I scoff. “Besides, can you imagine how competitive a job that would be? Those photographers are incredible. They have years of experience under their belts. I’m not even eighteen years old yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ve got time,” he says. “You know what someone said to me once? Figure out what you love doing, then figure out how to make money doing it.”

  I turn the thought over in my head. “I like that.”

  He smiles, plunging his hands into his pockets. “So tell me about you. Who is Pippa, in the broad scheme of things?” He winks.

  I return the smile. “Well, I’m an only child, born and raised in Chicago—”

  “Ah, Chicago. That’s the accent.”

  “I told you before, I don’t have an accent.”

  “To your ears you don’t.” He laughs. “But it’s definitely there to the rest of us.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “No,” he says. “It’s cute.”

  Oh, I might die. A boy used the word “cute.” And when describing something about me. I can’t look at him.

  “Well, I can’t really hear your accent,” I say.

  “That’s what happens when you move all the time. I can sound like I’m from wherever I want.”

  “Prove it. Let’s hear a British accent.”

  “I think technically it’s called an English accent, and no. I don’t work on demand.”

  I give Darren a little shove. “Come on, pansy. Just a wee little sampling,” I say, attempting the accent myself.

  He bites back a laugh. “That was … rubbish. And Scottish, if we’re being picky.”

  “Hey!” I say, shoving him harder like I’m twelve.

  He pokes my shoulder with his pointer finger and I rock back. I reach for him again, but he slides out of the way then takes off down the street in a run. Without hesitation I chase after him, hanging on to my camera to keep it from banging against my chest. He disappears between two buildings and when I round the corner after him, I’m met with a steep wall of concrete steps. A single light illuminates the way from the top. Darren’s already a quarter of the way up, taking two at a time.

  “Where are you going?” I call to him.

  He grips the rusty handrail, gasping for breath. “I have no idea!”

  The narrow space feels private and secluded, forbidden even. I search for a no trespassing sign and when I turn back to the base of the steps, Darren’s standing in front of me, hand outstretched.

  “What?” I ask, staring at a thick callous on his palm.

  Without a word, he snatches my hand and tugs me up the steps, our winded laughter echoing against the walls. At the top, he leads me over an iron railing to a vacant balcony and we look out to the darkening sea far below. Wispy clouds are just visible overhead, hints of pink from the setting sun fading fast.

  “It’s beautiful here,” I say. “Reminds me of Cinque Terre.”

  Darren grips the railing and leans back, arms locked. “Would you rather have stayed there?”

  “You’re not seriously asking me that,” I snort, narrowing my eyes at him.

  All the muscles in his face are relaxed as he meets my gaze. “I’m serious,” he says quietly. “Would you rather be there? With him?” He doesn’t look away. “I hope you didn’t feel like you had to come or something. Just because we asked you.”

  I blink and shudder as the memory of Bruno’s last kiss plays out in my mind. I really wish I would have punched him now.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, finally breaking eye contact. “It’s none of my business.”

  “No.”

  He meets my eyes again. “No to which part?”

  “No, I wouldn’t rather be with him,” I rush to spit out.

  “Really? Because that’s not the impression I got before we left.”

  “That didn’t mean anything. Not to me.” I suck in a nervous breath. “And not to him either. That’s just what he does.”

  “What else does he do?” His tone is harsh.

  I clench my teeth together before saying, “Nothing, Dad.”

  He forces a half smile and his eyelids drift closed. “I’m sorry. I just have a weird feeling about the guy.”

  Tell me about it. The dude read my journal. He knew I wanted to fall for an Italian all along. He thought he could be that Italian. Was it a game to him? Was anything he ever said real?

  “You really didn’t see me trying to push him away?”

  “You did?” Darren scratches along his jawline. “I guess I was too angry to notice that.”

  “You were?” So it was more than awkwardness. He was angry. The butterflies are back, flapping their stupid little wings in my chest.

  He nods and looks away from me, eyes focused past me to the sky as it wanes into a deep-blue blanket dotted with pulsing stars. Bells from a church ring out in the distance.

  “I’m glad you chose to come with us,” he says, s
till looking out over the black sea.

  With a sigh, I grasp the railing and follow his gaze. “Me too.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ASSIGNMENT NUMERO NOVE: THE PERFECT MAN We talk about boys a lot. Especially who’s hot, who’s not, and why. But if the movie actors of old have taught us anything, it’s that good looks go away. The perfect man needs more than a cute face and big biceps, because even those muscles will one day shrivel. But good character, hopefully, will not.

  List five attributes of the perfect man:

  1. loyal

  2. trustworthy

  3. smart

  4. funny

  5. real

  I don’t want to accidentally find myself on Darren’s pillow in the morning, so I curl up on my bed, back pressed against the wall. The room is dark, but as my eyes adjust to the outside light coming in through the small windows, I can see Darren sprawled out on his stomach across the entire twin bed. Half of his face disappears into the pillow, mouth slightly open, his sheeted figure slowly rising and falling.

  I remind myself that I’ve been living in the same apartment as Bruno, and he’s actually made a move, but I’m a mess of nerves. This feels nearly scandalous, practically sharing a bed with Darren. I turn over to face the wall instead. I can’t look at him. If I don’t look, he’s not really there.

  Just as my mind swirls with near-sleep, someone’s breathing evolves into a soft snore. I concentrate on the gentle rhythm across the room and identify the offender as Nina. I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. I mentally count my toes, telling each one to fall asleep, working up to my ankles, shins, and knees, but it just makes me aware of the soreness of my calves and then I can’t stop fidgeting.

  Quietly as possible, I unzip my backpack at the foot of my bed and feel around for my journal and the tiny book light. Keeping on my stomach and facing the end of my bed, I clip the light onto the cover of the journal and turn to my next assignment.

  In my periphery I see Darren’s feet move. I quickly press the button on my book light, straining to listen as he wrestles with his sheets, presumably to get comfy.

  “What are you doing?” he whispers, so close his breath causes a stray hair to tickle my cheek.

  I startle, leaning away and curling the wisps behind my ear.

  “Are you writing in your diary?” Even through the whisper I can tell he’s laughing.

  “No.” I feel in the dark for my backpack and cram the journal inside.

  “Please. Just admit you were drawing hearts around someone’s name.”

  “I didn’t even do that in junior high,” I say, my high-pitched whisper threatening to break into full voice.

  “Like I believe that.” He whisper-laughs again.

  A mattress spring creaks and I can hear movement near the head of his bed. A second later I can just make out Darren’s outline as he folds a pillow in half and lies on his side, facing me. I grab my own pillow and mirror him. Nina’s snoring deepens and Tate rolls over. I hold my head perfectly still and sense Darren do the same. It feels like we’re about to get caught breaking some kind of rule, lying on our beds the wrong direction.

  We’re quiet for so long, I’m sure Darren’s fallen back to sleep. I let my eyes close and start counting my toes again.

  “I keep a journal too.” His whisper seems much closer than I expected.

  In the soft light from above, I can see the glisten of his eyes looking right at me.

  I swallow and my throat makes an embarrassingly loud gurgling noise. “Is it full of hearts?” I manage to ask.

  The corner of his mouth pulls up. “That’s pretty much all I put in there. Hearts and flowers and more hearts.”

  My bed shakes from the chuckle I’m containing. “Hey, as long as it’s not poetry.”

  “What’s wrong with poetry?”

  “Nothing.” I bite my lip, worried I offended him. “You write poems?”

  “Sure. I’ve won awards for it.”

  “Oh. Wow. That’s … cool,” I manage, reluctant to admit that poetry’s one of those things I don’t understand. At all. And people who do “get” it enough to write their own make me nervous with their intellectual prowess.

  “Kiddiiiiing,” he draws out in a gravelly breath.

  “Make up your mind,” I tease, secretly hoping he really is kidding. “Do you or don’t you?”

  Eyes completely adjusted now, I can see him raise his hand and cross his fingers. “Don’t. Scout’s honor.”

  “Funny,” I say, snatching his hand and yanking it down. “Did you already forget how to promise?” I worm my pinkie around his and squeeze.

  He squeezes back and lowers our joined hands to the bed. My heartbeat is strong in my ears. Do I pull away first? Do I wait for him to? What if he doesn’t? What if we fall asleep like this?

  “I promise I don’t write mushy, girly stuff,” he says. “I just like to keep track of what’s going on, you know? The places I go, the things I find. The people I meet.”

  I could be imagining it, but the hold on my hand seems to be tighter.

  “I know one day I’ll want to look back,” he continues, “and I don’t trust my memory alone to remember everything. What’s important to me right now might not be later, but that doesn’t mean I want to forget it.” He yawns and his eyes get watery, tired.

  I fight the temptation to yawn myself. “I think you’ve just made an excellent case for diaries. Maybe I’ll start keeping one.”

  He yawns again and his grip on my pinkie loosens, but we’re still mostly hooked together. “It looked like you already were,” he says in a fading whisper. His eyes drift closed.

  I stare at his relaxed face, pale in the dim light. Nearly asleep, he looks vulnerable. Like I could tell him anything I wanted and he wouldn’t remember it in the morning.

  When I first met him, I thought he was attractive but not in an omg-he’s-the-most-gorgeous-thing-I’ve-ever-seen way. But somehow, now that I know him, how his light brown eyes can sear right through me, how the corner of his mouth turns up when he laughs, how he blushes when he’s caught wearing a headband, I can see that he really is beautiful.

  His hand twitches and his breathing slows, deep and heavy. In an instant he’s fallen asleep, and I’ve fallen even harder for him.

  And I have no idea what to do about it.

  The Roman Forum near the Colosseum is rubble, the layout hardly discernible to the untrained eye. But Pompeii is a preserved city. Colorful mosaics and frescoes, even some artwork on ceilings remain intact, protected for centuries by the very ash that killed everyone in its path.

  Darren’s in his element, dragging me from one point of interest to the next, leaving Tate and Nina in our dust. We reach a clear enclosure protecting thirteen body castings. Darren explains that the archaeologists who discovered the hollow cavities in the ash filled them with plaster, let them dry, then chiseled the pumice around them to reveal exactly how the bodies lay when they died. A few of them are small, obviously children, and all of them are on their sides or facedown except for one man in the corner who’s halfway sitting, as if he gave one last vain effort to escape.

  I snap a picture, then let my camera hang around my neck. It feels almost disrespectful to take pictures of these figures that were living people once upon a time.

  Warily I gaze back at the looming Mt. Vesuvius only five miles away. Could it go up right now?

  “Don’t worry,” Darren leans in and whispers, reading my mind. “It’s an active volcano, but they’re monitoring it.”

  “They better be.” I eye it one more time before facing him. “Where to next?”

  He studies the visitor guide and points in the direction we came from. “Let’s go see the Great Theater.”

  “There’s a theater?” I ask, instantly brightening.

  “You’re surprised they had a theater, or that it survived?”

  “Well, that they had one at all, I guess.”

  We walk a few streets over, th
e afternoon summer sun beating down hard on my shoulders. Darren leads me through an arched tunnel that opens to a dirt U-shaped area where the orchestra pit would be in a modern theater. The slope of a grassy hill wraps around us, tiered with stone steps and remnants of seats, evidence that this theater held thousands of spectators once upon a time.

  When the crowd thins a little, I rotate in a circle, taking a 360-degree panoramic. Darren ducks out of my way, so I make him pose for me to get a shot of him alone with the brick ruins in the background.

  I preview it on the little screen. His hair is magically controlled today, every curl falling perfectly in place around his head, though his facial hair is the scruffiest I’ve seen yet. His smile is more of a smirk, mischievous. Like he knows I have every intention of making this the background picture on my computer.

  A smile pinches my cheeks and I raise the camera to my eye, taking pictures of everything around me a second time just to hide.

  “When did the volcano blow?” I ask.

  “It’s erupted quite a few times, but the one that did all this was in AD 79.”

  My eyes scan the perimeter of the theater. “Did it ever have a roof?”

  “I think they used big canvas awnings.” He tugs at the collar of his shirt. “Which we could use right now.”

  I lead us closer to the stone seats to get a better look at them. “It sort of makes it hit closer to home. I mean, when you imagine life back then, you think of the primitive parts: building things, growing food, trying not to get stabbed by someone’s sword. You forget they might have had time for other stuff, like putting on plays.”

  “Oh, I know,” he says. “I think about that too, how people were still people. They looked out of their eyes and lived inside their heads just like you and I do. Think of how differently their eyes saw this place.”

  I smile. “And you said you don’t write poetry.”

  He laughs and palms the back of his neck. “Really though, you have to wonder how different we are. Minus electricity and modern medicine, I think things operated about the same. They went to work, came home to their families, ate meals together. The rich had the power, the poor did what they could to survive.” His eyes travel up an ancient aisle of steps. “But people have always wanted to be entertained. These days we just have fancier methods.”