Oh dear, I think feebly.
And just then, Evan, probably sensing that I’m looking his way, turns and grins at me.
“Having a good time, Violet?” he calls.
I nod, and find myself thinking:
Why does it feel so special when someone uses your name? Didn’t some ancient society have a custom that you had a secret name that only the people you really trusted knew, because using it gave people power over you?
If that’s true, and not just something I read in a novel, I really understand it now. There’s something so nice about a boy saying your name. As if he likes you for yourself, what’s inside as well as outside. Not just your boobs and face, but your brain, too.
Deliberately, I make myself smile back at him.
I’m getting over Luca, I tell myself. I have to start somewhere.
A Girl on a Mission
“Oh, my head!” Paige moans, but none of us cares. Not even the littlest bit.
We’re all still waking up slowly, acclimating to the bright daytime after our late night—we didn’t get back from the hot springs till two in the morning—and we all feel a little bit delicate, as if we’re missing a protective layer of skin. Paige always wants the most attention, gets ratty if she isn’t the loudest in the group. Which is annoying right now, I think crossly, as she’s the tallest and the blondest—can’t that be enough for her?
Clearly not.
“Oww!” she tries again, but the three of us keep ignoring her.
Thank goodness we don’t have lessons this morning; it’s Saturday, which means market day in the village, Greve in Chianti. Market day is a huge deal. Greve has a pretty triangular piazza filled with shops, but the prices are way beyond our budgets; plus, they mostly sell stuff girls don’t want to buy. The stores are geared toward older, richer tourists—ceramics, olive-wood bowls and chopping boards, household items.
But the market on Saturday is another thing. It could have been designed especially for teenage girls. Elisa goes down to the village in the Range Rover every Saturday at ten, and we can join if we want, but we got up too late today and had to tumble down the rough path that leads down the hill. It’s like a goat track, narrow and rocky, and it won’t be much fun going back up, but we were still determined not to miss out. Lorries are pulled up around the three sides of the piazza, the stalls folding out from them, metal frames hung to the rafters with cheap, enticing clothes on hangers, and tables covered with secondhand lucky dips or shoes lined up on their boxes. Every week we lose ourselves in the market for a couple of hours, trying things on, working out what we can afford, doing deals like “if we split this, I’ll wear it this week and you can next week.”
Paige shoots toward the hat stall. As always, the only people browsing there are foreigners, Japanese and English; the Americans usually wear baseball caps, and the Italians wouldn’t be caught dead in hats for some reason. Paige is picking up a soft, broad-brimmed straw hat in stripes of white and blue, its crown trimmed in a wide dark-blue satin ribbon; when she plops it over her blond curls, she looks like Brigitte Bardot in an old film. Even squinting at her through our sunglasses, we have to admit she looks great.
“She’s so lucky, being tall like that,” Kelly says wistfully. “She can carry anything off.”
Pirouetting in the hat, Paige is getting what she wants from the crowd, what we’re too knackered to give her: she’s the focus of all eyes.
“Che bonona,” says one guy devoutly, which we’ve learned is a compliment paid to girls who aren’t skinny-thin: it means “curvy and beautiful.”
I’m not in the mood for Paige’s antics today. And I’ve stopped spending money on clothes at the market; I’ve discovered something I like much better. I gesture to Kelly to let her know where I’ll be, and weave my way a few stalls down, to a banchino where a lady sells art supplies. Sketchpads, pastels and crayons, brushes, tubes of watercolor and oil paint, all kinds of paper … it’s a treasure trove for me. Learning to draw and paint has been a huge revelation since I came to Italy. I thought I wanted to study art history, but more and more, with the art lessons we’re having here, I think I want to do art itself instead. And from the encouragement I’ve been getting from our teacher, Luigi, I honestly think I might have some talent.
The problem, though, is that I’m on one track already; the exams I’ve done, the path I’ve chosen, all lead to a different destination. I can’t believe, talking to Paige and Kendra, how much better the system is in the US. There, you study all sorts of subjects till you’re eighteen, and even when you go to college, you don’t have to choose what you’re going to focus on for at least a year or two. It sounds brilliant. Kelly and I have grown up in a very different setting, where, at sixteen, you pick three or four subjects to concentrate on, and by eighteen you’ve decided exactly what you want to study at college.
I had no idea there was so much more freedom in the US for what you could study. Every time I think about it, I’m riven with jealousy. It’s so unfair. The choices I made at sixteen have trapped me in a way I never anticipated, and so has the choice my mum made when she sent me to a trendy London private school that didn’t teach anything as unfashionable as formal art lessons. It never occurred to me that I might actually be able to draw, to paint; the girls who studied art at St. Tabby’s were all doing installations, conceptual pieces where they took photographs of one another and scratched them up, performance work where they wandered around the school in tight-fitting bodysuits, striking poses and being really significant. They were all very thin and pretty—to be honest, I think the photos and bodysuits were mostly about showing off how thin they were. We might have visited proper museums, but St. Tabby’s was obsessed with being modern, cutting-edge; it wouldn’t have occurred to the art teacher to give lessons in something as conventional as drawing properly.
Which is what I long to be able to do. I’m determined to ask my mum for art lessons as soon as I get back to London, continuing what I’m learning here with Luigi. But I’m worried that a few months of art lessons won’t be remotely enough to put together a portfolio that will get me into art school.…
“Ciao!” says the woman behind the stall, smiling at me. “Bentornata!”
That means “welcome back.” I smile, saying “Ciao,” and she continues:
“Posso aiutarti?”
“Sì,” I answer. She’s asking if she can help me. I point to the pastels. “Questi—e carta?”
I’m asking, I hope, what paper goes with the pastels. She pulls out a sheaf, and starts to lay them out in front of me in a fan. Her eyes flicker sideways, and her smile deepens as she exclaims:
“Oh! Luigi!”
She bustles around the side of the stall to greet the man beside me, Luigi, our art teacher, kissing him on both cheeks, the way they do in Italy. Luigi calls a “ciao” to me in greeting, and the two of them rattle away to each other, much too fast for me to understand. I start pulling out pieces of paper, concentrating on the things I want to try to sketch, plus the budget I’ve allowed myself for today, and I get quite distracted.
By the time I’ve assembled my selection, Kendra is next to me, managing to patter away pretty well in Italian. She’s propped her bum against the table, blocking the view of the stall so the person talking to her can’t be distracted by its contents and has to look straight at her. She’s tilted her head to one side and is playing with a lock of hair, her lips parted as she stares at the man she’s focused on with her huge, dark, slightly slanting eyes.
I wince in a mixture of shock and revulsion. Because it’s definitely a man, not a boy. The person at whom Kendra is directing the full force of her considerable flirtatious wiles is Luigi.
It makes me incredibly uncomfortable to watch. I realize that, for the first time ever, flirting so openly, Kendra looks needy. Vulnerable.
Luigi is in profile to me. I notice his wide neck, his stocky body, the shirtsleeves rolled up above his elbows, displaying his muscly—and hairy—forearm
s. Hair sprouts from the open neck of his shirt, between the glinting links of his gold necklace, tight dark curls like the short ringlets that cover his skull closely, and I can even see hair at his neck … eww. Everything about Luigi is adult. Not like the boys we hang out with, boys our own age. Evan’s muscly, but there’s a solidity about Luigi, a confidence that comes with time. He must be well over thirty—double our age.
They’re oblivious to me, and that makes me even more uncomfortable, as I’m so close that I could reach out and touch them both. They’re pretty much the same height—Kendra’s tall, easily as tall as many men here in Italy—which means that as they lean closer to each other, their faces are on the same level. Luigi’s voice is a deep rumble, Kendra’s soft, a tone I haven’t heard from her before. It’s as if she’s speaking quietly to draw him in. And if that’s her goal, it’s working. He shifts, takes a step nearer to her, and as I watch him reach his hand toward her, clearly about to touch her arm, I can’t stand it anymore.
“Kendra!” I say loudly, and I barge sideways, interrupting Luigi’s gesture, catching it on my shoulder and ignoring it completely. “Look what I’m getting!”
She looks dazed. Her eyes are wide and shiny. It takes her a moment to turn her head toward me, and even then there’s another long moment before she blurts out:
“Oh! Hi, Violet! I didn’t see you there.”
Oh, please, I think, and even in my thoughts my tone is withering. You knew perfectly well I was here. You mean you forgot all about me because you were so busy making googly eyes at Luigi. And he was so busy perving after you.
“Are you getting anything?” I ask, still loudly. “I’m going to pay for my stuff, and then we should find Kelly and Paige. So are you getting anything?”
I sound like I’m on an endless loop. But I can’t think of anything else to say; the sight of Luigi about to stroke Kendra’s arm has turned my stomach. I’m babbling from embarrassment.
“Brava, Violetta!” Luigi says to me, wrenching his gaze away from Kendra with what looks like a major effort, and glancing down at the pile of paper, pastels, and crayons I’ve assembled. “Ti dai proprio da fare, eh?”
I work through the Italian carefully, translate it as “you’re working hard,” and say “Sì,” handing the pile to the stall owner. The trouble is that Luigi is a great teacher, enthusiastic and strict in good balance, and I’m the only student of his who’s really keen. Paige and Kelly dropped out of art classes almost immediately, and, to be honest, I’ve wondered before why Kendra didn’t too; she doesn’t have much talent or much interest. Now it’s hit me like a ton of bricks why she keeps coming to class.
I pay for the art supplies and take the bag, my brain racing. Luigi and Kendra are still standing there looking at each other. I take a deep breath, link my arm through Kendra’s, and physically pull her into the fray again, joining the stream of people who are flowing down the wide aisle between stalls.
“I hope Paige got that hat!” I observe, loudly again. I’m stuck on one volume setting and can’t get it down. “ ’Cause then it’ll be really easy to spot her!”
I sound like an idiot, but I feel so awkward, icky, confused, that it’s hard to get words out at all: I don’t know how to process what I just saw. It’s with huge relief that I do spot the blue and white brim of Paige’s hat bobbing above the crowd; my arm still twined through Kendra’s, I navigate us toward it. I feel that if I let go of her she’ll slip right back to Luigi.
“Hey!” I say brightly as we reach Paige and Kelly, who are looking at shoes; this stall is too expensive for us, but the stock is amazing. Stacked leather wedges trimmed with suede flowers, fastened with narrow silver and gold straps that wrap around and around the ankle; crazy stiletto heels that would be mad to wear here on the cobblestones but are just ridiculously beautiful.
“I keep hoping she’ll lower the price,” Paige says, “because they’re all here week after week, but it’s still forty-nine euros.…”
“Way too much,” Kelly says, turning away with a sigh.
“I need to talk to you,” I hiss at her. “Let’s hit the library now.”
“Are we going to the rotisserie chicken stall?” Paige asks. “I’m getting hungry.”
“Why don’t you and Kendra go and get lunch,” Kelly says, coming over all organized, “and then join us in the park with the benches in half an hour? Opposite the cinema? Violet and I want to go to the library.”
“Okay!” Paige says happily. I fumble for some euros to give her, but she waves me away. “I got this,” she says cheerfully. “You can treat next week.”
“Get lots of the fried veggies,” I say. “I love those.”
“And the polenta,” Kelly says eagerly.
I hesitate for a moment, wondering if I should tell Paige to keep Kendra away from the art stall and Luigi, but then I realize that’s impossible and silly. It would be for nothing, anyway; we’ll see Luigi this afternoon, for our art lesson. My plastic bag of art supplies swinging from my wrist, I follow Kelly through the crowds.
We turn under the stone colonnades that run around the sides of the piazza. In front of the bars are casual wrought-iron tables and benches, and chic dark-brown woven chairs and tables covered in cream cloths outside Nerbone, the smart restaurant. I always look with envy at the people lunching or dining in Nerbone; the food smells delicious, the tinkle of glasses and cutlery is enticing, the clientele is so smart.
And then I see Luca and Elisa, Catia’s daughter, our implacable enemy, having lunch at a table beside the hedge that wraps around Nerbone’s dining area. They look—perfect. Elisa is, as always, chic, wearing a slightly transparent shirt over a miniskirt that shows off her long, thin, tanned legs. Luca is in a white linen shirt and jeans. They’re each holding a glass of straw-colored white wine, talking and laughing without a care in the world. It’s as if he and I hadn’t had that dark, deep, passionate moment in the river yesterday, as if he could dismiss me, completely, from his mind.…
Kelly hasn’t seen them, I think. I turn my head so he won’t catch my stare; I believe we have a bond, which means he’ll sense I’m looking at him. And I couldn’t bear to see Luca raise his glass at me mockingly, saying with a glint in his dark-blue eyes, You ran away from me last night, so why shouldn’t I go out with Elisa? I’m free to see whoever I like, aren’t I?
He is free. Of course he is. I scurry away as fast as if the cobblestones were burning my feet, around the corner of the piazza, past the big stall that sells plants and herbs and flowers set out in pots and vases all over the pavement. We shoot across the traffic lights, crossing the little bridge over the Greve River, quacking ducks below calling to one another as they float on the shallow water. We pass the huge iron sculpture of a black rooster, the symbol of Chianti and its wines, turn left before the cinema, and walk down the path to the village library. Kelly discovered it first—in part, I think, as somewhere to hang out when the rest of us were wandering around the shops or sitting in the piazza having coffees and debating purchases. She has very little cash, and saying she wanted to go to the library was a clever way to avoid spending money while simultaneously looking good.
That’s Kelly in a nutshell. She thinks things over, works out solutions, plots and plans, uses her considerable brainpower to her best advantage. Of course, I would have bought her coffees, as many as she wanted, but she’s too proud for that. She’d see it as charity. And I admire her for her pride too, this clever new friend I’ve made in Italy.
“Did you see Luca?” she asks as we trot down the path.
“Yes,” I say shortly, flinching at the pain that every mention of Luca’s name gives me. “And I saw Elisa, too.”
Luca’s father is a principe, which means “prince”; Luca will inherit the title, and the castle, so Elisa is utterly focused on snagging him. Ditto Catia, who’s very ambitious for her daughter. We’ve all seen Catia working her friendship with Luca’s mother, the principessa, to maneuver their children together; we�
�re all regularly snubbed by Elisa, who called us pigs the first time she saw us; and we all, in consequence, hate her guts.
Kelly comments obliquely:
“That’s why we need to find out about you.”
I nod. The chink in Elisa’s armor is the attention that Luca pays me, the genuine feelings he has for me. It annoys her tremendously, and though of course that’s not the reason I’m so keen on Luca, I can’t help admitting that it’s an extra bonus, the icing on the cake. If somehow we can prove that he and I aren’t closely related, if we can be free to see each other, apart from making me ecstatic, it will drive Elisa crazy.
“I’m emailing my mum as soon as we get back to the villa,” I say. “I’ve already got it mostly written in my head.”
“Good,” Kelly says, turning to give me a very direct gaze, her hazel eyes clear. “And now we’ll start on the research side of things.”
She reaches out and squeezes my hand. We walk together the last part of the way still holding hands, something I’d never do in England, where it’s for little girls only; but in Italy, people are much more openly affectionate. They kiss each other’s cheeks on greeting; they embrace when they feel affectionate; grown men walk down the street with their arms around each other.
“Ciao, Kellee,” says the librarian, smiling at us as we come in. “Buon giorno.”
“Buon giorno, Sandra,” Kelly says. “Questa è mia amica Violetta. Abbiamo bisogno di aiuto.”
“We need help,” she’s saying. I nod and smile. I hatched this idea yesterday, on the drive home from Siena, but since Kelly’s Italian is better than mine, she launches into the words that explain what we’re after: I make out the words “Castello di Vesperi,” Luca’s home. The librarian’s nodding, standing up, leading us over to a section of books against the far wall, and I follow Kelly as we sit down where she indicates. We look at each other excitedly as the librarian pulls a large coffee-table book from the shelves, opens it, and places it triumphantly in front of us.
Kissing in Italian Page 4