I haven’t had to muster any arguments about not letting her quit, because her school and community did a ton of fund-raising to pay for this opportunity so that it would give her a more level playing field in her competition with much more privileged students for a place at Cambridge, where she wants to go to university and make her community proud.
I haven’t had to say that I’m scared that if she leaves, all her dreams will be lost forever. That precisely because she doesn’t have the advantages of money and class that we other three girls possess, this failure to stick it out will haunt her for the rest of her life. She probably won’t even apply to Cambridge, and if she does, she won’t have the confidence to impress her interviewers enough for them to accept her. She won’t have the career of an art historian, which has been a dream that’s blossomed during this visit to Italy. And if she loses her dreams, she’ll be lost herself.
I don’t know how much of this anyone else but me understands. But we’re all teenagers—or just-stopped-being-teenagers, in Evan, Stu, and Andi’s cases—bonding together to protect one of our own. Stopping her running away after a silly fight. Making sure, at the very least, that she has time to think about what she’s doing, not just throwing this opportunity away in a hysterical impulse.
“Can you pay for a water taxi with a credit card?” Kendra asks.
“You must be able to,” I say. “It’s got to cost at least a hundred euros—maybe even double that. Not everyone has that much cash on them. But I don’t have a credit card.”
“I do,” Kendra says, fishing in her bag. “Come on. Let’s go find a taxi rank.”
I’m so shocked that all I can do is shake my head back and forth slowly.
“Kendra,” I breathe. “I don’t believe it.”
“What?” she says, not meeting my eyes. “My mom gave me a card for emergencies too. This is one.”
“But she snitched on you!” Paige, very annoyingly, exclaims.
“I don’t like to think where I’d be right now if she hadn’t,” Kendra says soberly. “She kind of did me a favor, in a backhanded way.”
“Really?” Paige gasps. The wind is rising on the lagoon, and a gust blows through our hair, the wind scented with kelp, fresh and salty.
“I just checked Luigi out on Facebook,” Kendra tells her sadly. “I looked at photos of him with his wife and little girl. She’s really cute. And you can tell his wife’s pregnant. There’s a photo of them all together at a friend’s wedding, just last week. Hugging and kissing. When he was telling me he loved me and I was the only one.” She swallows hard, tears coming to her eyes. “I would have—I know I would have—” She catches herself. “Anyway, let’s go get Kelly! She did the right thing for the wrong reason: I’ll do the right thing for the right reason. Where’s the damn rank?”
I can’t help grinning at Kendra’s pompous words, her need to be superior to Kelly, even in a crisis: but I wouldn’t dream of pointing that out to her.
“There’s a taxi pulling in,” Andi says quickly, turning away from Kendra, giving her time to stifle her tears. Andi’s pointing to a sleek pale wooden boat visible through the glass walls. It’s turning, backing up to a pier just before a low stone bridge. “Can we grab that? Do you just, like, hail them like a cab?”
“Worth a try!” I say. “Come on!”
Grabbing Kendra’s hand, I dash out of the water-bus stop and along the waterfront. The taxi is gliding smoothly in reverse, docking at the pier.
“Let’s just hope it isn’t picking people up,” I say. “But there’s no one waiting, is there?”
“No, it’s dropping off—there’re people in the cabin,” Kendra says as dark shapes emerge onto the steps of the boat, one of them pulling money out of his pocket for the driver.
“Great! Kendra, thank you so much—”
We’re on the taxi pier now, and I pull up, waiting for the previous passengers to disembark, but my heart’s racing, frantic to jump on board and get going.
They’re stepping onto the pier now, a man helping a woman off, putting his arm around her as they walk toward us. The light’s behind them, so I can’t see anything but their shapes; I have a brief rush of envy, another happy couple in Venice, just come off a romantic water taxi ride.…
And then I shriek, loudly. Kendra echoes me a second later.
Because the people walking toward us, the girl leaning heavily on the boy’s arm, are the last two people in the world I expected to see.
It’s Kelly. And even more shockingly, Luca.
Wings of the Lagoon
It’s awful to admit, but the first emotion I feel on seeing the two of them is rabid, uncontrolled jealousy. Luca, so close to Kelly, his arm around her, taking some of her weight; Kelly, leaning on him like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel too fragile to walk on her own, looking up at him worshippingly as he speaks softly to her. So absorbed in each other that they haven’t even noticed us yet.
It should be me beside him! I think with raging envy. If he’s going to put an arm around a girl, ride with her in a water taxi, walk through Venice with her, it should be me!
They’re practically on top of us now. Luca looks up, sees us, and stops dead. For a brief moment he stares at me, and, taken completely by surprise, without a chance to compose his usual cynical, careless expression, I can see his true emotions. He’s looking at me with so much longing in his blue eyes that if this were the end of a romantic film I would be tearing across the few feet of pier that separate us, throwing myself into his arms, knowing that they would lock tightly around me and his mouth would come down on mine.
I know then that my attraction to Evan, nice, down-to-earth Evan, is nothing compared to what I feel for Luca. Evan’s come up behind us, towering over me, solid and secure. I must be the biggest idiot in the world to prefer Luca, sarcastic, shrugging, dismissive, moody Luca, to sweet, even-tempered Evan. But I can’t help it. I learn in that moment that you can be attracted to more than one boy at a time, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Not if, when you look into the eyes of the boy who means the world to you, you know with absolute certainty that he’s the one.
Luca is the one. And from the way he’s gazing at me, I know with equal certainty that he feels the same. That I’m the one for him, as much as he is for me.
But life isn’t a romantic film, as I’ve learned this summer with horrible force. Kendra, standing beside me, has had to absorb the same lesson. Both of our Italian romances have crashed us hard into brick walls; we’re bruised, shaken, battered, having found out the hard way that we’re characters in something a lot more gritty and realistic than a simple love story.
I can’t run to Luca, throw myself into his arms. And still, the jealousy that’s surging up in me makes me want to grab hold of Kelly and physically pull her away from Luca. Falling for someone turns out to be not romantic at all. It’s raw and primitive and completely illogical.
Luca and I can’t say a word: we’re staring at each other, tongue-tied. It’s Kendra who exclaims:
“Kelly! I’m so glad you came back!” so sincerely that Kelly promptly bursts into tears.
“Madonna,” Luca drawls, recovering his usual worldly-wise pose. “I spend such a long time making her calm, and now you make her cry all over again. Grazie tante.”
“Kelly!” Paige, thundering up behind us, crashes past me and Kendra, throwing herself on Kelly. “Yay! You came back! OMG, we were soo worried! Kendra was going to pay for a taxi to the airport to try to find you!”
“Really?” Kelly sobs. “Really, she was?”
“Yes!” Paige hugs her. “It’s all okay. Bygones are gone. That’s not right, is it? Anyway, you’re back! Hooray!”
I still can’t speak. Seeing Luca like this is like something slammed into my chest. I didn’t know if I would ever see him again; if bringing us to Venice was to keep me away from the di Vesperi family. For all I knew, Catia would make sure we didn’t ever go back to Villa Barbiano. I had done my best to
convince myself that we would never meet again, to tell myself I was okay with it.
And now I’m faced with the fact that I’ve been lying to myself. I wasn’t okay with it at all.
It’s Kendra who asks him bluntly:
“What happened? Why are you here?”
“I was at the airport,” he says. “I check in, and I go to get a coffee, and I see Kellee by the wall, crying, and I ask what’s wrong. And she says she wants to go home but she doesn’t have the money, it costs more than she thought. So I buy her a coffee and we sit down and talk, and I say maybe it is better to go back and finish what she has begun, here in Italy. That she should stay in Venice, one of the most beautiful places in the world. And that girls often fight—che vuoi, è normale.”
Kelly raises her blotchy face from Paige’s shoulder.
“He said at least Elisa isn’t here to be mean to us,” she says, sniffing hard. “And that should cheer me up a bit.”
“Hah!” Kendra, beside me, starts to laugh. So does Paige. I can’t, but the knot in my chest loosens until I can breathe properly again. I didn’t realize it, but I must have been taking really short, shallow breaths.
Luca knows what Elisa’s like. That means he can’t be dating her.
It doesn’t leave us any better off, though. I’m a dog in the manger. I can’t have him myself but I don’t want anyone else to have him either.
Wow. The more I learn about myself, the more selfish I turn out to be.
The wind is stronger now, the breeze ruffling all our hair. The taxi boat is pulling away, and the rumble of its engine, the slap of the water against the wooden poles of the pier, briefly drown out whatever any of us might say. I close my eyes for a moment, inhaling the salty air; I wish suddenly that when I opened them again, I’d be alone, the pier stretching out in front of me, and that I could walk to the end of it, sit down, dangle my legs over the lagoon, and just be still and quiet, listening to the waves. Black water and black night.
So much for wishes. I’m surrounded by people. We’re all turning now, walking back to land, with Paige still cuddling Kelly; I’m glad, because no better proof could be provided that Kelly has been forgiven.
“What were you doing at the airport?” Paige is asking Luca. “I mean, why are you in Venice?”
Thank goodness for Paige’s directness. I was curious too; what on earth is Luca doing here? And where was he going? Not back home; it would be crazy to get a plane from Venice to Florence, when the train is so fast.
“Oh, family business,” Luca says. “Nothing important.”
I notice he hasn’t really answered either question, but it’s not my place to say so. I notice, too, that he doesn’t have any bags. He wouldn’t have left them at the airport—he would have got them back from the airline on deciding not to take his flight after all. Which means he was traveling really light. All he has is a leather bag, like a small, elegant satchel, slung across his narrow chest.
But it’s not my place to ask about that, either. In fact, I’m determined not to speak a word to him.
“And you missed your flight!” Paige exclaims. “You missed your flight so you could bring Kelly back!”
“I couldn’t let her come back on her own,” he says lightly. “We thought I would bring her back here, walk back to the palazzo, and ring one of you on a mobile to let her in, quietly, so that Catia does not suspect.”
“That’s really nice of you,” Kendra says, glancing at me to see how I’m reacting to all this.
I nod, clamping my lips together.
“What a coincidence we bumped into you!” Paige comments. “That was crazy lucky.”
“Oh, Venice is tiny,” Luca says, shrugging. “Un piccolo paese—a small town. Even smaller than Florence. I see people I know five times a day here.”
“Wow,” Andi comments sotto voce to Stu. “Isn’t it cool to hear how real Italians live?”
“How did you know I was gone?” Kelly’s asking us.
“Violet found your note and came to get us,” Paige blurts out. “We figured you must have gone to the airport.”
“And Kendra, you were really going to pay for a taxi?” Kelly asks.
The two girls look at each other, face to face, the breeze lifting their hair. Kelly shivers a little—not, I’m pretty sure, because it’s cold, but because of this moment of confrontation.
Kendra takes a step forward, and Kelly flinches. I see Luca’s hand come up to pat her reassuringly on the arm, and my stupid jealousy flares up again, hot and bright.
“I was going to,” Kendra says. She swallows. “Kind of as a thank-you.”
“A thank-you?” Kelly repeats, baffled.
“If you hadn’t told on me,” Kendra continues, “I honestly don’t know what would have happened. But nothing good.” She shakes her head slowly. “Nothing good.”
Kelly seems about to speak, and then she meets my eyes: I know what she’s about to say, that she made exactly this point to Paige when the latter was having a go at her the morning after the big scene on the lawn. I shake my head swiftly at Kelly. It would be like rubbing it in, a “told you so.”
She gets the hint, thank goodness. Instead she says simply:
“I still shouldn’t have told on you.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” Kendra agrees. “But it ended up being the right thing to do. The wrong way to do it, but the right thing to do.”
“Thank you,” Kelly says, and the words truly sound as if they come from the bottom of her heart. She takes a tentative step forward, and Kendra does too: they reach out to each other, awkwardly, making it really obvious that they’ve never hugged before.
As they do, Kelly’s red head leaning into Kendra’s dark one, Paige, beside me, nudges me in satisfaction. I turn to grin at her, feeling suddenly like we’re two mums in the playground watching our daughters finally get on. They pull apart and Kendra links her arm through Kelly’s; I see with great happiness that Kelly’s pale skin is flushed with excitement and pleasure at this definitive burying of the hatchet.
“We’ll let bygones be bygones, as Paige nearly said,” Kendra comments, and she smiles, the first genuine smile I’ve seen on her face since the whole Luigi mess, as they start to walk down the pier toward land. “I’m really glad you didn’t get on a plane.”
“I thought there was a cheapo flight,” Kelly says, “but it didn’t go from the main Venice airport, but another one, miles away. I didn’t realize there were two. So I was stuck—there was a British Airways one—but it was so expensive! I just got hysterical—I couldn’t face going back on my own—and then Luca found me.”
“You were really lucky,” I say quietly.
“I’m sorry I was such a cow this afternoon, Violet,” Kelly says to me. “It was really nice of you to eat my pasta.”
“Paige put hers in her napkin,” I say.
“Oh really?” Kelly manages a giggle. “I should do that next time.”
“Hey,” Andi says as we pass the Alilaguna stop on our way back to Piazza San Marco. “I just figured out what ‘Alilaguna’ means: ‘Wings of the Lagoon.’ I love that! Doesn’t it sound like a romance novel?”
“Totally!” Paige agrees enthusiastically.
“Wings of the Lagoon!” Andi continues. “A beautiful American girl comes to Venice in the nineteenth century and gets swept away by a handsome gondolier …”
“Only her rich and powerful parents are way too snobby to allow them to date …,” Kendra chimes in.
“So they run away together in the gondola,” Andi says, “but get caught up in a terrible storm …”
“And her parents think they’re dead …,” Kendra adds.
“So they send out a search party and find them floating in the gondola, arms wrapped around each other,” Kelly suggests. “Still alive, but barely …”
“And the parents forgive her and say they can be together …,” Andi says.
“And then it turns out he’s the son of a Venetian duke who was going
to have an arranged marriage, but he ran away to be a gondolier ’cause he wanted to find a girl who loved him for himself …” Kelly’s voice is getting stronger and more confident.
“And they both live happily ever after!” Paige carols happily. “I love this story!”
She, Kelly, Andi, and Kendra exchange high fives.
“It’s nice when a story has a happy ending,” Luca says softly in my ear. I hadn’t realized he was so close to me. “In real life, it’s not so easy.…”
I swallow hard at the sound of his voice, at his words. All I can do is shake my head vehemently. No. It’s not so easy. You come to Italy and meet the son of a Florentine prince and you don’t live happily ever after. Not at all.
“Shall we go get gelato to celebrate?” Stu asks.
“Yeah! Gelato!” Andi says enthusiastically. “We’ve been eating gelato all over Italy, haven’t we, Stu? What’s the best place to get some in Venice?”
“Near here, it is Gelato Fantasy,” Luca says. “I can take you.”
“Don’t you need to get back to the airport?” Evan says, the first time he’s spoken since Luca and Kelly got out of the water taxi. “I mean, if you’ve got somewhere you need to be …”
Luca turns to flash him the most dazzling of smiles, pushing back his black hair with his long pale fingers.
“Ma no!” he says, so charmingly that I know he’s being totally fake. “Per niente! Now it is too late, my flight has gone. And I am very happy to show you all where to find some good gelato. Andiamo!”
“Wow,” Andi sighs as Luca leads us into the piazza. “Luca’s hot. I mean, I love you, Stu, but that’s just how I pictured Italian men. So handsome and sophisticated.”
“He’s a prince, too!” Paige says enthusiastically.
“Oh my God, you’re kidding!” Andi exclaims. “Kelly, you got rescued by a prince! That’s crazy!”
“I was so lucky he was at the airport,” Kelly says in heartfelt tones. “I don’t know what I’d’ve done without him.”
“We’d have turned up!” I say, for some reason finding it almost intolerable to hear Luca praised to the skies. “Kendra would’ve got a taxi, and we’d have come and found you. You would’ve been okay.”
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