Flirting in Italian

by Henderson, Lauren

  I’m cringing inside. I’ve never slapped anyone in my life. I didn’t know I was capable of it, and I hate that I just did it.

  But if it happened all over again, a voice in my head tells me, you’d react just the same way. You’d slap him, you know you would.

  I’m startled by my own behavior. Luca brings out dark things in me I didn’t even know were there.

  Stay away from him, the voice advises, and if it wouldn’t make me look like a lunatic, I’d nod fervently in agreement.

  “Hey!” Paige calls out, turning in her chair, wooden legs scraping on stone, boys jumping aside as she waves enthusiastically at me; she’s a bit tipsy, her gestures even larger now. “You all danced out?”

  I start to answer, but she’s already racing ahead eagerly:

  “We thought we should maybe get going, ’cause it’s getting late, but we’ll stop and get some pizza on the way home.” She throws her arms wide, palms up. “Apparently they have pizza in Italy! Who knew?”

  “Allora,” Leonardo says, pushing back his chair and holding out his hand to Paige to help her get up. “We go to get pizza, yes? Because the pizza, we have it in Italy too!” He and Paige fall over each other, roaring with laughter.

  “It was funny the first time,” Kendra says dryly to me. “But that was, like, a while ago.”

  Still, Kendra looks like she’s had a really good evening too. She’s not tipsy or merry, like Paige, but she’s glowing, her skin luminous and plumped out by compliments. It’s obvious that the two American girls have been the belles of the ball tonight, surrounded by handsome Italian guys who’ve been competing for them, exactly as we all dreamed of spending our summer in Italy. Even as Kendra stands up, Andrea and two other guys jump to attention, jostling each other in their attempt to be closest to her. Kendra’s pretending not to care, but I can tell by the gleam in her eyes how much she’s loving it.

  “So, you have a nice time with Luca?” says a sharp, high voice right behind me.

  I turn to see Elisa.

  “Luca likes to kiss the girls.” Elisa seems to be confiding, but also manages to smirk at the same time, which is sort of impressive. “Many girls. Molte ragazze. Every summer, the foreign girls. Very many.”

  Cold spreads across my rib cage as if she’s held an ice cube to my breastbone. But Elisa isn’t the first mean girl I’ve met in my life, and I’ve got plenty of experience dealing with them.

  “Don’t be jealous!” I say, tilting my head to one side and giving her my best faux-sympathetic smile. “He’s free now.” I glance sideways and spy at Luca, who’s standing by the bar table, finishing his Prosecco as coolly as if he’s entirely unaffected by what just happened between us. “You could go over and see if he’ll kiss you. Though I warn you, I’m a hard act to follow.”

  I spoke slowly and clearly, but I don’t know how much she understood; enough, anyway, to make her eyes and mouth narrow into slits.

  “Stronza,” she hisses, tossing her head and walking away, swaying like a giraffe on the impossibly spindly heels.

  I shrug dismissively, and see that Ilaria, who’s been waiting a short distance away for Elisa to drip her poison into my ear, registers this gesture. They made enemies of us the moment they called us “maiali,” they declared hostilities first: I’ve lost nothing by showing Elisa that I can take her on and beat her at her own nasty game. It might have been nice to have made some friends with Italian girls, but they wouldn’t let us, so now they’ve made their beds and they can lie on them.

  “Luca!” Leonardo calls as our group masses together and starts to move across the bar. “Si va, eh? E ci si ferma per una fetta di pizza—abbiamo anche la pizza in Italia, sai!”

  He cracks up, and Andrea does too: they’re clearly bringing Luca in on the whole “pizza in Italy” joke. I realize suddenly that Luca is our designated driver, and I stiffen at the thought of spending any more time in his company. But it’s such a bustle of activity as we stream out of the club, divide up into different cars, and head in a convoy through Florence, that there are always people between us. The boys at the table, Leonardo and Andrea’s friends, follow along, and Elisa and Ilaria are on the fringes too: when we pile out at the little open bar on a roundabout next to the Arno river, lights still twinkling over the bridges and along the riverbanks, there are at least fifteen of us, laughing and joking, a big jolly group. I make sure I’m close to Paige and Kendra. I do notice ruefully that Luca’s right: the boys surrounding them barely pay any attention to me. They’re too busy calling “Payyge! Kain-dra!” and teaching the girls Italian words, teasing them at their pronunciation, showing off their own basic English.

  Luca, as seems to be his way, stands off to the side watching the show, propping his shoulders against the side of the bar, drinking an espresso. I don’t look at him. I don’t want to feel the rush of emotions that will come if I accidentally meet his eyes. I concentrate on eating my slice of Margherita pizza, greasy and delicious, which really hits the spot.

  It’s great, too, to have something to do with my hands. I take small elegant bites so I don’t look like the pig Elisa called us. By the time I’ve polished it off, taken a handful of napkins from the dispenser, and wiped my hands clean, we’re all piling back into the cars again. An enthusiastic peck on each cheek from the boys, European-style, which adds up to more kisses from boys in this one night than in the whole rest of my life to date, one sparkling-eyed, dark-haired, floppy-fringed boy after another leaning in to kiss me in a waft of pizza breath and aftershave, even if I am the also-ran in the Hot Foreign Girl stakes.

  Luca’s already in the driver’s seat, and the atmosphere is so boisterous as he starts up the car that I don’t have to say a word to him. The car twists and turns up a sweeping, majestic avenue lined with overarching cedar trees, which opens out into a huge square overlooking Florence, with the dome of the Duomo terra-cotta against the night sky, glimpses of the Arno river twisting through the city. A stunning statue of David is lit up in the center of the square, making all of us girls exclaim in surprise, oohing and aahing in wonderment.

  “How romantic!” Paige sighs, seeing the dark shapes of entwined couples leaning on the stone balustrade at the far side of the piazza, looking down at the panorama below. “Super-romantic!”

  “I bring you back here,” Leonardo promises, swiveling around from the front seat. “We come back soon, we visit Piazzale Michelangelo in the night.…”

  Paige claps her hands like a five-year-old and says, “I can’t wait!”

  She likes too much to be liked, Luca remarks dryly inside my head.

  “I bring you,” Andrea, sitting between Kendra and Paige, says to the former in a very hopeful tone. “You like that, Kain-dra? You like to come with me?”

  Kendra smiles but says nothing.

  She puts a high value on herself, Luca comments.

  For a moment, I let myself look directly at him, the profile and shoulder I can see over Paige’s body; he’s staring straight ahead, his eyes never leaving the road, and yet I have the eerie feeling that he knows I’m glancing at him, and that he knows, too, that I’m hearing the observations he made earlier this evening about the two girls. You are not different, and maybe not easy, he said about me. And then he kissed me, and that match scraped across the striking strip, and I was as easy as that. As lighting a match.

  I squinch my eyes shut so I don’t look at Luca anymore. He’s playing music in the car, a soft guy’s voice singing in Italian. It’s even nicer not knowing the words; I can let the music sweep over me, be soothed by it without listening too closely. Suddenly, the sheer weight of the events of the day overwhelms me, and I snuggle back against the padded seat, comfortably squashed against Paige’s big warm side. I doze, rocked back and forth by the motion of the car, all the way back to Villa Barbiano.

  I’m half asleep as we climb out of the car on arrival, yawning and tripping on the gravel. Luca doesn’t get out. He waits until the last door’s slammed to back up and t
urn around.

  “Ciao, Kain-dra!” Andrea calls from beside Luca, leaning out of the car window, waving goodnight. “A presto! Ciao, Paige!”

  “Ciao, Violetta,” Luca says, to my surprise, and I whip around to see if he’s looking at me, but he’s already pulling away, the headlights swiveling over the gravel.

  I turned around so quickly that I stumbled, but Paige is nice enough to hold out an arm to me, and we climb the stone stairs at the side of the house, Leonardo still chattering under his breath to the other two girls as he produces the house key from his pocket. Catia hasn’t stayed up to see if we’re safe home, I notice. Our first night here, and we’re out till past one in the morning, quite unsupervised: she’s not exactly in the running for Chaperone of the Year. The girls are saying goodnight to Leonardo. Of course he lives here too with his mother and most uncharming sister. I head straight up the stairs. I want nothing more than to kick off my shoes, rip off my dress, chuck myself into bed like a sack of potatoes, and pass out cold. I’m so completely overwhelmed by everything that’s happened to me in the last eighteen hours, I’ve half forgotten we’ve left Kelly behind.

  All the lights are off on the top floor of the villa. I pick my way across the antechamber by the faint moonlight throwing slanted pale oblongs over the stone floor, and gently ease open the door to our bedroom, not wanting to wake Kelly. But as I do, I hear something that sounds like a dog whimpering, faint and almost imperceptible, buried under piles of blankets.

  Kelly hasn’t succeeded in crying herself to sleep. Or she woke up when she heard me come in.

  I’m ashamed to admit it, but my heart sinks. I can’t cope with someone else’s misery. I just want to curl up, fall asleep, and—hopefully—relive certain key events of tonight as they tumble through my dreams. Actually, Kelly isn’t acknowledging my presence. I click the door shut behind me and stand there, debating what to do. I can nip quietly into the bathroom through the connecting door, wash my face, brush my teeth, strip my clothes off, and climb into bed, pretending that I haven’t heard the tiny stifled sounds of misery that she’s making. Get a good night’s sleep, hope she eventually does too, and wake up tomorrow with a head not hazy and clouded with exhaustion.

  I’ll be able to help her much better tomorrow morning, I tell myself. Right now, I’m no use to man or beast, as Mum always says when she’s knackered.

  And Kelly probably wants me to pretend I can’t hear her, the voice adds. She hasn’t said anything, has she? It’d be a kindness, really, to let her have her cry-out in peace and quiet.

  I’ve convinced myself to ignore her misery. Turning toward the bathroom, I take a couple of cautious steps—it’s nearly pitch-black in here—and my foot knocks painfully into something on the floor that I’m sure shouldn’t be in the path to the bathroom door, and wasn’t here when I left to go out for the evening. Biting back a gasp, I bend down, rubbing my toe. My hand brushes against the outline of the obstacle, and with a sinking heart I realize what it is.

  Kelly’s suitcase. We shoved our cases under our beds after we’d unpacked, and now hers has not only been dragged out again, but—I slide my hand up the side, my fingers catching briefly on the rip in the fabric—yes, it’s newly full of clothes once more. I realize she’s pulled out from the drawers and off the hangers all her stuff after I went out, and dumped it back into the suitcase with the broken wheel.

  Packed, because she’s probably decided to leave tomorrow.

  I close my eyes in exhaustion, kneeling there on the stone floor. I picture Kelly, with the cheap matching set of luggage, the case that broke the first time she used it, which she told me she saved up to buy from the local cheap market, so she’d have brand-new, smart-looking luggage for her Italian adventure. I compare her to me, with my own suitcase and carry-on, battered now from all my travels with Mum, but which cost, I know, a lot more than Kelly’s did. I think of Paige and Kendra, with their huge cases stuffed with expensive clothes and makeup; Paige said this afternoon at the pool that she’d made her parents buy her a whole new set of electrical beauty items—hair dryer, straightener, tongs, hot rollers, epilator—ones that’d work with the European voltage. I imagine how Kelly must feel, not socially confident enough to withstand Elisa’s nastiness, not rich enough to feel she can compete with the rest of us, not privileged enough to act as if she can take the luxury here for granted. Yet she managed to get herself here to be part of an Italian summer program: that means she’s got a strong wish to be here.

  I remember her lugging that suitcase through the Pisa airport, the wheel coming off and rolling into the crowd, her face pink with embarrassment and humiliation.

  I take a deep breath, stand up, pull off my sandals, and pad over to her bed.

  They Love Us Over Here!

  “Kelly?” I say gently, my bum sinking into the mattress. “You don’t sound happy. Want to talk about it?”

  Kelly goes absolutely silent, so long that I panic, thinking I’ve done completely the wrong thing; that she’s now pretending to be asleep, and wants me to go along with it. I’m just about to lever myself off her bed and sneak off to the bathroom when she heaves a deep breath in, letting it out on a flood of sobbing that’s an unignorable cry for help.

  “I shouldn’t have come!” she wails, and from her muffled voice, I realize that her face is pressed right into her pillow. “I shouldn’t have come! I’m a bloody idiot—stupid, stupid, stupid …” She hits her fist feebly against the mattress. “My gran tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen—she said I’d be a fish out of water, she said no good comes of trying to act posh when you’re working-class, ’cause everyone just laughs at you and makes you feel horrible, and she was right, she was bloody right! I hate myself and I want to die.… I’m fat and stupid and everyone here thinks I’m common.…”

  “Oh, Kelly! Don’t say that! You’re being so harsh.”

  I scrabble around and manage to locate one of her hands by dint of finding an arm and working my way down it. The window doesn’t have curtains, but shutters, and they block off any crack of light. Kelly’s hand is limp, but I wind my fingers through hers, which feel like damp, knuckly sausages.

  “Look, Elisa’s mean and angry, and everyone knows it,” I start. “All she wants to do is wind us up and make us feel bad, and we mustn’t let her. She’s a nasty snob—she’s got a chip on her shoulder because her mum’s got to rent this place out for courses to make ends meet. She’s not rich either.”

  I fill Kelly in on what Leonardo told me in the bar, about his dad and Catia effectively being separated because they won’t get a divorce, and Catia having to make Villa Barbiano support itself.

  “He explained that Elisa was proud. She didn’t like having paying guests in the house,” I finish. “That’s why she’s such a bitch with us.”

  Kelly huffs a sodden, heavy exhalation into her pillow.

  “Spoiled cow,” she mutters. “She’s got a big stick up her bum.”

  “Even her brother said she was a stronza,” I tell Kelly. “I don’t know what that means, but it can’t be nice.”

  I remember Elisa calling me the same word in Central Park, her eyes malevolent; obviously, “stronza” must be equivalent to “bitch.” Very useful: I store that word away in my memory and also decide to check a dictionary.

  “You shouldn’t get all worked up about Elisa,” I say, giving Kelly’s hand a comforting squeeze. “We’ll all gang up on her and make sure she doesn’t get out of line with us.”

  But Kelly doesn’t respond with a squeeze of her own; instead, she pulls her hand back and shifts away from me, swallowing hard.

  “It’s not just her,” she mutters, turning over to lie facedown. “It’s everything. Dinner tonight, all the food and everything … I got the plate wrong, I picked up the one underneath when I shouldn’t have, I didn’t know which fork or knife to use, even the pasta was complicated! Grating cheese at the table, with everyone looking at me … being waited on! I’ve never had anything like t
hat happen in my life, I felt like everyone was looking at me and laughing … I made a stain on the tablecloth with my fork.…”

  I have to stop her and this litany of self-accusation.

  “You were very good at the wine-tasting bit,” I say, breaking in. “Catia was impressed. I saw she was.”

  At least this stops Kelly listing everything she did wrong. She falls silent, and though her breathing’s slow and bubbly with snot, she isn’t actually crying. Which has to be an improvement, I tell myself grimly.

  “I really want to go to a good uni,” she says eventually, in a thin thread of a voice. “Oxford, or the London School of Economics. But it’s so expensive now with the tuition fees, my family just can’t afford anything like that. I have to get a full scholarship, and there’s so much competition. My school said I needed to have an advantage, you know, show I’ve got extra skills. I did Latin A-level and I was good at classics and history, so my Latin teacher thought a summer course, Italian art and learning the language, would, you know, impress the interviewers. Do something the posh kids do. Learn to talk their language.” She huffs another long sigh. “I found this course online, and it sounded perfect.”

  I wince as I say as nicely as I can:

  “But isn’t this really expensive too? I mean, I don’t even quite know what it costs”—I’m embarrassed to admit that, as it shows how privileged I am compared to Kelly—“but I know it’s not, um, cheap.”

  In other words, I’m thinking, So how can you afford this, if you can’t manage tuition fees?

  “I had money saved up from holiday jobs,” she says, turning over to lie on her back now, her voice coming a bit clearer. “That wasn’t tons, but it was a start. And my teacher went and talked to the head, got the school involved. No one’s ever gone on to somewhere like Oxford or the LSE from my school.” She sniffs. “It’s a real armpit. Total sink school. But there’s this new head, she’s trying to reboot it, and she got very excited at the idea of a student her first year not only getting into an Oxbridge university, but hopefully managing a scholarship as well. So she rallied everyone, all the governors, and they held raffles and fund-raisers to help come up with the dosh to send me here. Plus she got some of the governors to make donations. They wanted me to prove I could do it for everyone in our school.”