Flirting in Italian

by Henderson, Lauren

  “That’s so nice,” I say, impressed. “You must be majorly brainy to have them go to all that trouble.”

  “But—” Kelly heaves herself up to a sitting position, stuffing her pillow behind her. “It’s so much pressure. Now I’ve got to get a scholarship, don’t I? ’Cause they’ve spent loads of time doing fund-raising, and sent me off to Italy for two months!”

  She sniffs again, snot bubbling in her nose.

  “I was excited. I didn’t want to think about what my gran was telling me,” she confesses. “One part of me knew she was right, but I just shoved it to the back of my mind and told myself I’d manage. And then as soon as I saw all of you, I knew I’d made a mistake. I tried so hard to get some nice clothes, I bought those suitcases—but you lot were all so posh and rich. You’re so confident. I knew you could tell that my clothes were dirt cheap—and when my suitcase broke, I could’ve died, and I knew it was wrong anyway—it looked really pricey on the stall, but when I saw it next to your stuff, I knew I’d got it wrong, it looked so manky—and I just want to go home! I want to go home tomorrow, I packed everything up—but I’ll be letting everyone down, they’ll be so disappointed, I can’t face telling them I’m too bloody common for a summer in Italy.”

  I think she’s going to cry again, and I stand up, taking a deep breath.

  “Hang on,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”

  I pick my way across the bedroom, my eyes sufficiently adapted now; shielding my eyes with a hand and squinting, I click on the overhead light in the bathroom. And when I return to the bedroom, I leave the door open, letting some illumination flood in, thinking that it can’t do Kelly’s spirits any harm.

  “Here,” I say, sitting back down next to her and handing her a facecloth that I’ve dampened in the sink. “Wipe your face.”

  She obeys dutifully. I take it back from her and give her a handful of tissues instead; she blows her nose, making a whole series of yucky, gurgling, honking noises.

  “Look,” I say firmly, chucking the facecloth onto the stone windowsill. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Tomorrow morning, you’re going to get up and unpack your suitcase all over again. And then you’re going to get dressed, go downstairs, and get on with this flipping course, okay? If your school thinks you can get a scholarship to Oxford or the LSE, you’re cleverer than me, and you’re definitely cleverer than Paige. So you’re ahead of at least two out of three of us already in the brains department. As for all the manners, every meal you’re going to sit next to me, or across from me, and copy what I do, so you’ll know what forks and knives to use, all that sort of thing. If I see you doing something wrong, I’ll kick you or give a signal or something. I’ve learned all this from my mum. It’s not hard at all. It’s just getting someone to show you. You mustn’t just give up and go home, you can’t. Not over stupid stuff like manners and clothes and things, when you’ve worked so hard to get here.”

  I pause. Kelly’s still honking away; I hope she heard me over the nose blowing.

  “How does that sound?” I ask.

  She sniffs.

  “I suppose I could try …,” she says in a small voice.

  “It’ll be fine,” I say encouragingly. “You’re really clever, you’ll pick all the social stuff up very quickly. There isn’t much in it, honestly.”

  “When do you take your napkin off your plate?” she asks, still in that small voice. ’Cause I looked around when the pasta came, and everyone else had their napkins on their laps already, but I didn’t.”

  “Pretty much straight after you sit down,” I say. “Whether it’s on your plate or under your fork, you sit down, then take the napkin off the table and spread it out on your lap. Oh.” Something else useful occurs to me. “And when you have different kinds of cutlery around your plate—you know, two forks on one side, and maybe a spoon and a knife on the other—you always start on the outside and work your way in. The outer is for the first course, and the inner is for the second.”

  Kelly heaves a long sigh.

  “Thanks, Violet,” she says. “I’m really glad you’re here too.” And I feel her stretch out her hand, reaching for mine. I meet hers, and we clasp our fingers together.

  “You’ll be fine,” I say softly. “Promise.”

  Kelly squeezes my hand tight. “I hope so,” she says.

  I close my eyes. I’m so tired I could burst into tears myself. Kelly sounds okay, at least for tonight; her crisis has been averted. My whole body sags in exhaustion. Another minute, and I can go and brush my teeth, wash my face, finally crash into my own bed—

  “Oh wow!” exclaims a loud voice, and our bedroom door flies open; a big dark shape looms up in the doorway. “Wasn’t it, like, the coolest night out ever? Kelly, honey, you totally missed out—you should’ve come, there were enough boys for everyone! Violet, you’ve been telling her all about it? Oh my God, we were like the stars of the night! They love us over here!”

  Kelly may be taking etiquette lessons from me, but she should definitely take a confidence course from Paige, who’d make Wonder Woman look shy and retiring.

  “Don’t turn the light on!” Kelly says quickly, and I realize she doesn’t want Paige to see her tearstained face.

  Paige steps forward and crashes into Kelly’s case.

  “What’s that?” she asks as I say swiftly:

  “Over here! We’re over here, on Kelly’s bed.”

  “Yay! Girl talk! Kendra’s crashed, but I wasn’t ready to go to sleep yet, I’m all buzzed—”

  Paige lands heavily on the end of Kelly’s mattress.

  “So!” she says happily. “Did Violet tell you everything? About the bar we went to, and the club, and all the boys?”

  I nudge Kelly, and say, “Oh yeah. Everything,” because otherwise Paige will launch into an entire catalog of every single event that happened tonight, and we’ll be up till dawn.

  “Cool! Oh, and did Violet tell you she had a fight with Luca? What happened? I didn’t see, but Kendra says she thinks you, like, slapped him or something? I didn’t want to ask you in the car, but did he, like, grab you? Oh my God, if he grabbed me, I so wouldn’t slap him! I’d kiss his face off! He’s totally cute! I mean, he’s a bit gloomy, but he’s definitely hot.…”

  No one but Elisa seems to have spotted me and Luca snogging. I sag with relief. Elisa’s scarcely going to start confiding in the foreign girls she despises, so my secret’s probably safe.

  “Who’s Luca?” Kelly asks, nudging me back. But it’s Paige who answers.

  “He’s gorgeous! Kinda grumpy, though. Tall, dark, and handsome and sort of brooding. He drove us to Florence.”

  “You went to Florence?” Kelly hisses to me.

  Paige is burbling on, thankfully for me not hearing Kelly. “He was at school with Andrea and Leo, and they said Elisa’s got a crush on him.” She giggles loudly. “I think she was really pissed that Luca was hanging out with Violet. Yay Violet!”

  “Elisa said to me that Luca’s a bit of a slut,” I say.

  “Oh, I bet he is!” Paige exclaims. “He’s so sexy! Did he try to kiss you, Violet?”

  “I wouldn’t trust a word Elisa says,” Kelly mutters as Paige rolls over her like an army tank.

  “He lives nearby, like on a hill or something,” she says. “Oh yeah, and get this—he’s a prince! Or his dad is, which means he will be one day! And he lives in a castle! How cool is that?”

  There’s a sudden tightness in my rib cage, a lightness in my head, a dizziness in my limbs as I hear myself ask:

  “It’s not the Castello di Vesperi, is it? I read that was close to here.”

  “That sounds like what Leo said,” Paige says. “But I dunno—Italian all sounds the same to me. Anyway, they’re all going to take us out again this weekend, to some fabulous party a friend of theirs is throwing in his house in the countryside that sounds, like, super-glamorous … I can’t wait!”

  I don’t believe it! My heart sinks. That would make Luca the s
on of the family I’ve come here to find out about. If he actually lives at the castello—he could take me around, show me the place, tell me about the family history, help me find out if the way I look is because I’m some kind of distant relation.…

  Oh my God, as Paige would say. After what happened between us. I really doubt that Luca’s going to be remotely helpful to me. His moods change so fast, he’s capable of making things even more difficult for me, because it amuses him. Or to make me feel bad, because I slapped him in public.

  I close my eyes. As if things weren’t complicated enough, I’ve not only pissed off the boy who might be my passport into the Castello di Vesperi, I’ve snogged him, too.

  And, I think dismally, worst of all, I slapped him.

  Next time I see him. I’ll have to apologize. He mocked me, he was a sarcastic bastard, but I’ll still have to apologize for slapping him.

  My feelings toward Luca are so complicated they make me think of a marionette with hopelessly tangled strings. But the prevailing emotion as I finally drift off to sleep is resentment: he came after me, he kissed me, then he taunted me and managed to put me in the wrong.

  Stay away from him, I think again. And I know it’s the best advice—if I can only take it.

  Molto Particolare

  “Questa è una rosa,” Catia says in a bored tone, holding a flower up in the air so we can all see it. “Cos’è questo fiore?”

  “Questa è una rosa,” we all dutifully chant as she adds it to the bouquet she’s forming in her hand.

  “Questo è un tulipano,” she continues, holding up a plump pink tulip and adding it in turn. “Cos’è questo fiore?”

  “Questo è un tulipano,” we chorus.

  This has been going on for some time now. It’s like watching paint dry with a call-and-response segment to add audience participation.

  “É questo è un mazzo di fiori!” she says, holding up the bouquet to indicate that it’s finished. It really is very elegant. I wonder if we should clap. “Cos’è?”

  We all stumble over the response—all of us but Kelly, who rattles back “Questo è un mazzo di fiori” as easily as if she’d been babbling Italian in her cradle.

  “Brava, Kelly,” Catia says, nodding approvingly. Kelly goes pink with pleasure. “You can also say ‘Questa è un bouquet.’ ” She gives the last word a very Italian spin. “As I have already said, Italian uses many foreign words now. Like ‘fare il footing,’ which means to go jogging. Or—”

  But Paige snuffles with laughter at Catia’s pronunciation of “footing,” which she says by pursing her lips together on the “foo,” drawing out the vowel and sounding, honestly, pretty silly. Kendra digs Paige in the ribs, hard, to make her shut up, drawing an “Oof!” of shock from her.

  “It is a little ridiculous,” Catia says to our surprise as she places the bouquet in a glass vase. “Il footing.” She shrugs. “Why not ‘il jogging,’ after all? ‘Il footing,’ it makes no sense.”

  She makes a dismissive gesture, as if she’s throwing something away. It looks so cool I long to copy it.

  “But to learn a language, you must be prepared to make a fool of yourself for a while. You must make mistakes, have people correct you, even laugh at you sometimes. È normale.” She shrugs again. “But it’s the only way to learn. You must go out, talk to Italians, not to each other. That is why I encourage you all to make friends with my son and my daughter, to meet their friends and learn and improve your Italian.”

  Paige, irrepressibly, giggles again: it’s not improving her Italian that’s the first thing on her mind, and from the lowering look Catia casts in her direction, she knows that as well as the rest of us. But Kendra and Kelly nod seriously, accepting her authority.

  “Now you will all make your own bouquets,” she says, indicating that we should come up to the dining table, where a range of flowers are laid out along its length on an old cloth placed there to protect the polished surface: roses, tulips, lilies, big brightly colored daisylike flowers that Catia says are called gerberas, and fernlike greenery to soften them. “You may choose what you want and which vase to use, then I will judge them. Remember to arrange them in your hand first, like I did. It is better not to put them in the vase until the bouquet is done.”

  Paige is already at the table, her head tilted to one side, pink tongue poking out a little in thought as she selects her flowers, exuding confidence from every pore.

  “Her mom’s in the Junior League,” Kendra mutters to me and Kelly. “She’s all up in this whole Martha Stewart stuff.”

  We nod: we don’t quite understand all the terms Kendra’s using, but we get the gist. Paige’s mum is a lady of leisure who does lots of charity lunches and flower arranging. Kendra’s mother, I get the sense, is a high-powered executive who pays someone else to do her flowers and tells them beforehand exactly what she wants. Certainly, the rest of us approach the bouquet-making challenge with much less assurance than Paige; Catia strolls out onto the terrace to sit on a dark brown wicker armchair, pulling out her phone, clearly in no rush for us to be finished. To our surprise, we actually get quite absorbed in the task. Silence falls, broken only by the sounds of us clipping the ends of flowers, muttering quietly to ourselves as we pick our vases, or flinching as we snag our fingers on rose thorns. Thirty minutes fly by; Paige is done first, though she fusses happily around her bouquet once it’s in the vase, fluffing out rose petals, making every flower look as full and blooming as possible.

  Weirdly, as we eventually step back and look at what the others have done, I realize that our bouquets are perfect reflections of our characters. I don’t know if the other girls see it too, but to me it’s blindingly obvious. Paige’s is big and luxurious and rich, a riot of bright pink roses and fluted white lilies, plumped out with glossy green leaves, tied together with twine concealed inside the faux-rustic ceramic vase to keep it in perfect shape. Kendra’s is spare and elegant, pale pastel tulips in a narrow white glass cylinder. Kelly, who was frowning in concentration the whole time, made a very conventional bouquet, everything carefully measured and in perfect alignment, the kind of thing that would get you an A grade simply because of its perfect execution.

  And mine … well, I don’t know what Catia will think of mine. One thing it definitely isn’t is conventional. Paige’s blond brows shoot up in incredulity as she looks at it: she’s too nice to make a comment, but she doesn’t need to; her expression says it all.

  “Allora?” calls Catia, so slim that I can see the terrace wall between her legs in her tight white jeans as she walks. Bangles jingle on her wrists as she slips her phone back into her pocket. “Avete finito?”

  “Si,” we sing out. Catia takes in the four vases placed on the dining table, and her eyes flicker. Dark, deep-socketed, heavily ringed today with brown eyeliner, they’re very expressive; they turn down slightly at the outer corners, which makes her look a little mournful, like a sad clown.

  “Allora,” she repeats, which seems to be a very useful word, meaning something between “all right” and “well, then.” “Paige, very nice. You have done this before, yes?”

  Paige nods, blond hair bouncing.

  “Si vede. I can see that. Molto bene. Very fun, very American. Kendra”—she takes in Kendra’s vase—“veramente elegante. Molto japonese. It is a very Japanese style.”

  Kendra’s eyes light up; she allows herself a rare, wide smile, showing dazzlingly perfect teeth and lots of pink gums.

  “My mom has a lot of Japanese art,” she says. “She’ll change the scrolls over for the different seasons. So that’s sort of influenced me. I like things quite simple.”

  “Very nice.” Catia nods. “The tulips are not right for what you try to do, but the style is there. You need different flowers, that is all, which you did not have today. “Kelly—” She moves along the side of the table. “You do not, I think, care about flower arranging.”

  Kelly looks absolutely mortified. I grab her hand, nervous that she’s going to
freak out like she did last night and run from the room. Catia’s holding up her hand in reassurance, though.

  “I mean,” she says, “that you have done a very good job with something you are not naturally drawn to. I’m right, si? You see this as a job to be done, and you have done it. I think you did not see it as something you artistically had a plan for.”

  Kelly relaxes; I loosen my grip on her hand. She even manages a self-deprecating smile.

  “I’m not artistic,” she admits. “I just tried to make something that looked balanced.”

  “It does look okay,” Catia says, smiling at her. “It looks very professional. Like in a hotel—not personal.”

  This would pretty much be the worst thing that anyone could say to me about my own vase—I know exactly what Catia means, those stiff, conventional flower arrangements that sit on semicircular tables on hotel bedroom floors when you get out of lifts, probably placed underneath a gilt-framed oil landscape painting. But, looking at Kelly’s face brighten, I understand why this is a good thing to her. It means she’s done something that fits into the world she wants to join. “Conventional,” “formal,” “traditional” are all good words to her, and it makes total sense that they should be. If you feel like an outsider who hasn’t grown up knowing when to put your napkin on your lap, or that you start using your cutlery from the outside in, then making a bouquet that could go in a vase at a four-star hotel is pretty much perfect proof that you’re doing things along the right lines.

  “È Violetta,” Catia says, looking at my vase, and my heart jumps, because I instantly remember Luca calling me Violetta last night. I think I remember every word he said to me in the order of utterance, which is depressingly pathetic. I’m distracted by my memories of Luca, so it takes me some time to realize that Catia hasn’t yet passed judgment on my arrangement.