It looked a lot better when I pictured it in my head. I wanted to try to do something with the gerbera daisies, whose bright orange and fuchsia inspired me; they’re so glaringly colored that they almost look fake. I cut them to different lengths, messing about with them; none of the other girls went near the gerberas. I know they’re not elegant, but there was something crazily alive about them that drew me to them instinctively. I got the big glossy lily leaves that Paige used so successfully in her bouquet, but I pierced holes in them with the scissors and pulled some of the gerberas through them to look as if the flaming orange flowers were bursting out of the bases of the leaves.
“It’s not, exactly—” I begin unhappily.
“Hmm!” she comments, reaching out to swivel the vase. “As a bouquet, it is not very good. In fact, it is very bad.” She tilts her head to one side, pulling her mouth down at the corners. “But,” she says finally, “it is interesting. Maybe even artistico.”
“I’m really looking forward to the painting classes,” I hear myself saying, locking on to the word “artistico.” “There are so many amazing views around here, I’d love to be able to paint them.”
I am surprised at myself. I was never that keen on art before—making it, that is. St. Tabby’s was a very trendy, fashionable school, so we did all the latest kind of modern art projects: papier-mâché sculptures on chicken wire, installations with silly titles, conceptual stuff, making machines to paint randomized dots on paper. Our art teacher was always making us go to Tate Modern and look at artworks that were sculptures that the artist had blown up with dynamite and then hung from the ceiling, or rooms that were completely empty apart from lights turning on and off. She had long explanations for why they were good that none of us remotely understood. I can’t remember ever doing anything as basic as sitting down with some paints and a bunch of flowers and trying to get on canvas what you see in front of you.
Which is all I want to do right now. Nothing too ambitious or intellectual, nothing that comes with seven pages of complicated catalog notes about why the lights are going on and off in the empty room. I’d just like to try to paint some flowers. Or a stone wall. Or some grass. Something really basic.
To see if I have any talent at all.
“Molto particolare,” Catia says, turning away from my vase. A tiny sigh escapes her lips; I may be paranoid, but I can’t help interpreting it as relief that she doesn’t have to look at my gerbera mess a moment longer.
“Molto particolare?” echoes a high, familiar voice, and all of us girls tense up immediately as Elisa comes into the room, wearing a linen shirt over a pair of beige shorts so tiny that only someone as thin and elegant as her could get away with them; anyone else would look like a stripper in search of a pole. “Cos’è molto particolare?”
“Elisa—” Catia starts, not looking best pleased at this interruption, but Elisa, black kohl like a sooty finger circling her eyes, a small cup of espresso in one hand, her phone in the other, wanders in, her leather sandals slapping lightly on the tiled floor. She takes in the scene at a glance, and yawns widely without even bothering to cover her lips. I see her pink tongue, the red-ribbed roof of her mouth.
“Ugh, che noia,” she says, looking down the dining table. “Flowers are so boring.”
“Elisa—”
“Ah, I see it!” She’s staring at my arrangement with a nasty little smile. “Veramente particolare! You know what this word means?” She looks straight at me, and I feel very large and under-made-up by comparison with her Italian chic. “ ‘Particolare’? It means strange, or odd. You say this word when you don’t like something but you don’t want to be rude.”
“Well, that’s not something you ever have a problem with,” Kendra snaps back, and even through my upset at Elisa’s meanness, I admire Kendra’s quick wits.
Catia clicks her tongue crossly.
“It means ‘special,’ or ‘particular,’ ” she says to me reassuringly, but we all know that Elisa’s hit the nail on the head. “And Elisa, if you don’t like flowers, you can leave us, please.”
“Oh, stai zitta, Mamma,” Elisa says, shrugging exactly the same way her mother does. She walks across the room and out the french windows, where she collapses as if boneless onto the wicker chair, lifts her phone, and sips her espresso while dialing a number.
“It’s like ‘darling,’ ” Paige says suddenly. She looks at our bemused faces. “My grandmother’s from Georgia,” she explains, “and there, if you want to be mean to someone, you say her bag or her hair or something’s ‘darling.’ It’s the worst thing you can say. Like you’re paying a compliment, but it’s really the opposite. Or,” she adds, warming to this theme, “if you’re talking about someone and you say ‘Bless her heart!’ that means you think she’s a total moron.”
Catia decides, visibly, to ignore Paige’s comments and her daughter’s horrid behavior. Instead, looking suddenly very tired, she says:
“There will be a light lunch in the kitchen for you all at one o’clock. Please tidy up all the flowers you have not used and put them in the big buckets with water; I will arrange them later. You may take your own arrangements to your rooms if you wish.”
Kelly cradles her vase in her hands, obviously looking forward to placing it in our room, a symbol of her success. I start to disassemble my daisy disaster, throwing the pierced leaves into the compost pile and placing the flowers back in the bucket for Catia to do something prettier with them.
“It was just an experiment—I didn’t want to keep it,” I say to reassure the other girls, who are looking at me with appalled stares, perhaps worried that I’ve taken Elisa’s nastiness too much to heart. But I’m not just saying this to make them feel better. My arrangement didn’t work, but I learned, at least, what not to do.
“You shouldn’t pay any attention to what she says,” Kendra says firmly, nodding at Elisa sprawled out on the terrace chair. “She’s just a nasty bitch. Ignore her.”
Elisa hears this, as she’s meant to.
“And you,” she calls to Kendra, swiveling on her chair to face inside the dining room, “you think you are so pretty, so beautiful, because all the boys want you. Well, they only want you because you are different. They think you are esotica. Exotic.”
Kendra looks as if Elisa just slapped her in the face, and Paige draws in her breath sharply.
“Are you kidding me?” Paige snaps at Elisa. “What did you just call her?”
Her hands clenched into fists, Paige marches around the table in Elisa’s direction; skinny Elisa flinches at the sight of 140 pounds of super-confident, sporty, protein-fed American girl heading toward her with fury in her eyes. I nip around the table from the other side and head Paige off before she backhands Elisa like Serena Williams hits a tennis ball, and sends her flying across the terrace and into the olive grove beyond. I’m not an etiquette expert, but I can’t help feeling that knocking our hostess’s daughter over a stone balcony might not be considered the most appropriate way to celebrate the first full day of our summer course.
“Paige, leave it! She’s just jealous,” I say swiftly. “Ignore her. She’s having a go at us because she’s pissed off that Luca likes foreign girls—he doesn’t want her.”
Elisa grabs her cigarettes and her phone, jumps up, and, sneering at us all, storms off the terrace, muttering “Vaffanculo!” as she flees the wrath of Killer Barbie.
That’s right—run away. To me, “exotic” sounds nice, like a compliment: out-of-the-ordinary, glamorous, exciting. But Kendra clearly hasn’t taken it that way, nor did Paige. I want to ask them why, but it’s Kelly, of all people, who saves the moment by saying meditatively:
“You know, we should make a note of all the mean things Elisa says to us in Italian. That way, we’ll learn all the best swearwords.”
The Elisa Cerboni
Alternative Italian Course
“Stronza!” Paige says cheerfully to me as I emerge from swimming a length underwater, pushing my hair of
f my face.
“Stai zitta!” I respond promptly, propping my arms on the edge of the pool, relishing in the sensation of the warm sunshine against my cool, wet skin.
“You better make sure Catia doesn’t hear you,” Kendra advises, sitting on a lounger fiddling with her phone. “This is not the kind of Italian our folks are paying for us to learn.”
“Hey, we’ll just tell her we’ve been taking the Elisa Cerboni Alternative Italian Course,” Paige says. She’s painting her toenails cotton-candy pink; she has an entire little manicure set laid out next to her lounger.
“I still can’t believe she told her mum to shut up. In front of all of us,” Kelly says, shaking her head.
That, it turns out, is what “Stai zitta” means; what the dictionary couldn’t help us with, a free online translation service could. Kendra exchanges an equally disapproving glance with Kelly.
“I know,” she says. “I can’t even begin to think what would happen if I talked to my mom like that, even in private. Let alone in front of a whole bunch of people!” She shudders in horror.
“She’d whup your ass!” Paige carols in a funny accent; it sounds like she’s doing some film imitation that Kelly and I don’t recognize. “With a big ol’ stick!”
“She pretty much would,” Kendra agrees. “My mom doesn’t mess around.”
“Mine wouldn’t even notice,” Paige says happily. “We’re a biiig family,” she informs me and Kelly as she leans over her legs and very carefully starts to add a second coat of polish, twisting the little brush expertly against the edge of the bottle every time she does a new nail, loading the brush with exactly the right amount of candy-pink viscous liquid. “Five of us—three boys, two girls. And we’re all loud. My mom doesn’t listen to a word anyone says—she hasn’t for years.”
“It sounds lovely,” I say wistfully, picturing Paige and her family in one of those gigantic American kitchens, a central island in the middle the size of a car, five huge blond boys and girls tearing in and out, making themselves American food—but what? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I decide, that’s what they always seem to be eating on TV—with a huge blond mother and father presiding over the chaos. I’m texting my mum—I emailed her last night before dinner, and I’ve already got back screeds of endless texts.
Right now, the idea of having a mother who doesn’t listen to a word one says is very appealing indeed.
“I know what you mean,” Kelly’s saying to Paige. “There’s three of us girls, my mum, and my stepdad, and my nan lives with us too. That’s my grandmother,” she adds, as Paige must have blanked on the word. “It’s a really small house, so you never get a moment’s quiet.”
“My brothers are soooo noisy!” Paige says. “There’s, like, never a moment when you don’t hear a ball bouncing off something or them shooting something in a video game, or dive-bombing each other in the pool—”
“You have a pool?” Kelly asks, her tone incredulous, and as Paige launches into a description of her family’s split-level ranch, I reach for a swim float, wrap my arms around it, and push myself into deeper water, floating happily, closing my eyes, as the conversation ebbs and flows over my head. If Kelly and Paige are getting on, I can basically stop worrying about Kelly from this moment forward: the way Paige defended Kendra today, she’s like a lioness with people she cares about.
I can’t summon a drop of empathy for Elisa getting her knickers in a twist—or, as Paige would put it, bent out of shape—because her mum needs to take in guests and do summer courses to pay her way. I mean, she still lives here, in what’s pretty much paradise. So what if she doesn’t have Villa Barbiano all to herself? Elisa could try making friends with the girls who come to stay—then she’d have people to visit all over the world, instead of making deadly enemies of them.
A big bumblebee buzzes past me, fizzing with purpose, and lands heavily in one of the lavender bushes planted as a hedge at the deep end of the pool. It’s joined by another, and they bumble from one tiny mauve flower to the next, sucking up nectar, their black and yellow fuzz very dark against the gray-green leaves and the pale stone wall beyond. Lavender honey, I think, watching them through my lashes; if I painted this little scene, that’s what I’d call the painting, Lavender Honey, and let people work out why I’d given it that title.
My float turns in the water, and I turn with it, my legs trailing, and then paddle a little to bring myself to the infinity edge of the pool, looking over the brimming stone curve to the landscape beyond. It’s so beautiful you don’t quite believe it.
Just below me, to my right, is Catia’s ornamental English rose garden, which she walked us around this morning before our flower arranging and Italian lessons. It’s a riot of color, because late June, she said, is prime time for roses: salmon pinks, yolk yellows, flaming reds, clear bright whites, all planted in neat little beds, curving around in a complicated formal design. I want to sit there when it’s not quite so boiling hot, maybe at dusk, so I can watch the colors fade as the sun sets and night falls, making everything look like a faint shadow of itself.
I shake my head in amusement at the way my thoughts are drifting, water dripping down my forehead from a loose strand of hair. Since I’ve come to Italy, I keep finding myself framing images, seeing how colors and light work together. I’m planning to study art history, so of course what my teacher calls “the visual arts” are what I want to specialize in. But picking up a brush, loading it with paint, trying to capture even a little of the loveliness in front of me—that’s an entirely new desire.
The image of the painting from Sir John Soane’s Museum pops into my head: Portrait of a Young Lady. That’s why I’m here, after all—because I accidentally came across a portrait of a girl who’s my mirror image. And now, the idea of painting itself is beginning to obsess me.…
I get a craving to look at the picture on my phone. I do that a lot. I’ve transferred it to my laptop too, of course, but I’ve kept the original photo on my phone, and I look at it very often, as if it’s a sort of talisman, reminding me that I came here because I have a mystery to solve. I spin myself slowly around in the water and kick toward the shallow end, the float tucked under my tummy, too lazy in the heat and the relaxation of floating to bother to do anything as strenuous as haul myself out of the deep end. Walking up the stone steps out of the pool is like wading through toffee, slow and languorous, the weight of water dragging at my legs. By the time I flop onto my lounger, adjusting the top bit to shade my face, and pick up my phone to look at the photo, I could fall asleep.
Paige and Kelly stopped chatting a while ago; I think they’re dozing. But Kendra is still click-click-clicking away at her phone.
“Blimey, Kendra,” I say on a big yawn, scrolling through my photos, “you’ve been texting for hours! Aren’t your parents going to freak when they get the bill?”
“I’m not texting,” Kendra says, and there’s a grimness in her voice that makes me sit up and pay attention. “I’m reading through the texts that the boys from last night sent me, and then I’m deleting them all.”
“You’re what?” Paige heaves herself up, awoken by this information. “You’re kidding! I, like, never delete a text a guy sent me! Like, ever!”
“You heard what Elisa said,” Kendra replies. “When she said they only wanted me ’cause I’m exotic, I remembered right away that one of them even called me that last night. I hate that word.”
“I’m sorry,” Kelly says simply, “I don’t understand why it’s so bad. I don’t think Violet does either, honestly.”
Paige pulls a face.
“It’s kinda racist,” she says frankly. “You know, saying she’s different. I mean, she’s not different. She’s just another American girl.”
“I won’t be their exotic summer treat,” Kendra interjects. “Like they’re looking at something in a zoo.”
“Oh no,” I say, really distressed. Not only at how upset Kendra is, but also, as Paige says, at the waste of deletin
g nice texts from a whole raft of admiring boys: from the amount that Kendra’s been clicking away, her phone must have been absolutely flooded with messages and invitations. I mean, I may have been kissed last night, but it didn’t exactly end on a high note, and no one asked me for my phone number so they could deluge me with texts. It’s incredibly frustrating to think that Kendra’s got what we all fantasize about—loads of hot boys avidly pursuing her—and is rejecting them all.
Particularly because this entire situation has been caused by Elisa. I hate her having this much power over us.
I open my mouth to say all this, but Paige gets there first. Swinging her legs vehemently over the edge of the lounger, which creaks in protest, she pushes herself to her feet, stomps over to Kendra, and grabs the phone from her hand.
“Are you kidding?” she bellows. “You’re doing this ’cause of Elisa? Please! Violet was totally right earlier, that girl’s so jealous she can’t think straight! She saw you and me yesterday with all those boys hanging off us and she went away and spent, like, all night figuring out the meanest, crappiest thing she could say to get you all wound up like …” She waves her arms around in frustration. “I dunno, what gets wound up?”
“A yo-yo?” Kelly suggests.
“Right! A yo-yo! A fricking yo-yo! And it works! You’re doing just what she wants!” Paige stabs a finger at the screen of Kendra’s phone. “These are hot Italian boys! Prime Italian boy-meat!” She throws her arms wide. “What the hell, girl? You are so not giving this all up! You think I care that they’re chasing me ’cause I’m blond and have big boobs and all the girls here look like they weigh a hundred pounds, max? So what if they like me ’cause I’m different? I got more attention last night than I ever did back home, ’cause back home tons of girls look like me, and here I’m exotic prime meat too!”
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