by Camilla Monk
My eyes narrowed as they dragged him toward us. Mid to late twenties, probably. No red blotches on what was otherwise a fairly good mug, save for that mask of exhaustion the street eventually paints on all features. One of the guards pulled on his T-shirt so hard he nearly tore it off. Hold on—no beer belly? That toned stomach was either a great contouring job or a fine case of meth abs.
I smelled a fauxbo. Dammit, I hated those. Wannabe artists and trust-fund babies, most of the time, who played bum all night before returning to their Brooklyn loft at dawn to sleep the booze off until noon. Even so, anger zinged up my spine and directly to my head when a burly guard punched him in the stomach hard, just for show. I leaped in front of them without thinking. “Hey, hey! Easy! Dude . . . He’s just a bum.”
They stopped and shot an anxious glance at Dante and the black guy. Neither moved to stop me. Dante flashed me a stiff smile I gathered meant he didn’t want a scene in front of Lily—whose eyes were so wide they’d roll out of her skull any moment now. The guards released their hold long enough for the hobo to brace his palms on his knees and gasp out a trickle of saliva, which he wiped with the back of his hand.
I bent toward him gingerly, picking up a whiff of booze and something sweet like candy. “You okay?”
He raised his head at me, and I nearly stumbled back in surprise. His glasses had slipped askew, and I could see that the eyes looking into mine were empty—his gray irises encased milky white pupils. Blind. I glanced down at the cane he still gripped tight in his right hand. Figured.
He grinned, revealing incisors that didn’t look like he’d spent years in the gutter, even if they overlapped a little. I fought the urge to step away when he reached for my face and grazed it briefly. I shivered from the contact. He spoke, the faintest accent lingering in his raspy voice. “You smell like a tourist.”
I shook off the fleeting pang of compassion I had allowed to dwell in my chest as I hauled him up. “You smell like a drunk asshole. Nice to meet you too.”
A hoarse chuckle on his side. “Pizza and coconut shampoo. American girls always smell like that.”
Perfect. A fauxbo and a C-grade pickup artist. “Seriously . . . Get the fuck out of here.”
He whirled around, bowed to me on unsteady legs and lumbered out of the site with a dramatic wave of his hand. My lips twitched involuntarily. There was something about people who no longer gave a flying fuck—a spark that regular folks just didn’t have.
After the hobo was out of sight, the black guy took Dante aside to discuss stuff with him. There was some nodding and fleeting glances at the hole. The guy—I figured he was Dante’s boss—shot a look my way before he put on sunglasses and left, escorted by a pack of bodyguards. I didn’t like his whole sunglasses-in-daylight-Godfather vibe and how he basically ignored Lily and me. The douche was strong with this one.
Night was falling. Pink clouds stretched behind the dark frame of the coliseum like a flaming halo, and the workers were starting to set up lights around the hole, angling them at the table. Lily walked up to me. “Dante and I are heading back. Do you want to come too?” Her tone grew hesitant. “Maybe we can have dinner together?”
I flung my hand toward the site’s well-guarded entrance. “Actually, I need to go to my hotel. I still haven’t checked in.”
“You’re not staying at your dad’s?”
I sidestepped the trap. “Only one bedroom.”
Done typing on his phone, Dante popped up behind Lily. “Where’s your hotel? Maybe we can give you a ride.”
I turned the idea in my head. Not ideal, but tolerable—and free. “It’s the Trionfale Guesthouse. On Via Alba.”
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone again to type in the address. He tapped, scrolled. Cringed. I felt my cheeks grow hot because I could read on his face what he thought of my twenty-five-bucks-a-night guesthouse. The pics hadn’t looked so bad to me when I’d booked it, but now, in Dante’s eyes, I saw that he and Lily and I lived in different worlds. Galaxies apart, really.
His mouth twisted, and he wrestled the grimace into a gentle smile. “You know what, Emma, why don’t we arrange a room for you at the Residenza for the week?”
Lily clasped her hands, shock and delight written all over her face. I inched away from her. “Thanks, but I already paid for my room at the Trionfale. What’s the Residenza anyway?”
“It’s a building where Katharos houses their employees. I live there with Dante. You’re gonna love it,” Lily said.
Unlikely, because I didn’t want their vanilla-flavored charity in the first place. But I was curious to see what the place looked like. Or maybe it was because of Lily, and the way she was looking at me, hopeful and anxious. I had an urge to jump as if I were standing on a ledge. I needed to see where it’d take me, seeing her again after all this time. Hooking my thumbs in my jeans’ pockets, I made my second stupid decision that day, and heard myself reply, “I guess we can always eat something and I’ll go to my guesthouse afterward.”
If I hadn’t been riding in the backseat of Dante’s Cayenne, this would have felt like a trip back in time. We drove up a long street where literally every single building was something straight out of a period drama. Antique arch doors, wrought iron grilles barring the first-floor windows, sculpted balcony above those. We passed churches that looked so much like ancient temples that I almost expected the tourists in front of them to grow togas over their backpacks. My forehead pressed to the window, I watched this endless party of columns stacked on top of more columns. I was starting to suspect they were the generally accepted unit of measure for street cred here in Rome.
And Katharos foundation’s Residenza didn’t lack any. The mandatory columns framed ten-foot-tall windows, and a pair of stone monsters guarded the entrance door, poised as if they were supporting the second-floor balcony—muscular guys with goat heads and really tiny dicks. Dante slowed down and glanced at me in the mirror. “What do you think?”
My first instinct was to reply that it was cool, but I feared it wouldn’t do, considering. “It looks very baroque,” I told him.
He gave a wheezing sound like a laugh was stuck at the back of his throat that he wouldn’t allow to come out. I never knew I was so funny . . .
In the passenger seat, Lily undid her seatbelt and turned to flash me a radiant smile. “The building dates from the eighteenth century, so it’s more of a neo-classical style, but yes, some of the architect’s choices were . . . baroque. Come, let’s get inside!”
I followed them through a wide courtyard with lollipop shrubs sitting in giant urns. I itched to take a few pics, but I thought maybe they’d find it weird because it wasn’t a museum or anything—they lived here.
“How long have you been living here?” I asked Lily as we entered a hall that looked like a movie décor . . . or Teresa Giudice’s house, if that’s your thing. The ceiling must have been at least fifteen feet high, and there was enough gold leaf on all those moldings to pay Greece’s debt.
“Three months. Mom and Dad came over for a couple of weeks this summer to help me move in.” She noticed my stony expression. Her smile wavered, and she gave a nervous chuckle. “I think she freaked out a little when I left the safety of home for this distant and mysterious land full of Italians.” She curled her fingers and wiggled them like tentacles as she recounted this.
Dante laughed. I didn’t. Lily’s arms fell back down at her sides. It was awkward.
She bit her lower lip. “Do you want to see my apartment? We can sit and catch up for a while before dinner.” She sent an apologetic look to her boyfriend, something along the lines of, “Sorry, I need you out of the way.”
As expected, Dante the sentient Ken doll, smiled and said, “Take your time; I’ll go review Lucius’s files in the salon.” With this, he bent to brush his lips against hers, allowing his nose to linger against hers tenderly before he walked across the hall and disappeared behind a set of heavy wooden doors.
After Da
nte was out of sight, Lily joined her hands on her lap and squared her shoulders. She tipped her head to a double marble staircase behind her. “It’s this way. I share my place with Dante.”
We climbed up the stairs under the judgmental stare of a series of old portraits—sixteenth to seventeenth century, because of the big ruffs. I remembered one of my history teachers telling us about those back in tenth grade. I skipped so many classes to smoke cheap weed in the bathroom, it’s a miracle I was even there for that one.
Lily led me down a long hallway with three sets of tall wooden doors. I smelled wax and detergent, and my Chucks dragged across a lavish oriental carpet. She opened the doors—no key. Did she trust the Katharos foundation so much she didn’t need the most basic level of privacy?
I went in after her. When she turned on the lights, my eyebrows hit my hairline and fell back in place. Like the rest of the mansion, Lily and Dante’s “apartment” screamed old money. She went to sit on the long cream sofa standing opposite a massive four-poster bed with silky gray linen. I glanced at the marble countertops of a kitchen tucked in a corner of the room. I dropped my backpack at my feet, went to lean against the island and crossed my arms, waiting for the conversation I knew she’d never have initiated in the middle of a crowded street or in front of Dante.
Lily’s smile was gone, replaced by an intense brown stare and dark circles I was only noticing now under her makeup. Her throat tightened. Here we go, I thought.
“Em, what happened?” were her first words since entering the room.
I shrugged. My tactic of choice whenever dealing with family.
Her hands wouldn’t stop fidgeting on her lap. “Saint-Henry called Mom as soon as you left. She actually went to the police. They told her they couldn’t do anything since you were eighteen already.”
I fought a victorious sneer at the memory of that day. Of course, they couldn’t stop me. I had been counting the days—the hours—until I could legally grab my backpack and walk free through Saint-Henry’s gate. There was this young counselor, a bleached blonde who loved to compare the place to Hogwarts and say we all had powers we didn’t suspect. She ran after me, said she’d call my mom so the three of us could sit down and “talk it out.” Nothing had ever felt as good as my two middle fingers flipping up in response.
Lily’s eyes went glassy as she recalled: “Mom was . . . She didn’t understand. She’s still hurt and angry about it—even now.”
The tears she was trying to hold back made my own eyes ache, but I wasn’t about to weep in front of Lily, of all people. “It’s been over two years,” I said evenly. “I’m sure she got over the loss.”
Lily shook her head as if something I’d said wouldn’t compute. “Where did you go? Why did you go?”
“I kind of just . . . traveled for a while. I settled a year ago after I got my job,” I replied, purposely avoiding her second question.
Her face bunched. “Traveled where?”
Another shrug. I was always a black-belt at shrugging—I’d spent most of my life clamming up against people asking questions I didn’t want to answer, after all.
Lily squinted up at me, and with each new wrinkle on her brow, I felt myself being picked apart, examined under a microscope. My short, bitten nails, the slight bags under my eyes, a few scars on my hands, the knuckles just a little too red, a little too rough. It was a familiar unease, spotted with a little guilt here, a little shame there, but also colorful specks of pride, in spite of it all. Not for the first time, I wondered if it showed on my face that I’d spent almost eighteen months of my life sleeping on benches and in abandoned buildings. “Where?” she insisted in a brittle voice.
I gave her my secret ninja shrug. “You wouldn’t get it.”
Her cheeks went ashen, and I read disgust and pity in her slightly parted lips. Maybe she thought I’d been a hooker or something. “But why didn’t you call us?” she near-shouted.
I wouldn’t cry about that shit, but my eyes were prickling, and I had to swallow hard to keep myself together. It was difficult to find the right words; they whirled around my head like moths around a lightbulb. I took a deep breath. “You and your dad, and my mom, you’re a family.”
“Yes, we’re your family,” Lily shot back indignantly.
“No,” I replied. I thought it’d be harder to say it, but I felt relieved hearing that single sharp syllable burst out loud in the silence. “You guys have your own thing, and that’s cool. I mean, I don’t care. You lost your mom, and mine stepped in, and it’s . . .” I was reaching the limits of my emotional vocabulary. A shrug was needed. My shoulders jerked once again. “It’s cool. I’m cool with that. But I was never part of it. It’s your story, not mine.”
Lily stared at me, her breath slow and shallow. I waved a hand at the wall. No need to explain. She wasn’t stupid—far from it. She might not want to talk about it, but she remembered the way my mom had latched onto her new husband’s perfect kid, this “second chance” like she’d said once. In front of me. Lily remembered the suffocating anger hanging in the air after each shitty report card, which would sometimes culminate in a resounding slap on my cheek after my mom was done reading. Lily knew, like everyone else did, that it was me who kept drawing on the walls of our bedroom with her pink nail polish and tearing pages out of Richard’s books—even though I always accused her with a straight face afterward.
To his credit, Richard did make halfhearted attempts to play peacemaker in the complete hell that was his new marriage. He’d hug Lily’s tears away, caress my mom’s equally damp cheeks with whispered pleas for her to calm down, that he knew it was hard. And I watched them from behind an ajar door, seething with resentment as the three of them bonded over the hell I was putting them through.
There must have been one morning where Richard woke up, and he told my mom he couldn’t go on like this, that five years of simmering war was his limit. I could still feel the silence around our dinner table, thicker than usual the night my mother had announced they were sending my ass to a therapeutic boarding school upstate—the first of three. I could still see Lily’s gaze, locked on the green beans on her plate, and that second of pure, blinding hate in my chest when I figured she wasn’t going anywhere.
The sum of all my failures wiped a tear from her eye—I wished she’d been the kind of nasty clichéd stepsis you see in Cinderella. It would have made it easier to hate her, instead of feeling like something was playing “The Winner Takes It All” in the background . . .
“If you couldn’t talk to Mom, you should have called me, or even Dad,” she argued.
“He was relieved to see me go, and you know it.”
Her voice rose again, defensive. “That’s not true. Dad was actually the one who always insisted you come home for Christmas, even when Mom said she was too tired to deal with you . . .” That last word came out in a sigh as Lily realized what she’d just said: that even ten days for Christmas were too much of me. No wonder I served four consecutive years of full summer school, spent sprawled at my desk in front of an empty notebook or daydreaming on a bench in the park.
My nostrils flared as Lily shook her head and murmured, “Em, I didn’t mean it like that.”
The wetness in my eyes was gone. I just felt angry and cold, and I kinda liked the way Lily was unraveling under my narrowed stare. I picked up my backpack. “It was good talking to you. I think I’ll go now.”
Lily shot up from the couch. “Em, wait!”
I walked straight to the door, ignoring her—another one of my specialties. I reached for the handle, but before I could grab it, it jerked. I leaped back in surprise just in time to avoid the door hitting my nose. I picked up a smoky, woodsy cologne and found myself standing in front of the black businessman from the archeological site. At least he’d ditched the sunglasses, but not the strict gray suit. Cold brown eyes sized me up; his smooth, perfectly symmetrical features relaxed into a smile that held no trace of any kind of warmth. He looked over my shoulder, a
t Lily. “Will Emma be joining us for dinner?” His voice was deep, like the hum of a bass, and with the slightest hint of an Italian accent underneath otherwise perfect British English.
I opened my mouth to decline, but Lily beat me to it and replied with a firm, “Yes, Lucius. I’m sorry; I know it’s a little unexpected—”
“It’s no problem at all. Emma is welcome to stay at the Residenza as long as she wants.”
Like Maury would say, the fact that Lucius wouldn’t even look at me as he stated this determined it was a lie.
That Lucius guy stared at me from across the table, leaning back in the same sort of gilded chair I sat in. He laced his fingers like an old-school villain—his lips curved. “So, Emma, how long are you staying with us?”
Approximately thirty seconds if you keep giving me your creepy fake smile, bro, was what I wanted to say. Instead, I replied, “My flight leaves on Sunday morning.”
“Excellent,” he said.
Lily and Dante exchanged embarrassed looks. I didn’t mind the jab. At least Lucius was the straight-shooter type. I was okay with that.
As if to clear the air, the dining room’s door creaked open to reveal a graying majordomo pushing a clothed cart—that one was an Alfred for sure. Or maybe Alfredo. I was used to waiting tables and handling whiny customers, but I rarely, if ever, sat in the chair, so it felt weird to see that guy do my job—much better than I ever did, by the way. He placed a plate of whitish Jell-O in front of me with smooth, controlled movements, and announced a scallop tartare with white truffle oil. I cringed and discreetly reached for the bread basket to grab a slice—you know, to go with it.
Lucius took a bite while Alfredo poured white wine into our glasses. Sitting ramrod straight in their chairs, Lily and Dante kept stealing glances at each other, the corners of their lips quivering from the smiles they didn’t dare exchange. I’d never admit it out loud to anyone, but it made me feel a little lonely that they had this whole silent world of their own, almost like a language. I looked away and hit my wine hard. The tartare sat untouched on my plate while I munched on my bread in silence. I watched the three of them over the crystal rim of my glass, wondering if the mood was always so lit at the Residenza, or if conversations and potted plants died wherever Lucius went.