Flirting in Italian (13 page)

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.”

“Stronza!”
Paige says cheerfully to me as I emerge from swimming a length underwater, pushing my hair off 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 deleting 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!”

“USDA prime exotic?” Kendra asks, her mouth beginning to curve in a reluctant smile.

“
Hell
, yeah!” Paige bangs her chest with Kendra’s phone. “Damn right! I’m USDA prime exotic fillet steak! What’s that one your dad likes?”

“Chateaubriand,” Kendra says.

“Yeah! That one! I can never pronounce it, but that one!”

Paige is panting for breath in her enthusiasm for convincing Kendra to change her mind, her hair—clipped on top of her head because she blow-dried it this morning and didn’t want to get it wet—beginning to fall down in big curls.

“Look, Kendra,” I say, trying to pick my words as carefully as I can, “I can totally see that it must be horrible to have people make decisions about you based on what you look like, because it’s not about you as a person.”

I was worried that she might snap at me that being black’s completely different from anything she thinks I might know or say.

“Some boys will
always
want you for some bit of you, not the whole thing. You know, some boys will like Paige because she’s blond with ginormous boobs”—Paige sticks her chest out and does a comedic wobble of them, which makes all of us giggle—“or Kelly because they like redheads—”

“Fat chance,” Kelly mutters gloomily.

“—or
anyone
,” I continue quickly, “for all sorts of stupid reasons. But you find out very fast when you hang out with them, or snog them, what they’re really like and what they’re really after.”

“Like the ones who just go for your bum straightaway when they’re kissing you,” Kelly chimes in. “And then keep
trying to get their hands around to the front, no matter how much you slap ’em off.”

“I
know
!” Paige howls. “I mean, I’ve got my jeans zipped up ’cause I like them that way! Stop trying to unzip them! Pigs! I’ll do that myself
if
I’m good and ready, which is
nowhere near
the first date! And besides, I
hate
them touching my tummy! It isn’t even flat when I’m lying down—I
never
want anyone to go near my tummy!”

“It only takes one, anyway,” Kelly says, reaching for the sunblock: she’s so pale she’s understandably paranoid about burning. “That’s what my mum says. It only takes one boy that you really like and you feel you can trust.”

The image of Luca floods into my mind, and despite the heat of the day, I shiver from head to toe. If I’m being honest, I have to admit I don’t even know whether I like him, let alone trust him; but my body’s telling me that he’s the only one I want.

I’ve been thinking about him so much, turning over and over in my head all the words he said to me. I wonder whether his telling me that I looked too Italian for the other boys to be interested in me was a way of making me feel grateful, that he liked me enough to talk to me, even to kiss me. Was it some sort of awful ploy to weaken my defenses so I’d let him go farther, do things I wouldn’t normally let a boy do, because I was afraid that if I lost him, no one else would be after me? That I’d spend this whole holiday—
Summer study course
, I correct myself—this whole summer course watching the other girls be chased by gorgeous boys, while I’d turned down the only one who’d deign to fancy me?

Is that what he was doing? Playing a psychological game with
me, trying to soften me up so I’d let him do whatever he wanted, just to keep him?
I shiver again, my head spinning, as I remember that kiss last night, how it made me feel things I’ve never, ever felt before. Do things I’d never done before, like snog him passionately in the middle of a crowded bar
—or slap him in the face
.

Kendra and Kelly and Paige are giggling together now; they’re all sitting on the edges of their loungers, leaning forward in a cozy little group, telling stories about boys, ones they like, ones they don’t, ones who try to get you drunk, ones who don’t do anything but you wish they would. I shut my eyes and lie back on the lounger and remember what it was like to feel his hand splayed out on the small of my back, his biceps lean and flexing under my palms, his body pressing tightly into mine.…