Flirting in Italian (11 page)

“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 turn 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.

“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 that 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.”

“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 son 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.…