The Juliet Club (14 page)

Benno raised his voice slightly. “Weren't you, Tom?”

“Hmm?” Tom blinked and refocused his attention. “What?”

“Weren't you just saying that you wanted to go—”

“Oh, yeah, right, I've got to go and, um, do some stuff,” Tom said quickly. “I'll see you guys later, okay?”

He kicked the ball neatly back to Benno, waved to Lucy, and jogged off toward the bridge.

“Well.” Lucy frowned as she watched him head away from her with an eager step. “Huh.”

“He is very distracted, Tom,” Benno said. “The workload is more than he expected. I think he wants to go study.”

She turned and saw Benno standing in front of her, holding a soccer ball and giving her an intense and unreadable look. She had forgotten that he was there, actually, which made her feel guilty, so to make up for it she said, “Oh, right! Tom is such a hard worker!” and gave him a brilliant smile.

The ball slipped from Benno's fingers and bounced away. He ran after it and accidentally kicked it even farther, ran after it again and finally managed to grab it, and ran back to her, blushing.

If Lucy knew one thing, it was how to be polite, so she tried to smooth over the awkward moment by saying the first thing that came into her head. “So you guys were playing soccer?” Too late, she heard these incredibly idiotic words coming out of her mouth and tried not to wince. Of
course
they were just playing soccer, what a stupid thing to say! She added brightly, “Looks like fun!”

She didn't mean it, of course. Nothing that involved running around, chasing small round objects and getting sweaty counted as fun in Lucy's world.

But her completely insincere comment made Benno's face light up as if a wondrous vision had just appeared to him. “Yes, it is! Would you like me to teach you?”

Lucy sighed. This was the problem with being polite. It made you say things you didn't mean, which other people believed, of course, because they didn't know you were just being polite, and then they said something back that you had to agree with because otherwise you would have to admit that you hadn't meant a word of what you had originally said, and the next thing you knew you were baking five hundred cookies for the choir fundraiser and resenting every moment.

And now Benno was holding out the ball with a hopeful look in his eyes. So she said “Sure” and tried to listen carefully as he told her how to kick it toward the goal.

But as Benno went into a lengthy explanation of how this seemingly simple action was to be accomplished, Lucy's mind drifted off. Somehow, she had thought that her trip to Italy was going to be quite different. Of course, she'd only been here a few days, but still. She had imagined flirtations in cafés, walks in the moonlight, chance meetings in the square. She had expected romance.

It wasn't, she felt, an unreasonable expectation. After all, back home she was popular, she went on dates all the time, every guy in her school would absolutely love to go out with her. . . .

So why had she just spent an afternoon watching Giacomo flirt with Kate? And why did Tom just dash off as if he couldn't wait to get away from her? Lucy's mother had taught her from an early age that a pleasant expression would keep her from getting wrinkles, but right now Lucy didn't care. She frowned.

Finally Benno stopped talking. “Why don't you give it a try?” he said.

“What?” Lucy stared at him, then remembered, just in time, that he had been teaching her something about soccer.

Benno put the ball on the ground and smiled encouragingly. “It's a little tricky, so don't worry if you don't get it right the first time.”

Lucy eyed the ball grimly.

“Just get a running start—”

She took three fast angry steps.

“And shoot it toward the goal—”

She kicked it as hard as she could.

Benno watched it sail through the air and land squarely in the net.

“Hey!” Lucy sounded absolutely astonished. “Did you see that?”

He nodded slowly, his face blank. “Yes,” he said. “Well. Perhaps it's not as tricky as I thought.”

An expression of shy delight dawned on her face as she murmured, “I'm really terrible at sports.“ Then she shrugged and gave Benno a smile that made him momentarily forget his own name. “That must have been beginner's luck.”

He cleared his throat. “Beginner's luck? There is no such thing,” he assured her. “Would you like me to teach you how to pass?”

Act II
Scene VI

Silvia stared balefully at the biscotti and espresso that the waiter placed on the table in front of her. He backed away slowly and exchanged a meaningful glance with the barista behind the counter.

Steer clear of that one, their expressions said. She's nothing but trouble.

Silvia saw the looks they shot at each other, and she knew what they meant, and she finally smiled. True, it was a bleak smile, but that was the best she could manage these days. Ever since last summer, in fact.

Her best friend, Elena, couldn't understand it. “You look amazing, Silvia!” she would say. “Such a change in just one year! I wish that I—”

“No, you don't.” Silvia would scowl at her. “Believe me.” Silvia and Elena had been best friends for years. Their connection had been based on the unhappy realization, the year they turned ten, that some girls were prettier than others and that they both belonged with the others. By twelve, they noticed that they were, perhaps, a little heavier than most of their friends. When they were thirteen, they got pimples and braces. By fourteen, Silvia and Elena knew what it felt like when boys' eyes slipped by them to focus on Bianca Donatelli, already as gorgeous as a supermodel, or Isabella Rossi, who had perfected the art of the hair toss and the coy smile.

“It's like we're invisible!” Elena would complain.

“Perhaps we should become cat burglars, then,” Silvia used to joke, back in the days when she could still find the humor in dark situations.

“I'm serious!”

“So am I. At least we would reap a financial benefit from our looks,” Silvia would say, laughing.

And then, the summer Silvia turned fifteen, she blossomed. She grew three inches, she discovered she had a figure, her braces came off, her skin cleared up. Her older cousin took her to a really good hairstylist, her parents finally agreed to replace her glasses with contacts, and boys started turning their heads to look when she walked down the street.

“You're so lucky,” Elena would sigh, half admiring, half envious. “You're not invisible anymore.”

“Yes, I am,” Silvia would argue. “They still don't see
me
. Now they just see this—” and she would wave her hand at her hair, her face, her body.

Elena would just look puzzled. “But that's good! That's great! That's what we always wanted, to look beautiful!”

Silvia finally gave up trying to explain why she felt just as resentful when boys noticed her because she was pretty as she had when they ignored her because she was plain. Instead, she started wearing all black clothes, torn fishnet stockings, and heavy boots; teasing her hair until she looked as if she'd just survived a tornado; ringing her eyes with black eyeliner; and putting away the pretty jewelry she had collected over the years in favor of silver skull rings and necklaces featuring daggers and razor blades.

Elena didn't hang out with her much anymore, but that was all right. Silvia had decided that she liked being alone.

She saw the waiter eyeing her from his safe spot behind the counter. She sneered at him and pulled a journal out of her handbag. Before she could jot down even one black thought about her life, however, the door to the café opened and Tom bounded in.

“Hi! Silvia!” he cried happily. “What are you doing here?”

She cast her eyes to the ceiling. Why was he always so
bouncy
? “Having an espresso,” she said, pointing sarcastically at her cup. “This is a café, after all.”

“What a great idea! Can I join you?” Without waiting for her response, he pulled up a chair and kept chatting. “I haven't had much of a chance to talk to you yet. Except when we're in class, of course. Which doesn't really count, because—”

He stopped, arrested by the basilisk stare she was leveling at him. After a long moment, he waved down the waiter.
“Un cappuccino, per favore,”
he said in a flat, nasal American accent.

Silvia made a small sound of amused disgust.

“What? Did I say it wrong?” he said. His green eyes looked worried.

She wanted to ignore him, but he looked so crestfallen that she found herself saying, entirely against her will, “It's not your pronunciation. Your pronunciation is—” She stopped. His Italian truly was execrable. “Well, anyway. It's just that, in Italy, people only drink cappucino in the morning. For breakfast. At this time of day, it is always espresso. Always.”

“Oh, okay.” He nodded slowly as he filed that away for future reference. She turned back to her journal, content with the thought that she had, ever so slightly, put him in his place.

Then he smiled at her, a big, cheerful, American smile. “Thanks a lot, Silvia! I would never have known that if it hadn't been for you! And that's exactly why I came here, to learn more about a different culture! So!” He earnestly bobbed his head up and down a few more times. “Thanks!”

“Try saying
grazie,
” she suggested wearily. “You are in Italy, after all.”

His smile flickered for a moment and she regretted her tone, which was sharper than she had intended, but she couldn't help it, he was just so irritating. For Silvia, for whom the sunniest morning was only a cause for dark suspicion—after all, if the day started off so well, it could only get worse—Tom was a complete conundrum. She couldn't understand why he was so happy all the time when he had so many reasons to be gloomy. After all, he was so naive. So uncultured. And the way he dressed!

Still, as she sipped the last of her espresso and listened to him butchering the word
grazie
over and over, shooting her quick looks to see how he was doing, she couldn't keep a small smile from tugging at her lips. She felt quite mature and sophisticated next to Tom. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling at all.

After Silvia left, Tom stared down at the dregs of coffee in his cup, mentally replaying everything she had said.

She had criticized his choice of drink. She had corrected his pronunciation. She had sighed and rolled her eyes and looked put upon any time he ventured an opinion.

Tom possessed a relentlessly optimistic personality, but even he couldn't make himself believe that their meeting had gone terribly well.

Faced with the problem of unrequited attraction, Tom decided to order some food. He knew this response proved that he did not possess a complex emotional life. A girl back home had told him this. She had seemed to think it was a problem. But at times like these he didn't care, because it meant that he could make himself feel much better simply by eating a grilled cheese sandwich or rather—he squinted at the menu chalked on a blackboard—a panino with tomato and mozzarella. There were advantages, after all, to being an uncomplicated person.

He was just about to wave for the waiter's attention when a rich, amused voice said from behind his left shoulder, “So, Tommaso, I see you and Silvia are getting along well.”

He turned to see Professoressa Marchese smiling down at him. “Um, not really,” he said. “I mean . . . do you think so?”

“I know Silvia quite well,” she said. “The fact that she did not throw her espresso in your face is an excellent sign.”

“Really?” He felt momentarily buoyed by this, and then he remembered. The professor had studied Shakespeare all her life, practically. That had probably totally messed with her head when it came to the real world. Like, she probably thought this was some kind of play, where people who act like they hate you actually love you.

He sighed. It would be nice if life were like Shakespeare, but he was wise enough to know it wasn't.

“I think she was just being polite,” he went on, feeling that the professor needed to be set straight. “Everything I say makes her mad.”

“Mmm.” Professoressa Marchese nodded gravely. “I can see why that would be disheartening.”

Somehow, the way she was looking so thoughtful, as if she was taking him so seriously, made him open up a bit more. “And it's not as if I even say much,” he confided. “I'm not very good with words.”

Professoressa Marchese looked as delighted as if she had just walked into a surprise party. “Ah, but words are not the only way to speak from the heart,” she said. “In fact, one might even say they are the least important.”

Tom nodded as if he understood, but in fact he had a feeling that often overcame him in the middle of conversations, especially with teachers or parents or any of those kids in the AP classes. They talked and talked and talked, an ocean of talk, and he nodded and pretended to get what they were saying. And all the time, he knew he was just floating along on the surface while all kinds of hidden meanings flowed by on some deep underwater current that he could never hope to reach.

“You're absolutely right,” he said agreeably, knowing from experience that this response usually worked.

Sure enough, she beamed with pleasure. “I have an idea for you,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “Read
Henry V
.”

His heart sank.
Romeo and Juliet
alone had been hard slogging. And now she wanted him to read
another
play?

She chuckled. “Don't look so dismayed, Tommaso! You will not be tested and you will enjoy it, I promise you. It is about a king who was a great warrior—yes, I thought that might get your attention. And what's more”—she gave him a mischievous wink—“I think you will find that certain parts will prove to be most helpful to you. Most helpful indeed.”