Kissing in Italian (13 page)

So what Kendra’s doing—lying there, letting it sink in, the full knowledge of how badly Luigi’s behaved—is the right thing to do. And I think what we’re doing—being quiet, not trying hopelessly to make things better—is right too.

Paige gives us a small jerk of her head toward the door, telling us we can go. It’s as if we’re at a funeral: no one wants
to say anything, not even in a hushed voice. We stand up and walk out of the room, trying to make as little noise as possible. Out of respect for Kendra’s suffering, I suppose. It’s for us, not for her—I don’t imagine she gives a toss how loud our feet sound on the stone floor. I put my hand on the light switch and meet Paige’s eyes: she nods, and I turn it off, leaving them in darkness. The only sound is Kendra’s poignant sobs of misery as I close the door.

Kelly and I turn to go to our bedroom and promptly jump, squeaking together in shock like frightened mice, because Catia is standing right there. She’s directly under the overhead light, and it sends weird shadows over her face, hollowing out her eye sockets, making her look like a corpse. When she speaks, her voice is dry and grating, adding to the corpselike effect.

“Kendra’s gone to bed?” she asks us, and we nod, tongue-tied.

“Good,” she says. And then she looks at Kelly. “You did the right thing telling me,” she adds. “At least I stopped it before it went any further.”

I freeze.

“Go to bed now,” Catia says wearily. “We all need some sleep. Tomorrow I will make some serious decisions.”

We watch her go down the stairs, her shoulders sagging under her linen sweater; Catia’s posture has always been perfect till now. I don’t move until we’ve heard her go into her suite on the floor below, the door closing behind her. Then I swivel my head to look at Kelly, hardly able to believe what I just heard. And simultaneously, the door of Paige and
Kendra’s bedroom swings open and Paige appears, pale with fury under her tan, as tall and blond and beautiful as one of the avenging angels in a fresco from Siena Cathedral.

“You
bitch
!” she hisses at Kelly.

And I don’t say a word in Kelly’s defense.

Mum’s coming to Italy. She texted first thing this morning. A huge relief has settled over me at the knowledge that I’ll see her. Excited as I was to get away, to explore the world without her, Mum has always been my rock, my anchor. Although I know that the fact she’s coming means she has something to tell me that I won’t want to hear, it also means she’ll
be
here, physically. I can’t wait, I just can’t. I’m
desperate to hug Mum, to cry on her shoulder, to hear what she has to tell me and pour out everything that’s been happening.

Well, almost everything. Obviously, I can’t ever tell her about Luca.

But why can’t she come straight away? She could have got on a plane this morning and been here by lunchtime
.

Something’s holding her up—something that must be very important. But if I speculate about it, my brain will start to whir faster and faster until it explodes, so my job until she comes is to try not to think about it at all.…

On the positive side, the Luigi/Kendra drama has certainly provided quite a distraction from the routine at Villa Barbiano. It isn’t exactly a normal morning on which to wake up, shower, and go down to breakfast.

On the negative side, however, the atmosphere is almost unbearably tense and poisonous. I’ve barely exchanged a word with Kelly so far, apart from a mumble about who’s going to use the bathroom first. I’ve never seen a girl look so miserable; she hasn’t met my eyes yet. As we emerge from our room, Paige and Kendra come out from theirs. I don’t know if the timing’s deliberate, but it’s like something out of a play, a highly charged moment where all the characters come onstage at the same time and the audience holds its breath, anticipating a fight.

No—on second thought, it’s more like something from a soap opera. Paige has clearly got up early to do herself and Kendra up to the nines. Her equivalent of going into battle is dressing up and working on her hair and makeup till her entire appearance is like a suit of polished armor. Her hair
cascades in waves, her makeup is impeccable, her tight white T-shirt fits her like a glove, her blush-colored linen mini is equally smart. She’s even wearing wedge heels instead of her usual daytime flip-flops.

Behind her, Kendra is ashy pale under her naturally warm-toned skin. But she’s holding her head high, and either she or Paige has curled her ponytail into a big fat ringlet that bounces bravely at the back of her neck. She’s in a short-sleeved button-up dress, and she too is carefully made up, with lavender eye shadow to contrast her dark-brown eyes and eyelashes that look as if she’s taken a curler to them.

“Hi, Violet,” Paige says.

“Hi, Violet,” Kendra echoes.

“Hi,” I mutter, thinking:
Oh no. Really? Please let this not be what I think it is—

“Come on, Kendra,” Paige says, raising her chin in a clear snub to Kelly and walking downstairs as elegantly as a Vegas showgirl with a huge headdress of feathers. Kendra follows, and I don’t dare look at Kelly. I have a nasty sense of what tactic they’ve decided upon, and over breakfast, it becomes abundantly clear. They’re sending Kelly to Coventry, which is British for what the Americans call a freeze-out.

Catia, presiding as usual at the head of the table, barely says anything after a token
“Buon giorno,”
and we follow her lead; we’re not keen to chatter away after the events of last night. But somehow, the fact that Paige and Kendra aren’t addressing a word to Kelly makes it more obvious, rather than less, when hardly anything is being said. Clearly, Paige has cast herself as the friend who’s going to avenge Kelly’s
betrayal of Kendra’s secret. She makes a point of asking me politely a couple of times to pass the
macedonia
, the big glass bowl of fruit salad, and offers me more orange juice or Danishes while ignoring Kelly completely. In short, she behaves in exactly the ladylike way Catia has been trying to ding into her for the last few weeks, and it’s so disconcerting and awkward that I barely manage to respond to her.

Because I’m very much on the fence myself. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to be singled out by Paige for this kind of overgracious treatment, but at the same time, I can’t blame Paige, not at all, for having her friend’s back. Kelly’s actions broke the most important rule of the girl code: not to tell tales on her friends to parents or teachers. She exposed Kendra to a scene so humiliating, so public, that I shiver at the mere memory; it makes me want to scratch my face up with my nails just to get the image out of my head. I give Kendra huge points for managing to get up and come downstairs this morning. I honestly don’t think I could have done it. My guess is that Paige gave her the courage to do it by promising her they’d make Kelly’s stay here a living hell from now on. And honestly, if that’s what Paige did, it wouldn’t be a bad strategy at all.

I can’t defend Kelly. Frankly, she deserves what she’s getting. But it’s very hard to watch.

Breakfast can’t last more than twenty minutes, but it feels like at least a couple of hours before Catia rises, puts her hands on the table, and says:

“We will not have lessons this morning. Kendra, I will see you now in my study. The rest of you may work on your
Italian grammar with particular attention to the past historic tense.”

We stare up at her, all mute now. I think we were hoping that everything would go back to a sort of normal, as it did after Paige came home tipsy: that Luigi would never be seen again, and that Catia would pretend nothing had happened.

Oops. Well, scratch that faint hope
.

There’s a pause, and then Kendra pushes back her chair and stands up too. Paige reaches out to squeeze her hand in support for a moment before Kendra follows Catia from the room. It makes me think of scenes from films where people are going off to their executions.

We wait until the door at the far end of the corridor has closed behind them. I start to say something, but Paige is clearly dying to start laying into Kelly, and she gets in the first word:

“Violet, you can tell your friend that as far as we’re concerned, from now on she doesn’t
exist
for us, okay? We’re not going to talk to her, help her out, be in the same room with her—after what she did, she doesn’t deserve
anything
. To think I helped her with her hair and makeup for the party! She’s a nasty little ungrateful
snitch
!”

I bite my lip. Kelly’s started to cry; she grabs her napkin and holds it to her eyes to cover her face under Paige’s onslaught.

“She should be ashamed of herself!” Paige continues passionately.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Kelly whimpers from behind the napkin. “I never meant—I didn’t think—”

Paige rounds on her furiously, her chair squeaking on the floor as she turns to confront her; then she realizes that she isn’t talking to Kelly, which makes things a bit difficult to yell at her directly.

“I just thought Catia would warn off Luigi,” Kelly sobs. “I never
imagined
that she’d go down and drag them up and make a huge scene in front of everyone! And I never thought that Luigi was
married
! How could I have known? Or about his wife being—” She gulps. “And it
is
a good thing we found out about that sooner rather than later. Can you imagine if things had gone any further—I mean, I don’t know how far things had gone—but can you
imagine …?
”

I realize I’m nodding in reluctant agreement.

“She
snitched
,” Paige says with absolute loathing in her voice. “That means we can never trust her again. I’d be really careful, Violet. I wouldn’t tell her
anything
.”

I take a deep breath.

“Kelly,” I say as calmly as I can, “why did you do it? If you were worried about Kendra, you should’ve come to me and Paige and we could have talked about it and tried to think of something to do.”

“I know it was totally wrong, but I was jealous,” Kelly sobs. “We were at the party and Andrea wouldn’t even look at me, he wouldn’t even say a word to me when I tried to talk to him. He wasn’t rude—it was
worse
. It was like I didn’t even
exist
! All he could do was gawk at her like she was the most beautiful thing in the world—and she doesn’t even
want
him! I know I shouldn’t have done it, I
know.…
”

“Well, that’s, like, totally
pathetic
,” Paige says contemptuously.
“So you just wanted to pull her down ’cause Andrea’s into her? That’s not her fault!”

“She knows that, Paige,” I cut in swiftly. “She
knows
that. She was an idiot and she’s really sorry. And look, Paige, you must have had a sense of what was going on. You two went out together, you must have known Kendra was sneaking off with Luigi.… Don’t you feel a bit bad about that, now we know he’s married? I mean, it’s not fair to dump all the guilt on Kelly!”

I don’t want to tell Paige that we overheard her and Kendra at the castello; that would lead to an explanation of why Kelly and I were hiding behind a sofa, which I certainly don’t want to give. I’m hoping I can point out to Paige that she should have looked after Kendra a bit better, deflect some of the aggression she’s directing at Kelly. But though Paige’s eyes flash at this, it just causes her to go more on the attack.

“But she
told
on Kendra!” Paige’s voice rises, and she puts her hands on her hips. “She
told
Catia where they were so Catia could go down and catch them! Can you
imagine
!”

“Buon giorno, ragazze!”
Elisa says, strolling into the dining room, her legs looking like toothpicks in her impossibly tight white jeans, a smirk as wide as the Cheshire Cat’s on her face.
“Tutto bene?”

“Everything okay?” she’s asking. Ugh, what a cow Elisa is. She was out last night during the huge Luigi-is-married-plus-his-wife-is-pregnant melodrama, but clearly Leonardo or her mum has filled her in. And she’s enjoying,
tremendously, the knowledge of Kendra’s humiliation, and the sight of us all at loggerheads.

Kelly rips the napkin from her face and does her best to look as calm as possible. We all keep blank faces, determined not to give Elisa any more ammunition to fire at us.

“Povera Kendra!”
Elisa says, and then switches into English. “Poor Kendra! She must be very sad today. It is very much a shame. She feels stupid, yes?
Molto sciocca
. Of course, she knows that she is not the first girl. Luigi, he has another stupid foreign girl two years ago.
She
cries a lot too when she finds out that he has a wife—”

Paige stands up, shoving her chair back with a scrape along the floor.

“I’m not staying here to listen to this,” she says. “I’ve got better things to do. Like going to pee.”

“Yes,” I agree, standing up too. “I think I might go for a wee too. Good idea, Paige.”

Elisa isn’t as disconcerted by our deliberate vulgarity as we hoped. She’s homed in on the weak link in our chain, and now she leans in to focus on Kelly, whose face is still damp.

“And you, Kellee?” she asks sweetly. “What will you do—cry some more?”

“Shut up,” I snap, as Kelly does indeed heave a sob at this. But I’m eclipsed by Paige, who loathes Elisa at least as much as I do, and clearly needs a truly satisfactory outlet for her fury at what’s happened to Kendra.

“You,”
she says to Elisa, rounding the table with the whirling-dervish fury of a tornado in wedge heels, “
you
stay away from us, you hear?
All
of us. I’ve totally had it with you sticking your nose in the air and thinking you’re better
than us just because you’re practically anorexic! You’re only dating Luca—if you even
are
—because Violet turned him down! If you say a
word
to any of us that isn’t just hello or goodbye or pass the salt at dinner, so help me, I’ll haul off and smash your skinny ass through the nearest window, don’t think I won’t! Right in front of your mama, too!”