Kissing in Italian (16 page)

Sometimes I think Paige is actually a lot cleverer than she seems; she’s doing a brilliant job of distracting me from the serious talk I’m trying to have with her.

“Paige!”
I yell loudly, casting around me for a way to make her listen. I glance back to see if Kelly and Kendra have heard me shouting, and I see Kendra still lying there, slumped on her lounger, unmoving.

“You don’t need to shout,” she says. “I’m right here. Oh, look at those cute kids!”

“Look at
Kendra
,” I say strongly. “Just look at her, okay? Does she look like she’s all right?”

Paige glances back for a second.

“Well, of course she’s not all right,” she says, sounding a bit more sensible. “She’s all messed up. You should hear what that creep told her. He was in love, she was the only one he’d ever felt like this about, she was the most beautiful girl in the world—
you
know.”

I don’t, actually. No boy has ever said those words to me. But I nod as if one has.

“I mean, she had
no
idea,” Paige continues. “None at all. And it was bad enough finding out, but like that?”

She doesn’t need to lower her voice; the wash of the waves, the happy chattering of the Italians all around us, the seagulls squawking overhead, means we can talk normally, which is a real relief.

“Did they—um—how far did they—um, you know, did they actually—” I’m asking this completely out of curiosity, it’s none of my business, but Paige doesn’t snub me for it.

“No,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Could you
imagine
? But they would’ve. He kept pushing for it. And she sort of wanted to.”

“Yuck,”
I say reflexively, thinking of hairy old Luigi. “Right,” she agrees.

I go in for the kill now that we’re on the same page.

“She must be in pieces,” I say. “Which is exactly why I’m asking you to start talking to Kelly. Don’t you see, it’s just drawing things out for Kendra? If she’s holding on to a grudge like this, and you’re egging her on, she won’t get over this whole Luigi thing. She needs to recover, not dwell on it.”

Paige shoots me an unexpectedly sharp look.

“You sound like someone on daytime TV,” she says. “Next you’ll be telling me she needs closure.”

Paige
, I decide in that moment,
is clever. Not academic-clever, but she’s smart. I should be careful not to underestimate her. I think this whole bouncy-blonde thing is an act she puts on to get what she wants
.

“Well,
doesn’t
she need closure?” I ask. “I’m not saying it won’t take time. Probably loads of time. But rubbing in what Kelly did over and over again isn’t going to help Kendra in the long run.”

“It’s sort of helping in the short run, though,” Paige observes, pinning up a lock of hair that’s fallen down.

Paige is turning out to be a really worthy adversary. I’d be impressed if it weren’t so frustrating. She turns to look at me face-on. Suddenly I feel that we’re rival generals, armies massed behind us, negotiating a peace treaty.

“Kelly doesn’t have all your advantages,” I say, my last card to play. “She’s poor, she’s not posh, and she doesn’t have your confidence. I’m not defending what she did, but you can understand, a bit, how she’d feel jealous of Kendra with all the boys after her.”

“Andrea never would have looked at her, whether Kendra was around or not,” Paige says with devastating frankness.

“So have a bit of compassion, okay? It was really hard for Kelly, crushing on someone she couldn’t have, watching him pretty much throw himself at Kendra’s feet. And Kendra’s so gorgeous,” I say. “Think about it.”

I hope I’ve wrestled Paige to a draw, at least. But I sense that I shouldn’t push this any more.

“He hasn’t been in touch with her,” Paige says, changing the subject a little, signaling that the Kelly subject is no longer up for discussion. “Not at all.”

I know she means Luigi and Kendra.

“Isn’t that a good thing?” I ask, a little confused. “Wouldn’t it be worse if he was still in touch with her?”

“Well,
nothing
’s pretty harsh,” Paige says, sighing. “She got really beaten up by this. Not even a ‘goodbye, I’m so sorry, I had real feelings for you,’ you know?
Nothing
’s basically ‘I was just using you to have a good time.’ Which makes her feel extra stupid.”

I nod. I feel really sorry for Kendra, but what can I say? Like Luigi, I have no words.

I need to move; I’m feeling restless. Standing up, I promptly scream as what feels like a pound of wet sand falls out of my bikini bottoms. It must have worked itself in there while we were sitting in the sea.

“Hahahaha!” Paige cracks up laughing. “It looks like you pooed yourself!”

“Yes, thanks, Paige—”

“It really does! It totally looks like you—”

“
Thanks
, I think we all get the point!”

I dash into the sea as fast as I can, more gobs of wet sand tumbling down my legs, looking and feeling almost exactly like—well, like poo. When I’m waist-deep, I pull the bottoms down and shake and scrape out a big handful of sand. Without any hesitation, I throw it directly at Paige. To my great satisfaction, it lands bang in her cleavage.

“Hey! You have poo on your boobs!” I say happily.

“Aah!”

Taking this in the spirit in which it’s meant, Paige scoops it out and hurls it back at me. I jump back, giggling, as she crab walks deeper into the sea, stands up, and starts fishing handfuls of sand out of her own bottoms to throw at me. We’re both laughing now, not aiming to hurt or hit the other one in the face, just letting off steam, and it feels
wonderful. The stress, the tension, the perpetual worrying about who I am fade away; I realize that negotiating with Paige on Kelly’s behalf has helped too.

Remember this
, I tell myself.
Looking after other people. Visiting somewhere new. Splashing around in the sea, throwing wet sand at another girl’s boobs as you both scream with laughter. These are all really good ways to distract yourself from freaking out about things you can’t do anything about
.

Up above, on his tower, the lifeguard’s standing up and looking down at us, hands on his hips. Laughing too.

“Vai bionda!”
he’s calling. “Go blondie!”

Paige hears it too, and understands—she’s called
“bionda”
here so much it might as well be her name. Turning around, she waves at him flirtatiously, which distracts her enough that I can bend down into the waves, grab a fresh handful of wet sand, and chuck it so it splatters all over her back. She screams, the lifeguard laughs harder, and people look in our direction, Paige hamming it up hugely, loving the attention. Boys start drifting over; she’s a magnet, and she adores it.

But on their loungers, Kendra and Kelly haven’t moved. They’re still lying down, showing no signs of coming to join us. Our once-happy group has splintered in all sorts of ways. But at least Paige and I are enjoying ourselves while Kendra and Kelly slump depressively in their own separate misery bubbles.

Please don’t let this last
, I pray.
Please let everyone cheer up. I don’t have the energy to make Kelly feel better—it’s all I can do to put a smile on my own face
.

“Ciao, ragazzi!”
Paige is saying to a couple of smooth-skinned,
darkly tanned boys who’ve got up the courage to approach her.

“Ciao, bella!”
one says back eagerly.

Oh
, I think wistfully,
if we could all be as light and easygoing as Paige, the world would be a much happier place!
Paige wouldn’t have thought twice about it if she’d spotted a portrait that looked just like her in a museum! She’d have said “Cool,” taken a photo, made it her Facebook profile for a few weeks, and then forgotten about it completely. She’s not only the queen of this beach, she’s the queen of living in the moment, not worrying about things she can’t control.

That’s what you should be doing, Violet
, I tell myself.
Live in the moment, okay? Stop looking over at your phone on the lounger, wondering if Mum’s about to ring or text. You’re in Venice on the beach in the summer sunshine! Enjoy it!

Paige and her new friends are throwing around a big stripy ball, the boys’ lean bodies jumping and twisting in the air like slim brown dolphins, Paige’s boobs jiggling in a way the boys doubtless intended when they produced the ball. The lifeguard’s attention is so focused on the contents of her bikini top that a whole family could be eaten by sharks, screaming for help, without his having the faintest idea.

Live in the moment
.

“Hey,” I yell. “Chuck it to me!”

And I run up the wet sand toward them.

Catia specified two things we absolutely had to bring to Venice—a swimsuit and sensible shoes, because we’d be doing a lot of walking. But you don’t realize how much that’s truly going to entail in a city where, most of the time, walking is literally your only option. The water-buses actually only go down the Grand Canal; all the other canals are too narrow, have bridges too low, for them to pass. The taxis are expensive, and not practical for nipping around town. You can’t bicycle—there are way too many bridges. You absolutely, positively have to walk, and often you have to walk extra far because of the difficulties of getting over the canals at the right place. The buses zigzag back and forth, so you can use those, and they also have these cool crossings
with gondolas called
traghetti
; if you need to cross the Grand Canal between bridges, there are little piers at which you wait until a group of you has built up. Then a scruffy gondolier—not in the full stripy T-shirt, black trousers, and straw hat—will hand you into the gondola, in which you stand up, balancing, as he poles you over to the other side. The trip itself barely takes a minute, but we love it; we’d do it again and again if it didn’t cost a euro per person each time.

We also like it, to be honest, because it involves standing still. Yesterday by the beach was blissful relaxation; today has been nonstop rushing. Catia’s hired a local guide to whisk us around, and, I suspect, instructed him to tire us out so thoroughly that we wouldn’t have much energy for sneaking off with lifeguards, boys from the Lido, or art teachers. Certainly, though the guide’s a man, Catia has picked one who won’t be any temptation to a group of single teenage girls. He’s a skinny, hollow-chested academic type who wears a sweater and tweed jacket even in this hot weather.

It’s just really unfortunate that he’s also called Luigi. Every time Catia says his name, Kendra flinches.

“You’d think she could’ve found someone with a different name,” Kelly mutters to me as Luigi Two bundles us briskly over the wooden bridge in front of the Accademia museum.

I nod emphatically. “This is
not
helping,” I agree.

The trouble is that as long as Kendra’s in a miserable, depressive slump, Paige will keep punishing Kelly by freezing her out. I don’t actually think Kendra’s consciously sending Kelly to Coventry anymore; I think she’s so down now that
she barely has a word to say to anyone. Kendra’s initial anger has all ebbed away, leaving almost nothing. She’s completely withdrawn, and so is Kelly: Kendra in grief, Kelly in guilt. Paige and I are effectively dragging around two millstones, and it’s totally knackering.

We do the Accademia and Ca’ Rezzonico, two stunning museums close to each other on the same side of the Grand Canal, so rich and lavish and breathtaking that we’re already done for the day after seeing their glories. But it’s only lunchtime, and Luigi Two makes us walk for ages down a series of narrow, crowded, hot streets, buildings rising high on either side so you’d have to tilt your head right back to see the sky, past an endless series of restaurants and pizza places where we’d be more than happy to get some food; but no, Luigi Two has a destination in mind, which turns out to be the fish market.

It’s open-air, stone colonnades and pillars holding up a high vaulted ceiling, on a bend in the canal; beyond it, boats ply up and down, people surge on and off buses at a stop, the sun beats down, making the wide ribbon of canal water glisten dazzlingly. What’s particularly amazing is that the market is surrounded by wine bars, their wooden frontages looking hundreds of years old, their big windows wide open as people gather inside and out, gossiping and drinking as the stallholders pack up the last bits of fish, seagulls clustering as thickly as the wine-bar patrons, cawing for scraps of fish gut.

Maybe the most amazing thing is how nice the fish smells. Not pongy at all: it’s like seawater, salty and clean and fresh. “It’s not exactly Birds Eye fish fingers, is it?” Kelly says,
jolted out of her silence by the sight of a whole crate of squid, white and violet with purple tentacles, arranged in overlapping rows.

“This is gross! But kind of interesting,” Paige comments, which is actually quite positive for Paige looking at a lot of raw fish.

As we walk by one stall, a guy behind it slices off a piece of bright-orange salmon, squeezes a lemon over it, and eats it just like that. Kelly gasps.

“Sushi!” Paige says, giving him a thumbs-up. “Ooh! Can we have sushi for lunch? I
looove
—”

“Sushi is not typical Italian,” Catia says, shaking her head. “Luigi is taking us to a typical Venetian lunch.”

It’s lucky we’re tired and hungry, as typical Venetian food is pretty challenging. Shrimp fried in batter for a starter sounds nice, until you hear that it’s been chilled and served in a vinegar and sugar sauce with raisins and onions. I quite like it, but it takes some getting used to. And when the pasta course comes out—a huge, heaping plate of spaghetti with mussels—Kelly goes pale.

“This is the specialty of the trattoria,” Luigi Two announces. “
Spaghetti con cozze e parmigiano
. There is parmesan cheese also on the pasta. It is very unusual and interesting.”

“Unusual and interesting” might be okay in a modern art museum
, I think,
but not for food! We’re teenage girls—doesn’t he realize we’d much rather have pizza?