Kissing in Italian (18 page)

“Yay!” Paige is caroling in my ear, and I jump.

“Evan’s here!” she sings. I keep saying that Paige sings, carols, yodels, and she really does. She can’t actually carry a tune, but the enthusiasm with which she communicates makes her voice go up and down so much that it’s weirdly melodic.

“Here at the palazzo?” I ask, dropping the cue on the table and turning to look at her.

“Here in Venice! Cool, huh? He met his friends and they all decided to come see us! I mean, who doesn’t want to come to Venice?”

“Kelly and Kendra,” I say sarcastically.

“Ha!” She rolls her big brown eyes. “Okay, apart from those losers!
Sooo
they just got off the train and want to meet up.”

“I don’t think Catia’ll be okay with letting them stay here,” I say cautiously. “I mean, it’s not her house. And Evan’s got people with him.”

“No, they booked a hostel online, and they dumped their stuff there already. They just want to go hang in—you know, the main square, where we were today.”

“Piazza San Marco?”

“Yeah! The one with the pigeons! It’s only nine. Ooh, I hope Catia lets us go out and see him!”

“It’s nine-thirty,” I say, following her as she eagerly scampers off to find Catia.

“So what? Everyone in Italy stays up past midnight!” she says unanswerably.

It’s true; in the summer, Italians tend to crash, aka have a siesta, in the hottest hours of the day and then stay out late in the cool evenings. I’ve noticed that in all the cities we’ve visited—Florence, Siena, Venice—tourists hugely outnumber the locals by day, but rarely by night.

Catia, found in one of the smaller sitting rooms reading a very intellectual-looking book, is surprisingly okay with the idea of us going out with Evan.

“He must come here, though, to collect you,” she specifies firmly. “And he must bring you back no later than eleven-thirty. Are you taking the other girls with you?”

It hadn’t even crossed our minds.

“I don’t think they’ll want to come,” I say frankly.

Catia huffs a small laugh.

“If they do,” she says, “you must keep a very strict eye on Kendra.”

She’s wearing glasses, and she lowers them to look at me and Paige in turn. It makes what she’s saying extra-serious.

“I know you both understand
exactly
what I mean,” she says. “I cannot keep her under lock and key, but you are friends of hers, and the last thing you will want is for her to do anything catastrophic with her life. Evan will understand too. He’s a sensible young man. I would not let her go out in the evening without Evan being there, and knowing
precisely
what her situation is.”

We nod so hard our heads nearly come off.

“
Thank
you!” we breathe, overwhelmed with anticipation at being out in the warm Venetian night.

“And don’t order
anything
from the bars on Piazza San Marco,” she advises. “I don’t want to get a phone call from you saying you’re being brought back by the
carabinieri
because you can’t pay your bill. They charge eight euros at Florian’s for a coffee and another eight for the orchestra fee. Per person.”

“Oww,”
Paige says with feeling.

“If Kelly wants to come out with us,” I say firmly as we dash upstairs to get ready, “you have to talk to her. Deal?”

“Oh, okay,” she sighs. “Deal. I was kinda over the not-talking thing anyway. And Kendra won’t care—ever since she got that email, she hasn’t noticed whether anyone else is dead or alive, let alone who’s talking to who.”

Evan and his friends are getting a water-bus to the closest stop to the palazzo, so we probably have fifteen minutes to doll ourselves up. And yes, there’s a curfew of eleven-thirty, but Catia’s always been lax on curfews before. I bet if we’re back around midnight, she won’t make any sort of fuss.

“Kelly!” I say, bursting into our bedroom before I realize the lights are all off.
Honestly, she’s gone to bed by nine-thirty? This is ridiculous
. I turn on the overhead light and say:

“Evan’s in Venice, with his mates! And Catia says we can go to Piazza San Marco with them! Come on, get up! You don’t want to miss this!”

She’s turned away from me and doesn’t stir. There’s a pillow pulled over her head to shut out noise. I heave a deep sigh and contemplate just letting her lie there sulking. Then
my conscience pricks me, reminding me that I forgot to bring her up the bread I promised from dinner, and I stride over to the bed to sit down and coax her up and out. I’m thinking the fact that she’ll be able to get pizza by the slice, or pastries and ice cream from the infinite number of bars in Venice, will be all she needs to convince her to join us. Kelly really likes her food; she didn’t eat much at lunch, and she skipped dinner. She must be starving.

“Kell, don’t be silly,” I say, and reach out to touch her shoulder.

And then I scream. Because my hand goes right through the sheet and into something horribly floppy, as if a serial killer’s somehow got into the Palazzo Giustinian while we were having dinner, slaughtered Kelly, taken out all her bones in the bathtub, and then put her deboned body back into her bed again.

I really have to stop reading those awful crime novels where girls get killed in all sorts of horrible ways.

Jumping up again, I drag back the sheet. Kelly has very cleverly managed to squish her bed pillows, plus the chair cushions, into the shape of a body. And under the pillow I thought was covering her head is a small decorative globe that was on the chest of drawers, giving just the right shape to mold the pillow into looking as if there’s a human skull beneath it.

Very clever, Kelly
.

If I’d come to bed later, I wouldn’t have turned on the main light. I would have sneaked in quietly, switched on my small bedside lamp, got undressed in its soft glow, and
gone to bed. I would have whispered a goodnight, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to be suspicious because she didn’t reply.

I spin around the room looking for clues as to where she’s gone, something,
anything
. I can’t believe she left without saying a word to me. She won’t have texted or emailed because I might have checked my phone or laptop tonight; she’ll have wanted time to get away. I swing all the way around again, having completed three hundred and sixty degrees, till I’m looking at the bed again.

Kelly’s very clever.

An idea strikes me. I rip at the pillows, pulling them off the bed one after another. Sure enough, under the last pillow of all, the one farthest down, is a folded piece of paper with my name on it.

The silly cow! The silly, silly cow!

Absolutely livid with her, I crumple up the paper, throw it at the wall, and dash next door to tell Paige and Kendra that we have an emergency on our hands.

It feels like only a minute later that the door knocker sounds: Evan and his friends are here. Paige dashes downstairs to stop them coming in. We need to shoot out as quickly as we can, not waste time as Evan makes polite conversation with Catia while we’re desperate to get out and start searching for Kelly. Kendra follows: I take an extra, crucial few moments on the laptop before slamming it shut and tumbling down the stairs myself. Catia will just think our hurry is because we’re keen to explore Venice by night.

Besides, her attention’s entirely focused on the possibility of Kendra running away; she isn’t remotely worried about Kelly. Hearing that Kelly’s sleeping off her headache, Catia nods briefly, tells us to stick together—with significant
glances at me, Paige, and Evan—and shepherds us out into the soft, warm Venetian evening.

The atmosphere is completely different after sunset. This is the
passeggiata
, where locals come out after dinner to stroll through the streets, stop at coffee bars, chat, meet up, flirt, fall in love; you hear all these songs about love being in the air, but this is the first time I’ve actually felt it. From the moment we step outside the palazzo—and yes, there is a door to the little street behind it, though a much smaller one than the grand entrance onto the canal—I feel the romance wrapping around us all. The narrow streets, the pretty bridges, the water lapping gently at the stone borders of the canals—in Venice by night, you should be walking hand in hand with someone you love, not sprinting along in a sweaty group to try to rescue a friend from making a really big mistake.

We’re racing to Piazza San Marco: my frenzied researches on the laptop have told me this is the main stop for the airport water-buses. Kelly has a head start of almost two hours, and she might well have managed to get on a water-bus by now, but we have to go there anyway. Someone at the ticket office might remember a lone redheaded English girl buying a one-way ticket for the airport, a girl who looked as if she’d spent the entire day crying.

Of course, I’ve tried to ring her, but her phone’s turned off; it goes straight to voice mail. I’ve left messages, texted her, begging her to ring. But so far, no reply.

“The cool thing,” Evan says to me, striding along, not remotely out of breath, “is that there are signs everywhere to Piazza San Marco—look.”

He points to a corner, where a little plaque with directional arrows tells us which way to go for Piazza San Marco and which for the Rialto.

“As long as you keep to the main drag,” he says, “you can navigate really well. We worked that out already coming from the station.”

“Phew!” I pant, half jogging to keep up with him. “We went everywhere today but we had a guide—I thought we’d get lost a hundred times trying to get to the piazza.”

“If we’re lucky,
she’ll
have got turned around a few times,” he says. “Maybe she isn’t that far ahead of us.”

“I hope so!” I say, grateful to Evan for being so positive.

“Why did she run off like this?” he asks. “She seemed like she was having a good time! Did you girls have a fight?”

Evan’s not an idiot. He hasn’t grown up with Paige without knowing how girls can pull and tear and rip at each other till they can make their victim feel like they’re going insane.

And suddenly, there’s nothing more important to me than Evan knowing I’m not like that. I’m not one of those girls.

“She didn’t fight with me!” I say as fast as my pattering feet. “I even ate all her mussel pasta at lunch so she wouldn’t have to!”

Evan laughs. “That was nice of you.”

He grabs my arm. “Here, this way. Look …”

He’s pointing at another plaque, indicating that San Marco is to our right. We turn and start down the street—well, they’re really lanes, they’re all so narrow—which is lined with illuminated shopwindows filled with glittering glass. Multicolored chandeliers; clear bowls ribboned with
orange and green, filled with fruit, apples, oranges, lemons, all made of beautifully blown glass; more tiny orchestras; miniature animals. Luigi Two explained today a bit about glassblowing, one of Venice’s main art forms (the other one is lace-making). It’s breathtaking to think that each of these pieces was made by a man blowing air into hot glass down a tube. I can’t get my head around it.

“The glass is crazy, isn’t it?” Evan says, reading my mind. “I really want to take something back to the States.”

“What are you going to get?”

“I thought a little guitarist,” he says a bit bashfully. “You know, one of the musicians.”

“Oh, cool!”

He’s still holding my arm, and it’s nice. Not pulling or pushing, not like one of those bossy boyfriends who likes to move their girlfriends around with a hand in the small of their back. Just a light clasp guiding me along because he’s taller and can see the plaques better.

We pass under an arch and emerge into a loggia, a covered walkway with columns: we’re in Piazza San Marco. It opens out in front of us, sparkling gold and bright with lights from the bars flooding out into the square. The orchestra of the Caffè Florian, the marble-tiled, gold-walled bar that Luigi Two told us today has been here for almost three hundred years, is playing under the loggia farther down. If I thought Venice was romantic before, this is enough to make me want to cry. There are some couples waltzing slowly in the piazza, wrapped in each other’s arms, and as we dash past I can’t help staring at them longingly.

Pigeons fly up as we shoot across the piazza; today we saw
kids feeding them from bags of corn, putting the kernels in their palms, even on their heads, so the birds could perch and nibble. It explains why the pigeons don’t move till you practically land on them; they’re tame enough to be fed by hand. But a stampede of large Americans—plus one smaller English girl—tearing across the square sends them all up in a cloud, flying toward the domes of St. Mark’s Basilica on the far side. It’s lit up by night, glowing pale gold, and we all catch our breath at its beauty.

Now it’s me who knows where we’re going, having lugged around here today. I steer us past the big brick bell tower, which, thank heavens, Luigi Two didn’t make us climb. The Grand Canal’s in front of us, the basin that opens up to Giudecca Island and the Lido beyond. A big boat chugs across the lagoon, a brightly lit beacon moving across the dark water: the Lido car ferry, which we saw going back and forth from the beach yesterday.

“Wow,” says Stu, one of Evan’s friends. “This is
unbelievable
.”

“I know,” says his girlfriend, Andi. “It’s
magic
.”

Those few precious minutes I spent scrabbling on the laptop told me that the airport bus line is called Alilaguna. And the main stop is along to the right, on those new, posh-looking piers I spot as we race along the waterfront, past the stalls and the outdoor bars and the people turning to stare at us, because who runs like this in Venice, when you should be strolling arm in arm, eating ice cream and falling in love.…