Kissing in Italian (19 page)

“There!” I’m almost out of breath, but I point to the sign I recognize from the Internet, the Alilaguna logo, two
wibbly-wobbly blue lines like drunken seagulls on a white background. We run onto the wooden pier and look around frantically for (a) Kelly and (b) the ticket office.

“Kendra, you ask the ticket office about her,” Paige instructs. “You speak Italian best. Stu and Andi, you go with her. The rest of us’ll search around here for Kelly, in case she’s waiting for a boat.”

Evan agrees. “All split up and meet back at the ticket office in ten minutes. That way we’ll stop her if she’s just about to board.”

I nod, catching my breath, and head off to the far side; it’s really confusing to work out which of the stops are for people arriving or people departing. There are three colored lines here, blue, orange, and green, and I didn’t have time to check which one Kelly would want. But because the stop is new and modern, every wall is a single sheet of glass, which means it’s pretty easy to see who’s waiting in the separate areas. I dash around, weaving my way through various groups of people gathered around their suitcases. I want to make sure I’ve covered every single place she could be. I know Kelly didn’t take her suitcase, that poor, beaten-up cheap thing she got from the market in London; it was still under her bed. She walked out with just her handbag, which means she really was in a bad state, because she wouldn’t want to leave her clothes behind.

My heart’s sinking. I don’t see her anywhere. I even nip out onto the stone waterfront again, to see if she went to get something from a bar while waiting, but I doubt she’d have gone far—she wouldn’t have wanted to miss her boat. After
a few minutes searching, I give up, trudging disconsolately back to the ticket office again.

Paige and Evan are returning from unsuccessful searches too. And Kendra, turning away from the window of the ticket office, says:

“She was here maybe a couple of hours ago, buying a ticket. One of the women remembers her, because her eyes were all red—like her hair, she said.”

“A couple of hours!” I feel my heart drop even further. Now it’s roughly on a level with my stomach. “She’ll have had plenty of time to get on a boat then, right?”

Kendra nods.

“I think the blues go every half hour,” she says, “and the oranges every hour—though I might not have got that bit right. They talk really fast. But anyway, there’s no way she isn’t on her way to the airport. She could easily be there by now.”

“Oh
no
,” I sigh, though it was only to be expected. Kelly might have been in an awful emotional state, but she’s practical, efficient, and smart; she found her way here, she bought a ticket, she would definitely have boarded a boat.

“Are there flights out tonight?” asks Andi. “She’s going to London, right? Stu, check to see if there are flights from Venice to London.”

Stu thumbs at his phone, and announces:

“There’s a British Airways that leaves at eleven-twenty-five. Hate to say it, but if she doesn’t have luggage to check in, she could make it.”

“Kelly doesn’t have enough money for British Airways,” I say quickly. “How much is it?”

“Uh—three hundred euros, give or take,” he says.

“Oh, no way could she afford that!” I say.

Paige says with brutal frankness, “That’s a point, Violet—how could she buy a plane ticket at all?”

“She’s got a prepaid card for emergencies,” I say, “but I don’t know how much is on it. Not
that
much, I’m sure.”

“The question is,” Evan says, “should someone get on a boat for the airport? By the time we got there she could be checked into a flight.”

“A water taxi would be a lot faster,” Paige says. “But that’d cost a fortune.”

There’s no question among any of us that we want to get Kelly back if we possibly can. For which I am hugely grateful.

I haven’t had to muster any arguments about not letting her quit, because her school and community did a ton of fund-raising to pay for this opportunity so that it would give her a more level playing field in her competition with much more privileged students for a place at Cambridge, where she wants to go to university and make her community proud.

I haven’t had to say that I’m scared that if she leaves, all her dreams will be lost forever. That precisely because she doesn’t have the advantages of money and class that we other three girls possess, this failure to stick it out will haunt her for the rest of her life. She probably won’t even apply to Cambridge, and if she does, she won’t have the confidence to impress her interviewers enough for them to accept her. She won’t have the career of an art historian, which has been a dream that’s blossomed during this visit to Italy. And if she loses her dreams, she’ll be lost herself.

I don’t know how much of this anyone else but me understands. But we’re all teenagers—or just-stopped-being-teenagers, in Evan, Stu, and Andi’s cases—bonding together to protect one of our own. Stopping her running away after a silly fight. Making sure, at the very least, that she has time to think about what she’s doing, not just throwing this opportunity away in a hysterical impulse.

“Can you pay for a water taxi with a credit card?” Kendra asks.

“You must be able to,” I say. “It’s got to cost at least a hundred euros—maybe even double that. Not everyone has that much cash on them. But I don’t have a credit card.”

“
I
do,” Kendra says, fishing in her bag. “Come on. Let’s go find a taxi rank.”

I’m so shocked that all I can do is shake my head back and forth slowly.

“Kendra,”
I breathe. “I don’t
believe
it.”

“What?” she says, not meeting my eyes. “My mom gave me a card for emergencies too. This is one.”

“But she snitched on you!” Paige, very annoyingly, exclaims.

“I don’t like to think where I’d be right now if she hadn’t,” Kendra says soberly. “She kind of did me a favor, in a backhanded way.”

“Really?”
Paige gasps. The wind is rising on the lagoon, and a gust blows through our hair, the wind scented with kelp, fresh and salty.

“I just checked Luigi out on Facebook,” Kendra tells her sadly. “I looked at photos of him with his wife and little girl. She’s really cute. And you can tell his wife’s pregnant.
There’s a photo of them all together at a friend’s wedding, just last week. Hugging and kissing. When he was telling me he loved me and I was the only one.” She swallows hard, tears coming to her eyes. “I would have—I
know
I would have—” She catches herself. “
Anyway
, let’s go get Kelly! She did the right thing for the wrong reason: I’ll do the right thing for the right reason. Where’s the damn rank?”

I can’t help grinning at Kendra’s pompous words, her need to be superior to Kelly, even in a crisis: but I wouldn’t dream of pointing that out to her.

“There’s a taxi pulling in,” Andi says quickly, turning away from Kendra, giving her time to stifle her tears. Andi’s pointing to a sleek pale wooden boat visible through the glass walls. It’s turning, backing up to a pier just before a low stone bridge. “Can we grab that? Do you just, like, hail them like a cab?”

“Worth a try!” I say. “Come on!”

Grabbing Kendra’s hand, I dash out of the water-bus stop and along the waterfront. The taxi is gliding smoothly in reverse, docking at the pier.

“Let’s just hope it isn’t picking people up,” I say. “But there’s no one waiting, is there?”

“No, it’s dropping off—there’re people in the cabin,” Kendra says as dark shapes emerge onto the steps of the boat, one of them pulling money out of his pocket for the driver.

“Great! Kendra, thank you
so
much—”

We’re on the taxi pier now, and I pull up, waiting for the previous passengers to disembark, but my heart’s racing, frantic to jump on board and get going.

They’re stepping onto the pier now, a man helping a
woman off, putting his arm around her as they walk toward us. The light’s behind them, so I can’t see anything but their shapes; I have a brief rush of envy, another happy couple in Venice, just come off a romantic water taxi ride.…

And then I shriek, loudly. Kendra echoes me a second later.

Because the people walking toward us, the girl leaning heavily on the boy’s arm, are the last two people in the world I expected to see.

It’s Kelly. And even more shockingly, Luca.

It’s awful to admit, but the first emotion I feel on seeing the two of them is rabid, uncontrolled jealousy. Luca, so close to Kelly, his arm around her, taking some of her weight; Kelly, leaning on him like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel too fragile to walk on her own, looking up at him worshippingly as he speaks softly to her. So absorbed in each other that they haven’t even noticed us yet.

It should be me beside him!
I think with raging envy.
If he’s going to put an arm around a girl, ride with her in a water taxi, walk through Venice with her, it should be me!

They’re practically on top of us now. Luca looks up, sees us, and stops dead. For a brief moment he stares at me, and,
taken completely by surprise, without a chance to compose his usual cynical, careless expression, I can see his true emotions. He’s looking at me with so much longing in his blue eyes that if this were the end of a romantic film I would be tearing across the few feet of pier that separate us, throwing myself into his arms, knowing that they would lock tightly around me and his mouth would come down on mine.

I know then that my attraction to Evan, nice, down-to-earth Evan, is nothing compared to what I feel for Luca. Evan’s come up behind us, towering over me, solid and secure. I must be the biggest idiot in the world to prefer Luca, sarcastic, shrugging, dismissive, moody Luca, to sweet, even-tempered Evan. But I can’t help it. I learn in that moment that you can be attracted to more than one boy at a time, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Not if, when you look into the eyes of the boy who means the world to you, you know with absolute certainty that he’s the one.

Luca is the one. And from the way he’s gazing at me, I know with equal certainty that he feels the same. That I’m the one for him, as much as he is for me.

But life isn’t a romantic film, as I’ve learned this summer with horrible force. Kendra, standing beside me, has had to absorb the same lesson. Both of our Italian romances have crashed us hard into brick walls; we’re bruised, shaken, battered, having found out the hard way that we’re characters in something a lot more gritty and realistic than a simple love story.

I can’t run to Luca, throw myself into his arms. And still, the jealousy that’s surging up in me makes me want to grab
hold of Kelly and physically pull her away from Luca. Falling for someone turns out to be not romantic at all. It’s raw and primitive and completely illogical.

Luca and I can’t say a word: we’re staring at each other, tongue-tied. It’s Kendra who exclaims:

“Kelly! I’m so glad you came back!” so sincerely that Kelly promptly bursts into tears.

“Madonna,”
Luca drawls, recovering his usual worldly-wise pose. “I spend such a long time making her calm, and now you make her cry all over again.
Grazie tante
.”

“Kelly!” Paige, thundering up behind us, crashes past me and Kendra, throwing herself on Kelly. “Yay! You came back! OMG, we were
soo
worried! Kendra was going to pay for a taxi to the airport to try to find you!”

“Really?” Kelly sobs. “Really, she was?”

“Yes!” Paige hugs her. “It’s all okay. Bygones are gone. That’s not right, is it? Anyway, you’re back! Hooray!”

I still can’t speak. Seeing Luca like this is like something slammed into my chest. I didn’t know if I would ever see him again; if bringing us to Venice was to keep me away from the di Vesperi family. For all I knew, Catia would make sure we didn’t ever go back to Villa Barbiano. I had done my best to convince myself that we would never meet again, to tell myself I was okay with it.

And now I’m faced with the fact that I’ve been lying to myself. I wasn’t okay with it at all.

It’s Kendra who asks him bluntly:

“What
happened
? Why are you here?”

“I was at the airport,” he says. “I check in, and I go to
get a coffee, and I see Kellee by the wall, crying, and I ask what’s wrong. And she says she wants to go home but she doesn’t have the money, it costs more than she thought. So I buy her a coffee and we sit down and talk, and I say maybe it is better to go back and finish what she has begun, here in Italy. That she should stay in Venice, one of the most beautiful places in the world. And that girls often fight—
che vuoi, è normale.
”

Kelly raises her blotchy face from Paige’s shoulder.

“He said at least Elisa isn’t here to be mean to us,” she says, sniffing hard. “And that should cheer me up a bit.”

“Hah!” Kendra, beside me, starts to laugh. So does Paige. I can’t, but the knot in my chest loosens until I can breathe properly again. I didn’t realize it, but I must have been taking really short, shallow breaths.

Luca knows what Elisa’s like. That means he can’t be dating her
.

It doesn’t leave us any better off, though. I’m a dog in the manger. I can’t have him myself but I don’t want anyone else to have him either.

Wow. The more I learn about myself, the more selfish I turn out to be
.

The wind is stronger now, the breeze ruffling all our hair. The taxi boat is pulling away, and the rumble of its engine, the slap of the water against the wooden poles of the pier, briefly drown out whatever any of us might say. I close my eyes for a moment, inhaling the salty air; I wish suddenly that when I opened them again, I’d be alone, the pier stretching out in front of me, and that I could walk to the end of it, sit down, dangle my legs over the lagoon, and
just be still and quiet, listening to the waves. Black water and black night.

So much for wishes. I’m surrounded by people. We’re all turning now, walking back to land, with Paige still cuddling Kelly; I’m glad, because no better proof could be provided that Kelly has been forgiven.