Kissing in Italian (5 page)

“This is the best night ever!”

Andrea and Leo, squashing up opposite us, have their hair plastered over their faces, their eyes shining with the success of their evening plans. I look at them and see that Leo’s arm is around Paige, who’s half on his lap. Andrea is staring at Kendra, who’s ignoring him, chatting with Evan; I give her points, because even with the rivalry she has with Kelly, she’s not using the fact that Andrea prefers her to wind Kelly up.

“Andrea—” Kelly says, and I watch him turn to look at her, his eyes passing over me, not in an unfriendly way,
but simply as if I’m not here. To Andrea and Leo, I’m part of the furniture, just another girl who looks like so many other Italian girls: not different, not special in any way, not a strapping blonde or a black goddess or a redheaded, charmingly freckled Irish girl.

As Andrea decides to push himself off his side of the thermal hot tub and over to Kelly, I reflect that maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed with Luca. He’s the only boy I’ve ever known who looks at me as if I’m the only girl in the world, as if, when he’s with me, he doesn’t even notice anyone else. As if he and I are in a bubble, suspended out of time.

Andrea is hugging Kelly now, whispering in her ear, snuggling up next to her, setting his shoulders against the stone surround of the pool, pulling her familiarly back against him. I know how happy this will make her, that the boy she’s so keen on, has been crushing on since she first saw him, is finally singling her out, showing her attention. I cross my fingers, hoping that it isn’t just to make Kendra jealous, that Andrea has realized now he has no chance with Kendra and is turning his focus to someone who actually likes him back.

But as I glance sideways, I see that Andrea, though stroking Kelly’s arms, is not looking down at her head, nestled below him. His chin is up, his gaze directed to the other side of the pool, where Kendra is chatting with Evan about some people they both know in the States, her skin glowing dark and luminous against the milky water and the white of her bra. Her hair is pulled back into a short ponytail, showing off her strong jaw and full mouth.

Oh dear
, I think feebly.

And just then, Evan, probably sensing that I’m looking his way, turns and grins at me.

“Having a good time, Violet?” he calls.

I nod, and find myself thinking:

Why does it feel so special when someone uses your name? Didn’t some ancient society have a custom that you had a secret name that only the people you really trusted knew, because using it gave people power over you?

If that’s true, and not just something I read in a novel, I really understand it now. There’s something so nice about a boy saying your name. As if he likes you for yourself, what’s inside as well as outside. Not just your boobs and face, but your brain, too
.

Deliberately, I make myself smile back at him.

I’m getting over Luca
, I tell myself.
I have to start somewhere
.

“Oh, my head!” Paige moans, but none of us cares. Not even the littlest bit.

We’re all still waking up slowly, acclimating to the bright daytime after our late night—we didn’t get back from the hot springs till two in the morning—and we all feel a little bit delicate, as if we’re missing a protective layer of skin. Paige always wants the most attention, gets ratty if she isn’t the loudest in the group.
Which is annoying right now
, I think crossly,
as she’s the tallest and the blondest—can’t that be enough for her?

Clearly not.

“Oww!” she tries again, but the three of us keep ignoring her.

Thank goodness we don’t have lessons this morning; it’s Saturday, which means market day in the village, Greve in Chianti. Market day is a huge deal. Greve has a pretty triangular piazza filled with shops, but the prices are way beyond our budgets; plus, they mostly sell stuff girls don’t want to buy. The stores are geared toward older, richer tourists—ceramics, olive-wood bowls and chopping boards, household items.

But the market on Saturday is another thing. It could have been designed especially for teenage girls. Elisa goes down to the village in the Range Rover every Saturday at ten, and we can join if we want, but we got up too late today and had to tumble down the rough path that leads down the hill. It’s like a goat track, narrow and rocky, and it won’t be much fun going back up, but we were still determined not to miss out. Lorries are pulled up around the three sides of the piazza, the stalls folding out from them, metal frames hung to the rafters with cheap, enticing clothes on hangers, and tables covered with secondhand lucky dips or shoes lined up on their boxes. Every week we lose ourselves in the market for a couple of hours, trying things on, working out what we can afford, doing deals like “if we split this, I’ll wear it this week and you can next week.”

Paige shoots toward the hat stall. As always, the only people browsing there are foreigners, Japanese and English; the Americans usually wear baseball caps, and the Italians wouldn’t be caught dead in hats for some reason. Paige is picking up a soft, broad-brimmed straw hat in stripes of white and blue, its crown trimmed in a wide dark-blue satin ribbon; when she plops it over her blond curls, she looks like
Brigitte Bardot in an old film. Even squinting at her through our sunglasses, we have to admit she looks great.

“She’s so lucky, being tall like that,” Kelly says wistfully. “She can carry anything off.”

Pirouetting in the hat, Paige is getting what she wants from the crowd, what we’re too knackered to give her: she’s the focus of all eyes.

“Che bonona,”
says one guy devoutly, which we’ve learned is a compliment paid to girls who aren’t skinny-thin: it means “curvy and beautiful.”

I’m not in the mood for Paige’s antics today. And I’ve stopped spending money on clothes at the market; I’ve discovered something I like much better. I gesture to Kelly to let her know where I’ll be, and weave my way a few stalls down, to a
banchino
where a lady sells art supplies. Sketchpads, pastels and crayons, brushes, tubes of watercolor and oil paint, all kinds of paper … it’s a treasure trove for me. Learning to draw and paint has been a huge revelation since I came to Italy. I thought I wanted to study art history, but more and more, with the art lessons we’re having here, I think I want to do art itself instead. And from the encouragement I’ve been getting from our teacher, Luigi, I honestly think I might have some talent.

The problem, though, is that I’m on one track already; the exams I’ve done, the path I’ve chosen, all lead to a different destination. I can’t believe, talking to Paige and Kendra, how much better the system is in the US. There, you study all sorts of subjects till you’re eighteen, and even when you go to college, you don’t have to choose what you’re going to focus on for at least a year or two. It sounds brilliant. Kelly
and I have grown up in a very different setting, where, at sixteen, you pick three or four subjects to concentrate on, and by eighteen you’ve decided exactly what you want to study at college.

I had no idea there was so much more freedom in the US for what you could study. Every time I think about it, I’m riven with jealousy. It’s so unfair. The choices I made at sixteen have trapped me in a way I never anticipated, and so has the choice my mum made when she sent me to a trendy London private school that didn’t teach anything as unfashionable as formal art lessons. It never occurred to me that I might actually be able to draw, to paint; the girls who studied art at St. Tabby’s were all doing installations, conceptual pieces where they took photographs of one another and scratched them up, performance work where they wandered around the school in tight-fitting bodysuits, striking poses and being really significant. They were all very thin and pretty—to be honest, I think the photos and bodysuits were mostly about showing off how thin they were. We might have visited proper museums, but St. Tabby’s was obsessed with being modern, cutting-edge; it wouldn’t have occurred to the art teacher to give lessons in something as conventional as drawing properly.

Which is what I long to be able to do. I’m determined to ask my mum for art lessons as soon as I get back to London, continuing what I’m learning here with Luigi. But I’m worried that a few months of art lessons won’t be remotely enough to put together a portfolio that will get me into art school.…

“Ciao!”
says the woman behind the stall, smiling at me.
“Bentornata!”

That means “welcome back.” I smile, saying
“Ciao,”
and she continues:

“Posso aiutarti?”

“Sì,”
I answer. She’s asking if she can help me. I point to the pastels.
“Questi—e carta?”

I’m asking, I hope, what paper goes with the pastels. She pulls out a sheaf, and starts to lay them out in front of me in a fan. Her eyes flicker sideways, and her smile deepens as she exclaims:

“Oh! Luigi!”

She bustles around the side of the stall to greet the man beside me, Luigi, our art teacher, kissing him on both cheeks, the way they do in Italy. Luigi calls a
“ciao”
to me in greeting, and the two of them rattle away to each other, much too fast for me to understand. I start pulling out pieces of paper, concentrating on the things I want to try to sketch, plus the budget I’ve allowed myself for today, and I get quite distracted.

By the time I’ve assembled my selection, Kendra is next to me, managing to patter away pretty well in Italian. She’s propped her bum against the table, blocking the view of the stall so the person talking to her can’t be distracted by its contents and has to look straight at her. She’s tilted her head to one side and is playing with a lock of hair, her lips parted as she stares at the man she’s focused on with her huge, dark, slightly slanting eyes.

I wince in a mixture of shock and revulsion. Because it’s
definitely a man, not a boy. The person at whom Kendra is directing the full force of her considerable flirtatious wiles is Luigi.

It makes me incredibly uncomfortable to watch. I realize that, for the first time ever, flirting so openly, Kendra looks needy. Vulnerable.

Luigi is in profile to me. I notice his wide neck, his stocky body, the shirtsleeves rolled up above his elbows, displaying his muscly—and hairy—forearms. Hair sprouts from the open neck of his shirt, between the glinting links of his gold necklace, tight dark curls like the short ringlets that cover his skull closely, and I can even see hair at his neck … eww. Everything about Luigi is adult. Not like the boys we hang out with, boys our own age. Evan’s muscly, but there’s a solidity about Luigi, a confidence that comes with time. He must be well over thirty—double our age.

They’re oblivious to me, and that makes me even more uncomfortable, as I’m so close that I could reach out and touch them both. They’re pretty much the same height—Kendra’s tall, easily as tall as many men here in Italy—which means that as they lean closer to each other, their faces are on the same level. Luigi’s voice is a deep rumble, Kendra’s soft, a tone I haven’t heard from her before. It’s as if she’s speaking quietly to draw him in. And if that’s her goal, it’s working. He shifts, takes a step nearer to her, and as I watch him reach his hand toward her, clearly about to touch her arm, I can’t stand it anymore.

“Kendra!” I say loudly, and I barge sideways, interrupting Luigi’s gesture, catching it on my shoulder and ignoring it completely. “Look what I’m getting!”

She looks dazed. Her eyes are wide and shiny. It takes her a moment to turn her head toward me, and even then there’s another long moment before she blurts out:

“Oh! Hi, Violet! I didn’t see you there.”

Oh, please
, I think, and even in my thoughts my tone is withering.
You knew perfectly well I was here. You mean you forgot all about me because you were so busy making googly eyes at Luigi. And he was so busy perving after you
.

“Are you getting anything?” I ask, still loudly. “I’m going to pay for my stuff, and then we should find Kelly and Paige. So are you getting anything?”

I sound like I’m on an endless loop. But I can’t think of anything else to say; the sight of Luigi about to stroke Kendra’s arm has turned my stomach. I’m babbling from embarrassment.

“Brava, Violetta!”
Luigi says to me, wrenching his gaze away from Kendra with what looks like a major effort, and glancing down at the pile of paper, pastels, and crayons I’ve assembled.
“Ti dai proprio da fare, eh?”

I work through the Italian carefully, translate it as “you’re working hard,” and say
“Sì,”
handing the pile to the stall owner. The trouble is that Luigi is a great teacher, enthusiastic and strict in good balance, and I’m the only student of his who’s really keen. Paige and Kelly dropped out of art classes almost immediately, and, to be honest, I’ve wondered before why Kendra didn’t too; she doesn’t have much talent or much interest. Now it’s hit me like a ton of bricks why she keeps coming to class.

I pay for the art supplies and take the bag, my brain racing. Luigi and Kendra are still standing there looking
at each other. I take a deep breath, link my arm through Kendra’s, and physically pull her into the fray again, joining the stream of people who are flowing down the wide aisle between stalls.

“I hope Paige got that hat!” I observe, loudly again. I’m stuck on one volume setting and can’t get it down. “ ’Cause then it’ll be really easy to spot her!”

I sound like an idiot, but I feel so awkward, icky, confused, that it’s hard to get words out at all: I don’t know how to process what I just saw. It’s with huge relief that I do spot the blue and white brim of Paige’s hat bobbing above the crowd; my arm still twined through Kendra’s, I navigate us toward it. I feel that if I let go of her she’ll slip right back to Luigi.

“Hey!” I say brightly as we reach Paige and Kelly, who are looking at shoes; this stall is too expensive for us, but the stock is amazing. Stacked leather wedges trimmed with suede flowers, fastened with narrow silver and gold straps that wrap around and around the ankle; crazy stiletto heels that would be mad to wear here on the cobblestones but are just ridiculously beautiful.