Kissing in Italian (7 page)

Evan’s expression is comical, his blue eyes stretched as wide as they’ll go as he plucks a string and, in a singsong nursery-rhyme voice, intones:

He throws his hands wide. “See? Not much to work with.”

“At least you don’t have rude stuff that rhymes with you,” Kelly says gloomily. “They called me Smelly Jelly Belly at school for years.”

“And Kendra isn’t that great either. It sort of sounds like bend-ya,” Kendra adds.

I can’t help smiling that Kendra and Kelly are competitive in everything, even down to whose name rhymes with worse stuff.

“Kendra,”
Evan sings, playing a chord,
“I would never bend ya
,

“ ‘Engender’!” Kelly exclaims. “That’s really good!”

I pull myself out of the pool and walk over to a lounger, picking up a towel and wrapping it around myself; I sit on
one side of Evan, Kelly on the other. Even cool-as-a-cucumber Kendra has sat up to watch Evan playing his guitar.

“What about Paige?” I ask, looking over at his sister, the only one uninterested in her brother’s talent. She’s got a moisturizing pack on her hair—her head is wrapped in the special leopard-skin towel she uses when she’s doing a hair treatment—pink headphones on her ears, and a magazine in her hands as she reclines on her lounger.

“Paige goes into a rage when you tell her she’s not yet legal drinking age—”
Evan sings immediately, and Paige, who must have been listening after all, promptly throws her magazine at his head. He ducks easily, and it flies past and lands on the tiles.

“You haven’t done me yet!” Kelly says wistfully, twisting her hair over one shoulder, playing with the ends. She’s got some sun since she’s been here, taking it slowly and carefully after a couple of days where she went bright pink; now her fair skin looks sun-kissed, her freckles standing out prettily across her nose, and she’s been squeezing lemon juice over her red hair to lighten it, which has worked a little. She looks very pretty staring at Evan imploringly. He grins, strums a series of soft chords, and starts to croon:

She’s giggling now.

“Sorry,” Evan says, plucking a final chord. “Turns out even I can’t make smelly into a compliment.”

“Two out of three isn’t bad,” I point out, very impressed with Evan’s skills. He can sketch out a tune really fast, and switch between styles; one moment he’s doing a blues song, then pop, and the one he made up for me was like something from a musical.

As if he’s reading my mind, he echoes, turning to look at me, drawing out the syllables:

“Don’t forget, Vio-let—Dive in!”

This time he ends the line low and gentle, and it isn’t a musical number anymore. It’s almost a love song.

“You mind if I work on that?” he asks, leaning on the guitar, looking at me. “That’s kinda nice. I could do something with that.”

“Oh!” I don’t quite know what to say. “Sure,” I add.

“Ooh! Evan’s writing Violet a love song!” Paige whoops, coming over and retrieving her magazine. “Evan and Violet sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

I expect Evan to look embarrassed, or to tell Paige to shut up, but he just grins again, bending over his guitar, starting to strum it again, quite unaffected by his sister.

I laugh and settle back on the lounger, watching him play, his hands moving with surprising lightness and dexterity on the strings. Kelly is watching him too, and so’s Kendra, who has slipped into the pool and is propped up on the side, her dark limbs gleaming with the water, sunglasses on
her nose; we’re circled around him, enchanted by someone who can make music this easily.

Well
, I admit,
a
boy
who can make music this easily
. Let’s be honest, if it were one of us, we wouldn’t all be gathering around like worshippers at a shrine. And if it were a girl playing, would a bunch of boys be sitting around her? Or would they be trying to grab the guitar from her so they could show off themselves?

That’s not fair, though. Evan isn’t showing off; he’s genuinely enjoying himself. His head ducked over the guitar, his lips moving as he tries out lyrics under his breath, he’s completely unaffected, I can tell; like his sister, he’s very open and outgoing, but unlike Paige, he doesn’t crave attention.

He’s so nice
, I think.
Why can’t I like Evan? Why can’t I feel as excited when I see Evan as I do when I see Luca? It would make my life so much easier!

As if sensing my thoughts, Evan raises his head and looks directly at me, his blue eyes clear and candid. The blond eyelashes glint in the sunshine, tiny gold threads, and his tanned skin creases into fans of equally tiny white lines as he smiles at me.

I like Evan a lot, I realize. And as he bends his head once more, his thick fair hair close to his scalp, I wonder what it would feel like to run my hand over it, whether it would be bristly under my palm, or unexpectedly soft and silky.…

I feel a shiver running down my back, as if someone trickled a few slow, icy drops of water down the beads of my spine, running between my shoulder blades. I wriggle a little; the sensation’s unexpectedly pleasant. I’m still staring at Evan’s bent head, and suddenly I connect the two things.

Oh. Maybe I could like Evan that way after all
.

I’m so absorbed in my thoughts that I haven’t seen the flash of sunlight on metal that means a car is coming up the winding drive, working its way around the switchback bends. I don’t notice the other girls stir, sit up, because a car approaching at this time of day is very likely to contain precious cargo: i.e., at least one boy.

Up this steep hill, without our own transport, and a long, sweaty walk to the village, we’ve quickly got attuned to the rhythms of Villa Barbiano, the times that people come and go. The post lady drops off the mail between twelve and one—we’ve learned not to get excited at the sight of her white Panda chugging up the hill. Catia goes down to the village early, to do the marketing, but after that her jeep stays in its ivy-covered shelter and doesn’t go out unless she’s taking us on an excursion or, occasionally, leaving us in the evening for dinner with a friend. So, in the afternoon, a car might be Elisa, Catia’s unpleasant, skinny daughter, which would be a definite negative.

Or it might be Leonardo. And Leonardo almost always means Andrea, too; they’re like a two-for-one offer.

I only hear the car when the wheels spin loudly, whisking up the gravel of the parking area, set on a terrace below the pool. That means it’s definitely a boy: only boys drive like that, announcing their arrival with a whirl of loose stone on rubber. And the swift, imperative series of honks that follow confirm it. Catia would be furious if Elisa disturbed the afternoon peace by pounding the car horn like that, but her son gets away with much more. Catia may be American,
but she’s fully adapted to the Italian way of parenting, where boys seem to be pampered to an almost limitless extent.

Like Luca with his mother, the principessa
, I reflect.
She fawns on him as if he were already the prince he’ll be when he inherits from his father
.

Then, because I’m not thinking about Luca, I determinedly push that idea away and look up to the terrace of the villa, where a distraction is being offered in the shape of Elisa. She’s leaning over the stone balcony like a modern Juliet, all streaked hair and dangling gold earrings, a huge pair of sunglasses obscuring most of the upper part of her face, her lips pouting as she blows a theatrical kiss to the parking lot, then raises one thin arm to wave, gold bracelets clinking so loudly we can hear them over the soft strumming of Evan’s guitar and the chattering of the crickets.

So it’s not Leonardo or Andrea
, I realize.
Elisa wouldn’t bother to put on a full charm offensive for her brother or his friend
. I turn to glance down at the parking lot just as Elisa yodels:

“O! Ciao, bello! Arrivo!”

“I’m coming,” she’s saying. I realize who she’s calling to just a flash of a second too late; I’ve already turned my head, am gazing at the car that’s pulled up at an angle across the center of the lot, not parked, but waiting to pick up a passenger. The driver’s door is open, and Luca’s leaning on it, elbows propped on the top, in a white linen shirt, his black hair raked back from his brow, sunglasses dangling from his long fingers.

As soon as I catch sight of him, he lifts his head, as if he’s sensing me. Our eyes meet.

Oh no. I can’t do this
.

I get a flash of sapphire, and it’s awful, it’s too intense. How can just a momentary glance do this to me? It’s ridiculous, beyond stupid, and when Luca promptly lifts his sunglasses, slides them onto his nose, and raises his head further, chin tilted up, clearly avoiding my gaze, I’m grateful. I really am. I tell myself so, very firmly.

But then I see him looking at Elisa, raising his hand to wave back to her as she positively dashes along the terrace on her high stacked heels, pale layers of chiffon wafting around her top half, her lower half almost completely visible in her taupe cuffed shorts. She has really good legs, and she knows it: long, slim, bronzed, enviable. Elisa flits across my eyeline and then, mercifully, disappears as she heads down the steps at the end of the terrace. Going to meet Luca.

The other girls are all glancing at me to see how I’m dealing with this. I reach up to my hair, lifting it, squeezing water out of it down my back, and I know that the movement summons Luca’s attention back to me. I can feel his eyes on me now as I move closer to Evan on the lounger, looking at his hands moving on the strings, the typical girl admiring a boy playing a guitar. Evan flashes me a smile and keeps strumming away, quite unaware of the little drama being enacted around him.

“Don’t forget, Vio
-let,” he croons softly. And though I can’t really sing, not properly, I know the tune now, and my head leans in toward his as I join in on the last two words:

“Dive in!”

He finishes on a last, rising chord and lifts his head, our faces close now. The sunshine beats down on us; the blue
water of the swimming pool glints brightly in the heat, the breeze raising tiny ripples on the surface. Evan’s eyes are as clear and blue as the water, with no hidden currents, no unexpected, dangerous undertow. The rosemary and lavender bushes planted around the verge are wafting a lovely, sun-warmed scent, bees buzzing in the lavender. It’s paradise. It
should
be paradise.

In the parking lot below, tires screech. We all jump. Luca must be executing the tightest, sharpest three-point turn in history: the car scrapes, churns, tears up the gravel, and shoots out of the lot and down the drive so fast we wince. It snaps back and forth like Road Runner as he speeds downhill. Only a very good driver could make those switchback turns so fast without crashing—and he’s very lucky he didn’t meet anyone coming up.

“Wow! I guess they have somewhere they really need to be,” Paige observes.

“More like someone to get away from,” Kelly says dryly under her breath, so only I can hear her.

“Whatever,” Kendra says, standing up. “We’ve got art class coming up, Violet.”

“Really?”

I glance up at the sun, still high in the sky; art class doesn’t start till five-thirty, and it can’t even be near five yet.

“I’m going in to change,” Kendra says, pulling her sarong around her, tying it at her slender waist. Slipping her feet into her flip-flops, she pads back to the house, watched by the three of us girls; none of us say a word until she’s well out of earshot.

Then Paige turns back to me and Kelly and says:

“
Riiiiight
. Because it takes nearly an
hour
to get ready for art class.”

“It does if you have a crush the size of Big Ben on the art teacher,” Kelly zings back.

“She isn’t even any good at art!” Paige giggles. “I mean, not like Violet!”

“Violet’s
brilliant
,” Kelly says, very pleased to have found an opportunity to both praise me, her friend and ally, and get in a dig at Kendra, her rival for Brainiest Girl in Villa Barbiano. “Her paintings are
gorgeous
.”

“Oh yeah?” Evan says to me. He’s very good at tuning out girl talk and focusing only on the important information—a skill doubtless acquired from a lifetime of living with Paige. “What do you paint?”

“Still lifes, at the moment,” I say, feeling self-conscious. “But I’d really like to do portraits. We need a life model, though, and Kelly won’t do it and Paige can’t stay still for long enough.”

“I fidget,” Paige says cheerfully.

Kelly ducks her head and doesn’t say anything; she’s too self-conscious about her looks to want them immortalized. Though she’s finding out that curvy girls, in Italy, are considered attractive, she’s still not as slim as she’d like; she’s definitely cutting down on pasta and bread.

“I’ll do it,” Evan offers. “If you want.”

“Oh! Would you?” I say eagerly. “That would be
great
. Luigi said if one of the girls would do it, he’d teach me figure drawing—you could come along to class this afternoon and see if he’ll be okay with starting now.”

“Ha! Evan’s going to take his clothes off, Evan’s going to
take his clothes off!” Paige yodels. “Violet and Kendra are going to draw Evan’s pee-pee!”