A Semester Abroad (24 page)

I bent to kiss him and pull the blanket around him as he laughed.

“Okay,
bella, buona notte
.”

“
Buona notte
,” I said. I went into my own room and bed.

I couldn’t sleep right away. My room felt stuffy. I opened my window. I changed my T-shirt to a tank top and climbed back into bed. My legs felt hot. I tossed a bit in my sheets, I kicked off the blanket, then decided I wanted it around me.

In Michelle’s room, Duccio and Michelle were having sex.

I had not felt this feeling in a while for anyone but Jonas. And I wasn’t feeling it for Gaetano, necessarily, but I was feeling it. Restless. In heat. And it was Gaetano who just happened to be in the next room. The walls were thin. There was something happening inside me. A want I would like to satisfy. But I couldn’t, not with Gaetano.

But what if I crept in there? What would his face look like when I pulled the sheet back? I wondered if his chest was as tan as his face. It could be so quick. We would both feel good.

But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do something like that and not experience the repercussions. I worked so hard to be his friend. I couldn’t fuck it up. Not for stupid selfish reasons.

I forced myself to sleep.

When I woke in the morning, my thoughts surprised me. I was glad I didn’t do anything but kept wondering why I wanted to in the first place.

Gaetano smoked three cigarettes and drank two espressos before he really opened his eyes. He got another espresso as we walked to his bus stop. He stuck one hand in his pocket and gestured dramatically with his cigarette. I knew that I made the right choice going to sleep. I couldn’t deal with any awkwardness. He kissed me goodbye at the bus stop and got on his bus. Then I got on mine to Florence.

When Olivia opened the door, her hair was a choppy mess. She had been letting it grow out of her bob, but now it was kind of long in some parts and short in others. There was no rhyme or reason to her hair. It was like someone just randomly clipped off sections.

“Don’t say a word about it,” she said, as I followed her back to her room. I couldn’t stop looking at it. “I thought I was going to a salon, but it was apparently the butcher shop. I was saying the right words.
No
is pretty universal, but they did what they wanted. I believe it’s anti-American sentiment.”

“It’s not too bad,” I lied. “You should see what they did to Lucy’s hair.”

Lucy got her hair chopped at a beauty parlor in Siena. Like most of the girls in my group who got their hair cut, she was horrified and starting wearing a baseball cap. This made her stand out even more. A month earlier, I had let Michelle cautiously cut off about an inch of my hair.

“Let’s never talk about it again, okay?” Olivia looked me in the eye. “And whatever you do, don’t take any pictures.”

“
Va bene
.”

The family that lived in the house was out, not that Suzie and Olivia really socialized with them that much. There was a tiny bathroom attached to their tiny bedroom so they were pretty self-sufficient. There was a whole side of the apartment that they had never seen.

“I thought we’d go to the Medici gardens,” Olivia suggested.

“Great.” I said. “I’m doing my oral report on the Medicis.”

“So is everyone on my group,” Olivia said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, it’s that, Goitto or the Etruscans.”

“I guess that makes sense. Where’s Suzie?’

“In the shower,” Olivia said looking at her watch. “She’s been in there forever.”

She was crying. I knew it. I pictured Suzie sitting naked on the tiny ledge of their skinny shower. Her open mouth turned up into the thin stream of water, so that Olivia wouldn’t hear her sobbing through the wall.

“How is she?” I asked. I already knew the answer.

“Shitty.” Olivia eyed the bathroom door and dropped her voice. “Did you ever meet that girl Jessica?”

Jessica? I remembered thick black eye-liner, husky voice, hippy shirts, and cigarettes. One of many faces I’d been introduced to. “Yeah.”

“He was cheating with her. Jessica had her friend Deb tell Suzie. He didn’t even deny it. It turns out everyone knew. The fucking assholes.”

“Did you know?” I asked.

“I wish I did.”

“It’s better that you didn’t,” I said. I heard the shower stop in the bathroom. I whispered. “What could you have done? What would you have?”

“I know, but we always thought, you know–” She didn’t finish because Suzie opened the bathroom door. She smiled at me. If you weren’t looking for anything, you might not have noticed her red eyes and she would be as pretty as ever.

“Hey, Gabriella, sorry I’m taking so long. I’m a spaz today. I’ve still got to blow dry my hair.”

“No problem, take your time.” Suzie shut the door again. We heard the low hum of the blow dryer. Olivia looked at me and shook her head.

“Anyway, I’m sorry about last night,” Olivia said, getting up to turn on the stereo. It was some San Remo mix with all the songs we heard the Italians singing in the bars. “I didn’t mean to dis you.”

“No problem. I wished I had a phone.”

“I thought about calling Gaetano, but I figured he was already with you, his
tesoro
.” I nodded and sort of smiled. Olivia wrinkled her brows. “What?”

“What?” I asked.

“Your face. You’re making a weird face.”

“Nothing, it’s just, I was just thinking.” I realized I was not going to get out of explaining this. “I felt kind of strange last night.”

“Oh, my God, you didn’t! Did you and Gaetano hook up?”

“No, no, no nothing like that. Shh,” I looked toward the bathroom door. “I just felt kind of strange. He slept in Lisa’s room. I guess I was just feeling kind of–”

“What?’

“But I didn’t do anything.” I protested.

“What?” Olivia was getting angry now.

“I felt kind of ... I don’t know. I believe the word is horny.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Listen, I didn’t do anything.” But it was too late. Olivia was thrilled by this. She was dancing around the room. She pointed a little finger in the air and shook it at me. I picked up one of her pillows and swatted it at her. I yelled. “Nothing happened!
Niente.
”

Then Suzie opened the door and we stopped laughing. For some reason, we didn’t want to be too happy. It might have hurt her. She looked good. She blew her curly hair out straight, which was quite a feat with the cheap, low power blow dryers we all bought at Upim department stores.

“So are we ready or what?” Her voice sounded different, deeper. Olivia and I jumped up and put on the lightweight denim jackets we bought at the
mercato
.

We stopped at an
alimentari
on the way to the garden to pick up bread, cheese and pesto for a picnic. I knew parts of Firenze; I had a general sense of direction even though I was usually following Olivia around. That afternoon, I knew enough to see that Olivia chose the long route to the garden. Her path was farthest away from where Kurt lived.

After we got back from the gardens and some shopping, Suzie decided that she didn’t want to come out with us that night. We tried like hell to get her to come, but she wouldn’t. And she yelled at us when we offered to stay with her.

“Look, I just want to be alone, okay. I don’t need a babysitter. I’m just going to go to bed. I didn’t sleep that well last night, you know.”

And so Olivia and I reluctantly went back to the Mexican restaurant where we ate tacos with fontina cheese and listened to obnoxious Americans screaming over the music. Then we went to an Irish bar where we cursed all men over beer after beer.

I really wasn’t supposed to stay on the floor of their tiny room, but Olivia snuck me in. We were quiet when we went into the room. We didn’t turn on any lights. We slipped off our clothes in the darkness, and I wrapped Olivia’s extra blanket around myself on the floor.

When I heard Suzie’s uneven breath, I knew that we made the right choice not turning the lights on. In the darkness, Suzie was crying.

Finally, winter completely broke in Siena. It was spring, not just a random warm day here and there.
Primavera
. I felt my body open a bit. I no longer had to brace myself and hunch over in the cold on the way to school. The first morning I felt this, I was surprised by it. Like a flower I thought, then translating,
come un fiore
. My posture improved; my shoulders became less stiff.

“You are taller,” Gaetano said as we walked
in giro
.

With the new warmth, the town became full. Everywhere I turned there were groups of tourists filling the streets from every nation. Usually a woman holding an umbrella high above her head led them around.

“You’re kind of like one of those umbrella women,” I said to Olivia one afternoon as she led me around Firenze. I had blown off classes once again. The tourists had shown up in force there, too. I suspected spring was the time they were all over the country.

English was the common language spoken by all of these people. I felt cursed to speak such a cheap language. The most amazing part of the influx was that all of the shopkeepers in Siena, who looked at me with such awful puzzled expressions when I first arrived, now seemed to be able to communicate in English with the deep-pocketed tourists. Where was this knowledge when I stumbled over ordering bread?

I was offended when I went into a bar by the church of Santa Caterina one day and the man said “may I help you?” instead of “
dimmi.
” Granted, it wasn’t a place I frequented, but I expected to be spoken to in Italian. I answered in the most formal Italian, enunciating everything I could as I ordered a cappuccino.

“If I wanted people to speak English to me, I would still be wearing my sneakers,” I complained to Olivia who was, as usual, three paces ahead.

“Now you know what it’s like here in Florence,” Olivia said without much sympathy. “You’re lucky they spoke Italian to you for this long.”

The warm weather was coming just in time for Kaitlin on her spring break. She wanted to see Tuscany the way I saw Paris. I was hoping to introduce her to Olivia, but Olivia was also going on her spring break. Olivia and Suzie would travel down the east coast of Italy and catch a ferry to some Greek islands. It sounded like fun to me, and I almost wished that Kaitlin and I could go with them, but I also wanted to show Kaitlin Siena.

Olivia wasn’t sure she wanted to go with Suzie. She helped Suzie plan this trip a couple of months earlier. And even though she researched all the hostels and locations, she felt like what she was–a replacement.

“You could stay here and meet Kaitlin. I think you’d like her,” I said. I wasn’t sure if this was true one way or the other, but I wanted it to be.

“Or you guys could come with us. It would be better for me to have women who weren’t depressive around.” I smiled, happy to not be considered the depressive one for once.

“I’d love to go, but I promised to show Kaitlin Siena and besides, we’re going to take a couple of days to go to the coastal towns, Cinque Terre. I’m not actually on my spring break, remember?”

Olivia nodded. It was half-hearted. We all sort of believed that school was important, but the traveling was even more educational. Even Arturo turned a blind eye to absences from his culture class when we could prove we had been exploring other cities and not just behaving like hungover Americans.

“Have you talked to Kaitlin yet?” Olivia asked. “About the summer?”

“No, but I will,” I said. “I’ll talk to her this week when she comes down.”

From the time that Kaitlin decided she was going to Paris, she wanted to railroad and backpack around Europe after classes were done. When I chose Siena, we agreed that we would do it together. Suzie and Olivia developed a similar plan early in their roommate history, but since then Olivia feared that it wasn’t going to happen. First she thought that Suzie would throw her over to travel with Kurt. Now she was pretty certain that Suzie was going to go home as soon as classes were done. I didn’t want to leave her in a bind and was hoping that three of us could travel together. While Kaitlin and I hadn’t made any concrete plans other than buying our Eurail pass, Olivia had specific ideas about what she wanted to see.

“You sure?” she asked, meeting my eye. “I don’t want to create any drama.”

“No drama,” I said, trying to sound emphatic. I didn’t expect there to be any, but the weird thing was the way my world was opening up. Once it had been as simple as making a loose plan with Kaitlin and now there were train schedules to other cities and friends I had made and probably some she had made who would want to meet up with us or travel with us. The summer still seemed far away, but it lay ahead and full of possibilities.

Janine’s old boyfriend Adam came to see her. They lay around in her room because she didn’t want to take him outside in case her Italian boyfriend, Andrea, was around. Somehow, she made excuses not to see Andrea for the week that Adam was there.

Adam planned his trip back when Janine needed him, but now she had Andrea. Now she had someone to pay her all the attention she craved. She looked at Adam with disgust; he was a pathetic reminder of her past.

He was good-looking in the way of the frat boy that likes alternative music, but Janine was afraid of what the rest of the roommates would think. He represented her somehow, and she didn’t want to make us think that she overplayed something. She whispered to us when he was not exactly out of earshot, “He used to be much cuter.”