Flirting in Italian (21 page)

Quick. Think fast. What does it need?

There’s some green in Kelly’s palette, next to me. Kelly isn’t painting at the moment; she’s at the sink, chucking out the water in her can, having already used several colors and made the water too murky. She took a different approach from mine and mixed up loads of colors before she started; along with the green, which is bright and grassy, there’s an equally bright yellow on her palette. I wash my brush one more time and dip a bare three millimeters of the tip into the green, dotting miniature centers onto each blossom. Then I wash it one more time and dot tiny yellow circles overlapping the green ones, and add a light wash of yellow to one of the weird black branches. I think I’ve added depth, but I’m not really sure.

Stop now
, the voice says firmly.
Now. Don’t touch it any more
.

I step back, breathing normally again, and look at my sheet of paper.

It really isn’t very good. Not when I compare it to Luigi’s, which he’s propped up at the end of the trestle table.

But for a first attempt, I honestly don’t think it’s that bad, either.

I look around at the other girls’ sketchbooks. Kendra’s got a decent-looking branch, but only after numerous tries,
while Paige and Kelly have a lot of crumpled-up sheets at their feet and dejected expressions on their faces.

“I
suck
at this,” Paige sighs.

“Stick to flower arranging,” Kendra suggests, frowning hard as she dabs some bright red flowers onto her branches.

“Oh, hey,” Paige says gloomily to Kelly, “you can’t be good at everything, right?”

“I’m
rubbish
at everything,” Kelly says, grimacing.

“Oh, shut
up
!” Paige waves dismissively at her. “You did an okay bouquet, you’re really good at wine tasting, and your Italian’s the best of all of us. I hate when girls put themselves down. Kendra’s mom’s always lecturing us on that—she says women should always be confident. She’s really smart. She’s a research scientist at a global pharma company, and Kendra’s dad is too. Major brainboxes.”

“Paige.”
Kendra’s voice has an edge. “Don’t.”

Paige pulls a comic face. “Kendra doesn’t like it when people know what her folks do, ’cause they think that it’s, you know, Big Pharma making drugs too expensive for poor people. But your mom’s doing all this really cool stuff, Kendra!” She swivels to us. “Really complicated, like herbal remedies, but it costs gazillions in research. It’s not all animal experiments.”

“Paige!”
Kendra snaps.

“Sorry!” Paige mimes zipping her lips, and then promptly continues:

“My mom doesn’t do anything. And my dad basically plays a lot of tennis at the club. Kendra’s parents are regular grown-ups, so when her mom tells me what to do and what not to do I kind of like it.”

“You wouldn’t if you had it all day long,” Kendra says sourly. “My mom expects daily emails telling her what we’ve learned and what I’m going to put on my college applications. She never lets up. It’s all right for you, Paige. You just want to go to Miami and party. I’m destined for Ivy or death.”

Paige nods. “Yep, I wanna go to college in Miami,” she explains to me and Kelly. “Big party school; great weather.”

“I can’t even
imagine
what my mom would do if I went to college anywhere but New England,” Kendra says, shuddering. Just then, Luigi interrupts:

“Okay,
basta chiaccherare!
You have tried to paint, and I let you talk because I know it ees deefeecult. But now, we look at what you have done.”

We fall silent immediately, recalled to order. It doesn’t hurt that Luigi is very good-looking in a grown-up way. Unlike the tall, slim, almost lanky boys we’ve met so far, Luigi is short and stocky, with a hairy chest (you can’t fail to notice the tight dark curls of hair poking out from the neck of his denim shirt); equally hairy, muscly forearms; and a strong, bullish neck.

And though he’s a bit too manly-looking for my tastes, he’s obviously exactly what Kendra likes. As soon as he spoke, her head whipped around and her huge slanted dark eyes went dewy; she’s staring at him with her head tilted to one side. I doubt she’s listening to a word he’s saying. She’s just watching his full lips move as he talks.

“Who does not like to paint the watercolors?” he asks.

Paige and Kelly’s hands shoot up.

“Bene,”
he says, shrugging in a way that would be really
rude in Britain, but somehow in Italy isn’t dismissive. “You may try the oil paints. They are easier. But you, and you?” He looks at me and Kendra. “I begin looking at what you have done.”

He walks around to stand behind Kendra.

“Allora,”
he says, looking at her branch and blossoms. “A good start.” He nods. “There is confidence here.
Bene
. We work on the technique.”

Kendra preens as he walks around the table toward me.

“Eccecente,”
Luigi says, his bushy brows rising to mingle with his dark ringlets. “You have done thees before?”

“No,” I say, my heart shooting up into my mouth, because that question can only be positive.

“Molto, molto bene,”
he says, nodding in short, sharp jerks of appreciation.
“Complimenti.”
He reaches out to touch the blossoms, pointing to the green and yellow centers. “Why did you do thees? Eet ees your memory of the flowers, how you have seen them?”

I shake my head.

“They just needed something,” I say. “It didn’t look finished without them.”

“Benissimo,”
he says, nodding sharply. “
Complimenti
. The green and the yellow, thees is vairy nice. I like. You have correct instincts.”

I’m bright red with sheer happiness. I know I am, but I don’t care. Kendra’s scowling, and I don’t care about that either.

You can have Luigi
, I say to her.
Honestly. He’s not my type and too old! All I want is to learn how to paint, okay?

I’m loving everything about being in Italy
, I think with a rush
of sheer happiness.
The countryside, the beauty, the yummy food, and most of all, learning to paint. Oh, but then—Luca. Luca Luca Luca
 …

But I realize to my surprise that while I was painting, I didn’t think about Luca at all, not once. I was completely absorbed; I could do it all day long. I absolutely love it.

I so don’t want to go home.

After all, Kelly and I have no proof I was poisoned
, I tell myself firmly.
It could have been just a fluke. A reaction to something, a bout of nasty food poisoning. I’ll be careful what I eat and drink from now on
.

But Kelly’s probably right
, I think, wincing.
From now on, maybe I should stay away from the Castello di Vesperi
. …

“Par
-tee
! Par
-tee
!”

Paige clatters downstairs, whooping happily, all hair and tan and teeth, looking as if she’s come straight out of a Southern California reality show. Her cork-soled wedges make her legs seem endless, as do her white short shorts. I always thought you had to be really thin to wear shorts like that, but Paige isn’t, and she totally makes them work. Mind you, the glorious American tan helps too. I’ve been sunbathing, but it’ll take me some time to get as lovely and golden as Paige is.

“Madonna santa,”
Leonardo says devoutly, goggling at Paige.

“Bellissima,”
Andrea agrees. He looks around at the rest
of us girls, all clustered in the hall waiting for Paige to take out her hot rollers and get herself downstairs, and smiles at us.

“Bellissime tutte,”
he continues. “You are all beautiful.”

Even Kendra, who’s so cool and poised, can’t help looking smug at this flattery; Kelly and I positively coo with pleasure. I don’t think I’ve ever been called beautiful by a boy in my life. It’s definitely not an English-guy thing; in London, we pride ourselves on our irony and sarcasm. You’re lucky if you even get a backhanded compliment from a boy. “Your hair doesn’t look terrible today”—that kind of thing.

If boys only realized how much girls love attention and compliments
, I think,
they’d do it more. I mean, we absolutely melt when one of them kisses our hand, or tells us we’re pretty—even beautiful. To be brutally honest, they don’t even have to mean it a hundred percent. They just have to say it
.

I glance at Paige and Kendra: yep, I’m willing to bet that American boys don’t throw around words like “beautiful” either. They’re both glowing like hundred-watt bulbs. Kendra has sort of poofed up her hair into a big smooth chignon at the top of her head, and in her white halter dress she looks sophisticated enough to challenge Elisa for Chicest Girl at the Party.

“Andiamo!”
Leonardo says, throwing back his dark hair from his face and holding out his hand to Paige like a medieval courtier; she giggles madly as she places hers in his and totters out of the house and down to the car, wobbling in her wedges.

“If she has a drink,” Kelly mutters to me, “she’s going to fall on her face in those heels. Fashion victim or what!”

“There’ll be plenty of boys ready to catch her,” I point out as we follow.

Andrea is escorting Kendra, catching the pale pink cardigan that’s sliding off her shoulders—she’s wearing it in a very Michelle O way, like a cape—and handing it back to her with a gentlemanly flourish. The pairing-off is going on already, I notice. I really hope that at least some boys at the party are interested in talking to me and Kelly. I don’t know if Luca’s coming—I was much too proud to ask Leonardo and Andrea if he was—and actually, I don’t mind being a wallflower if, as Luca predicted, Italian boys don’t generally find my looks that appealing. If Luca isn’t there, I’m still going to dance and hang out and make friends.

But Kelly won’t be happy to be a wallflower, I know. She’s dressed up within an inch of her life, eye makeup layered on, wearing a black top and skirt that make her look slimmer, her white skin gleaming against the black. It’s almost translucent, her skin; you can see a tracery of blue veins beneath its lightly freckled surface. She’s geared up for this party, having missed the last one. I’m really glad she’s coming along.

We pile into the jeep, which Leonardo has special permission to drive, and bounce down the driveway and through a winding maze of asphalt and dirt roads, blue signs with white lettering flashing a series of little villages called Vagliagli, Tregole, Capriolo. The white dust of the roads, kicked up by the tires of passing cars, is thick in the hedgerows, making them seem ghostly in the headlights; there are no streetlights, none at all, and around us it’s completely dark, apart from the bright stars and a yellow moon that
hangs low in the sky, behind the branches of the oak trees on the ridges of the hills. The radio’s playing loud dance music, and by the time we turn a curve and see a line of cars parked on each side of the road, angled up on the sloping tree roots, my heart’s surging with anticipation. I
love
parties.

Leonardo drives the jeep right up onto the bank, at the end of the line of parked cars, going so high that the jeep tilts and we all scream, scared and thrilled by what feels like the imminent danger of tipping over. He cranks up the handbrake, turns off the engine, and we literally tumble out the road side of the jeep, because the higher side is blocked by a tangle of brush.

“Wow,” I breathe as we walk along the road past the parked cars, and come to an arched gate set in a low wall, a drive slanting steeply downhill through the archway. A few Vespa scooters are leaning against the wall, by the gateposts, and at the bottom of the drive is a small house, all its windows blazing with light, music pouring out into the dark velvety night air. It’s like something out of a fairy tale. A modern fairy tale, where Hansel and Gretel don’t get put into a witch’s oven, but dance all night under the stars.

And maybe there’ll be a prince to make the fairy tale complete
, I can’t help thinking, before I firmly forbid myself from speculating about whether Luca will be here. I’m determined not to make my happiness dependent on whether Luca’s at a party or not; I’ve never done that before with the boys I’ve dated. I’ve managed to keep myself from being one of those pathetic girls who can’t get out an entire sentence without wedging the name of their latest crush into it. But I have the
horrible feeling that Luca is going to test my ability to stay strong and independent like never before.

Basta
, as they say over here. Enough. I push him to the back of my mind as we pass through the gate and start picking our way down the steep gravel drive to the fairy-tale party house. Horses neigh, and we do a double take, realizing that the fences on the right of the drive enclose paddocks: one horse ambles up to the rail as we pass by, its silhouette looming huge and dark against the sky. Kelly squeaks in shock.

“It’s so
big
,” she says nervously, shying away to put me between her and the horse. “It can’t jump the fence, can it?”

“Of course not!” I say as confidently as I can, though actually I have no idea.

“I’ve never been that close to a horse before,” she confides. “We’re not big on the countryside in my family. We go to the sea. You know? Fish and chips on the pier, and the arcades. My gran likes bingo.”

The horse nickers amiably and wanders away. A cat slips across the path in front of us, its eyes gleaming orange in the dark; an owl hoots in the distance, a white shadow flitting through the sky. Kelly jumps again.
Everyone’s out for the night
, I think, smiling.
Looking for their own particular party
.

We’re at the base of the drive now, in front of the house, which looks very small from this angle. A wooden door is slightly ajar, golden light spilling out from inside, but Leonardo and Andrea ignore it, taking a stepping-stone path down the side of the hill that curves around the house, revealing it to be built into the slope. A stone terrace, lined with lemon trees in terra-cotta pots, stretches out over the
edge of the hill, with what must be, in daytime, a wonderful view of the valley below.

But no one’s looking at the view tonight. Huge yellow candles are burning in shallow stone dishes, and an insistent bass is pounding at the walls of the house, forcing its way free and out into the evening air. The terrace spreads out into a rough oval, the dance floor. As at the club in Florence, there aren’t that many people actually dancing. I remember Luca saying that Italians prefer to stand around and show off their outfits.

Agh!
I catch myself.
Stop it with this Luca stuff! You’re getting as bad as the pathetic girls you just said you despised!

So instead, I think:
Great—more room on the dance floor for me!
and follow the boys, Paige, and Kendra as they head along the terrace and through the wide french doors, thrown open to let people flow in and out of the house. The first thing I see inside is gobsmacking.

“Is that
wine
?” Kelly exclaims.

It’s a huge glass bottle of wine. No, not a bottle. A vat. A huge glass vat of wine shaped like a bottle, standing on a solid wooden table, with a plastic tube coming out of the top and finishing in a plastic spigot. The tube is hanging over the edge of the table, over a big plastic tub that’s presumably there to catch the drips. Leonardo picks up the spigot and presses a lever, holding a series of plastic cups underneath it, filling them one by one, gesturing to us to come over and take a cup each.

“Omigod!”
Paige yodels, and everyone who hadn’t noticed our group before looks over and keeps looking. “It’s like a
keg party
! Only with
wine
!”

I see Leonardo wincing at the loudness of her voice, and realize that it’s because she’s called attention to the fact that an Amazonian blonde and a stunning black girl have arrived. It’s a feeding frenzy. Boys swoop in from all directions to surround Paige and Kendra, trying to cut the girl of their choice off from the rest of the group, peacocking in front of them, showing off their clothes, their command of English, their handsome smiles. Kelly and I edge back by the side of the table and stand watching the attempts of Leonardo and Andrea to wedge their way back to Paige and Kendra.

Kelly sips some wine and makes a face. “It’s a bit rough.”

“It isn’t even in bottles,” I point out. “What do you expect?” Thank goodness my stomach’s back to normal; I sip some myself. “Oh, come on, it’s not
that
bad. Just ’cause you’ve got the good palate, you’re showing off now.”

Kelly grins. “I am not,” she says.

“Really?” I tease her.

“Okay. Maybe just a little bit,” she says. But then she looks over at the group around Paige and Kendra, and her face falls. I think that it’s basic envy of the sheer level of attention they’re getting—envy I totally share—until I realize that her stare is fixed on one particular person; her head’s turning to follow his movements.

It’s Andrea. Kelly likes Andrea. Who’s forged a path to Kendra’s side and is doing his best to shoulder away all the other guys as he monopolizes her with quick-fire conversation.

Oh dear
, I think.
Kelly doesn’t stand a chance with Andrea
. My heart sinks. I want her to be happy, have a great time—

And then a stocky dark boy wheels up in front of us. He doesn’t even look at me; his gaze is entirely fixed on Kelly as he says to her, smiling appreciatively:

“O bella rossa! Come ti chiami?”

“Mi chiamo Kelly,”
Kelly says carefully in Italian, and I realize that he called her a “beautiful redhead.” Wow. What a way to start talking to a girl. No wonder Italian boys are famous for being incredibly charming.

“Io sono Gianbattista,”
he says, and he takes her hand, the one that isn’t holding the wine cup.
“Andiamo a vedere le stelle.”

He starts to pull her away, and she throws me a look over her shoulder, wide-eyed, brimming with incredulity, her cheeks flushed, her freckles standing out on her nose.

“I’m going outside with Gianbattista. To look at the stars,” she says, trying to sound matter-of-fact. I notice that she glances over hopefully to see if Andrea’s noticing that she’s made a conquest.

“They don’t mess around here, do they?” I say, because Gianbattista has already got her halfway to the french doors. “Have fun!”

“Che bonona,”
another boy says, staring after Kelly as she disappears onto the terrace with her star-viewing guide. I make a mental note to remember that word and ask what it means as I take another sip of wine and look around the room, which is a big open-plan living room, a kitchen visible through an archway at the far end. I can barely see the furniture because the room is full of Italians, lounging on the sofas and flicking through coffee-table books of photographs,
standing in groups waving their hands around as they talk in the loud, emphatic way that I’m coming to realize doesn’t mean they’re arguing or even disagreeing with each other: it’s just their way of having a conversation. They’re wearing white linen and blue denim. Their hair is shiny; they’re well groomed; the boys are smooth-shaven or sporting designer stubble, the kind you do very carefully with an electric razor to get the effect just right; and the air smells of perfume and aftershave.

I know it’s early in the party—the huge wine bottle’s still almost full, and the night is young—but I’m impressed at how good everyone looks. And sober. No one’s pink-faced and stumbling, no one’s slurring their words. The groups of people are all mixed. It’s not like the London parties I’ve been to, with boys at one end of the room getting drunk enough to build up the courage to talk to the girls, who are at the other end giggling and pretending to ignore them.

This is impressively grown up.

And Luca was bang-on in his assessment of me. I’m standing here alone, no one coming to talk to me. I think I look pretty nice: I did myself up in my best makeup, dark smoky eyes and red lipstick. I wish I could wear white, like Kendra, who looks amazing in it, but I’m a little too body-conscious for that. Kendra has an athlete’s body, and I don’t. I’m okay with not being really thin, but I’d feel like a great white whale if I wore a white outfit.

Is it a whale?
I wonder.
Or a shark?
I shrug. These are the kind of questions you find yourself pondering when you’re at a fantastic party, all your girlfriends have been snapped up
on sight, and you’re busy propping up the drinks table with your bum because no one wants to talk to you. There aren’t any girls to talk to just to look busy.

Get a grip, Violet. No self-pity. And no more than one glass of wine
.

I walk out onto the terrace, watching the flames burn liquid in the big shallow terra-cotta dishes. The wax inside is yellow, the color of the lemons in the little trees.
Citronella candles
, I think.
To keep off mosquitoes
. My grandmother burns them in Norway, by the lake, but I’ve never seen ones this big; the scent is sharp, a chemical citrus. I prop my elbows on the stone balcony and watch the party in full swing around me; it seems like everyone knows everyone else, but then it always does at parties when you don’t know anyone at all—apart from your three girlfriends, who you can’t even see because they have boys packed around them three-deep.