Girl at Sea (18 page)

His lips twitched just slightly. Elsa looked between them, turning her gaze from one to the other.

“Yeah,” he said, throwing up his arms. “Fine. I guess they can’t blame us if they didn’t tell us.”

Elsa clapped.

“I’ll get my purse,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

Aidan tried a large, heavy stride that rocked the boat and almost sent the fisherman off the side. He settled himself on the damp bottom of the boat and gave the fisherman a flat smile.

The fisherman stared at him, then at Clio.

Where is the large-breasted, Italian-speaking blonde?
his eyes asked.
She was the only reason I even came over in the first place.

“Momento,”
Clio said, and immediately regretted it. She was pretty sure that wasn’t an Italian word. You can’t just add an
o
to any English word to make it
foreign.

Aidan looked into the plastic barrel next to him and quickly retracted.

“Crabs,” he said. “I’m sitting next to crabs.”

“See that?” Clio said. “You’re with your own. This is working out already.”

149

“I’m only doing this to make sure nothing happens to you two,” he said.

“Liar.”

Aidan’s slender eyebrows shot up, but he quickly pulled them back down again and composed his expression into the usual calculating one. He leaned forward, balancing his elbows on his knees. The fisherman looked between them, clearly unsure of what was going on.

“We probably only got left behind because your dad was annoyed at you,” he said. “You know, about my computer.”

“I didn’t touch your computer,” she said. “Well, I touched it.

And that was literally it. I didn’t look through it or do anything to it. I just wanted to see if it was online. I didn’t . . . go into any of your personal stuff. I wouldn’t.”

“I know you didn’t,” he said. “I could tell. But that’s still probably the reason.”

“So you’re blaming me?” she asked.

“No. I’m simply stating a fact.”

The doors opened, and Elsa ran across the deck, her shoes clomping hard against the fiberglass. She had obviously changed them while she was getting her purse. As she extended a leg off the platform into the boat, Clio saw the shoes—they were very high white wedges. They struck Clio as being very Scandinavian.

She loved them.

Both the fisherman and Aidan attempted to help her. But since Aidan was sitting, the fisherman got there first.

“All ready, everybody?” Elsa said, flashing the fisherman a smile that would have melted a hole in a polar ice cap. “Let’s go.”

150

A Brief History of Floridian

Girl-Lifting

The fishing boat didn’t go to a dock; it went to the beach. The man waved his arms, and three other guys waded out to it. They stared at Clio, Elsa, and Aidan. A conversation was had in Italian.

“They’re asking about us,” Elsa whispered as they spoke.

The owner of the boat got out, and the four men together took a rope that was tied to the front of the boat and dragged it up to the beach. It was clear that their presence made the work a lot harder than usual. But there was a final tug, a yell, and the boat eased onto the shore with a thick sluffing sound.

“What do we do first?” Elsa asked after giving the fisherman their thanks. He looked after her and blew her a kiss. She smiled that easy, radiant dairy goddess smile.

“There’s someone I have to get in touch with,” Clio said.

“Your boyfriend!” Elsa said, squeezing her arm. “You poor thing! You haven’t been able to talk to him all week!”

151

“Is that why we just jumped onto the good ship
Crabby
?”

Aidan asked, looking genuinely unimpressed. “So you could call your
boyfriend
?”

This boyfriend thing had been getting thrown around too much for Clio to correct it now.

“No,” she said. “We did it so that we could visit this beautiful Italian town. Wherever we are.”

Like Sorrento, this town was above them, but not nearly as high up. If anything, the town seemed to be piled on top of itself in about eight layers of sherbet-colored buildings. They only had to walk up one set of steps to get there, and these steps were nowhere near as agonizing as the ones Clio had taken last time.

They started making their way to them. Elsa pulled off her white wedge shoes.

Clio looked down at her red flip-flops in the black sand. This sand glinted bizarrely—there were tiny dots of color strewn throughout it, sparkling in the sun. She reached down and grabbed a large handful, picking out the colored bits. They were tiny, perfectly smooth pebbles in brilliant green, aquamarine, rust red, stark white.

“I think this is glass,” she said.

“Wow,” Aidan said. “Glass.”

“No,” she said. “Look. Have you ever seen a beach like this?

How did all of this glass get into the sand? It’s everywhere! And it’s completely smooth.”

“I guess it got sanded,” he said. “Here. In the
sand
.”

“But there’s so
much
of it,” she said, pointing to the long stretch of beach.

“I guess the Italians throw a lot of bottles into the sea,” he 152

said. Clio shook her head. Why did he have to be so sarcastic all the time? And why was she letting it get to her? Ollie would have appreciated all this beauty. But for some reason, Clio was really frustrated that Aidan didn’t seem to get it. Was he
trying
to be stubborn?

Elsa wasn’t paying attention to them. She was examining the view around them with a thoughtful look on her face; then she jumped in front of Aidan and Clio.

“You two,” Elsa said. “You do not have the proper attitude right now. So I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to get something to
eat
and to
drink
. Then you can call home.”

There wasn’t a lot to the town, whatever it was. There was a stretch of pavement at the top of the steps with a smattering of restaurants, gelato stands, and tourist beach-supply shops.

Beyond and above that were peeling buildings with large shuttered windows swung wide open, revealing the insides of apartments, televisions on, and dangling laundry. In any other place, this probably would have been very unappealing, but in Italy, it felt right.

There were plenty of nice restaurants along the main street, but the trio needed something affordable, and it was Clio who managed to locate the perfect spot. It had white plastic outdoor tables with blue vinyl cloths on them, shaded by tipsy red umbrellas advertising something that Clio had never heard of.

Each table was decorated with silk flowers arranged in empty Orangina bottles. The menu was one laminated page, written in both Italian and misspelled English, and it was all pasta.

None of them had a lot of cash, so they ordered three of the same dish, ziti with tomato sauce, the simplest, least expensive 153

pasta on the menu. Elsa added something on at the end, pointing at a different section of the menu and giving the waiter a huge smile.

“We’re celebrating,” she said, passing the menus over.

The waiter brought over two carafes of red wine and three glasses and a basket of chewy, dark-crusted bread. Elsa poured.

“To our escape,” she said, raising her glass.

They all sipped the wine. It was warm going down. And once Clio got over that initial strange flavor, the total lack of sweetness, she almost thought she got what people meant when they said “woody aftertones.”

“I think he likes us,” Elsa said, watching the waiter walk off.

“This is a little bit nicer than what I think I ordered. Now. Our plan for this evening? Since we will have already annoyed the others, and by the others, I mean Clio’s father, I think we should just go out fully. Agreed?”

“I agree,” Clio said.

They clinked glasses on it.

Aidan said nothing. He just leaned back in his plastic chair, his hair flopping over his piercing eyes. He picked out a bug that had flown into his glass and drowned.

“Here,” Clio said, retrieving her com and putting it in Elsa’s purse. “I don’t want to hear it when he starts calling for Number Five.”

“Exactly,” Elsa said, dropping her arm over Clio’s shoulders.

“
That’s
better.”

In no time at all, they were presented with three massive plates. Even though the pasta was simple, it managed to be the best Clio had ever had. It was very fresh and just a little spicy, 154

with big pieces of basil. The pasta was chewy and perfect, and the whole thing was steaming hot, as if it had just been snatched off some grandmother’s stove.

“You’re not being very smart,” Elsa said, toying with her pasta and looking over at Aidan. Aidan had already cleaned a quarter of his plate before they had really even started.

“Why’s that?” he asked, his mouth full.

“Because you’re sitting here at a table with two girls, two rather attractive girls . . .”

How did Elsa do that? Clio wondered. How did she just come out with that and not have it sound conceited? That was definitely a superpower.

“. . . and you’re doing absolutely nothing to impress or entertain us. And we need entertainment. We’re both suffering.”

“All right,” he said, his eyes narrowing a bit. “I’ve got a story.”

“Let’s hear it,” Elsa said, raising her glass.

“I used to be a ballet dancer.”

Elsa’s glass landed back on the table, and she let out a bright, loud laugh.

“You’re lying,” Clio said, feeling herself crack a smile.

“This is one
hundred
percent true,” he said. “When I was a kid, we had an insane neighbor named Mrs. Chemonsky who started a dance studio in her basement. She used to come over and have coffee with my parents all the time. She was one of those people who no one really wants to have over, yet you can’t seem to stop her. No one could say no to her because she’d just push and push and push. She ran everything in my neighbor-hood. So, she kept complaining to my parents about how she didn’t have any boys, and how dancing really was a masculine 155

thing to do, and how she really wished more parents were enlightened about it, and why didn’t I come over and be in the class? She completely wore my parents down, and I ended up going there two times a week.”

“In tights?” Elsa asked. “Please tell me there were tights.

Please describe them fully.”

“Oh yes,” he said, reaching for more wine. “There were tights.

They were green.”

“And they had feet?” Elsa asked. “Full-length tights?”

“They had little green feet,” he said. “It did really good things for my self-esteem.”

The vision of Aidan in green tights cheered Clio up a lot. The more she pictured it, the more she realized that it probably wouldn’t be too bad a sight. He had really dense legs, with muscles.

“It was only supposed to be for a little while,” he went on,

“but we couldn’t stop, or Mrs. Chemonsky would come over and hound my mother. And my mother really hated being hounded by Mrs. Chemonsky, so I stayed in there for
three
entire years. I was in high school when I finally got out of it. You do not want to know what would have happened to me if the people in my high school found out I was in ballet class. I’m from Florida. You do not do ballet in Florida if you’re a guy.”

“So you can dance?” Elsa said. “And you’re going to show us, right?”

“I can’t dance at all,” he said. “My dancing ability is
zero
. All I really did was lift. That’s what guys in ballet do—they lift girls.

I did a lot of girl-lifting.”

“Not bad for you,” Elsa said.

“You’d think so,” he said, getting more animated. “Right? But 156

that’s totally not the case. First of all, no serious dancers went to Mrs. Chemonsky’s. It was mostly little girls. Little girls and me.

It was okay when I was, like, thirteen and the girls were ten. But when I was fifteen and the girls were ten . . . then it was starting to get creepy. The whole thing only ever paid off in my Yale interview, when they asked me what my hobbies were. Not too many ballet dancers in the engineering department.”

“Well, that settles it,” Elsa said. “We’re going dancing after this, and you’re lifting us. We need to experience this very special skill of yours.”

“If you want,” he said with a shrug. “It’s up to you. If you want to be lifted, I’ll lift you.”

“Oh yes,” Elsa said, refilling all the glasses. “There will be lifting.”

Clio realized that she hadn’t spoken through any of this. It was all Elsa lifting and carrying the conversation, twirling around with it.

“Sure,” Clio said. “Pick me up.”

Aidan tipped his head in concession, his green eyes lit up for once.

“You want me to pick you up, I guess I can’t refuse.”

Now that she’d heard her own words said back to her, Clio realized her mistake. But he had gone with it, and strangely . . .

she liked it. For the first time this whole summer, she really felt like she was part of a group, a group she wanted to be in.

When dinner was over and they’d cobbled together what money they had for the bill, Elsa hooked each of them by the arm and started off down the cobbled street, walking a slightly uneven walk. Clio couldn’t tell if it was Elsa’s high shoes on the 157