Instructions for a Broken Heart (5 page)

Francesca tried again. “He’s David. From David and Goliath. Before the battle. He kills Goliath with a slingshot and a rock.”

The woman gasped, her hand over her heart. “That’s so violent. I’m not sure that’s appropriate for a school tour? That kind of violence.”

Jessa stared. This woman was like some sort of sociological experiment. Jessa wasn’t really religious. She’d been raised in one of those vague northern California quasi-Zen-we-value-everyone-secular-humanist sort of households, but even she knew most of the Bible stories. Someone seriously couldn’t be this dim, could they? Even one who clearly worshipped at the altar of Neiman Marcus?

The only other teacher from their group moved himself a bit away from Mr. and Mrs. Cruella until he was standing close to Jessa. He never seemed to say much, mostly just hung out in the background. He was Quiet Guy. Of course, Jessa would be quiet all the time too, if the only people she had to talk to were Cruella and her horse snack–mustache husband.

Finally, Ms. Jackson’s hand shot up. “You mentioned we will see the original work inside the gallery?”

Francesca looked like she might jump into the group and kiss Ms. Jackson right on the mouth. “Yes, yes. Inside we will see the original
David
in the Tribuna, which was built to especially house this piece of art. Come on, then.”

Jessa hesitated, watching the annoyance wash over Cruella. What brought someone to Cruella’s place, to that constant default to snarly irritation, a look that always suggested she was barely stomaching all of this, all of them?

***

Waiting in line outside the sweeping columned stone of the Uffizi Gallery, Jessa leaned down and plucked a piece of paper from the ground at her feet. It was a computer printout of a painting, a portrait, maybe Roman or Greek. A funny-looking little man draped in sheets, his head adorned with leaves, holding a glass of red wine. “Room 43” was scrawled across the top in green pen. Underneath the blurry black and white of the photo, someone had written:

Bacchus. (c. 1595) Patron deity of theater. And wine.

Caravaggio. Dark and light. Considered enigmatic.

Humanist.

“Hey! Did someone drop this?” Jessa called up ahead to her group, waving the sheet of paper over her head.

Jade shook her head and went back to her conversation with Christina. Kevin frowned. “Maybe it’s Tim’s? He went for a gelato.”

“Actually, it’s mine.”

Jessa turned and found Natalie, standing with her hands clasped by her side, looking nervously at the paper, or maybe she was really looking nervously at Jessa but couldn’t meet her eyes.

“Oh.” Jessa handed it over. Natalie wanted to see a Caravaggio painting? Jessa loved his work, all that dark and dangerous paint, always playing with light. But Natalie? Jessa would have pegged her as a Raphael’s-little-angels sort of girl.

Natalie smoothed the paper, folded it once and slid it into her bag.

“Why that painting?” Jessa blurted. “I mean, that one in particular?”

Natalie shuffled her feet a little, cleared her throat. “Just something I want to see here. It’s just…” She fiddled with the skin around her nails. “My dad used to have a print of this in his office. Something my mom gave him in college. As a joke. She used to call him Bacchus. They were both theater majors. And, well, sort of partiers, I guess?”

“His work was very controversial.”

“Whose?”

Jessa pointed at the paper. “Caravaggio.”

“Oh.” Natalie shrugged. “I just sort of want to see it in person, that’s all.”

Sean came up along side her with three cones of what looked like pistachio gelato. “Oh.” His eyes darted between the girls. One of the cones dripped a green drop of melty gelato onto his shoe. “Um, here.” He handed a cone to Natalie.

“Anyway, thanks.” Natalie nodded to Jessa, taking a dainty lick of her ice cream.

With the eyes of a cornered animal, Sean held up a cone. “I’d offer you a bite but you hate pistachio.”

“I’m kind of gelatoed out.”

Jessa watched them wander away and join Hillary in line, where Sean handed her the third cone. Jessa’s eyes strayed again to Natalie, who was laughing at something Hillary had just said to L. E. Wood and taking small bites from her cone.

Natalie seemed like a girl entirely free of angst, as if she didn’t have the time for the sort of silly nonsense when there was so much hair product to experiment with. Jessa bit her lip, a distressing thought creeping in, a candle flicker of fear. Maybe Sean just wanted to be with someone who liked pistachio ice cream as much as he did, who would want to share the Junior Mints at the movies, or who when asked didn’t really have an opinion about most things.

***

Jessa’s heart thumped against her chest as she roamed the ornate rooms of the Uffizi, her eyes trying to pull in everything at once. She tried to stay mostly by herself, determined not to let the other groups’ stupid questions or the stupid penis jokes of the boys from her own group ruin the gallery for her. The
David
had been a bit of a disaster earlier that day, but Jessa knew that putting that big of a bare butt, even a marble one, in front of a bunch of teenage boys pretty much annihilated any chance of an artistic experience.

But here, this place—this was what she had dreamed of seeing, all these paintings in one spot. When she was a little girl, her family used to visit her grandmother in Arizona. Her grandmother always had a huge glossy
Art of the Renaissance
book on her coffee table. While her parents talked in the other room, Jessa would flip through the pages for hours, her fingers hovering above the paintings—Botticelli, Parmigianino, Raphael, Cosimo—each one a tiny window onto an untouchable world, their rich colors like candy in glass jars. The clock would tick on the wall of the quiet room and Jessa would imagine herself in each painting, floating to the earth on a giant seashell or as one of Raphael’s tiny crouching angels, full of secrets. In each painting, she would hold still for that invisible hand of the artist, imagine herself inside the world the artist created.

Now here she was standing in front of
The Birth of Venus
, her favorite painting as a child. A woman brought to earth held in her seashell on the waves, fully formed, blown here by the zephyrs, her body long and odd.

“Ick. Why are they all so fat?”—redheaded Madison from the other group, Madison with her entrepreneurial camera and cracking-glass voice.

“What’s beautiful changes throughout generations,” Jessa heard herself saying, remembering her mother telling her that as she turned the pages of her grandmother’s glossy book.

Madison shrugged, waved to her friend across the gallery. “Um, yeah. They’re still fat.”

Then Dylan Thomas was at her side. “Madison, I think they sell original thought in the gift shop.”

“And imagination,” Jessa added helpfully.

Madison rolled her eyes, already texting into her phone as if the press of each small key deleted them from her presence. She vanished into the sea of people all around.

Jessa turned back to the painting. “Why did they even come to Italy?”

Dylan Thomas stuffed his hands into the pockets of his black pants, shook his head a bit. “Their families have buckets of money. They know they
should
go to Italy. My mom says they’re the kind of people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Nodding, Jessa studied the faces of the winds, almost bored as they blew their charge to shore. Maybe they were teenage zephyrs.

“You ever think,” Dylan Thomas waved a hand toward Venus, “that it would be better if we all just showed up full grown?”

Jessa noticed Mr. Campbell across the room, peering closely at a small painting she couldn’t see. A sadness seemed to glow halolike around him, like one of the many religious paintings here. Shaking her head, she said, “Would it matter?”

***

Jessa didn’t know who had started it. Probably Tim or Devon. It was right up their alley. And it
was
hilarious. Still, she had never seen Mr. Campbell so mad. He had ushered the whole group right off the bus, which idled softly behind them in the dusty parking lot.

“I don’t want this kind of behavior on the trip.” Mr. Campbell stared at them, his face red, his eyebrows at war with his forehead. “I don’t care if you think she’s annoying. I just don’t care. You don’t act like that.” Ms. Jackson stood quietly by him, dragging a toe of her shoe through the dust. She just shook her head in disbelief.

What had happened took all of five seconds.

Cruella had boarded the bus. And someone had whistled the Wicked Witch theme from
The Wizard of Oz
, quietly but loud enough. “Do-do-do-do-do-do. Do-do-do-do-do-do. Do-do-do.”

Cruella stopped cold, her sunglasses huge bug eyes surveying the students. Then someone laughed. Just a titter.

Mr. Campbell had been on his feet in seconds. “Williams Peak. Outside. Now.”

They’d scurried from the bus like ants.

Outside, Hillary raised her hand. “I think you’re assuming it was our school. It could have been one of them too. But if it was one of us, whoever it is should just say. Don’t be a coward.” Practical, look-at-all-sides Hillary.

Christina whispered, “I think we know it was our group.”

“I’m not going to force someone to be a rat,” Mr. Campbell said. “But that was just awful. I mean, the woman has feelings.”

“You sure about that?” Tim muttered.

Mr. Campbell sighed, ran his fingers through his hair, settled his hands in a clasp atop his head. His face had returned to a normal color. “You know, I have one rule,” he said. “What is it?”

Like a Greek chorus, they all singsonged, “Don’t be a jerk!”

“Right.” He paused, taking the time to settle his eyes on each one of them. “You broke the one rule.”

Everyone stared at the ground. Somehow, wrapped up in the bleak air of his disappointment, they had all broken the one rule.

Mr. Campbell sighed again, and this time Jessa thought maybe he was taking the whole dramatic-pause thing a little too far. Finally, he asked, “What do you want to do, guys?”

Devon cleared his throat. “I’m sure that you all think it was me and it wasn’t. But think about
why
someone did it. That rule should apply to everyone. We need to request a new group. Seriously, I’d rather travel with a knife-wielding barracuda.”

The group, a cup brimming at the edge, spilled over, with everyone talking at once. Ms. Jackson’s whistle brought back the silence. “That,” she said while looking at Devon, “is not the point.”

Sean raised his hand, which was weird, because Sean didn’t usually raise his hand, even in class. He was more of a blurter when he had anything to contribute at all. “OK, so it was me.”

More murmurs. Another whistle.

Natalie giggled into her hand.

“Natalie,” Ms. Jackson frowned. “This isn’t funny.”

“Sorry.” She flicked a strand of hair from her eye and set her jaw defensively at Ms. Jackson. “But we’ve all had enough. I mean, the woman’s a total bitch, excuse my language.”

What happened next was a bit like a big garbage dump, a big back-the-truck-up-and-dump-a-bunch-of-crap-right-in-the-middle-of-everything dump. That was all Florence needed, more garbage. Everyone, it seemed, had already had a run-in with Cruella. Jessa wasn’t sure how she’d missed it, how she’d been so far sunk in the muck of her own self-pity that she hadn’t noticed, but she had missed it.

They had a list of complaints—a long list.

Yesterday, when Jade accidentally sat in her seat on the bus, Cruella had told Jade to move her “hippie ass.” At Vatican City, she had told Kevin to get his “K-Mart backpack” out of the way on a bench she wanted to sit on. At dinner, she had asked Maya Rodriguez if she could pass the olive oil, “
Comprende?
” That one almost sent Ms. Jackson onto the bus after the woman, muttering, “Racist cow!” Mr. Campbell had to snatch the back of her jacket, fastening her back to the group.

Yesterday morning at breakfast, over tiny rolls and pots of jam, Cruella had told Blake and Erika that their “gothy
Twilight
vampire crap” was boring and couldn’t they just “give it up already?” And she called Tim and Devon “losers” when they were practicing some improv stuff outside the hotel. Apparently, on the bus that morning, she had said that Sean and Natalie made her “want to barf.” Jessa actually agreed with her on that last one, but her classmates were making quite a case.

In fact, Jessa was beginning to feel a little left out. Cruella hadn’t said anything to her.

Without warning, the frog joined the group. Francesca stood, licking her lips, a finger poised in the air, the frog stick tucked under one arm. She had some serious attachment issues with that frog.

“We have a problem?” She blinked at the circle of students, her eyes slipping back toward the waiting bus.

Mr. Campbell cleared his throat. “It seems…Um, it seems that we have some issue with the other group. Or a member of the other group.”

Francesca began nodding much more vigorously than necessary, her curls bouncing. “Yes. Yes. She’s quite upset.”

Ms. Jackson’s eyes widened. “Right. Of course. And we will definitely be apologizing.” She looked sharply at Sean. “But this incident isn’t without, um, provocation.”

The frog twitched in Francesca’s arm, continued to twitch as Ms. Jackson relayed each incident like blocks rising into the air, a Cruella-complaint tower. Francesca’s curls started to wilt with each block added to the stack. Finally, Ms. Jackson stopped adding them.

Francesca sighed through her nose, pinching her lips together. “I am so sorry. This is hard sometimes on trips with two schools. There is nothing to be done.” She looked sadly at them, her eyes large pools. She shrugged. “I could talk to her. Might make things worse. She is not…agreeable. I’ve seen this before. No good comes from making it worse.”

She waited. The frog waited. Williams Peak Drama Academy waited.

“Um…” Mr. Campbell’s mouth pulled at the edges, like he was trying to form words for the first time. “Isn’t there…someone to call?”