Wish You Were Italian (5 page)

I turn to look at him, expecting him to elaborate, but he keeps his eyes forward.

He pays for our cups and we stroll along the crowded street until we’re in front of the Pantheon. Sitting along the base of a big water fountain in the middle of the piazza, we have a full view of the monstrous building glowing an eerie yellow in the streetlights against an indigo sky. Tourists speaking languages I can and can’t identify mill about, pointing, chatting, and posing for pictures. A similar scene plays out right here every single day, and tonight I get to be part of it.

Darren is quiet for a few minutes before he asks, “So what brings you to Italy?”

I savor the taste of the rich chocolate, choosing my words carefully. “My parents sent me.”

“Sent you? For what, like a learning experience?”

“Something like that,” I mutter.

“I’m listening.”

I hesitate, but then realize how anxious I am to talk it out with someone. “I’m supposed to go to this summer program in Florence.”

“Supposed to go, huh? Now this is getting interesting.”

“Yeah, I’m supposed to be there by Wednesday,” I say. “But it’s going to be so lame, studying art, like the old stuff people go
to see just to say they’ve seen it. Not my thing.” I look up at the Latin words across the top of the Pantheon. “So I decided today that I’m not going.”

“Rebellion. I like it.” The twisty tooth again. “And how did your parents take the news?”

I bite my lip, fiddling with my camera.

“They don’t know?” He snickers. “How do you plan on pulling that off?”

I stare at the ground between our feet. “I haven’t figured out the logistics yet.”

Deciding that I’m skipping out on Florence in favor of touring the country for the summer is as far as I’ve gotten. But there’s so much more to it than that if I plan to accomplish it all undetected. There’s a school that’s expecting me and parents that are paying for me to go to said school. Then there’s the issue of making a budget and sticking to it so I don’t starve.

Darren waves a hand in front of my face. “Anyone in there?”

I blink.

“You didn’t hear anything I just said?”

“Oh. No, I’m sorry,” I say. “I was trying to—”

“Come up with a plan?” I nod and he continues, “I was saying I can help.”

“How?”

He sits up straighter and polishes his nails on the front of his shirt. “Because I’m the king of subterfuge.”

“That’s a pretty big claim.”

“Well, I’m kind of a big deal.”

“Ha! Okay.” I snort. “Let’s hear how you came to be so qualified in subterfugery.”

“Well, I can’t even count how many times my brother, Tate, and I said we were spending the night at a friend’s house, but we really just pitched a tent at the park, pretending to be explorers or something.”

“Hmmm.” I scratch my chin like Darren does. “That’s child’s play. What else you got?”

“Hard to please. Okay.” He pauses. “For a while we lived down the street from this church. We weren’t even Catholic, but my parents had it in their heads that I needed to go to catechism classes. Once I figured out I wouldn’t be learning about actual cats, every week I’d ride my bike toward the church, then turn off and just keep riding until I thought it was time to go home.”

I groan. “Are you a cat lover?”

“She asks, disdainfully.” He puts his hands up in surrender. “Look, I was ten years old. And why do you have such animosity toward cats?”

“Because of the creep factor. They’re unpredictable and always have the same facial expression so you can never tell what they’re thinking. Are they going to rub against your leg or slash your face open?”

“Wow.” Darren rests a hand on my shoulder. “Do you need a support group? They say talking about traumatic experiences is the only way to move on.”

“Wait a minute.” I ignore him, holding up a finger. “Did you do anything sneaky
after
the age of twelve?”

He removes his hand and runs it through his hair, laughing halfheartedly.

“I thought you were actually going to be able to help me. You know, bring some real experience to the table here.” I drop
my head into my hands. “I’m in a foreign country and I’m planning to lie to my parents about my whereabouts for almost three months. It’s a little more serious than skipping catechism class and camping at the park.”

I take in slow, deep breaths, trying to decide if I’d rather laugh at him or cry at the situation I’m digging myself into. “This was a bad idea, wasn’t it? Maybe I should just suck it up and go to Florence.”

Darren’s voice is calm. “Look, I don’t know what kind of relationship you have with your parents, so I can’t tell you what you should do. You’ll be the one answering to them if—”

“Honestly, I’m not sure they’d even catch on,” I confess. “They’re so busy with work right now. That’s the real reason I got shipped off.”

I’d suspected it ever since the moment they sprung my summer plans on me last week, but admitting it to someone proves I actually believe it. It’s the perfect setup for my parents—send me away for a few months to get schooled on art galleries and come back just in time for the opening of their own.

“They wanted me out of the way,” I say. “Who knows what they did with Gram after I left.”

“Gram?”

“My grandma—my mom’s mom. She lives with us.” My insides flutter as I remember saying good-bye to her at the airport. Gram and Morgan were the only ones I let see me off.

“
You’ll do just fine,” she cooed, fingertips stroking my hair as I buried my head against her neck. “You’ll get to eat carbs every day without anyone telling you not to. You’ll be
required
to look at sculptures of naked men! You’ll say
‘grazie’
and
‘prego!’”

Gram always did have that magical calming effect on me. As she spoke, the tears stopped and my breathing steadied
.

“
Tell me I’m going to have a good time,” I mumbled, taking in the scent of lavender perfume one last time
.

“
Pippa.” She sighed, laughing in her sweet, grandmotherly way. “It will change your life
.”

Darren clears his throat, bringing me back to the present. “I’ve got two questions for you.” He pulls his knees toward his chest and folds his arms over them, looking at me intently. “First, what do you have to lose if you go through with skipping out on school?”

“Well, I—”

“Don’t answer out loud! The less I know, the better. I don’t want you blaming me if this thing backfires.”

What do I have to lose?

They could ban my phone, my computer, the TV. Hopefully they aren’t cruel enough to take my camera. I’d be grounded for some unspecified amount of time, and I’d probably be forced to work in their stupid gallery every day.

Well, the gallery’s my future no matter what. Doomed to a life of living out my parents’ dream. I thought parents were supposed to dive headfirst into supporting what their kids wanted to do. But Gram gave me the fancy camera, not my parents. And how many of my plays have they come to together? Dad usually caught at least one showing of each run, but it wasn’t uncommon for Mom to have something better to do—at the beck and call of some client with bottomless pockets looking to hang a dead artist’s work on all his walls.

But it’s not like I won’t learn about art if I don’t go to the
program. I mean, real life education is better than the classroom, right? I’d still be doing what my parents want, just in a different way.

I look at Darren, feeling a little more determined to take control of my summer.

He smiles before asking, “And what do you have to gain?”

Within ten minutes, we have a plan that might actually work. All I have to do is open an e-mail account using my mother’s name, compose a message to the school telling them I’m not going, and continue sending e-mails to my family periodically throughout the summer so they know I’m alive. It all hinges on the supposition that both my mom and the school’s person-in-charge are such busy people that communicating exclusively through e-mail is acceptable. And that I’ll consistently be able to find Internet service. Yeah, it’s risky, and potentially the most idiotic thing I’ve ever tried, but now that the idea is in my head, I can’t
not
do it.

I’m torn between wanting to sit here with Darren until all hours of the night and rushing back to the hotel to put my plan into action. I’m afraid if I wait too long, I’ll lose my nerve. I’m also running out of juice and my eyes are starting to burn from being awake for so long.

But I might not see Darren again … and I still don’t really know anything about him.

I make my body relax a little so it doesn’t look like I’m anxious to leave. “Well, now that we have me all figured out, what’s your story? Why are you here?”

He runs a hand through his curls. “I just graduated, like, a week ago.”

“Oh, lucky!” I say, unable to mask the envy. “So is this a graduation trip or something? Backpacking across Europe?”

“Not exactly. Both Nina and my brother wanted to do this private archaeology program to pad their résumés for grad school, and since I’m planning to study archaeology too, my parents offered to pay for me to go with them. We’re going to work at different field schools, learning at active excavation sites and stuff.” He studies my face. “I’m totally boring you.”

“No, not at all!” I say quickly. “I think it’s cool. And it explains why you know so much about everything here.” I glance back up at the Pantheon, wishing there was some easy way to transfer all his knowledge to my brain. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone interested in that before, and now there are three of you.”

Darren stretches his legs out in front of him. “Well, my parents are both anthropology professors now. They met here when they were in school. Rome is, like, their place. Which is probably one of the reasons my mom was so excited about this summer. She wants it to be as special for me and Tate as it is to her.”

“Is it? Special for you, I mean.”

He points a finger at himself. “Future archaeology student, remember? It’s impossible not to get caught up in the history and romance of this place.”

Accordion music echoes across the piazza and I smile. Rome doesn’t even have to try to be romantic. It just
is
.

“Nina’s already thinking about grad school? Is she that much older than you?”

“A few years, yeah.”

“Whoa.” I refrain from making any cougar comments. “And you’re spending the whole summer in Rome?” I ask. “Digging things up?”

He absentmindedly plays with a loose string at the hem of his shirt. “We’ll be here a few more weeks. Then we’ll move on to a dig in Tuscany. And we get weekends off, sometimes even three-day weekends, so I plan on traveling when I can. Blowing all my graduation money,” he adds with a laugh.

“Where to?”

“Pompeii, for obvious reasons, but I also want to see Venice before it sinks. And everyone says the place to see at least once in your life is the Cinque Terre.”

I do my best to repeat the words he just said. “Cinque Terre?”

“It means ‘the five lands.’ It’s a section of the northern coast, the Italian Riviera. Five little fishing villages all connected by a path along the cliffs of the sea. The trail’s pretty famous. It’s called la Via dell’Amore.” The words flow like he’s a local.

I look away quickly when I realize I’m staring at his lips, silently begging for him to keep speaking in Italian. “Sounds beautiful.”

“I’ve heard it’s one of the best places to photograph in the country,” he says, pointing to my camera. “You should go and check it out. I mean, since your summer’s free now.” He flashes a sneaky smile. My partner in crime.

I return the smile. “Maybe I will.”

“Well, I guess I should get going,” he says through a yawn.

I have no clue what time it is, but it’s probably late and the travel exhaustion is definitely setting in. “Yeah, me too.”

We stand and I observe the sea of people around us, adjusting both my camera and tote bag so they’re in front of me.

“Do you have far to walk to your hotel?”

“No, it’s just behind the Pantheon.”

“Oh, I’ll walk with you. I’m going that way, anyway.”

We walk in silence, Darren’s hands in his pockets and mine gripping the strap to my bag where it crosses over my chest. My mind whirls a mile a minute. Does he want to keep in touch? Would that be weird?

“Thanks for everything,” I say when we reach the front door to the hotel. “You’ve definitely softened the blow of my first day.” It’s the truth, but my smile feels forced for some reason—anxious.

He shrugs. “Thanks for dinner.”

“Thanks for the gelato.”

I shift my camera around to my side as Darren starts opening his arms to go in for a hug, but at the last second he plunges one hand into his pocket and offers me the other to shake. His grip is firm and he holds my gaze a few seconds longer than I expect before letting go and taking a step back.

My heart sinks, but I’m not entirely sure why. I knew this was coming. I knew I’d have to face my summer alone.

His smile is genuine, like a friend’s, and he says, “Good night, Pipperoni. Maybe I’ll see you again sometime.”

Chapter Seven

Get my picture taken at the Colosseum

ASSIGNMENT NUMERO DUE: PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, THE ITALY EDITION

We have the L train here in Chicago, but what do they use in Italy? Find out, get on, and get off somewhere that sounds interesting. Take pictures for evidence, and write about it, leaving space for a 4x6 once you get your pictures printed
.

The next morning, I wake up on my own around nine, cursing the bright light sneaking through a gap in the curtains right into my eyes. This must be what it feels like to get hit by a truck. My legs and even my arms ache, my abs hurt like I did a hundred
crunches before bed, my head feels foggy, and I’ve never had such a strong craving for ice water. I work my way to the bathroom for the morning rituals, and gravity seems to be tugging on all my limbs with more force than usual, which means everything takes twice as long.