Kissing in Italian (11 page)

I tilt my head back, gasping for breath, and past Evan’s shoulder, I see the principe and the principessa standing at one of the windows. The principe is clapping enthusiastically, eyes and teeth sparkling, applauding our efforts, looking from side to side at his guests, exhorting them to clap too; the ones who aren’t are raising their Prosecco flutes to us like salutes. Golden light floods out from the salon, the spectators lit up as if they’re onstage, not us. The principe
looks like the conductor of an orchestra, gesturing at us all, and the principessa—

Oh. She’s the only one who’s doing nothing. Not clapping, not raising her glass. Her hands are empty, and she’s looking straight at me, her face dead white, framed by hair that’s dyed too black, making her look like a ghost. I flinch as I meet her eyes.

I’m not dancing with your son!
I think frantically.
I’ve stayed away from him. And I was invited here by your husband! None of this is my fault.…

Then I realize that the prince is looking directly at me too. Husband and wife stare at me, panting, still twined in Evan’s arms. I feel horribly self-conscious: I know I’m sweaty, but hopefully I’m not too shiny, as the evening breeze is cooling me down. The principe, having whipped up his guests to applaud, is taking this opportunity, while they’re all distracted by the spectacle, to observe me, his gaze sharp and focused, and I understand with a shock that his seemingly nonchalant greeting earlier was all an act, a cover-up for the chance to scrutinize me when he could do so without anyone else realizing.

Anyone, that is, but his wife. Because now the pressure of her stare eases as she glances at him instead. Her husband, looking at a girl who might be his daughter. I can’t imagine what it feels like for her.

And another thought hits me now like a physical blow as I look at the man who could be my father.
Was this all planned? Did he come back from Florence because he heard of my existence? Did he make his wife throw a party so he could get a look at me in the most completely unsuspicious, neutral way possible?

I tear my head away swiftly, burying it in Evan’s shoulder.

“Hey!” he says above me, sounding understandably surprised. “You okay? What’s up?”

“Everyone’s looking—I feel shy,” I manage to say.

It’s not completely a lie. He turns me with him, his arm still around my waist, walking away from the lit windows and into the comparative shadow at the back of the terrace.

“Complimenti!”
a high voice trills, and I look sideways as we pass to see Elisa smiling at us, extremely complacent to see me in another boy’s arms.

And beyond her, Luca, not smiling: positively glowering. I can see his eyes now, and they’re burning as blue as if there were a miniature gas flame in each one. I feel scorched by the anger in his stare.

How dare he be angry with me! At this moment, I swear, I’m done. If I could run away right now and never come back, I would. Because I never want to see any of the di Vesperis again. I cling to Evan as if he were a life raft in choppy seas.

“Violet!” Kelly hisses next to me. She’s a little out of breath, which surprises me, as I don’t think she was dancing. She pushes her hair back with both hands as she says quickly:

“Come with me! There’s something I really need to show you!”

I feel awful, because Evan’s been so nice; asking me to dance, which is always lovely—no one likes to feel like a wallflower. And he was kind enough to whisk me off the center of the terrace when I was overwhelmed by the di Vesperi family drama. But if Kelly’s found something out, there’s no question that I have to go with her.

“I’m just nipping to the loo,” I say to him, and as I slip away with Kelly, a woman with hair dyed blond, her makeup plastered on, sashays across the terrace toward Evan. She’s wearing a purple knit dress that clings to every single curve of her tall body and she’s smiling at Evan like Shere Khan in
The Jungle Book
when he’s contemplating eating Mowgli.

“ ’Ello!” she says to him flirtatiously. “You dance
very
well. My name is Sunny, what’s yours?”

“Wow, cougar alert!” I mutter to Kelly, who looks back and giggles.

“Hey!” Paige says as we pass, clutching Leonardo’s arm with one hand and pointing at Evan with the other. “Did you see? Evan’s got a new dancing partner!”

It’s another waltz: Sunny’s drawing Evan onto what’s become the dance floor, sliding one hand around his neck to pull him close.

“She’s, like,
ancient!
” Paige howls happily. “Where’s my phone? I’ve got to take photos!”

Kelly pulls my arm to guide me along the terrace, leading me into a room with paneled walls that smell deliciously of wood polish. I imagine an army of cleaners tearing through the castello over the last week now that the principe is back with his money to take care of things. It reminds me of the animals and birds in Disney films that whisk away any dirt in the blink of an eye. Hard not to keep thinking of fairy tales when you’re at a party in a castle.

“Here!” Kelly says eagerly, almost running over to the far side of the room, dodging past a grand piano with a silver candelabra on top and a mahogany stand carrying a huge, elaborately decorated Chinese vase that must be three feet tall. “I found some photo albums, and you’re not going to
believe
what’s in them.…”

She reaches a long table against the far wall, laden with leather-bound albums embossed in gold. I open one at random. Each page of photos has its own translucent protective covering sheet, and I raise the one on top to see neatly
pasted black-and-white photos with those old-fashioned white scalloped edges. The middle one is a trio of girls, their arms around one another’s waists, dressed up in forties-style wide skirts and small fitted jackets, smiling at the camera. Their hair is curled, their faces are bare of makeup apart from lipstick and powder, and the one on the right is the spitting image of me. I slam the album shut with a crash.

Dust puffs out.

“I don’t want to see any photos that look like me,” I say in a small stifled voice. “It’s making me feel weird.”

“No, that’s not what I was going to show you,” she reassures me. “But—”

Her hand slides across the page of the album that she’s just opened, covering the picture.

“It’s not going to make you feel amazing, though,” she continues nervously.

“Let me see,” I say curtly, before I can change my mind.

She moves her hand away from the page that she was concealing, and I lean over to look. It’s a color photo of the principe. Younger, with no gray in his hair, and fewer lines around his eyes. But really, apart from those small differences, he hardly seems to have changed.

“He looks almost the same, doesn’t he?” Kelly comments, as if reading my thoughts. “That’s what happens when you have tons of money.” She grimaces. “You should see
my
dad in a photo from nearly twenty years ago. You wouldn’t even recognize him.”

The principe is smiling broadly at the camera. He has one arm around a beautiful girl who’s towering above him in her high heels. They’re clearly at some sort of fashion
show. She’s in a tiny, acid-bright lace dress, her legs seeming endless, her shoes a tangle of little straps reaching up to mid-calf. Behind them is a catwalk; I can make out the rows of delicate gold chairs behind it. It looks as if the fashion show has finished; there are groups of people milling around, chatting.

And on the far right—Kelly’s pointing her out, but I’ve found her already, I know now why she’s showing me the photo—on the far right is my mum. Wearing another tight little lace minidress, her long slim body making it look elegant rather than vulgar. Her blond hair is teased up into a crazily high arrangement like the one on the model the principe is embracing. Mum’s talking to another woman, a scary-thin blonde with poker-straight hair in tight leather trousers and so much black liner around her eyes that she looks like a full-on Goth.

“That’s Donatella Versace,” Kelly says in awe. “Your mum was really a proper model, being in a Versace show.”

I nod absently, unable to take my eyes off my mum. She looks so beautiful, the makeup and the hair turning her into a goddess. She never wears much makeup nowadays; she says she had enough in her modeling days to last her the rest of her life. Her cheekbones are so high with the contoured blusher that her face looks almost alien.

“So you know what this means,” Kelly’s saying, and I realize that I’ve been focusing hard on my mum’s gorgeous face to avoid coming to the real conclusion. Reluctantly, I nod again.

“This is September 1994,” she says, “in Milan. I mean, it doesn’t prove anything at all. But it shows that they were
together, they could have met. Before you were—
Anyway
, they could have met.”

She’s right: it doesn’t prove anything. But it’s another nail in the coffin of my hopes that Luca and I aren’t related. And for a moment, horribly, I resent Kelly with such intensity that my fists clench, my nails digging into my palms. She’s too good at researching, too clever. She’s only seen a couple of photos of my mum on my phone, and she still managed to locate these albums, work through the ones with the correct time period, and spot Mum in the background of a photograph that didn’t even feature her.

I should thank her. But instead, I want to kill her.

“Violet?” she starts, and I swallow hard, because my anger has suddenly transformed itself into a desperate wish to burst out crying. And I absolutely can’t burst into tears, not here, not at this party.…

Then we hear footsteps outside, on the terrace, a swift pattering of heels on stone, coming closer. We stare at each other in panic. Under the circumstances, the last thing I want is to be caught here, looking at family photograph albums. Kelly moves like lightning. She shuts the album, grabs my arm, and pulls me to a small sofa, ducking down to hide behind it. One of my sandals twists under me and I wince, but I can’t move to adjust it now, not a muscle, because the footsteps are clattering onto the parquet floor, and Paige is saying breathlessly:

“Are you really upset about tonight?”

“Yes!” Kendra sighs in a rush. “Oh God, I feel like I’m going mad!”

“Is he—”

“Yes! He’s waiting, to see if I can sneak off, but he can’t hold on for much longer—he’s got to go and help out a friend later with something—”

“Oh
no
!” Paige gushes.

“I feel like I’ll
die
if I have to wait till tomorrow to see him!” Kendra bursts out passionately. “And it was going to be so lovely tonight—he was going to take me out to dinner somewhere far away, where no one would recognize either of us, a little restaurant in a sort of secret garden—it was going to be so romantic. He’s
so
disappointed! He’s been texting and texting me—”

“Oh!”
Paige is clearly completely caught up in the romance of all this sneaking around. “But hey, we can do it anytime, though—we’ll just say we’re doing the double-date thing again. I can always find someone to go out with, and then you can take off with Luigi—”

“Shh!” Kendra hisses. “Don’t
ever
say his name!”

“Sorry!” Paige is contrite.

“He says Catia would go
mad
if she knew,” Kendra whispers.

Squashed beside me, I feel Kelly’s head nodding in vigorous agreement at this.

“Oh, she
totally
would,” Paige agrees. “And we have to be really careful around Evan, too. He’d go crazy.”

“It’s so
unfair
!” Kendra laments. “Just because he’s a bit older! Why can’t people
understand
? I don’t
want
to date boys my own age!”

“I’ll
totally
help,” Paige assures her enthusiastically.

“Hey!” cuts in a deeper voice, and I can hear the two
girls start, their feet shuffling, their dresses rustling, at the interruption.

“Ev!” Paige says quickly. “What’s up?”

“I’m hiding out,” her brother says. “There’s this, um—
lady
, who—”

“Omigod, I
know
!” Paige says in a happy rush. She’s having a fantastic evening; so much drama she doesn’t have time to keep up with it all. “She was, like, all over you!”

“She said she feels much more at home with all us young people,” Evan recounts, sounding very uncomfortable. “She said her husband was really boring and everyone inside was really old—”

“She’s
really old!” Paige exclaims.

“It was pretty embarrassing,” he says. “I mean, she made me waltz with her and she was kind of rubbing my arm and talking about my muscles.”

“Cougar bait!” Paige trills. She giggles. “I bet you’d rather’ve been dancing with Violet, right? Did you head in this direction ’cause Violet came this way?”

Evan mumbles something unintelligible.

“You’re mean to tease him like that,” Kendra says after a few moments; I presume Evan’s left.

“What? He likes Violet!” Paige says. “And she’s not after Luca anymore—or she messed up with him, ’cause he’s with Elisa now. I’m almost positive. I thought he was into Violet, but something went wrong there.”

“She played that badly,” Kendra agreed.

Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves. I jerk furiously, fighting the impulse to stand up and yell at them that
they don’t know what they’re talking about: that Luca still really likes me, that Elisa’s only second-best to him, that he looked beyond jealous just now when I was dancing with Evan.…

“We should get back,” Paige is saying.

“I don’t want to.” Kendra sighs miserably.

“You’ll see Lu—er,
him
tomorrow!” Paige says. “You can sneak out into the garden again! Just wait till ten, like last night. I’ll get us all watching a movie like the last time—no one had any idea you weren’t reading in bed. Come on, we should get back.”

“I wish I could be like you,” Kendra says as they go out onto the terrace. “You just don’t
feel
things like I do.”

“That’s me. Easy, breezy, beautiful CoverGirl. Deep as a puddle of water,” Paige says lightly as their voices fade away.