by Arvin Ahmadi
I rejoined Jahan and Giovanni and Rocco on the dance floor. I noticed glow stick bathroom boy sitting at a small table by the bar.
“Who’s that?” I asked Jahan over the music; it was poppy and Italian, and everyone was singing along.
“That’s Valerio,” Jahan said. “He’s Francesco’s cousin. I think he’s a student or something in Rome. Looks like he’s working the drink ticket booth.” He prodded me with his elbow. “Are you interested, Amir?”
I didn’t say anything, but I did decide I needed a drink.
My heart was beating fast, again, just like in the basement, as I walked up to the drinks booth. He, Valerio—who had not introduced himself to me yet, and for all I knew now, maybe wasn’t flirting in the basement but genuinely just wanted to help me put my glow stick on—was standing in front of a small table with a metal cash box. He, Valerio—the first boy I would ever make a move on in my life, since technically Jackson had approached me—was talking to an extremely attractive Italian girl. He, Valerio—descendant of Julius Caesar and Michelangelo and Al Pacino and—
All right, you get the picture. I was nervous. There was a lot going through my head.
But then Valerio did something drastic, something that would relieve all the fear swirling in my head: He looked away from the intensely spray-tanned Italian girl, looked over at me, and smiled.
Valerio ripped a red ticket from the ticket wheel and held it under the table. His eyes flickered downward. The girl laughed and said something in Italian, glancing over at me. It struck me that they were both waiting for me to take the ticket.
I shook my head and took it. At the bar, I ordered an Aperol spritz, which tasted refreshingly sweet.
Someone tapped my shoulder. “Hello, bathroom boy.”
I turned around, but Valerio had slunk around next to me at the bar. He barely had an Italian accent. “Thanks for the f-free drink,” I said.
“It is my pleasure,” he said, and okay, now he had an accent. Or was he trying really hard to sound like he didn’t have one?
“How did you know I didn’t speak Italian?” I asked.
“Because you would yell ‘damn it!’ every time you could not get that bracelet on,” Valerio said. God, his eyes were cute. Bluish green.
I turned red.
“Aren’t you going to ask my name?” he asked.
“Umm,” I said, taking a big sip of my drink.
“Valerio.”
“Amir,” I said. Behind him, Giovanni was ordering a drink at the bar. He winked at me.
“So … you sell drink tickets?” I asked Valerio.
“Yes, but my shift is over.”
“I don’t see anyone else manning the ticket table,” I said. “Does that mean the drinks are free now?”
“For me, I hope so. God knows I cannot afford them,” Valerio said.
“With a job like that, I’d assume you were loaded.”
Valerio nudged me with his elbow. “I work four jobs like that, at other bars and restaurants in Testaccio, and I am still not, as you say, ‘loaded.’ ”
It turned out Valerio was a student at Sapienza University in Rome. He had just finished his freshman year, and he was studying the very lucrative field of Latin.
“So you’re a nerd,” I said.
“I am actually very dumb.”
“I bet if I looked up this school right now, it’s probably the best college in Italy.”
Valerio scratched the back of his head, and I immediately pulled out my phone. He tried to take it away from me, but I managed to pull up the Wikipedia page.
“See!” I yelled, twisting my body to keep him away from my phone. “It says right here, ‘one of the most prestigious Italian universities, commonly ranking first’—”
“Okay, okay,” Valerio said, giggling. I looked back and saw Jahan and the others watching our little tug-of-phone.
After the bar shut down, Valerio suggested we continue our conversation over on a couch in the corner. Where our hips touched. And then our legs became intertwined. The dance floor was sparse, and it was at least five in the morning.
“I should get going,” Valerio said. “But I like you. You are funny. Let me get your number.”
I gave it to him. We didn’t kiss, although that might have been my fault, because I got sidetracked when I saw that my friends were retreating downstairs.
I said goodbye to Valerio and ran down the stairs, into the room of Italian antiques, where they had taken refuge on a couch in the very back of the center room—it felt like a ship cabin, with high ceilings, curved, just extremely deep. Neil was popping a bottle of prosecco and Jahan was going through a record collection in a dusty cabinet to the side of the couches.
“Whitney Houston!” Jahan yelped.
“Madonna!” Neil cheered as he uncorked the bottle.
He poured the prosecco into a line of flutes for us, and we toasted to the night.
Interrogation Room 38
Soraya
I NEEDED TO know where Amir had gone. I had already messed everything up by telling my mom and dad. Amir must have blocked us or something, because after a few days of nonstop calls—nonstop yelling—he stopped picking up our calls. They stopped going through. They would just go straight to voicemail.
Eleven Days Ago
WHEN I RANG the doorbell, I could hear dogs barking in the background and Neil yelling over them. “Mina! Firenze! Calmatevi!”
The lock rustled. “One second,” Neil said. He cracked the door open, the dogs skittering around his feet. “Hey! Come in,” he said.
We were having our lesson at Neil’s apartment today because I wanted to meet his dogs. I had thought he would just bring them by Rigatteria, but Neil had the day off from the bookstore, so he asked if I could just meet him at his apartment.
Neil and Francesco lived in a neighborhood called Pigneto (pronounced pin-yeto; in our first lesson, Neil had told me that in Italian, you pronounce every letter. I soon learned that was a big lie). I got there by taking one of the trams from Trastevere to Porta Maggiore, a massive, ancient gate that used to be part of the wall of Rome and was now a major traffic hub.
Neil’s apartment was much nicer than Jahan’s. It was airy, with a large balcony and lots of antique art scattered throughout. We studied on the couch in the living room, our notebooks spread out over the treasure chest coffee table. The couch was old and sank, which meant his waist was pressed right into mine and our knees sometimes touched. But I wasn’t freaking out nearly as much as you might expect. Just weeks ago, if you’d typed this equation into the Hot Dude Calculator—hidden heartthrob, works at a bookstore, multiplied by intimate Italian lessons—you would have gotten ERROR: CANNOT COMPUTE. Divided by a lesson at his apartment? LOL: GOOD ONE.
But today, I was fine. I kept my cool. Besides, I had a date with Valerio tonight. A real date. My very first real date. He had asked after that night at Rigatteria if he could take me out to dinner.
When I told Neil, he became unreasonably excited. “We found you an Italian boy!” he exclaimed. Even the dogs were freaking out. Neil translated what I had just told him for Francesco, and midsentence, Francesco’s eyebrows shot up, but then he smiled. He said something in Italian. “Keeping it in the family,” Neil translated for me.
We spent the rest of the lesson going over Italian words for love and bed-related things. Francesco got involved. They were like my gay uncles, preparing me for my very first date.
On my way out the door, Neil taught me one more phrase, “In bocca al lupo,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “It means good luck. Although—Italian has a lot of weird phrases like this—it technically translates into, ‘in the mouth of the wolf.’ You’re supposed to respond ‘crepi,’ which basically means, ‘may the wolf die.’ ”
I shook my head. “Italian is a strange language.”
Outside, I found Valerio leaning against a motorcycle. I complimented him on finding such a badass vehicle to stand and look cool against, a
nd he chuckled and said, “No, this is mine.”
I gawked for a second. “I’m not getting on that,” I said.
Valerio frowned. “Come on, it is safe! I have been riding it since I was your age.”
“So you’ve been riding it for two years. Nuh-uh. I’m not getting on a motorcycle.”
“It is a scooter.”
“When you said you’d pick me up, I thought you meant by foot, or maybe, at best, with a car …”
“I did not specify what kind of ride,” he said, smiling. I don’t know if he meant it that way, but I couldn’t help thinking about that line sexually. What kind of ride. And that was all it took for me to get on his motorcycle-scooter thing. God, I’m easy.
Valerio gestured at the handlebars below the passenger seat. “You can hold tight to these handles down here, or you can hold tight to me.”
“Well, that’s one way to make a move,” I said.
I strapped on my helmet. Valerio accelerated smoothly down the street. My nerves calmed; this didn’t feel so different from driving a car. Until, whoa, the first turn felt like we were karate chopping through the air. So I gripped his waist tighter.
We sliced through the highway. Every time we hit a bump, I gripped my fingers tighter around Valerio’s waist, and he laughed. The wind whipped my T-shirt. “I hope that thing doesn’t fly off,” Valerio said. He was talking! Like it was a normal car ride and we were just two normal passengers.
Valerio parked the motorcycle—I mean, scooter—and I dismounted awkwardly, one leg stuck in the air like I was contemplating a drop kick. My legs were shaking as they touched the ground.
I took off the helmet, and Valerio laughed. “You were supposed to buckle up,” he said.
“What? There was no seat belt,” I said, pointing at the seat. “I thought you were my seat belt.”
“I mean the helmet,” he said. “You never buckled it. I was going slowly, so it stayed on your head. But if I had gone any faster, it would have definitely flown off.”
I had a hard time believing that that was slow, but I smiled at the possibility of maybe someday going faster with Valerio.
Valerio took me to an outdoor restaurant in Garbatella, a sort of quaint Italian neighborhood not too far from bustling Trastevere. There were actual houses there—not unlike the colonial homes in Maryland, where I grew up—with yards and front doors and mailboxes. They were more colorful, though. Less brick, more color. That’s how I would sum up Roman architecture, if I had to.
He ordered for us as soon as we sat down, a long string of Italian peppered with words I recognized like “spaghetti” and “bruschetta” and “tiramisu.” I asked Valerio if this was where he brought all the American boys he picked up at two in the morning. That led to him telling me about his first and only relationship, with an upperclassman he had met his third week of college.
“I thought he was my amore,” Valerio said, he said, taking a last bite of our primi, the pasta dish. It was the most delicious red-sauced pasta I’ve had in my life. “I was not expecting the breakup. I was extremely heartbroken.”
I assumed this meant that Valerio was still a virgin, like me, until he told me about the aftermath.
“I am very sensitive when the people I like disappear. It is the Italian in me. We are very emotional.” He paused. “You could say I am scarred.”
“In America we call that ghosting,” I said.
“Yes, I am afraid of ghosts.” Valerio chuckled, probably pleased with himself that he’d made a dating/Halloween crossover joke. But then his face got grim. “After my amore and I broke up, he stopped talking to me. And so I went out with my friends that Friday night. I met a boy who quite literally swept me off my feet. He marched up to me at the bar, and I thought there was someone attractive behind me, so I turned around. But he wanted me. He said, ‘Un bel ragazzo’—beautiful man—with such confidence.”
The waiter stopped by and dropped off our secondi. Valerio said “grazie” and gestured at me to take a bite, and over a thin slice of veal that melted in my mouth, I asked him to keep telling the story.
“Oh, he was beautiful himself,” Valerio said, his eyes lost in the past. “Beach-blond hair, tall, tan like a Sicilian. I could not have drawn up a more attractive man. Within minutes we were kissing. My friends left me with this boy. I believe his name was Alessio. I will spare you the details, except that on our way to his apartment just blocks away from the bar, he bought a rose for me from one of those street peddlers. A rose! And so in my drunken, heartbroken state that night, I slept with him. He was gentle. So kind. The next morning, I walked home from his apartment, happier than I had ever been with my amore. I felt hope. I felt wanted.”
I knew where this story was headed, and my face turned grim as well. “He never texted you,” I said. “Did he?”
Valerio’s eyes fell to the table. “He did not. Another ghost. It truly hurt.”
I took a long sip of red wine. I couldn’t help but think about Jackson, how I might have hurt him in the same way when I just cut him off like that.
“I’m sorry, Valerio,” I said.
“It is fine,” he said, and he raised his glass to me. “Nothing a little wine cannot help.”
“Salute,” I said.
“Cheers,” he said, exhaling.
Dessert was sweet and soft and cocoa-filled. The lights strewn around the outdoor restaurant grew brighter. We stumbled off back to Valerio’s motorcycle—at least, I did. Valerio only had one glass; I finished the bottle. I assumed this was the end of the night, but Valerio drove past my neighborhood and up and up a winding road until we reached the most amazing view of Rome.
It was an area like a piazza—a piazzale, Valerio called it—high up, like an outdoor observatory. Hordes of other people, mostly around our age, hung around the ledges, drinking and taking in the view.
“Piazzale,” I said, stretching the word. “Like a piazza but high up?”
Valerio thought for a moment. “Not quite. A piazza is surrounded by buildings on every side. A piazzale usually has a side that is not buildings,” he said, sweeping his hand across the view.
“So it’s like a peninsula,” I said.
“What?”
“An island is surrounded by water on all sides,” I said. “But a peninsula has one side that’s connected to land.”
Valerio still looked confused. “It is not a peninsula. It is a piazzale.”
I snorted. “You’re a piazzale.”
He shrugged. “If you insist.”
We claimed a space on the stone ledge, and he called out some of Rome’s wonders from the skyline: Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and, next to it, the two-thousand-year-old chariot racing track.
“My friends from Rome, they say they used to drink and make out there when they were in high school,” Valerio told me.
“Where I’m from,” I said, “people in high school drink and make out in dark parks, not on ancient Roman racing tracks.”
Valerio giggled, scooting closer to me on the ledge. He leaned in and whispered, “I would make out with you anywhere. Racing track, dark park, wherever,” he said, his warm breath tickling my ear.
I pulled back.
“What is wrong?” Valerio asked.
I looked around the piazzale nervously. There were so many people around, most of them straight couples, though there were two girls who looked like they could be together. “Nothing, nothing,” I said, forcing a smile.
Valerio and I sat and talked for a while, and then he drove me back to my place, the ride even scarier and more life-threatening in the dark. He helped me off the scooter.
“Do you live alone?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “though I kind of miss living with Jahan. I was on his couch for a few days when I first came to Rome.”
“That is really nice of Jahan,” Valerio said, swinging his arms.
“He’s been so great to me,” I said, swinging mine. “He—” Before I cou
ld finish my sentence, Valerio grabbed my elbows and pulled me in and pressed his lips against mine.
I stood still.
I must have look petrified, because Valerio’s face fell. It was just like that split second in the car with Jackson, the first time we kissed, when I pulled back. Valerio started to stutter that he should go.
“No,” I pleaded. “Sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” he asked, confused.
Something about being boozy and having my own place made me wonder the same thing. Why was I sorry?
“Do you want to come up?” I asked, half smiling.
Valerio paused, looked at me, completed my smile, and nodded.
I fumbled with my giant key until I got it in the keyhole. That’s not an innuendo. That’s just a statement of fact. Then we cannonballed onto my bed. Fact. Valerio kissed me like a skilled sailor tying the most perfect knot in the middle of the ocean. Subjective, non-fact.
Valerio took off his shirt. Fact. There was a shiny silver pin punctured through his right nipple. Fact.
Remember Jahan’s nipple story? The one I’ve alluded to but have been waiting for the right moment to tell?
We have arrived. Our destination is on the right.
When I caught sight of Valerio’s shiny piercing, my mind immediately raced through Jahan’s story: His friend had gone home with a cool DJ, tattoos and piercings and all, and they took off their clothes, and one of his nipples was pierced, so he went in and sucked the nipple, because that’s what one does, apparently, and he enjoyed it, so he kept sucking. Then he felt something on his tongue, so he pulled back—it’s just a hair, bound to happen. But when he checked his tongue, nothing was there, and then he noticed something dangling from the guy’s pink little pepperoni, a white string. That was when it hit him.
He had sucked the nerve tendon out of his crush’s nipple.
When the cool DJ saw it for himself, he was just like, “Oh yeah, that happens all the time.” So he just pushed.
It.
