Last Rites

by Danielle Vega

  “That hill is famous,” Mara says, squinting. “It was . . . damn, I can’t remember the story. What did Professor Coletti say about it, Harpy? Was it Lucia again, or something about the Inquisition? I swear I wrote it down.”

  “I don’t remember, but we can go up after lunch, if you want.” Harper frowns at something and then knocks her shoulder into mine, nodding at a man standing on the corner opposite us.

  He’s young and a little overweight. His belly sags against his blue polo. The red stripe on his trousers and the gun hanging from his belt tell me he’s poliziotto. An Italian policeman. He watches us, scowling.

  “Puttana americana,” he mutters, shaking his head. He spits on the sidewalk before walking away.

  “What’s his problem?” I ask.

  Harper says, “Some of the locals don’t like CART students.”

  “Especially not us slutty American girls with our short skirts and loose morals.” Mara rolls her eyes.

  “Just be cool, it’s not a big deal.” Harper waves her phone at me. “We missed a turn back there. Come on.”

  Sweat pours down my back as we make our way back down the steep roads and across busy streets that twist and curve, not bothering with stop signs. Cars zip past us, honking like crazy as we approach the street.

  “Careful,” Mara warns, a hand on my shoulder. “They won’t stop for you.”

  I follow close behind them and jog quickly across the street when there’s a break in the traffic. It’s harder than I thought it would be to navigate the cobblestones. Harper and Mara don’t have as much trouble as I do—they must be used to the bad roads by now—but I struggle to keep up with them, my ankles twisting with each step.

  Another slimy drop of water falls from the laundry hanging overhead, slithering down my back. I whirl around, swatting at it like it’s a bug, and the edge of my sandal catches a gap in the cobblestones.

  I’m falling before I realize I missed a step. I land on my knees—hard—the cobblestones rubbing skin from bone. Blood bubbles up from my veins, gathering between my knee and the grimy stones. My ankle pulses where I twisted it.

  Shit. I grasp my ankle, fighting back tears. Pain pulses below my skin. The strap of my sandal has snapped in half. I look up, expecting my friends to swoop down on me, make sure I’m okay. But they’re gone.

  “Harper?” I struggle to my feet, careful not to put pressure on my injured ankle. “Mara?”

  They were only a few feet ahead of me—they couldn’t have gone far. I take a step forward, and pain shoots up my leg. I release a quick hiss of breath, clenching my eyes shut. I need to sit. I’ll have to find them at the restaurant, if I can remember what it’s called.

  A small stone cathedral sits at the end of the twisting road. I shield my eyes to get a better view. Its whitewashed walls have long since gone yellow, and a bell tower peeks out from above the other crumbling buildings, casting a shadow over the cobblestones.

  Creepy, but pretty. And most churches in tourist cities like this are open to the public, aren’t they? I manage to hobble up the stone steps and push the creaky wooden door open.

  A thick shadow falls over me. The only light comes from the trickle of sunshine seeping through the stained-glass windows. The space is huge and airless, stretching back much farther than I expected it to. The ceiling soars above, all domes and arches.

  A priest in white robes stands at the pulpit at the far end of the room, speaking in solemn Italian to the few people scattered throughout the front rows of wooden pews. I shiver and wrap my arms around my chest.

  A girl with acres of dark hair cascading down her back kneels in front of an altar. Above her, hundreds—maybe even thousands—of tea lights flicker, their wicks dancing inside red votive candleholders. I start hobbling toward the closest pew, my ankle throbbing. The girl looks up as I walk past.

  She’s arresting, but not quite pretty—not like the bartender from last night. A long, thin nose cuts her face in half, hooking slightly over full lips. Her cheekbones are sharp and high, her eyes too large and dark as pools of oil.

  “Scusami,” she says in a high, tinkling voice, “sei persa?”

  I hesitate. “I’m so sorry, but I don’t speak Italian.”

  She studies my face, doe eyes narrowing. She wears a modest, ill-fitting dress, the neckline much too high for a day as hot as this one. The fabric bunches around her narrow shoulders and stretches tight across her ample chest. In comparison, my tank top and cutoff shorts show off way too much skin. I feel naked.

  She says, in careful English, “Are you . . . sick?”

  Sick. The word sends something dark twisting through me. I’m not sick. Not anymore.

  I say, too quickly, “Why would you think that?”

  Her eyes lower, landing on my ankle. The skin around the bone has started to swell and turn purple, and the cuts on my knee are still bleeding freely. Lines of red trail down my leg. Her eyebrows lift.

  “Sick?” she says again. Then, searching for the word, “I mean . . . hurt. Are you hurt?”

  “Oh! Yes, I’m hurt.” I gesture toward my ankle. “Twisted it on the sidewalk.”

  She shakes her head indulgently and says something else in Italian. She gestures with her hands as she speaks.

  “Those sidewalks,” she says, in English. “They are the devil. Come here. Sit.”

  She nods at a chair beside the altar.

  “Grazie,” I say, sitting.

  “Here, light a candle and we can say a prayer, for your health.” She points to a sign in front of the candles, written in Italian and English and French. I squint to read the words in the dim light. For a euro, you can buy a candle to light and say a prayer. It reminds me of being a little kid and making a wish as you toss a quarter into a fountain.

  “Yes, thank you.” I dig a euro coin out of my pocket, but the girl shakes her head.

  “No, no. We will give you your first prayer for free.” She smiles, her full lips turning up in a demure curve. The smile lights up her face.

  I smile back and choose my candle. I think the girl wants me to pray for my ankle to heal, but I can’t help thinking of Giovanni’s lips, of his hands on my waist. The memory causes heat to rush into my face.

  Suddenly I’m making a different prayer—more wish than anything else. It’s the same thing I’ve been wishing for all summer, ever since the moment I got out of the institute.

  I just want to be the person I was before, I think. Please let me get my life back.

  The girl stands, lighting a long match, which she hands to me. It trembles as I take it from her, lowering the flame to the candle. I repeat my prayer like a mantra.

  Please let me get my life back. Please.

  The flame jumps from my match to the wick, flaring in a sudden spark of red and orange. I release a surprised yelp and shake the match out before the fire can nip at my fingers.

  The girl says something sharp, in Italian, and reaches for my hand. “Sorry,” she mutters, pulling my arm straight so she can examine my wrist. “But you should be okay, it is only wax—“

  She pauses, frowning. I follow her gaze to a white clump of wax clinging to my arm. She wipes the wax away, revealing pale skin below. The wax didn’t leave a mark.

  “Strange,” she murmurs, brushing the tips of her fingers over my skin. “You are very lucky; the candle did not burn you.”

  “Yeah.” I straighten, goose bumps racing up my arms, and squirm away. “I should go find my friends.”

  She nods, those dark eyes studying my face with new interest. I back toward the door.

  The silence in the church feels heavier than it did a moment ago. I glance up at the pulpit and realize the priest has stopped his sermon. He’s staring at me. My breath catches. They’re all staring at me. The people gathered at the front of the church are twisted around in their pews, watching.
>
  In my hurry to get back outside, I put too much weight on my ankle and cringe, struggling to push the heavy door open. Heat wafts over me, leaving me momentarily breathless.

  I swallow, letting the door slam closed. I hear the Italian girl’s voice echo in my head as I struggle down the sidewalk.

  You are sick?

  There’s a part of me that wonders if they could tell, if she could smell the institute on me like perfume. If, even now, after all these months, I’m still just the girl in the nuthouse.

  * * *

  • • •

  I find Harper and Mara sitting outside a little café as I stumble back to the apartment. They make a big show of fussing over my knee, requesting ice from the waiter, and sopping up the blood with napkins.

  “We thought you’d gone back home,” Harper says offhandedly when I ask why they didn’t come to look for me. She’s already got a glass of wine in front of her, and I notice that her hangover seems to have disappeared.

  I cringe as she presses down on the napkin. Icy water trails down my leg. “Why would you think that?”

  Harper and Mara share a look and quickly change the subject.

  I tune them out, staring down at the napkin bunched against my knee. The ice has all melted, and my blood has seeped straight through the fabric, staining it red. If I squint, it doesn’t look like a napkin at all. It looks like something gory.

  Raw meat, maybe. Or a handful of flesh.

  CHAPTER 5

  Before

  I perch on the edge of a white, over-pillowed couch in a small white room. My new therapist has gone overboard with the color scheme. There’s white carpet, white chairs, white side tables holding delicate white lamps. Black-and-white photographs cover the walls. Their frames are white. Of course.

  Harper did the same thing our senior year, only with black. She painted her walls the color of ink, bought a matte-black bedspread and gauzy black curtains. Hung shiny silver frames on her walls to break up the dark. It looked sort of cool, actually, but then Mara started calling her goth princess, so she changed it.

  Dr. Andrews takes the seat in front of me and studies me for a moment without speaking.

  I study her right back. She’s black, in her midforties, with deep brown shoulder-length hair and wide, sympathetic eyes. Everything she’s wearing is white. Her eyes are a shade or two lighter than her skin. Tiger’s eyes, my mother would call them. They’re hypnotizing.

  “So,” she says, folding her hands in her lap. “Why don’t you start by telling me why you’re here?”

  “Here, like, in this office?” I plop back against the pillows. “Daily therapy sessions with you are a requirement during my last three weeks. I figured you knew that.”

  Dr. Andrews nods. She narrows her eyes just enough to make the corners crinkle. Something about her expression is incredibly calming, like staring into still water. I wonder if they teach that in shrink school.

  Mara’s thick premed textbooks flash through my head. I bet she’d know.

  I clear my throat, waiting for Dr. Andrews to speak, but she only tilts her head, examining me with those strange hypnotist’s eyes. The silence grows.

  Finally, I ask, “Or did you mean why am I here, like, at the institute?”

  She wets her lips. “What do you think I meant?”

  I squirm, digging a pillow out from behind my back. “That’s all in my file or whatever. Don’t they make you study up on us before sessions?”

  “They do. But I’d like to hear the story from your perspective.” Dr. Andrews leans back in her chair, opening a small notebook. It’s a black leather Moleskine, and I don’t remember her holding it a second ago, but now it’s balanced on her crossed knee, and she has a felt-tip pen in her opposite hand.

  I pull one of her pillows onto my lap and start playing with the fringy bit. I expected us to start slowly. Something like “Tell me about your home life” or “Do you have a boyfriend?” I’d almost been looking forward to talking about myself, telling her how my dad used to make us grilled cheese at midnight, our secret ritual. Or how I’d watch ancient Nora Ephron movies with my mom on weekends, the two of us giggling over bowls of popcorn. I’d been normal before all this.

  But nope. This lady opens our first session by asking me to give her a breakdown of the worst day of my life. Well, second-worst day.

  “It’s not a secret or anything,” I say, choosing my words carefully. “My friend had just committed suicide. I was sad, and I was at this stupid party, for some reason. I took too many drugs and, like, freaked out or whatever. Had a panic attack. Or ‘panic episode.’ End of story.”

  “Is there a reason her death affected you like that?”

  “She was my best friend.” This comes out more sharply than I intended.

  Dr. Andrews lifts her chin. “The mourning process is different for everyone, of course, but a panic episode seems like an extreme response. Was something else going on?”

  I think of Tayla and me at five years old, playing Barbies-meet-dinosaurs in my backyard. The two of us taking a break to run inside for cookies and lemonade. I give a quick jerk of my shoulder. “I don’t know. I was just . . . sad. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I feel better now, though, so I don’t know why it matters.”

  I smooth the pillow tassels with my thumb and forefinger, waiting for Dr. Andrews to say something. She watches me for what feels like a full minute.

  Finally, she says, “And that’s the only reason you think you’re here?”

  “Well, yeah,” I blurt, frowning. “I’d just started college—NYU? I was nearly finished with my first semester when it happened—the episode, I mean. The dean even said I could finish out the year, see how things went, but my mom made me drop out. She wanted me to do six weeks here first, as a precaution. I was hoping that if you talked to me and saw that I wasn’t really crazy, you’d see how this was all a big mistake.”

  Dr. Andrews studies me. I swear, she hasn’t blinked once since I sat down. “Is that right?”

  “Yeah?” But my voice rises at the end, making it sound like I’m not sure.

  Dr. Andrews nods and leans over her notebook.

  “What are you writing?” I ask.

  She straightens, tapping the edge of her notebook with her pen. “So far, you’ve told me the reasons other people think you should be here. I want to know why you think you should be here.”

  I feel my jaw tighten. I don’t think I should be here. I think I should be walking down University Avenue with Harper and Mara, drinking overpriced smoothies and looking through the used books at the Strand.

  But, out loud, I say, “Those are the reasons I think I’m here.”

  Dr. Andrews closes her notebook and places it on her lap, like it’s a period she’s putting at the end of this particular sentence.

  “Therapy is a process,” she explains. “There’s no way to get through everything we have to work on in one session. Perhaps we’ll leave it at that for today.”

  I dig my fingers into the pillow on my lap.

  Sometimes, when I’m in a situation I can’t control, I try to think of how my friends might handle it. How Harper would smile and charm her way into getting whatever she wanted. How Mara would use cool logic to point out exactly why the other person was wrong. How Tayla would—

  But I don’t have those tools. I sit there, silent.

  “You can spend the next twenty-four hours thinking about what you’d like to discuss with me tomorrow.” Dr. Andrews places her notebook on the table next to her chair and stands, nodding toward the door.

  “Whatever.” I get up, tossing the pillow aside, and head back into the waiting room.

  * * *

  • • •

  The waiting room is a carbon copy of Dr. Andrews’s office, except there are half a dozen white chairs scattered around, instead of a cou
ch, and more throw pillows than I’ve ever seen in one place in my entire life. If I had my phone, I’d snap a pic for Harper. She’d love this.

  Sofia sits in one of the chairs, staring into space, knee bouncing like crazy. She looks up when the door opens. “Oh, hey.”

  “You up next?” I ask.

  Eye roll. “Unfortunately.”

  “Not a fan?”

  Sofia goes back to studying some spot on the floor at my feet, eyes unfocused. “Are you?”

  “It’s only my first session.” I glance over my shoulder to make sure Dr. Andrews isn’t standing there, listening. The door stays closed, so I drop into the chair next to Sofia and lower my voice. “I was kind of hoping therapy wouldn’t be so . . .” I trail off, searching for the right word.

  Sofia’s eyes come up to meet mine. “Mind-numbingly lame?”

  “Something like that.”

  Her lips purse, like she has a bad taste in her mouth. “Get used to it. The only ways out of here without Andrews’s stamp of approval are the three B’s.”

  “The three B’s?”

  “Bribery, blackmail, or . . .” Sofia sticks her tongue into her cheek, one hand pumping like she’s giving a blow job.

  “Gross,” I say, slapping her. “And whom, exactly, am I supposed to be giving a blow job? If you haven’t noticed, there’s a severe lack of men in this place.”

  “Yeah, but it starts with b. You’re ruining the joke, Berk.” She snickers. “What’s the big deal, anyway? It’s just talking. You told me your story easily enough.”

  “With her it’s exhausting. It’s like she thinks you should be able to determine your emotional state down to the millisecond.”

  I catch the twitch of Sofia’s mouth from the corner of my eye. She asks, “You sure you told her everything?”

  I feel a sudden spike of anger, like a muscle spasm. “You think I lied?”