“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?”
Ms. Jackson placed a hand on his arm. “Maybe we should talk to her. Maybe have the adults meet to discuss this.” She spoke quietly, the way she might talk to a student who’d come to her desk to ask a question during a test.
He nodded, and Francesca brightened. “Yes. Very good, then. We go? Dinner now.” She kissed the tips of her fingers, then turned on one pointy black-heeled boot and escorted the frog back to the bus.
One by one, with shoulders at varying degrees of defeat, Jessa and her classmates followed the frog onto the bus.
As Jessa passed Cruella, their eyes met briefly, and Jessa’s heart sagged.
The woman’s eyes were filled with tears.
***
The restaurant walls were too close, pressing in at Jessa at odd, fragmented angles. The tables all seemed a bit too snug, the chairs too small, and Jessa felt suddenly like Alice, fumbling her way through Wonderland. She was crammed at a table with Dylan Thomas, Tyler, Erika, and Blake in the middle of the small room. Erika, in between bites of caprese salad, argued with Blake about vampires in the 1800s, something about how women vampires had more power then than now, because apparently, vampire rights were going through a rocky phase or something. Bad time to be a girl vampire in Erika’s opinion. Blake didn’t agree.
Jessa tugged her jacket off and hung it on the back of her chair. The room sweltered; sweat beaded on her upper lip. She nibbled at her salad, but it tasted like paste. At the next table, Sean laughed at something Natalie leaned in to say, brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. She fed him tiny balls of mozzarella with her fingers.
Tyler watched them too. Jessa could see his eyes dart back to them every once in awhile when Erika started repeating herself. He pointed his fork at Jessa. “You want to switch places with Erika?” Erika looked momentarily surprised to hear her name, then dove back into Blake’s argument like it was the hazelnut gelato Jessa had devoured after the Uffizi.
Jessa shook her head, tried to focus on Blake’s words, but she couldn’t quite get them to stay in one place. They’d spill from his mouth and then dissipate before she could put them in her ears, form an opinion about them.
Dylan Thomas lost interest in the vampires. He studied Jessa, drank his soda, studied her some more. His coal-black eyes took on heat, bore into her skull.
“What?” She finally asked him, wanting to hose his face down to extinguish those eyes.
“What’s with the PDA at the next table?”
Jessa stabbed at a tomato on her plate.
“Former amore? The garbage boy?”
“Garbage boy?” Tyler looked confused. Jessa shrugged and ate the tomato out of her salad.
Tyler cleared his throat, leaned in a bit. “A week ago, he was with Jessa.” Erika and Blake stopped talking instantly. Even vampires were no match for Jessa’s mangled heart. Tyler filled him in.
“What a wanker!” Dylan Thomas said a little more loudly than Jessa would have liked. Of course, the wanker in question was too involved feeding buxom Barbie to notice.
“Total wanker,” Tyler agreed, sipping his Coke.
“Are we even allowed to say ‘wanker’ if we’re not British? You guys sound like posers.” Erika fiddled with one of the million safety pins on her jacket.
“Right,” Tyler drawled. “We’re the posers.”
Erika flipped him off.
“Can we talk about vampires again?” Jessa leaned back as the waiter set the pasta she had ordered in front of her. The slender noodles twisted through a sea of red sauce, her heart on a plate.
“You should slap him right in his face,” Erika suggested, tucking into her lasagna with meat sauce. She wiped some red sauce from her lips, looking more like a vampire than ever before.
Dylan Thomas’s eyes widened. “Excellent. Yes. You need your moment.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “My moment?”
Dylan Thomas nodded, curling his arms in front of him on the table, his pasta untouched. “Sure. When you found him—did you give him a good smack? Did you scream at him? Did you break something of his that was especially important? A favorite CD? An arm?”
Tyler laughed and slurped some pasta into his mouth. “Jessa would never do that.”
Jessa frowned. What had she done? When Carissa split up with John Marshall, she’d papered his locker with magazine ads about erectile dysfunction. And with Tom Levy, she’d swiped his phone and set the ringtone so that it played Beck’s “Loser” over and over, knowing that he had no clue how to reset his ringtone. Seriously, he’d had that ringtone for a week before he could convince anyone to change it for him. But what had Jessa done? The door of the costume barn had swung open. She saw them there, all blurry and kissing and tangled in the red dress she’d worn to play Kate. Kate would have broken his arm. Mr. Campbell had said something about giving it a rest. Said something to stop them, but he’d swept her away into the theater. Sat her there on the metal chair. She’d stared at the smooth cement of the floor, at a smash of gum like a tiny handprint there next to a crack. She hadn’t screamed or slapped or broken anything at all.
“I didn’t do anything.”
Dylan Thomas shook his head. “To quote our friend here,” he pointed at
Tyler, “dubious.” Tyler slurped some more pasta and wiggled his eyebrows at Jessa.
Reaching into her pocket, Jessa ran her finger over the velvet edge of Carissa’s note. “Excuse me,” she said to the waiter as he passed with a tray of steaming rolls in a basket. “Can I get a drink? An orange soda?”
“What are you doing?” Tyler asked, his forkful of pasta halfway to his mouth, his face suddenly flushed.
“Buying myself a very belated Valentine. Carissa’s orders.”
Tyler set his fork down.
The table watched silently as she waited for her drink. Watched as the waiter set the clear glass of toxic orange liquid down in front of her. Their eyes grew wider as she took a sip, then stood, squeezed through the chairs between their tables, and without preamble, threw the entirety of the glass into Sean’s shocked face.
#5: quicksand
“What happened back there?” Mr. Campbell placed his hands on the curve of stone next to Jessa and tipped his face toward the cool wind coming off the water.
She leaned on the stone bridge railing, looking out on the darkening waters of the Arno River. The dusky evening light was turning the water pink and yellow and blue. “I was having my moment.” She sighed, the colors all around pressing against her, her ears buzzing with distant scooters, the murmur of restaurants, somewhere a woman’s laughter ringing out.
“Feel better?”
“Actually I do.” Only she didn’t. The orange soda had soaked his white T-shirt, flattened his hair. That look of complete shock, the way his face had cracked like an egg into surprise, then understanding, that must have been how she’d looked last Monday framed in the doorway of the costume barn; he’d mirrored it right back to her.
“That boy’s going to need a shower.” Was it her imagination or was Mr. Campbell smiling a little, just at the corners of his mouth. “But for the record, I’m officially against you throwing drinks in people’s faces.”
“I broke the rule.”
“Little bit, yeah.”
Instructions for a Broken Heart Page 6
