by Melissa Marr
I couldn’t think about it.
The blazing summer heat evaporated as soon as our group had filed only a few feet down into the catacombs. The underground chill always turned the day to winter. My friends began shivering; I had known to bring my embroidered shawl in my bag. Several steps ahead, I saw Cairo shrug on a hoodie.
Crudely carved fish and lambs dotted the bleak stone walls as we went farther and farther down. Since the tour guide was rattling off a lot of history my parents had already taught me, I fell toward the back, making room for my friends to hear better.
And, as it turned out, for someone else to fall in beside me.
“Hey.” I felt that smile tugging at my lips again as I glanced over to see Giovanni walking downstairs by my side. “I thought you’d wait for the Italian-language tour.”
“I have been here before many times.” Giovanni’s hands were tucked into his jeans pockets so that his elbows splayed out a little, revealing what broad shoulders he had. “I do not need to hear the tour guide again.”
“Why come at all?”
“Have to.”
“School trips suck.” I sighed. Though this one was looking up all of a sudden. I wondered if Giovanni and I could meet up after—Mrs. Weaver would never have let me go on a date, but an espresso at the hotel café seemed possible.
“One thing is better this time.” Giovanni’s shy smile made this cold, dark, dead place feel warm and alive. “You are here.”
I ducked my head, unable to meet his eyes any longer but unable to quit smiling. No guy had ever flirted with me before. Maybe it was something about Italian guys. Maybe it was something about Giovanni himself. But I felt totally sure he wasn’t just playing me—that he’d never done anything like this in his life.
That made two of us.
We reached the very bottom level of the catacombs, catching up with the rest of the group—my friends were silhouetted by the naked bulbs that served as lighting down here. They stood just through a stone archway. Carved-out graves surrounded us, and I saw Giovanni glancing their way.
“No need to be nervous.” I felt bold enough to tease him. “No dead bodies in there anymore.”
“Nothing but dust, now.” Giovanni’s mournful expression reminded me what this place used to be. Now it had become a stop on the standard tourist routes, with school bus trips tromping through every day and a souvenir shop nearby. Once, though, it was a secret cemetery where people came to hide their martyrs and hope for miracles. I looked up into the dark chambers above us and felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. What I felt was wonder—the emotion I’d been waiting to feel in Rome, but that had evaded me. Until Giovanni.
I smiled at him and whispered, “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” he said. “For finding me. I have waited so long.”
“Waited?”
“No one sees me. Only you see me.”
“Giovanni, we only just met—” I edged through the archway, with a glance over my shoulder. I expected him to follow me, and he did.
What I didn’t expect was for him to walk through the wall.
Straight through the stone wall.
I didn’t imagine it. It wasn’t a trick of the light. Giovanni really walked through the stone. “How did you do that?” My voice was too loud; I could hear the echoes in the stone chambers, and several people turned back toward me in irritation.
Audrey, in particular, looked put out. “Who are you talking to?” she muttered. “You’ve been ranting to yourself all morning. Did Cairo, like, infect you with weirdness?”
I pointed at Giovanni, who stood right in front of her, where she couldn’t possibly miss him. He had an apologetic look on his face. Then I realized that our shadows were all outlined sharply against the stone wall—everyone but Giovanni’s. The light shone right through him.
When our eyes met again, Giovanni nodded. “You are the only one who has seen me since I died.”
I screamed because I couldn’t do anything else, louder and louder, until someone turned out the lights.
What happened next—I couldn’t say. To me it was only confusion. I must have fainted, because the next thing I knew, I was lying on the sun-heated grass outside, Rome’s summer light nearly blinding me, Mrs. Weaver almost panicking, Marvin trying to get me to drink water out of his squeeze bottle. None of it made any sense until I saw my brother.
Cairo knelt by my side and took my hand. None of the instability I’d seen last night, or the insecurity I’d seen this morning, was visible now. Even when my brother had trouble being strong enough to take care of himself, he could be strong for me. “She needs to rest; that’s all. Just put us in a taxi back to the hotel,” he said. “I’ll see that she gets some sleep.”
Mrs. Weaver looked around, as if she wanted someone else to tell her what to do. But there weren’t enough adults on this trip, and she had about another twenty minutes to get the rest of the group back on the tour bus for the afternoon trip to the Castel Sant’Angelo. That, plus Cairo’s steadiness—his apparent recovery from last night’s upset—must have convinced her. “Don’t set one foot outside the hotel,” she said. “When we get back at six, I expect to see both of you waiting for us.”
“We will.” I would have said anything to get out of there.
Only when Cairo and I were truly alone—me flopped in exhaustion across my hotel bed, and him sitting yoga-style on Audrey’s—did we speak to each other. “What happened?” he said.
“I was talking to this guy, Giovanni, but . . . he wasn’t real.”
“What do you mean, not real?”
“He didn’t have a shadow. Nobody else could see him. And he said—he said I was the only person who’d seen him since he died.” I clutched the cover on my bed into a knot between my fingers. “That can’t be real, right?”
Only after I said the words did I realize—I didn’t have to tell Cairo the truth. I could’ve pled sunstroke or dizziness or something else and denied what had happened to me. But I never lied to him; it hadn’t occurred to me to start now.
Instead of calling the nearest psychiatrist, Cairo remained by my side. He even smiled. “It all makes sense now.”
“What makes sense?”
“Don’t you get it? I wondered about this before, but . . . when it was just me, I couldn’t be sure. Now I am. We’re psychic.”
“Psychic?”
“Or . . . talented, somehow. I don’t know the right word for it. But I have moments when I can hear people’s thoughts, and you can see the dead. We’re twins; I guess it makes sense that if it was happening to me, eventually it would happen to you too. Maybe it’s the . . . family inheritance. Something like that.”
I wanted to tell Cairo to stop talking about hearing people’s thoughts, just like I had the night before, but I couldn’t, and not just because I had begun experiencing something even stranger. I wanted to go back in time to the night before and not be such a bitch to Cairo, to come through for him the way he came through for me.
Most of all I wanted to go back to the life I’d had just this morning, where fitting in seemed possible. If Cairo was right, then I would never fit in. My brother and I really were freaks, and we’d be freaks forever.
But down deep I knew, for certain, that I’d seen Giovanni.
“How can we be sure?” I said. “It could have been heatstroke, or . . . déjà vu, or something.”
Cairo folded his arms. “Do you honestly believe that?”
“Can’t you tell?” I retorted. If he wanted me to take him seriously as Mr. Mind Reader, he was going to have to offer more proof.
“When I can hear thoughts, I can hear all of them. When I can’t, I can’t,” he said. He was bouncing on his heels, energized by the possibilities. “I can’t turn it on or off, but lately I’ve started thinking there might be a pattern—but I’m not sure yet. Enough of that. Back to you. Ravenna, do you really think what happened to you was as simple as heatstroke?”
“No,”
I admitted. “But I need to understand what’s going on before we try to diagnose ourselves because of a vision I saw in the catacombs.”
He checked the time on his phone. “If we cab it out there, we can get to the catacombs and back before the others return to the hotel.”
Breaking Mrs. Weaver’s rules didn’t bother me nearly as much as seeing Giovanni again. When I looked into my brother’s eyes, I could see that he understood my fear.
I said, “I don’t know why he appeared to me. What Giovanni wants.”
“Neither do I. What was he saying to you?”
“Ordinary stuff.” I shrugged. “Actually, I thought he was flirting with me. But I guess he was just excited that someone could see him finally.” It had been nice, thinking some hot Italian guy was into me. I should’ve known something was up.
“Well, we’ll go back. I’ll be with you. I can’t see the dead— not yet, anyway—but you won’t be alone. And you can figure out for sure whether or not this is real.”
“Thanks.” It came out in a small voice.
Cairo gave me a look. “If this had happened to you first, instead of me? I wouldn’t have believed you either. So stop feeling guilty. We have bigger things to deal with.”
When we returned to the catacombs in the early afternoon, the summer sun had intensified until even the roads seemed to sizzle. Although trees grew on the grounds outside the tombs, shade didn’t help much. My skin felt grimy with sweat. For a while we stood around where I’d first seen Giovanni that morning, but nobody appeared except a gaggle of blue-habited nuns awaiting their own tour.
“Maybe it doesn’t happen every time,” I said. “Maybe I can’t predict when it happens.”
“Possibly.” Cairo wasn’t ready to give up. “We should go back to the last place you saw him.”
Nobody could walk down into the catacombs without being on a guided tour, so we had to buy more tickets. The seller said crisply, “The next English-language tour is in just over one hour.”
Too long, I thought, to give us time to explore the catacombs and yet get us back to the hotel on time. “What’s the very next tour?”
“French, in five minutes.”
“We speak French,” I said. “Deux billets, s’il vous plaît.”
As we walked toward the gathering spot for the tour, Cairo said, “You wouldn’t have admitted that yesterday.”
“I wouldn’t have admitted a lot of things yesterday.” My long-cherished desire to look and act normal had so obviously died that there was nothing to do but let it go. If I could see the dead, “normal” was never going to happen.
We arranged ourselves at the end of the French tour. For the first little while, nothing appeared out of the ordinary—but as we descended the uneven stone steps toward the chamber where Giovanni had walked through the wall, my heartbeat quickened. It wasn’t just nerves; it was like my body knew he was near.
When I walked back in, Giovanni stood there, as if he’d been waiting for me the whole time.
He looked so relieved to see me. Almost on the verge of tears. I thought I might cry too. Giovanni was more beautiful to me now than he was before—now, when I knew what he was, when he ought to have terrified me. But there was nothing scary about him. He was simply someone who had died—something that happened to everyone, eventually.
He was the proof that I was sane.
And he was the proof that Cairo and I really were twins of the soul and always would be.
“You have come back,” he said.
“Yeah. Sorry I panicked.”
“He’s here?” Cairo whispered to me, looking around wildly in pretty much every direction but the right one.
“You can’t see him?”
Cairo shook his head. Whatever powers he possessed, they weren’t like mine. Just as I had zero ability to read other people’s thoughts. Our gifts were unique. Our own.
Giovanni looked even sadder. “You have told someone about me? He is . . . boyfriend?”
“Cairo’s my brother. He’s just trying to help.” Glancing behind me to see if the French tourists were paying any attention to the muttering teenagers in the back—which, fortunately, they weren’t—I took a deep breath. “Giovanni, I’m not sure how to ask this, but . . . you’re definitely dead, right?”
He nodded, unconcerned; it was old news to him. “My school came here. I fell. My neck, it broke.”
Maybe his clothes came across so 1970s because that was when he died. “Do you think you were pushed? Did someone murder you?”
“What? No. Not possible.” Giovanni seemed utterly sure about this. “Rain was falling. The steps were wet all over. My feet went”—he made a hand motion that resembled the Nike swoosh.
“He says he wasn’t murdered,” I whispered to Cairo, who shrugged. The only other sounds were the increasingly distant patter of the tour guide and the shuffling feet of French tourists walking away. I turned back to Giovanni. “Then why are you still here? I always thought . . . if spirits stuck around on earth, it was because they had some kind of unfinished business here.” But what did I know? It had been only stupid TV shows and horror movies to me until a few hours earlier.
Yet Giovanni nodded. “One thing I never did on earth. One thing I always wanted to do.”
Maybe he needed me to find his mother and tell her he loved her. Maybe I had to search for some long-lost friend. Or get revenge. Was I willing to get revenge for Giovanni for something that happened decades before I’d been born? Carefully, I said, “What’s that?”
Bashfully, Giovanni said, “Never I kiss a beautiful girl. Never any girl, actually.”
For a long moment, I thought I must have gone crazy after all. He couldn’t have said that, could he? “You’ve hung around on earth for thirty years or so because you didn’t want to go to heaven without kissing a girl?”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Cairo whispered. I elbowed him sharply in the side; mockery wasn’t going to help us.
Giovanni said, “I want this very badly. Please—maybe you would—maybe? You are most beautiful girl.”
I didn’t especially want my first kiss to be from a dead guy. If this was a sign of how my love life would go from then on, my already low expectations were going to have to drop even lower.
And yet . . . it was such a simple request. He wanted it so badly. He thought I was beautiful. He was so gorgeous; if I hadn’t realized he was dead, I would have kissed him for certain. And Giovanni would always be the first guy who had ever flirted with me.
The tour group had moved significantly ahead of us now, but we could still hear them—still catch up if we had to, without getting lost down here. I told Cairo, “Can you give us a second?”
“For what? So you can kiss him?” To my surprise, Cairo— who’d been so unflappable through all of this—looked disgusted. “You don’t know what that will do. He might, I don’t know . . . suck your soul out.”
“I don’t think it works that way.” How it worked, I wasn’t sure, but I felt convinced that Giovanni wasn’t trying to hurt me. “Remember how you know that Michael’s always interested in Audrey’s feet? That’s how I know Giovanni isn’t trying to hurt me.”
Cairo considered this. “You can read his mind?”
Giovanni said, “Tell him I will not hurt your soul.”
“It’s not mind reading. It’s just . . . if he were lying, I’d know. I feel sure of that.” And I did.
The French-speaking guide had taken our group almost out of earshot. With a sigh, Cairo said, “Okay, I’m going ahead. Catch up when you can. And if anything weird happens . . . scream even louder than you did last time.”
“All right.” We tangled pinky fingers for just a moment, a quick sign of solidarity we hadn’t shared since we were eight years old. Then Cairo walked off without a backward look. I knew it was his way of saying he trusted my judgment. The question was, did I trust my own?
I turned back to Giovanni, who still stood there, hopeful and sweet. He was
so beautiful—big, dark eyes, long eyelashes, dimpled chin—that only one question came to mind: “How is it that you never kissed a girl?”
It turned out to be possible to blush after death. Giovanni flushed so that the catacomb around us seemed to turn a soft shade of pink. “Did not always look like this.”
“What do you mean?” I shouldered my cloth bag and tried to stay focused. I hadn’t brought my shawl this time, and I shivered slightly in the underground chill. “Did you . . . change or something? After you died?”
“After death, we look like we are meant to look. Not always in life.”
I began to understand. This wish of his wasn’t only about kissing a girl; this was about making up for the life he lost—not after he died, but before. “Show me.”
Giovanni didn’t want to, I could tell, but he obeyed. His beautiful face seemed to melt, the skin along the left side of his jaw crinkling and turning a vivid, meaty red. A burn scar, I realized. Giovanni’s fall on the catacomb steps wasn’t the first terrible accident he’d been in.
It wasn’t so horrible, really—just a line along one side of his face—but I could imagine what most girls would’ve said about it. What Audrey would have said. If Giovanni had lived to be a little older, he might have met a girl mature enough to look past his scar and see the gentle, beautiful guy beneath. But he didn’t make it.
“You see me now,” he said, ashamed.
“I see you now.” I stepped closer to Giovanni and put one hand to his face. I couldn’t actually touch him—or so it seemed to me—but when my fingers appeared to brush his face, his lips parted slightly as though he could feel it. “I see all of you.”
I lifted my face to his and closed my eyes. I felt his kiss not as a touch, but as a glow—warmth spreading through me, making me aware of my blood and my pulse, of everything that separated the living and the dead. For one moment, I knew more than ever before what it meant to be alive.
The kiss’s end was like the snuffing of a candle—a little less light and heat in the world.
When I opened my eyes, Giovanni was beaming at me, his face whole and perfect once more, and slightly transparent now. “Thank you,” he said.
