IT WAS A cool Italian night, the stars in full view over the rooftop of Rigatteria. Broken windowpanes and antique furniture were scattered all over the giant wooden deck. At my last Italian lesson, Francesco explained to me—through Neil, who translated his broken English—that Rigatteria was actually built on the side of a mound called Monte Testaccio, which used to be where ancient Romans all disposed of their olive oil jars. We were partying atop millions of broken antique shards.
About fifteen people were taking turns breaking a piñata when I arrived. I’m not going to describe the piñata in detail, except to say that it was exceptionally phallic.
Meanwhile, Jahan was trying to convince a group of Italians that gorgonzola is the gayest cheese.
“Ascoltami,” he said. He noticed me out of the side of his eye. “Sembra che tu stia succhiando un cazzo quando lo dici. Gorrrrgonnnzzzoollllaaaaa,” he stretched out the word and made a sexual gesture with his hand and mouth.
“Gorrgonnzoolaaa,” one of the boys said.
“Gorrggohhrrrhgghhh,” said a girl with pink streaks in her hair. She practically choked on the word. Jahan explained to me what was going on, and I agreed that although I might have previously questioned how cheese could have a sexual orientation, after this debate, I fully believed that gorgonzola was the gayest cheese.
I looked around for Neil and Francesco. Between the penis piñata and the gorgonzola debate, it didn’t seem like quite the right mood for a proposal tonight. Though I should have been used to these gay blends of silly and serious. It seemed to be the tempo of my life these days.
After the candy and condoms from the penis piñata had been cleared out, Francesco stepped out from behind the bar. Everyone gathered around him.
Francesco spoke in Italian—fast, nervous, shaky—but I didn’t need any translation when he got down on one knee. The way he looked in Neil’s eyes when he popped the question, the way Neil held his hand over his chest as he watched, and the way he uttered one of the few words in Italian I knew—sì—I was overwhelmed. We all were.
Everyone pulled out their phones to take pictures. I would have pulled mine out, too, but the camera was hardly any good. I was using an old Android Jahan had given me earlier that day. After the last call with my parents, I decided to lose my American number and get an Italian one. I didn’t share that number with anyone from back home.
As Jahan and Neil and Francesco, all their friends, their family, snapped photos and cheered, something came over me. I was so damn happy for Neil and Francesco. I thought maybe someday, I could find happiness, too.
Later, I found Neil in the crowd. He slung an arm around my neck and I went in for a full hug, like we were best friends or something. Neil stumbled forward; he was more than a little bit drunk. I held him up. High on the proposal, on the energy of the moment, I said, “Auguri”—the Swiss Army knife of Italian words, which has many different uses, but in this case, congratulations. He smiled.
“You’ve been studying,” Neil said.
“I have,” I said, and I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation, this close to Neil, this soon after he had just been proposed to.
It must have felt that way for Neil, too. “Thanks, man,” he said. “I expect to see you at the wedding, you know.”
I pulled back from the hug, my face dumbstruck. I was hung up on the fact that Neil, the hot tutor of my dreams, had invited me to his wedding. And I wasn’t the least bit heartbroken. It didn’t ruin the fantasy at all. There was no fantasy. Friendship, I realized, is better than fantasy.
I was riding higher and higher. The strings of light around the rooftop glowed warmly. More people began to fill the space and dance. Love was in the air.
Glow sticks were in the air, too. Jahan had gone downstairs and came back with a whole box of them. He’d crack a bundle of glow sticks and shake vigorously before he tossed them, lighting up the sky like fireworks.
I caught a glow stick and ambled my way downstairs to the bathroom. I was sober, but I felt drunker than I’d ever been.
The basement had to be negative eight million degrees Celsius—Celsius!—but I still felt warm and boozy inside. Even with the long line at the bathroom, my priority was not to relieve my bladder but to create a glow stick bracelet by poking the end of the glow stick into the little plastic fastener thingy. Even in my relatively sober state, I was hard-core struggling to fasten the glow stick around my wrist.
And then I heard, “Here, let me help you. You need two people for that.”
Behind me, a boy with curly brown hair offered a hand. He looked extremely tall, but that was because he was standing a step above me. When he came down, he was only a couple of inches taller than me. Droopy, kind eyes. The kind that look tired in a cute way. He took one end of the glow stick while I held the plastic fastener, and when he pushed it in, his thumb pressed into my wrist.
“There,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said back.
I was going to introduce myself, do more than just stand there and give the tile floor a dumb smile, but the bathroom freed up. So I went inside. When I came out, he was gone, so I went back upstairs.
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.