The cab makes a sharp turn onto a cobblestone road, and Cambria appears, like a mirage. It’s a smaller town than I expected, all narrow streets and quaint squares and centuries-old towers. The crumbling stone village seems to rise out of the olive groves and wheat fields. Weeds grow out of windows and climb up walls. Everything is heavily coated in layers of dirt.
A cow with visibly protruding ribs stumbles, lazily, into the middle of the road, and the cabbie skids to a stop. He lays on the horn, swearing in Italian until the creature casts us a withering glance.
“The village is overrun with livestock,” Harper explains, wrinkling her nose. “It’s so gross.”
I watch the cow lazily trot away. “I don’t know. You don’t think they’re kind of sweet?”
“Say that after some wandering cow stops your taxi for the fortieth time,” Mara says, and Harper snickers.
One hairpin turn later and the cab skids to a stop in front of what appears to be an old church. The exterior is all stone arches and dirty stained-glass windows. A gargoyle leans over the double doors, staring down at our cab with wide, unblinking eyes.
Mara starts digging around for euros, while Harper and the cabdriver exchange pleasantries in Italian. I should offer to pay. I reach for my tote—
“We got this,” Harper says, waving my hand away.
I hesitate. “Really?”
“Definitely. Don’t even worry about it.”
It feels weird to let her pay, but I tell myself I’ll buy wine later to make up for it.
I swing my bag over my shoulder and dart across the street as the taxi peels away in a cloud of exhaust. It doesn’t occur to me that we’re headed for the church until Harper stops in front of the massive doors, a set of heavy keys dangling from her fingers.
I have to fight to keep my mouth from dropping open. “This is where we’re staying?”
“I know. Isn’t it amazing?” Harper pushes the door open with a grunt. “And it’s only, like, fifty euros a night. Crazy, right?”
“A ton of students got their own places,” Mara explains. “CART dorms are tiny.”
“And what’s the point of coming to Italy if you aren’t going to live among Italians?” Harper adds.
“Definitely,” I say. Cambria Art Institute’s summer program—or CART—is the reason they’re here. But it doesn’t sound like they’ve been going to many classes. Dinner with their professor tomorrow night is the first I’ve heard of an actual teacher.
“We’re pretty sure someone got murdered here and that’s the only reason we’re getting such a good deal,” Mara’s saying. She takes my suitcase from me and wheels it inside.
There are bikes and tennis shoes piled by the front door and a row of metal mailboxes hanging from the wall, crumpled envelopes overflowing from the cubbies. The heavy door swings shut behind us, making the floor tremble beneath my feet. It’s at least ten degrees colder in here, and the walls are so thick that they block sound completely.
We climb three flights of cracked stairs and end up in front of a doorway that’s a perfect miniature of the main entrance. A tiny gargoyle peers over the top of the stone arch as Harper fumbles with her keys.
“You ready?” she asks, but she throws the door open and herds me inside before I answer. The door slams shut behind us, and I’m entirely surrounded by walls painted a deep, bloody red.
“Looks like it was decorated by Dracula, doesn’t it?” Mara says, ushering me into the living room. She leans my suitcase near a leather settee and switches on a floor lamp. The sudden light makes me squint.
Velvet curtains cover the windows, blocking the setting sun. The furniture is all heavy and dark, with ornate carvings cut into the wood and elaborate images stitched into the fabric.
“Want the tour?” Harper claps her hands together, giddy.
I grin at her excitement, shoving my hands into my back pockets. “Lead the way.”
We check out her room first. It looks a lot like the living room—the same dark wood and heavy fabrics—but a four-poster bed sits against the middle of the wall, directly across from a wide balcony overlooking the entire city of Cambria. Clothes and shoes are strewn over every surface.
“You didn’t lie about bringing your whole closet,” I say.
“When in Rome—well, sort of,” Harper explains, pushing the balcony door open. A gasp of warm air sweeps into the room, carrying the comforting smell of bread and the sound of a woman below arguing with someone in Italian. “We drink espresso out here every morning. You’ll see.”
Mara’s room is up next. It’s not as big as Harper’s, and there’s no four-poster, but a fluffy white duvet covers her bed, and the Juliet balcony overlooks a massive field of sunflowers. Thick stacks of books crowd the walls, but the thin layer of dust on their covers tells me they haven’t been opened in weeks.
“Whoa,” I breathe, impressed. The setting sun has turned the field gold and fiery.
“I know,” Mara says from behind me. She casts a guilty look at her books. “You can see why studying hasn’t been at the top of my agenda.”
My room is through the last door at the end of a long, narrow hall. I try not to look disappointed when Harper pushes the door open and flips on the light, but compared to the other two bedrooms, mine looks more like a closet. A narrow bed slouches against the far wall, and there’s a heavy wardrobe shoved into the corner. A fresco painting hangs above the bed, the sky filled with some gruesome battle scene between angels and devils while, on the ground below, all the humans scream in agony. A single girl has been tied to a stake, fire curling at her toes.
There’s a tiny plaque at the bottom of the painting. I lean closer to read it: Il Sacrificio di Lucia.
“That’s a famous story from Cambria’s history,” Harper explains. “Legend has it that the whole town went totally mental in the sixteenth century . . .”
“Nice, Harper,” Mara says, shaking her head. To me, she adds, “The town was sinning too much, according to historians. God punished them by causing a drought, keeping the crops from growing, that sort of thing.”
“That’s basically what I said,” Harper mutters.
“The town sacrificed Lucia as a penance, and they all lived happily ever after,” Mara finishes. “Cool story, right?”
“Charming.” I’m too focused on the extreme tininess of my room to listen to the story, and I guess a little bitterness slips into my voice. Mara and Harper share a look.
“We know it’s small,” Harper says apologetically.
“It’s just that we’ve been here all summer, so it made sense for us to take the bigger rooms,” Mara adds.
Suddenly I feel like a complete jerk. I wanted to come here, didn’t I? It’s not their fault there are only two good rooms. “It’s perfect, guys, really. Don’t worry about it.”
I plop down on the bed, determined to love my tiny room. It might be small, but the ceiling soars above me, and sure, there’s no balcony, but there is a flower box below the window. The flowers are all sort of dead, but still.
I squint at the flower box, spotting movement. A black cat waits outside, pawing at the glass.
“Ooh, now you get to meet Lucky.” Mara unlatches the window and pushes it open so the cat can slip inside. It rubs the length of its body against Mara’s arm and then leaps to the floor, vanishing beneath my bed. “He’s a stray, but we feed him, so sometimes he comes and hangs out here. He likes to sit on my feet while I read.”
“He also likes chewing up expensive leather handbags,” Harper mutters, glaring at Lucky. “Which is why he’s no longer allowed in my room.”
“He’s so cute.” I scoot to the edge of the bed and lean over, spotting two yellow eyes in the darkness. I reach out a hand. “C’mere, Lucky.”
“We should let you get settled in,” Harper says. I’m still upside down, so I can’t see her, but the sound of her voice tells me she’s hovering near the door. “You must be exhausted, what with jet lag and everything. You want to take a nap?”
I flip my head up, pushing my hair back with one hand. I wasn’t planning on sleeping, but now that she’s mentioned it, my eyes do feel a little heavy. I swallow a yawn. “Maybe a short one?”
“Totally,” Mara says, and pulls my door shut. Their footsteps thump down the hallway.
Lucky races out from beneath the bed and leaps up next to me. A second later, he’s curled himself into a ball on my pillow, purring.
I don’t know how long I sleep, but I wake to the sound of giggling.
I groan and lift a hand to my face, blinking. The light seeping in from beneath the curtains is no longer gold and dusty—now it’s a deep, hazy blue. I frown and push myself up to my elbows, upsetting Lucky. He meows, lazily, and hops off the bed.
The giggling outside my door gets louder.
“Oh my God, you’re so bad!” Mara squeals.
Then Harper: “Shh . . . you’ll wake her up.”
What the hell? I climb out of bed and creep across the room, easing my bedroom door open a crack.
Mara and Harper hover near the front door. They’ve changed clothes: Mara’s in a strappy black top over cutoff jeans, wobbling a bit on towering high heels that she’s obviously borrowed from Harper’s closet, while Harper wears a gauzy white sundress with brown sandals laced around her ankles. She’s got her purse balanced on her hip, and she’s rooting around inside for something.
“Hurry!” Mara whispers, giggling into a fist. “We don’t want to—“ She lifts her head, eyes meeting mine, and her pale face goes a shade lighter than it is already. “Shit.”
Lucky slips between my feet as I step into the hallway, still rubbing the last of the sleep from my eyes. “What’s going on?”
Harper pulls her hand out of her purse, fingers clutching the heavy set of keys. “We didn’t know when you’d wake up.”
“You’ve been napping for hours,” Mara adds, studying her fingernails.
I try to ignore the hurt building in my chest. “So you were just going to leave without me?”
“No!” Harper says, too quickly. She and Mara exchange a look. “It’s just . . . a bunch of people from CART are at the trattoria down the street. We were going to go hang with them until you woke up.”
“We figured you might want to sleep for a while,” Mara says.
“We left a note,” Harper finishes, lamely.
I don’t believe they actually left a note. In fact, I don’t believe anything they just said. They’ve been acting weird since I got here, and I’m about a million percent certain they were going to ditch me tonight.
I don’t look half as cute as they do, in my plane-rumpled clothes, my face still red and puffy from my nap, but I’ll be damned if I let them leave without me. I snatch my tote bag from the back of the door. “I’m up now. Let’s go.”
Harper and Mara’s CART friends take up an entire table in the back of the tavern. They seem cool enough. They all smile and say hey when Harper introduces me, but their faces blur together, and I quickly lose track of their names—they’re all called Emma or Emmy or Emilia.
Mara immediately gets drawn into a discussion about the relationship between two modern artists I’ve never heard of before. I try to follow along, but I know nothing about Italy or art or anything else they’re talking about. I turn to Harper, hoping she’ll talk to me, but she’s admiring some girl’s new leather shoes and seems to have forgotten that I’m there.
Finally I lean across the table, taking advantage of a break in the conversation. “Should I grab the first round?”
Harper gives me a thumbs-up without looking up from the shoes. I don’t think Mara hears me.
I take my time heading across the trattoria. This isn’t what I’d been expecting. I kind of figured things would be weird—the three of us haven’t had a chance to hang out since I got back from the institute—but I didn’t think they’d be this weird. Harper and Mara have been nice enough, I guess. But there’s something beneath the smiles, something that makes me wonder if they want me here at all.
I slide my elbows onto the sticky bar and wave over the bartender. “Um, three—whoops, I mean tre—uh, shots of”—I point to a bottle filled with vibrant green liquid—“whatever that is. Grazie.”
The bartender pulls the bottle down from a wooden shelf and pours three shots. She jerks her chin at the CART students.
“You’re with them?” she asks in perfect English, the barest trace of an Italian accent curling her r’s.
“No, I’m not in the program. Just visiting for two weeks.”
“Ah.” She smiles, showing off a mouthful of perfectly straight, white teeth. She’s a classic, curvy Italian beauty with wicked eyes and thick, dark hair that she wears in a short shag. It’s dark in here, but I think I see green strands just behind her ears. She pushes the shots toward me. “Did you just get in?”
I fiddle with the wad of euros I just pulled out of my purse. “Is it that obvious?”
“A tiny bit.” The bartender flicks a hand at my money, laughing. She has tiny tattoos around her hand: horseshoes and stars. They remind me of Lucky Charms. “The first round is on the house. Welcome to Italia.”
I thank her and curl my hands around the shots, taking them back over to Mara and Harper. I squeeze in at the end of the table and set the shot glasses down, sending a drop sloshing over my fingers.
“Ooh, shots!” Harper says, eyes lighting up.
Mara raises her eyebrows. “That was sweet of you.”
“In honor of my first night,” I explain, handing them out. I lift a glass: “To the best trip of our lives.”
The three of us clink our shot glasses together and drink. Mara and Harper cringe and crumple their faces, like they’ve never had alcohol before, but I don’t mind the taste of the liquor. In fact, I hold it on my tongue for a second longer than necessary, relishing the burn.
I look around just as a crowd of Italians enter the trattoria, talking and laughing.
“Ooh, the tour guides have arrived,” Harper says, wiggling her eyebrows. “The Demons’ Walk tour ends right next door, so they all end up partying here after freaking out tourists with stories of human sacrifice.”
“Harpy, look, it’s our favorite,” Mara says, pointing. Harper giggles as Mara nudges my shoulder. “See, right over there? He doesn’t come every night. Dreamy, right?”
I turn. A guy stands near the door, and at first, I think there’s no way he’s worth drooling over. He’s facing away from me, but he looks pretty nondescript. Tall and thin, with dark hair and tanned skin, just like every other Italian in this town.
Someone calls his name—Giovanni—and he turns, smiling. His hair is a little curly in the front, and his nose is long and straight in a way that reminds me of old pictures of Roman emperors. Black stubble shades his jaw and cheeks, and I can see the fan of his dark eyelashes from all the way across the room.
I swallow and turn back around, revising my initial opinion. Dreamy suddenly seems too soft a word for the tall, dark tour guide. He looks like he stepped out of a painting.
“He’s the best guide in town,” Mara is saying, “and not just because he’s gorgeous. He’s really smart, too. I’ve already done the Demons’ Walk tour twice.”
Harper laughs. “Yeah, Mara, you did the walk twice because he’s smart.”
I turn, catching another glimpse of Giovanni leaning over the bar. He pushes his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, revealing tanned skin and lean muscle. The bartender with the green strips dyed into her hair says something, and Giovanni laughs, the sound rising over the rest of the tavern’s noise. I feel a small twinge of jealousy. They look right together, beautiful and hip.
Then, out of nowhere, Giovanni turns, shifting his gaze toward the back of the room. For just a second, I think he’s looking right at me. But then his dark eyes flicker away.
People keep filing into the trattoria until, eventually, the conversation gets drowned out by the crush of other voices. Someone turns up the music. European techno. It’s weird, close enough to music I’ve heard before to feel familiar, but just off enough to sound foreign. I close my eyes and start to sway. The music is all bass. I feel it vibrating in my bones.
“Let’s dance.” I stand, reaching for Harper’s hands. She weaves her fingers through mine, allowing me to pull her to her feet. Her eyes have gotten droopy, and she moves in a slow, silly way, already a little drunk.
“It’s so cool that you’re here,” she says, wrapping her arms around my neck. The heat has made her makeup smear. Her face looks like it’s melting.
“Thanks,” I say, patting her on the back.
“Mara was, like, totally convinced you’d back out. I don’t think she really believed you were coming until you stepped off the plane.”
The music’s louder now, with the sweaty, gyrating crowd pressing in around us. I lean in close to Harper’s ear and yell, “Why didn’t she think I’d come?”
Harper shrugs, the movement slow and sloppy. “I don’t know. I guess she thought your parents wouldn’t let you or something? You know what she’s like.”
Harper suddenly seems distracted by something happening behind me. I turn and spot her art-class friends crowded around the bar. One of the guys peels off his sweaty T-shirt, egged on by some blond girl called Emma or Emily, while the others all press in around him, whooping and catcalling. He tosses the shirt into the crowd, and I have to duck as it flies over my head. Gross.
Harper’s eyes have gone glassy. She watches the sweaty T-shirt sail past and then waves to the blond girl. “Emma! Come dance with me! I miss you.”
I want to point out that she’s spent every single day this summer with Emma, and I just got here, but it doesn’t seem worth it. Shaking my head, I start to head back to our table.
“Sei bella,” someone says. A chill moves from the top of my head and down my spine before settling in the tips of my toes. I turn.
Giovanni’s taller than I expected him to be, and his lips curl at the corners, like he’s fighting back a smile.
“What did you say to me?” I ask.
His lips twitch. “Ah. An American.” The way he rolls his r’s makes the hair on my arms stand straight up. He touches a finger to his mouth. His nails are painted in peeling black polish, and he wears a skull ring on his middle finger.
He leans in closer. “Sei bella means you are beautiful.”
“Sei bella,” I repeat. I glance around for Harper—an ugly, jealous part of me wants her to see the dreamy tour guide flirting with me—but she’s dancing with the shirtless guy and seems to have forgotten all about me. She stumbles backward, but the crowd catches her, putting her upright again.
Giovanni doesn’t ask me to dance, but suddenly his hand is at my waist, and then he’s right in front of me. He smells like something I can’t quite put my finger on. Incense, maybe. And smoke.
I want to talk to him, if only so that I can hear that sexy accent one more time, but the music is too loud. The crowd pulses around us, pushing us together. His chest is pressed to my chest, and I feel the heat of him through the thin fabric of my tank top.
He lowers his mouth to my ear and whispers, “I am Giovanni.”
“Giovanni,” I repeat. His name tastes like chocolate. “I’m Berkley.”
“Berkley.” In his mouth, my name is a tangle of growling r’s and hard consonants. “It is a pleasure.”
I don’t know what it is, exactly. Maybe the booze has left me feeling dizzy, or maybe it’s Giovanni’s intoxicating smell, or the foreign music pumping through my veins, making my heart race. Or maybe it’s just that I finally feel like someone wants me here. I didn’t realize how upset I was until Giovanni curled his arms around me and pulled me toward him.
For a moment, it’s like I’m seeing myself from the outside. Sure, my friends sort of ditched me, but I’m still in a tiny bar in Italy, dancing with this gorgeous stranger. I turn my face an inch to the left, and my nose brushes against Giovanni’s.
“Bella,” he murmurs, moving his face closer to mine.
Just then, the crowd parts. The bartender is watching us from across the room, her brows knitted together, her lips half-curled. I catch her eye. I think I expect her to smile, but instead she shakes her head and goes back to pouring drinks. She looks disgusted.
Giovanni’s arm tightens around my waist. The music grows louder. A girl’s voice rises above the beat, her scream quickly dissolving into jagged laughter.
I feel a prickle in the air, and for a single second, I find myself wondering what just happened.
But then Giovanni and I are kissing, and I forget the bartender completely.