The horrible white ceramic vase, with a complicated gold floral motif, which had always occupied a corner of the bathroom, had been in the Della Rocca family for five generations, but no one really liked it. On several occasions Alice had felt an urge to hurl it to the floor and throw the countless tiny fragments in the trash can in front of the house, along with the Tetra Pak mashed-potato containers, used sanitary napkins-although certainly not used by her-and empty packets of her father's antidepressants.
Alice ran a finger along the rim and thought how cold, smooth, and clean it was. Soledad, the Ecuadorean housekeeper, had become more meticulous over the years, because in the Della Rocca household details mattered. Alice was only six when she first arrived, and she had eyed her suspiciously from behind her mother's skirt. Soledad had crouched down and looked at her with wonder. What pretty hair you have, she had said, can I touch it? Alice had bit her tongue to keep from saying no and Soledad had lifted one of her chestnut curls as if it were a swatch of silk and then let it fall back. She couldn't believe that hair could be so fine.
Alice held her breath as she slipped off her camisole and closed her eyes tightly for a moment.
When she opened them again she saw herself reflected in the big mirror above the sink and felt a pleasurable sense of disappointment. She rolled down the elastic of her underpants a few times, so that they came just above her scar, and were stretched tightly enough to leave a little gap between the edge and her belly, forming a bridge between the bones of her pelvis. There wasn't quite room for her index finger; but being able to slip her little finger in made her crazy.
There, it should blossom right there, she thought.
A little blue rose, like Viola's.
Alice turned to stand in profile, her right side, the good one, as she would tell herself. She brushed all her hair forward, thinking it made her look like a child possessed by demons. She pulled it up in a ponytail and then scooped it higher up on her head, the way Viola wore hers, which everyone always liked.
That didn't work either.
She let her hair fall on her shoulders and with her usual gesture pinned it behind her ears. She rested her hands on the sink and pushed her face toward the mirror so quickly that her eyes seemed to form one single, terrifying Cyclops eye. Her hot breath formed a halo on the glass, covering part of her face.
She just couldn't figure out where Viola and her friends got those looks they went around with, breaking boys' hearts. Those merciless, captivating looks that could make or break you with a single, imperceptible flicker of the eyebrow.
Alice tried to be provocative with the mirror, but saw only an embarrassed girl clumsily shaking her shoulders and looking as if she were anesthetized. The real problem was her cheeks: too puffy and blotchy. They suffocated her eyes, when all the while she wanted her gaze to land like a dagger in the stomachs of the boys whose eyes it met. She wanted her gaze to spare no one, to leave an indelible mark.
Instead only her belly, bum, and tits got slimmer, while her cheeks were still like two round pillows, baby cheeks.
Someone knocked at the bathroom door.
"Alice, it's ready," her father's hateful voice rang out through the frosted glass.
Alice didn't reply and sucked in her cheeks to see how much better she would be like that.
"Alice, are you in there?" her father called.
Alice puckered her lips and kissed her reflection. She brushed her tongue against its image in the cold glass. Then she closed her eyes and, as in a real kiss, swayed her head back and forth, but too regularly to be believable. She still hadn't found the kiss she really wanted on anyone's mouth.
Davide Poirino had been the first to use his tongue, in the third year of secondary school. He'd lost a bet. He had rolled it mechanically around Alice's tongue three times, clockwise, and then turned to his friends and said okay? They had burst out laughing and someone had said you kissed the cripple, but Alice was happy just the same, she had given her first kiss and Davide wasn't bad at all.
There had been others after that. Her cousin Walter at their grandmother's party, and a friend of Davide's whose name she didn't even know, and who had asked her in secret if he could please have a turn too. In a hidden corner of the school playground they had pressed their lips together for a few minutes, neither of them daring to move a muscle. When they had drawn apart, he had said thank you and walked off with his head held high and the springy step of a real man.
But now she was lagging behind. Her classmates talked about positions, love bites, and how to use your fingers, and whether it was better with or without a condom, while Alice's lips still bore the insipid memory of a mechanical kiss in third year.
"Alice? Can you hear me?" her father called again, louder this time.
"Ugh. Of course I hear you," Alice replied irritably, her voice barely audible on the other side of the door.
"Dinner's ready," her father repeated.
"I heard you, damn it," Alice said. Then, under her breath, she added, "Pain in the ass."
Soledad knew that Alice threw away her food. At first, when Alice started leaving her dinner on her plate, she said mi amorcito, eat it all up, in my country children are dying of hunger.
One evening Alice, furious, looked her straight in the eyes.
"Even if I stuff myself till I burst, the children in your country aren't going to stop dying of hunger," she said.
So now Soledad said nothing, but put less and less food on her plate. But it didn't make any difference. Alice was quite capable of weighing up her food with her eyes and choosing her three hundred calories for dinner. The rest she got rid of, somehow or other.
She ate with her right hand resting on her napkin. In front of the plate she put her wineglass, which she asked to be filled but never drank, and her water glass in such a way as to form a glass barricade. Then, during dinner, she strategically positioned the saltshaker and the oil cruet too. She waited for her family to be distracted, each absorbed in the laborious task of mastication. At that point she very carefully pushed her food, cut into small pieces, off the plate and into her napkin.
Over the course of a dinner she made at least three full napkins disappear into the pockets of her sweatpants. Before brushing her teeth she emptied them into the toilet and watched the little pieces of food disappear down the drain. With satisfaction she ran a hand over her stomach and imagined it as empty and clean as a crystal vase.
"Sol, damn it, you put cream in the sauce again," her mother complained. "How many times do I have to tell you that I can't digest it?"
Alice's mother pushed her plate away in disgust.
Alice had come to the table with a towel wrapped like a turban around her head in order to justify all the time she had spent locked away in the bathroom.
She had thought for a long time whether to ask them for it. But she'd do it anyway. She wanted it too much.
"I'd like to get a tattoo on my belly," she began.
Her father pulled his glass away from his mouth.
"Excuse me?"
"You heard," said Alice, defying him with her eyes. "I want to get a tattoo."
Alice's father ran his napkin over his mouth and eyes, as if to erase an ugly image that had run through his mind. Then he carefully refolded it and put it back on his knees. He picked up his fork again, trying to put on all his irritating self-control.
"I don't even know how you get these ideas into your head," he said.
"And what kind of tattoo would you like? Let's hear," her mother broke in, the irritable expression on her face probably due more to the cream in the sauce than to her daughter's request.
"A rose. Tiny. Viola's got one."
"Forgive me, but who might Viola be?" her father asked with a bit too much irony.
Alice shook her head, stared at the middle of the table, and felt insignificant.
"Viola's a classmate of hers," Fernanda replied emphatically. "She must have mentioned her a million times. You're not really with it, are you?"
Mr. Della Rocca looked disdainfully at his wife, as if to say no one asked you.
"Well, pardon me, but I don't think I'm all that interested in what Alice's classmates get tattooed on them," he pronounced at last. "At any rate you're not getting a tattoo."
Alice pushed another forkful of spaghetti into her napkin.
"It's not like you can stop me," she ventured, still staring at the vacant center of the table. Her voice cracked with a hint of insecurity.
"Could you repeat that?" her father asked, without altering the volume and calm of his own voice.
"Could you repeat that?" he asked more slowly.
"I said you can't stop me," replied Alice, looking up, but she was unable to endure her father's deep, chilly eyes for more than half a second.
"Is that so? As far as I know, you're fifteen years old and this binds you to the decisions of your parents for-the calculation is a very simple one-another three years," the lawyer intoned. "At the end of which you will be free to, how shall I put it, adorn your skin with flowers, skulls, or whatever you so desire."
The lawyer smiled at his plate and slipped a carefully rolled forkful of spaghetti into his mouth.
There was a long silence. Alice ran her thumb and forefinger along the edge of the tablecloth. Her mother nibbled on a bread stick and allowed her eyes to wander around the dining room. Her father pretended to eat heartily. He chewed with rolling motions of his jaw, and at the first two seconds of each mouthful he kept his eyes closed, in ecstasy.
Alice chose to deliver the blow because she really detested him, and seeing him eat like that made even her good leg go stiff.
"You don't give a damn if no one likes me," she said. "If no one will ever like me."
Her father looked at her quizzically, then returned to his dinner, as if no one had spoken.
"You don't care if you've ruined me forever."
Mr. Della Rocca's fork froze in midair. He looked at his daughter for a few seconds, seemingly distressed.
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, a slight quaver to his voice.
"You know perfectly well," Alice said. "You know it'll be all your fault if I'm like this forever."
Alice's father rested his fork on the edge of his plate. He covered his eyes with one hand, as if thinking deeply about something. Then he got up and left the room, his heavy footsteps echoing across the gleaming marble hallway.
Fernanda said, oh Alice, with neither compassion nor reproach, just a resigned shake of the head. Then she followed her husband into the next room.
Alice went on staring at her full plate for about two minutes, while Soledad cleared the table, silent as a shadow. Then she stuffed the napkin filled with food into her pocket and locked herself in the bathroom.
Pietro Balossino had stopped trying to penetrate his son's obscure universe long ago. When he would accidentally catch sight of Mattia's arms, devastated by scars, he would think back to those sleepless nights spent searching the house for sharp objects left lying around, those nights when Adele, bloated with sedatives, her mouth hanging open, would sleep on the sofa because she no longer wanted to share the bed with him. Those nights when the future seemed to last only till the morning and he would count off the hours, one by one, by the chimes of distant church bells.
The conviction that one morning he would find his son facedown on a blood-soaked pillow had taken root so firmly in his head that he was now used to thinking as if Mattia had already ceased to exist, even at times like this, when he was sitting next to him in the car.
He was driving him to his new school. It was raining, but the rain was so fine that it didn't make a sound.
A few weeks before, the principal of Mattia's science high school had called him and Adele to his office, to inform them of a situation. But when the time came for the meeting, he skirted the issue, dwelling instead on the boy's sensitive temperament, his extraordinary intelligence, his solid 90 percent average in all subjects.
Mr. Balossino had insisted on his son being present for the discussion, for reasons of correctness, which doubtless interested him alone. Mattia had sat down next to his parents and throughout the whole session he had not raised his eyes from his knees. By clenching his fists tightly he had managed to make his left hand bleed slightly. Two days before, Adele, in a moment of distraction, had checked only the nails on his other hand.
Mattia listened to the principal's words as if he were not really talking about him, and he remembered that time in the fifth year of primary school when, after not uttering a word for five days in a row, his teacher, Rita, had made him sit in the middle of the room, with all the other kids arranged around him in a horseshoe. The teacher had begun by saying that Mattia clearly had a problem that he didn't want to talk to anyone about. That Mattia was a very intelligent child, perhaps too intelligent for his age. Then she had invited his classmates to sit close to him, so that they could make him understand that they were his friends. Mattia had looked at his feet, and when the teacher asked him if he wanted to say something, he finally opened his mouth and asked if he could go back to his chair.
Once the plaudits were finished, the principal got down to business. What Mr. Balossino finally understood, although only a few hours later, was that all of Mattia's teachers had expressed a peculiar unease, an almost impalpable feeling of inadequacy, with regard to this extraordinarily gifted boy who seemed not to want to form bonds with anyone his age.
The principal paused. He leaned back in his comfortable armchair and opened a folder, which he didn't need to read. Then he closed it again, as if remembering all of a sudden that there were other people in his office. With carefully chosen words he suggested to the Balossinos that perhaps the science high school was not capable of responding fully to their son's needs.
When, at dinner, Mattia's father had asked him if he really wanted to change schools, Mattia had replied with a shrug and studied the dazzling reflection of fluorescent light on the knife with which he was supposed to be cutting his meat.
"It isn't really raining crooked," said Mattia, looking out the car window and jerking his father out of his thoughts.
"What?" said Pietro, instinctively shaking his head.
"There's no wind outside. Otherwise the leaves on the trees would be moving as well," Mattia went on.
His father tried to follow his reasoning. In fact none of it meant anything to him and he suspected that it was merely another of his son's eccentricities.
"So?" he asked.
"The raindrops are running down the window at an angle, but that's just an effect of our motion. By measuring the angle with the vertical, you could also calculate the fall velocity."
Mattia traced the trajectory of a drop with his finger. He brought his face close to the window and breathed on it. Then, with his index finger, he drew a line in the condensation.
"Don't breathe on the windows, you'll leave marks."
Mattia didn't seem to have heard him.
"If we couldn't see anything outside the car, if we didn't know we were moving, there would be no way of telling whether it was the raindrops' fault or our own," said Mattia.
"Fault for what?" his father asked, bewildered and slightly annoyed.
"For them coming down so crooked."
Pietro Balossino nodded seriously, without understanding. They had arrived. He put the car in neutral and pulled on the hand brake. Mattia opened the door and a gust of fresh air blew inside.
"I'll come and get you at one," said Pietro.
Mattia nodded. Mr. Balossino leaned slightly forward to kiss him, but the belt restrained him. He leaned back into the seat and watched his son get out and close the door behind him.
The new school was in a lovely residential area in the hills. It had been built in the Fascist era, and in spite of recent renovations, it remained a blot on the landscape amid a row of sumptuous villas; a parallelepiped of white concrete, with four horizontal rows of evenly spaced windows and two green iron fire escapes.
Mattia climbed the two flights of steps leading to the main door but kept his distance from all the little groups of kids who were waiting for the first bell, getting wet from the rain.
Once inside, he looked for the floor plan with the layout of the classrooms, so that he wouldn't have to ask the janitors for help.
F2 was at the end of the corridor on the second floor. Mattia took a deep breath and entered. He waited, leaning against the back wall, with his thumbs hooked in the straps of his backpack and the look of someone who wanted to disappear into the wall.
As the students were taking their seats, their new faces glanced at him apprehensively. No one smiled at him. Some of them whispered in each other's ears and Mattia was sure they were talking about him.
He kept an eye on the desks that were still free, and when even the one next to a girl with red nail polish was taken, he felt relieved. The teacher came into the classroom and Mattia slipped onto the last empty chair, next to the window.
"Are you the new boy?" asked his neighbor, who looked just as alone as he did.
Mattia nodded without looking at him.
"I'm Denis," he said, extending his hand.
Mattia shook it weakly and said nice to meet you.
"Welcome," said Denis.
Viola Bai was admired and feared with equal passion by her classmates, because she was so beautiful she made people uneasy, and because at the age of fifteen she knew more about life than any of her contemporaries did; or at least that was the impression she gave. On Monday mornings, during break, the girls congregated around her desk and listened greedily to the account of her weekend. Most times this was a skillful reimagining of what Serena, Viola's older sister by eight years, had told her the day before. Viola transferred the stories to herself, but embellished them with sordid, and often completely invented, details, which to her friends' ears sounded mysterious and disturbing. She talked about this or that bar, without ever having set foot in them, and she was capable of giving minute descriptions of the psychedelic lighting, or of the malicious smile that the bartender had flashed at her as he served her a Cuba libre.
In most cases she ended up either in bed with the bartender or out behind the bar, among the beer kegs and the cases of vodka, where he took her from behind, covering her mouth with his hand to keep her from screaming.
Viola Bai knew how to tell a story. She knew that all the violence is contained in the precision of a detail. She knew how to work the timing so that the bell rang just as the bartender was busy with the fly of his name-brand jeans. At that moment her devoted audience slowly dispersed, their cheeks red with envy and indignation. Viola was made to promise that she would go on with her story at the next bell, but she was too intelligent to actually do it. She always ended up dismissing the whole thing with a pout of her perfect mouth, as if what had happened to her was of no importance. It was just one more detail in her extraordinary life, and she was already light-years ahead of everyone else.
She had actually tried sex, as well as some of the drugs whose names she liked to list, but she had been with only one boy, and only once. It had happened at the shore. A friend of her sister's who had smoked and drunk too much that evening to realize that a little thirteen-year-old girl was too young for certain things. He had fucked her hastily, in the street, behind a trash bin. As they walked back, heads lowered, to rejoin the others, Viola had taken his hand but he had snatched it away and asked what are you doing? Her cheeks burned and the heat still trapped between her legs had made her feel alone. In the days that followed the boy didn't say a word to her and Viola had confided in her sister, who had laughed at her naivete and said wise up, what did you expect?
Viola's devoted audience was made up of Giada Savarino, Federica Mazzoldi, and Giulia Mirandi. Together they formed a compact and ruthless phalanx: the four bitches, as some of the boys at the school called them. Viola had chosen them one by one and had demanded a little sacrifice from each of them, because her friendship was something you had to earn. She alone decided if you were in or out, and her decisions were obscure and unequivocal.
Alice observed Viola on the sly. From her desk two rows back, she fed off the broken sentences and fragments of torrid tales; then in the evening, alone in her room, she savored every detail.
Before that Wednesday morning Viola had never spoken a word to her. It was a kind of initiation and had to be done properly. None of the girls ever knew for sure whether Viola was improvising or whether she planned the torture in advance-but they all agreed that it was brilliant.
Alice hated the locker room. Her oh-so-perfect classmates stood around for as long as possible in their bras and underwear so as to make the others envious. They assumed stiff, unnatural poses, sucking in their stomachs and thrusting out their tits. They sighed at the cracked mirror that covered one of the walls. Look, they'd say as they sized up their hips, which could not have been better proportioned or more seductive.
On Wednesdays Alice wore her shorts under her jeans so that she wouldn't have to get completely undressed. The others would look at her suspiciously, imagining the horrors that were surely hidden under her clothes. She would turn her back to take off her sweater so they wouldn't see her belly.
She would put on her sneakers and tuck her shoes, neatly parallel, against the wall, and then carefully fold her jeans. Her classmates' clothes, in contrast, tumbled chaotically from the wooden benches, their shoes scattered about and upside down because they had yanked them off with their feet.
"Alice, do you have a sweet tooth?" Viola asked.
It took Alice a few seconds to convince herself that Viola Bai was actually talking to her. She was sure she was invisible to her. She pulled the two ends of her shoelaces, but the knot came untied between her fingers.
"Me?" she asked, looking around uneasily.
"I don't see any other Alices."
The other girls giggled.
"No. Not particularly."
Viola got up from the bench and came closer to her. Alice felt those marvelous eyes on her, bisected by the shadow of her bangs.
"But you like gumdrops, don't you?" Viola continued in her honeyed voice.
"Yeah. I guess. Pretty much."
Alice bit her lip and chided herself for being so wishy-washy. She pressed her bony back against the wall. A tremor ran down her good leg. The other remained inert, as always.
"What do you mean pretty much? Everyone likes gumdrops. Isn't that right, girls?" Viola addressed her three friends without even turning around.
"Mm-hmmm. Everyone," they echoed. Alice noticed a strange trepidation in Federica Mazzoldi's eyes as she stared at her from the other end of the locker room.
"Yes, actually, I do like them," she corrected herself. She was starting to feel frightened, even though she didn't yet know why.
In the first year, the four bitches had grabbed Alessandra Mirano, the one who ended up being thrown out and going to beautician school, and dragged her into the boys' locker room. They shut her inside and two boys pulled their cocks out in front of her. From the corridor Alice had heard the four torturers egging them on and laughing hysterically.
"I thought so. Now, would you like a gumdrop?" Viola asked.
If I say yes, who knows what they're going to make me eat, Alice thought.
If I say no, Viola might get pissed off and I'll end up in the boys' locker room as well.
She sat in silence like a moron.
"Come on. It's not such a hard question," Viola said mockingly. She took a handful of fruit candies from her pocket.
"You girls back there, what flavor do you want?" she asked.
Giulia Mirandi came over to Viola and looked into her hand. Viola didn't take her eyes off Alice, who felt her body crumpling under the gaze like a sheet of newspaper burning in the fireplace.
"There's orange, raspberry, blackberry, strawberry, and peach," Giulia said. She threw a fleeting, apprehensive glance at Alice, without letting Viola see.
"I'll have raspberry," said Federica.
"Peach," said Giada.
Giulia tossed them their candies and unwrapped the orange one for herself. She slipped it into her mouth and then took a step back to return the stage to Viola.
"Blackberry and strawberry are left. So do you want one or not?"
Maybe she just wants to give me a candy, Alice thought.
Maybe they just want to see whether I eat or not.
It's just a candy.
"I prefer strawberry," she said quietly.
"Damn it, that's my favorite too," Viola said, giving a terrible performance of disappointment. "But I'll happily give it to you."
She unwrapped the strawberry candy and let the paper fall to the ground. Alice held out her hand to take it.
"Wait a minute," Viola said. "Don't be so greedy."
She bent down, holding the candy between her thumb and index finger. She rubbed it along the filthy locker room floor. Walking with her knees bent, she dragged it slowly along the whole length of the room to Alice's left, close to the wall, where the dirt had coagulated in balls of dust and tangles of hair.
Giada and Federica were dying of laughter. Giulia nervously chewed on her lip. The other girls had figured out where things were going and left, closing the door behind them.
When she got to the corner, Viola headed for the sink, where the girls splashed their armpits and faces after gym. With the candy she wiped up the whitish slime that lined the inside of the drain.
Then she turned to Alice and held the revolting object under her nose.
"There," she said. "Strawberry, just what you wanted."
She wasn't laughing. She had the serious, determined look of one who is doing something painful but necessary.
Alice shook her head no. She pressed herself even closer to the wall.
"What? Don't you want it anymore?" Viola asked her.
"Go on," Federica cut in. "You asked for it and now you can eat it."
Alice gulped.
"What if I don't?" she summoned the courage to say.
"If you don't eat it, you'll accept the consequences," Viola replied enigmatically.
"What consequences?"
"You can't know the consequences. Ever."
They want to take me to the boys, Alice thought. Or else they'll strip me and not give me back my clothes.
Trembling, but almost imperceptibly, she held her hand out toward Viola, who dropped the filthy candy into her palm. She slowly brought it to her mouth.
The others had fallen silent, and seemed to be thinking, no, she's not really going to do it. Viola was impassive.
Alice put the gumdrop on her tongue and felt the hairs that were stuck to it dry up her saliva. She chewed only twice and something squeaked between her teeth.
Don't throw up, she thought. Do not throw up.
She choked back an acidic spurt of gastric juices and swallowed the candy. She felt it as it went down, like a stone, along her esophagus.
The fluorescent light on the ceiling gave off an electrical hum and the voices of the kids in the gym were a formless mixture of shouts and laughter. Here in the basement the air was heavy and the windows were too small to allow it to circulate.
Viola stared solemnly at Alice. Without smiling she nodded her head as if to say now we can go. Then she turned around and left the locker room, passing the other three without so much as a glance.
There was something important you had to know about Denis. To tell the truth, Denis thought it was the only thing about him worth knowing, so he'd never told anyone.
His secret had a terrible name, which settled like a nylon cloth over his thoughts and wouldn't let them breathe. There it was, weighing heavily inside his head like an inevitable punishment with which he'd have to come to terms sooner or later.
When, at age ten, his piano teacher had guided his fingers through the D major scale, pressing his hot palm on the back of Denis's hand, Denis had been unable to breathe. He bent his torso slightly forward to hide the erection that had exploded in his sweatpants. For his entire life he would think of that moment as true love, and would fumble around every corner of his existence in search of the clinging warmth of his teacher's touch.
Each time memories like this surfaced in his mind, making his neck and hands sweat, Denis would lock himself in the bathroom and masturbate fiercely, sitting backward on the toilet. The pleasure lasted only a moment and radiated just a few inches beyond his penis. But the guilt rained down on him from above like a shower of dirty water. It ran down his skin and nestled in his guts, making everything slowly rot, the way that damp eats away at the walls of an old house.
During biology class, in the basement lab, Denis watched Mattia dissect a piece of steak, separating the white fibers from the red. He wanted to stroke his hands. He wanted to discover whether that cumbersome lump of desire that had taken root in his head would really melt like butter simply through contact with the classmate he was in love with.
They were sitting close to each other. Both rested their forearms on the lab bench. A row of transparent flasks, beakers, and test tubes separated them from the rest of the class and deflected the rays of light, distorting everything beyond that line.
Mattia was intent on his work and hadn't looked up for at least a quarter of an hour. He didn't like biology, but he pursued the task with the same rigor he applied to all subjects. Organic matter, so violable and full of imperfections, was incomprehensible to him. The vital odor of the soft piece of meat aroused nothing in him but a faint disgust.
With a pair of tweezers he extracted a thin white filament and deposited it on the glass slide. He brought his eyes to the microscope and adjusted the focus. He recorded every detail in his squared notebook and made a sketch of the enlarged image.
Denis sighed deeply. Then, as if taking a backward dive, he found the courage to speak.
"Mattia, do you have a secret?" he asked his friend.
Mattia seemed not to have heard, but the scalpel with which he was cutting another section of muscle slipped from his hand and rang out on the metal surface. He slowly picked it up.
Denis waited a few seconds. Mattia sat perfectly still, holding the knife a few inches above the meat.
"You can tell me; you can tell me your secret," Denis went on. His veins pulsed with trepidation. Now that he had pushed himself over the edge and into his classmate's fascinating intimacy, he had no intention of letting go.
"I've got one too, you know," he said.
Mattia cleanly sliced the muscle in half, as if he wanted to kill something that was already dead.
"I don't have any secrets," he said under his breath.
"If you tell me yours, I'll tell you mine," Denis pressed. He moved his stool closer and Mattia visibly stiffened. He stared, expressionless, at the scrap of meat.
"We have to finish the experiment," he said in a monotonous voice. "Otherwise we won't be able to finish the chart."
"I don't give a damn about the chart," said Denis. "Tell me what you did to your hands."
Mattia counted three breaths. Light molecules of ethanol stirred in the air, and some of them penetrated his nostrils. He felt them rising, a pleasant burning sensation along his septum, up to a point between his eyes.
"You really want to know what I've done to my hands?" he asked, turning toward Denis but looking at the jars of formalin lined up behind him: dozens of jars containing fetuses and amputated limbs of all sorts of animals.
Denis nodded, quivering.
"Then watch this," said Mattia.
He gripped the knife in his fist. Then he plunged it into the hollow of his other hand, between his index and middle fingers, and dragged it all the way to his wrist.
On Thursday Viola was waiting for her outside the gate. Alice, head lowered, was walking past her when Viola grabbed her by the sleeve. Viola startled her, calling out her name. She remembered the candy and was dizzy with nausea. Once the four bitches had you in their sights, they didn't let you go.
"I've got a math test," Viola said. "I don't know anything and don't want to go."
Alice looked at her uncomprehendingly. She didn't seem hostile, but Alice didn't trust her. She tried to pull away. Let's go for a walk, Viola continued. You and me? Yes, you and me. Alice looked around in terror. Come on, get a move on, Viola urged, they can't see us out here. But… Alice tried to object. Viola didn't let her finish; she pulled her harder by the sleeve and Alice had no choice but to follow, hobbling, as they ran to the bus stop.
They sat down side by side, Alice pressed against the window so as not to invade Viola's space. From one moment to the next she expected something to happen, something terrible. But Viola was radiant. She took a lipstick from her bag and ran it over her lips. Want some? she then asked. Alice shook her head. The school shrank in the distance behind them. My father will kill me, Alice mumbled. Her legs were shaking. Viola sighed. Come on, show me your attendance sheet. She studied Alice's father's signature and said it's easy… I'll sign it. She showed Alice her own sheet. She faked a signature whenever she didn't feel like going to class. Anyway first period tomorrow is Follini, she said, and she can't see a thing.
Viola started talking about school, about how she didn't give a damn about math because she was going to do law anyway. Alice could hardly believe her ears. She thought about the day before, about the locker room, and didn't know what to call this sudden intimacy.
They got off in the square and started walking under the arcades. Viola stopped at a clothing shop with fluorescent windows where Alice had never even set foot. She was acting as if they were lifelong friends. She insisted they try on some clothes, which she picked out herself. She asked Alice her size, and Alice was ashamed to tell her. The shop assistants watched them suspiciously, but Viola paid no attention. They shared a dressing room and Alice surreptitiously compared her own body with her friend's. In the end they didn't buy anything.
They went to a cafe and Viola ordered two coffees, without so much as asking Alice what she wanted. Alice hadn't a clue what was going on, but a new and unexpected happiness was filling her head. Slowly she forgot all about her father and school. She was sitting in a cafe with Viola Bai and that time seemed theirs alone.
Viola smoked three cigarettes and insisted that Alice try one too. Viola laughed, showing her perfect teeth, every time her new friend exploded in a fit of coughing. She subjected her to a little quiz about the boys she hadn't had and the kisses she hadn't given. Alice replied with her eyes lowered. You want me to believe you've never had a boyfriend? Never ever ever? Alice shook her head. That's impossible. A tragedy, Viola exaggerated. We absolutely have to do something. You don't want to die a virgin!
So the next day, at ten o'clock break, they roamed the school in search of the boyfriend for Alice. Viola had dismissed Giada and the others, saying we've got things to do, and they watched her leave the classroom hand in hand with her new friend.
Viola had already organized everything. It would happen at her birthday party the following Saturday. They just had to find the right boy. As they walked down the corridor she pointed this and that out to Alice, saying look at the ass on that one, not bad at all, he certainly knows what to do.
Alice smiled nervously but couldn't make her mind up. In her head she imagined with unsettling clarity the moment when a boy would slip his hands under her shirt. When he would discover that, underneath the clothes that fell so well, there was nothing but chubby flesh and flabby skin.
Now they were leaning on the fire escape railing on the third floor, watching the boys play football in the courtyard with a yellow ball that seemed not to be blown up enough.
"What about Trivero?" Viola asked.
"I don't know who he is."
"What do you mean you don't know who he is? He's in the fifth year. He used to row with my sister. They say some interesting things about him."
"What sort of things?"
Viola gestured with her hands, indicating something long, and then laughed loudly, enjoying the disconcerting effect of her allusions. Alice felt her face flush with shame, but she also felt a marvelous certainty that her loneliness was truly over.
They went down to the ground floor and passed the snacks and drinks machines. Students had formed a chaotic line, chinking the coins in their jeans pockets.
"Okay, but you've got to decide," said Viola.
Alice spun on her heels. She looked around, disoriented.
"That one looks cute," she said, pointing at two boys in the distance, near the window. They were standing close together, but they weren't talking or looking at each other.
"Who?" Viola asked. "The one with the bandage or the other one?"
"The one with the bandage."
Viola stared at her. Her sparkling eyes were as wide as two oceans.
"You're crazy," she said. "You know what he did?"
Alice shook her head.
"He stuck a knife in his hand, on purpose. Right here at school."
Alice shrugged.
"He looks interesting," she said.
"Interesting? He's a psychopath. With a guy like that you'll end up chopped to pieces and stuffed in a freezer."
Alice smiled, but went on looking at the boy with the bandaged hand. There was something in the way he kept his head tilted down that made her want to go over to him, lift his chin, and say to him look at me, I'm here.
"Are you absolutely sure?" Viola asked her.
"Yes," said Alice.
Viola shrugged.
"So let's go," she said.
She took Alice by the hand and pulled her toward the two boys at the window.
Mattia was looking out the opaque windows of the atrium. It was a bright day, an anticipation of spring at the beginning of March. The strong wind that had cleared the air during the night seemed to sweep time away too, making it run faster. Mattia tried to estimate how far away the horizon was by counting the roofs of the houses that he could see from there.
Denis was surreptitiously staring at him, trying to guess his thoughts. They hadn't talked about what had happened in the biology lab. In fact, they didn't talk much at all, but they spent time together, each in his own abyss, held safe and tight by the other's silence.
"Hi," Mattia heard someone say, too close to him.
Reflected in the glass he saw two girls standing behind him, holding hands. He turned around.
Denis looked at him quizzically. The girls seemed to be waiting for something.
"Hi," Mattia said softly. He lowered his head, to protect himself from one of the girls' piercing eyes.
"I'm Viola and this is Alice," she continued. "We're in 2B."
Mattia nodded. Denis's mouth fell open. Neither of them said anything.
"Well?" Viola said. "Aren't you going to introduce yourselves?"
Mattia spoke his name in a low voice, as if just remembering it himself. He offered Viola a limp hand, the one without the bandage, and she shook it firmly. The other girl barely touched it and smiled, looking in another direction.
Denis introduced himself next, just as clumsily.
"We wanted to invite you to my birthday party the Saturday after next," said Viola.
Again Denis sought Mattia's eyes, but Mattia responded by staring at Alice's timid half-smile. Her lips seemed so pale and thin to him, as if her mouth had been carved by a sharp scalpel.
"Why?" he asked.
Viola looked at him askance and then turned to Alice, with an expression that said I told you he was mad.
"What do you mean why? Obviously because we feel like inviting you."
"No, thanks," said Mattia. "I can't come."
Denis, relieved, quickly added that he couldn't come either.
Viola ignored him and concentrated on the boy with the bandage.
"You can't? I wonder what could be keeping you so busy on a Saturday evening," she said provocatively. "Do you have to play video games with your little friend? Or were you planning on cutting your veins again?"
Viola felt a tremor of terror and excitement as she uttered those last words. Alice gripped her hand harder to make her stop.
Mattia reflected that he had forgotten the number of roofs and wouldn't have time to count them again before the bell.
"I don't like parties," he explained.
Viola forced herself to laugh for a few seconds, a sequence of piercing, high-pitched giggles.
"You really are strange," she teased, tapping her right temple. "Everyone likes parties."
Alice had withdrawn her hand and unconsciously rested it on her belly.
"Well, I don't," Mattia snapped back.
Viola stared defiantly at him and he blankly held her gaze. Alice had taken a step back. Viola opened her mouth to give some kind of reply, but the bell rang just in time. Mattia turned around and headed resolutely toward the stairs, as if to say that as far as he was concerned the discussion was over. Denis followed, pulled along in his wake.
Since entering the service of the Della Rocca family, Soledad Galienas had slipped up only once. Four years ago, one rainy evening when the Della Roccas were out to dinner at a friend's.
Soledad's wardrobe contained only black clothes, underwear included. She had spoken so often of her husband's death in a work accident that she sometimes even believed it herself. She imagined him standing on a scaffolding sixty feet off the ground, cigarette between his teeth, as he leveled a layer of mortar before laying another row of bricks. She saw him trip over a tool or perhaps a coil of rope, the rope with which he was supposed to make a harness and which instead he had tossed aside because harnesses are for softies. She imagined him wobbling on the wooden planks before plummeting without a sound. The image panned out so that her husband became like a little black dot waving its arms against the white sky. Then her artificial memory ended with an overhead shot: her husband's body splattered on the dusty ground of the building site, lifeless and two-dimensional, his eyes still open and a dark pool of blood oozing out from under his back.
Thinking of him like that gave her a pleasurable tremor of anguish, and if she dwelled on it long enough, she even managed to squeeze out a few tears, which were entirely for herself.
The truth was that her husband had walked out. He had left her one morning, probably to start his life over again with a woman she didn't even know. She had never heard anything more about him. When she arrived in Italy she made up the story of her widowhood to have a past to tell people about, because there was nothing to say about her real past. Her black clothes and the thought that others might see the traces of a tragedy in her eyes, a pain that had never been assuaged, gave her a sense of security. She wore her mourning with dignity, and until that evening she had never betrayed the memory of the deceased.
On Saturdays she went to six o'clock mass, in order to be back in time for dinner. Ernesto had been courting her for weeks. After the service he stood waiting for her in the courtyard and, always with the same precise degree of ceremony, offered to walk her home. Soledad shrank into her black dress, but in the end she gave in. He told her about the post office where he used to work, and how long the evenings were now, at home alone, with so many years behind him and so many ghosts to reckon with. Ernesto was older than Soledad and his wife really had died, carried off by pancreatic cancer.
They walked arm in arm, very composed. That evening Ernesto had shared his umbrella with her, allowing his head and coat to get soaked so as to shelter her better from the rain. He had complimented her on her Italian, which was getting better week by week, and Soledad had laughed, pretending to be embarrassed.
It was thanks to a certain clumsiness, a lack of coordination, that instead of saying good-bye to each other as friends, with two chaste kisses on the cheek, their mouths had met on the front step of the Della Rocca house. Ernesto apologized, but then he bent over her lips again and Soledad felt all the dust that had settled in her heart whirl up and get in her eyes.
She was the one to invite him in. Ernesto had to stay hidden in her room for a few hours, just long enough for her to give Alice something to eat and send her to bed. The Della Roccas would be going out soon and wouldn't be back till late.
Ernesto thanked someone up above for the fact that such things could still happen at his age. They entered the house furtively, Soledad leading her lover by the hand, like a teenager, and with her finger to her mouth she told him not to make a sound. Then she hastily made dinner for Alice, watched her eat it too slowly, and said you look tired, you should go to bed. Alice protested that she wanted to watch television and Soledad gave in, just to get rid of her, as long as she watched it up in the den. Alice went upstairs, taking advantage of her father's absence to drag her feet as she walked.
Soledad returned to her lover. They kissed for a long time, sitting side by side, not knowing what to do with their own hands, clumsy and out of practice. Then Ernesto plucked up the courage to pull her to him.
As he fiddled with the devilish hooks that fastened her bra, apologizing under his breath for being so clumsy, she felt young and beautiful and uninhibited. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she saw Alice, standing in the doorway.
"Cono, " she blurted out. "?Que haces aqu'?"
She slipped away from Ernesto and covered her bosom with one arm. Alice tilted her head to one side and observed them without surprise, as if they were animals in a zoo.
"I can't get to sleep," she said.
By some mysterious coincidence Soledad was remembering that very moment when, turning around, she saw Alice standing in the study doorway. Soledad was dusting the library. Three at a time she pulled the lawyer's encyclopedia, the heavy volumes with dark green binding and gilded spines, off the shelf. While she held them with her left arm, which was already beginning to ache, with her right she dusted the mahogany surfaces, even in the most hidden corners, because the lawyer had once complained that she only pushed the dust around.
It was years since Alice had entered her father's study. An invisible barrier of hostility kept her frozen in the doorway. She was sure that if she placed so much as a toe on the regular, hypnotic geometry of the parquet, the wood would crack under her weight and send her plunging into a black abyss.
The whole room was saturated with her father's intense smell. It had seeped into the papers stacked neatly on the desk, and drenched the thick, cream-colored curtains. When she was little, Alice would tiptoe in and call her father for dinner. She always hesitated for a moment before speaking, enchanted by her father's posture as he loomed over his desk studying complicated documents from behind his silver-framed glasses. When the lawyer realized his daughter was there, he slowly lifted up his head and frowned, as if to ask what she was doing there. Then he nodded and gave her a hint of a smile. I'm coming, he said.
Alice was sure that she could hear those words echoing against the wallpaper in the study, trapped forever in these four walls and inside her head.
"Hola, mi amorcito," said Soledad. She still called her that, even though the pencil-thin girl standing in front of her was a far cry from the sleepy child she used to dress and walk to school every morning.
"Hi," replied Alice.
Soledad looked at her for a few seconds, waiting for her to say something, but Alice glanced away nervously. Soledad returned to her shelves.
"Sol," Alice said at last.
"Yes?"
"I have to ask you something."
Soledad set the books down on the desk and walked over to Alice.
"What is it, mi amorcito?"
"I need a favor."
"What sort of favor? Of course, tell me."
Alice rolled the elastic of her trousers around her index finger.
"On Saturday I have to go to a party. At my friend Viola's house."
"Oh, how lovely," said Soledad, smiling.
"I'd like to bring a dessert. I'd like to make it myself. Would you help me?"
"Of course, darling. What sort of dessert?"
"I don't know. A cake. Or a tiramisu. Or that one that you make with cinnamon."
"My mother's recipe," said Soledad with a hint of pride. "I'll teach you."
Alice looked at her pleadingly.
"So we'll go shopping together on Saturday? Even though it's your day off?"
"Of course, dear," said Soledad. For a moment she felt important, and she recognized in Alice's insecurity the little girl she had raised.
"Could you take me somewhere else as well?" Alice ventured.
"Where?"
Alice hesitated for a moment.
"To get a tattoo," she said hastily.
"Oh, mi amorcito." Soledad sighed, vaguely disappointed. "You know your father doesn't want you to."
"We won't tell him. He'll never see it," Alice insisted with a whine.
Soledad shook her head.
"Come on, Sol, please," she begged. "I can't get it done on my own. I need my parents' permission."
"So what can I do?"
"You can pretend to be my mother. You'll only have to sign a piece of paper, you won't have to say anything."
"But I can't, my dear, I can't. Your father would fire me."
Alice suddenly grew more serious. She looked Soledad straight in the eyes.
"It'll be our secret, Sol." She paused. "After all, the two of us already have a secret, don't we?"
Soledad looked at her, puzzled. At first she didn't understand.
"I know how to keep secrets," Alice continued slowly. She felt as strong and ruthless as Viola. "Otherwise he'd have fired you ages ago."
Soledad was suddenly unable to breathe.
"But-" she said.
"So you'll do it?" Alice cut in.
Soledad looked at the floor.
"Okay," she said quietly. Then she turned her back on Alice and arranged the books on the shelf while her eyes filled with two fat tears.
Mattia deliberately made all his movements as silently as he could. He knew that the chaos of the world would only increase, that the background noise would grow until it covered every coherent signal, but he was convinced that by carefully measuring his every gesture he would be less guilty of that slow ruin.
He had learned to set down first his toe and then his heel, keeping his weight toward the outside of the sole to minimize the amount of surface area in contact with the ground. He had perfected this technique years before, when he would get up in the night and stealthily roam about the house, the skin of his hands having become so dry that the only way to know they were still his was to pass a knife over them. Over time that strange, circumspect gait had become his normal way of walking.
His parents would often find themselves suddenly face-to-face with him, like a hologram projected from the floor, a frown on his face and his mouth always tightly shut. Once his mother dropped a plate with fright. Mattia bent down to pick up the bits, but resisted the temptation of those sharp edges. His mother, embarrassed, thanked him, and when he left she sat on the floor and stayed there for a quarter of an hour, defeated.
Mattia turned the key in the front door. He had learned that by turning the handle toward himself and pressing his palm over the keyhole, he could eliminate almost entirely the metallic click of the lock. With the bandage on it was even easier.
He slipped into the hallway, put the keys back in again, and repeated the operation from inside, like a burglar in his own home.
His father was already home, earlier than usual. When he heard him raise his voice he froze, unsure whether to cross the sitting room and interrupt his parents' conversation or go out again and wait until he saw the living room light go out from the courtyard.
"I don't think it's right," his father concluded with a note of reproach in his voice.
"Right," Adele shot back. "You'd rather pretend nothing is wrong, act as if nothing strange were going on."
"And what's so strange?"
There was a pause. Mattia could picture his mother lowering her head and wrinkling up one corner of her mouth as if to say it's pointless trying to talk with you.
"What's so strange?" she repeated emphatically. "I don't…"
Mattia kept a step back from the ray of light that spilled from the sitting room into the hall. With his eyes he followed the line of shadow from the floor to the walls and then to the ceiling. He realized that it formed a trapezoid, only one more trick of perspective.
His mother often abandoned her sentences halfway through, as if she had forgotten what she was going to say as she was saying it. Those interruptions left bubbles of emptiness in her eyes and in the air and Mattia always imagined bursting them with a finger.
"What's strange is that he stuck a knife in his hand in front of all his classmates. What's strange is that we were convinced those days were over but we were wrong once again," his mother went on.
Mattia had no reaction when he realized that they were talking about him, just a mild sense of guilt at eavesdropping on a conversation he wasn't supposed to hear.
"That's not reason enough to go and talk to his teachers without him," his father said, but in a more moderate tone. "He's old enough to have the right to be there."
"For God's sake, Pietro," his mother exploded. She never called him by name. "That's not the point, don't you understand? Will you stop treating him as if he were-"
She froze. The silence stuck in the air like static electricity. A slight shock made Mattia's back contract.
"As if he were what?"
"Normal," his mother confessed. Her voice trembled slightly and Mattia wondered if she was crying. Then again, she cried often since that afternoon. Most of the time for no reason. Sometimes she cried because the meat she had cooked was stringy or because the plants on the balcony were full of parasites. Whatever the reason, her despair was always the same. As if, in any case, there were nothing to be done.
"His teachers say he has no friends. He only talks to the boy who sits next to him and he spends the whole day with him. Boys his age go out in the evening, try to hook up with girls-"
"You don't think he's…" his father interrupted. "Well, you know…"
Mattia tried to complete the sentence, but nothing came to mind.
"No, that's not what I think. Maybe I wish that's all it was," said his mother. "Sometimes I think that something of Michela ended up in him."
His father let out a deep, loud sigh.
"You promised not to talk about that anymore," he said, vaguely irritated.
Mattia thought of Michela, who had disappeared into thin air. But only for a fraction of a second. Then he let himself be distracted by the faint image of his parents, who, he discovered, were reflected in miniature on the smooth, curved surfaces of the umbrella stand. He started scratching his left elbow with his keys. He felt the joint twitching from one tooth to the next.
"Do you know what really makes me shiver?" said Adele. "All those high grades he gets. Always the highest. There's something frightening in those grades."
Mattia heard his mother sniff, once. She sniffed again, but now it sounded as if her nose were pressed up against something. He imagined his father taking her in his arms, in the middle of the living room.
"He's fifteen," said his father. "It's a cruel age."
His mother didn't reply and Mattia listened to those rhythmic sobs rising to a peak of intensity and then slowly ebbing, finally growing silent again.
At that point he walked into the living room. He closed his eyes slightly as he entered the beam of light. He stopped two steps away from his hugging parents, who looked at him in alarm, like two kids caught necking. Stamped on their faces was the question, how long had he been out there?
Mattia looked at a point midway between them. He said, simply, I do have friends, I'm going to a party on Saturday. Then he continued toward the hall and disappeared into his room.
The tattoo artist had eyed suspiciously first Alice and then the woman with the too dark skin and the frightened expression whom the girl had introduced as her mother. He didn't believe it for a second, but it was none of his business. He was used to tricks of that kind, and he was used to capricious teenage girls. They were getting younger and younger: this one couldn't be as much as seventeen, he thought. But he certainly wasn't in a position to refuse a job for a question of principle. He'd shown the woman to a chair, and she'd sat down and hadn't said another word. She had gripped her purse tightly in her hands, as if ready to leave at any moment, and looked everywhere except in the direction of the needle.
The girl hadn't flinched. He had asked does it hurt, because that's something you have to ask, but she had said no, no through clenched teeth.
He had recommended that she keep the gauze on for at least three days and to clean the wound morning and evening for a week. He had given her a jar of Vaseline and stuffed the money in his pocket.
Back home in the bathroom, Alice took off the white tape that held the bandage on. Her tattoo had been in existence for only a few hours and she had already peeked at it a dozen times. Each time she looked, a bit of the excitement dispersed, like a pool of shimmering water that evaporates beneath the August sun. This time she thought only of how red her skin had turned, all the way around the design. She wondered if her skin would ever regain its natural color and for a moment her throat tightened with panic. Then she banished that stupid anxiety. She hated the fact that her every action always had to seem so irremediable, so definitive. In her mind she called it the weight of consequences, and she was sure that it was another awkward piece of her father that had wormed its way into her brain. How she longed for the uninhibitedness of kids her age, their vacuous sense of immortality. She yearned for all the lightness of her fifteen years, but in trying to grasp it she became aware of the fury with which the time at her disposal was slipping away. The weight of consequences was becoming more and more unbearable and her thoughts began whirling faster and faster, in ever smaller circles.
She had changed her mind at the last moment. That was what she had said to the young man who had already turned on the whizzing machine and was bringing the needle to her belly: I've changed my mind. Unsurprised, he had asked her don't you want to do it anymore? Alice had said yes I want to. But I don't want a rose. I want a violet.
The tattooist had looked at her, puzzled. Then he had confessed that he didn't exactly know what a violet looked like. It's kind of like a daisy, Alice had explained, only with three petals at the top and two at the bottom. And it's violet in color. The tattooist had said okay and set to work.
Alice looked at the livid little flower that now framed her navel and wondered if Viola would understand that it was for her, for their friendship. She decided she wouldn't show it to her till Monday. She wanted to present it without any scabs, bright against her pale skin. She chided herself for not doing it earlier, so that it would have been ready for tonight. She imagined what it would be like to show it secretly to that boy she'd invited to the party. Two days before, Mattia had appeared in front of her and Viola, with that sunken air of his. Denis and I are coming to the party, he had said. Viola hadn't even had time to come up with an unpleasant remark before he was already at the far end of the hall, his back turned to them and head lowered.
She wasn't sure she wanted to kiss him, but it was all decided now and she would look like an idiot in front of Viola if she backed down.
She measured the precise point where the top of her underpants had to come to be able to see the tattoo but not the scar immediately below it. She slipped on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a sweatshirt big enough to cover the lot-the tattoo, the scar, and the bumps of her hips-and then left the bathroom, to join Soledad in the kitchen and watch her make her special cinnamon dessert.
Denis took deep, long breaths, trying to fill his lungs with the smell of Pietro Balossino's car. A slightly sour smell of sweat, which seemed to emanate not so much from the people as from the fireproof seat covers, and from something damp that had been sitting there too long, perhaps hidden under the mats. Denis felt the mixture wrap around his face like a hot bandage.
He would happily have spent all night in that car, driving around the half-dark streets of the hill, watching the lights of the cars in the opposite lane strike his friend's face and then return it to the shadows, unharmed.
Mattia was sitting in the front, beside his father. To Denis, who had been secretly studying the absence of any expression on both their faces, it seemed that father and son had agreed not to utter a single word during the whole journey, and to ensure that their eyes didn't meet even by accident.
He noticed that they had the same way of holding objects, framing them with their fingers tensed, touching surfaces but not really resting on them, as if they feared deforming whatever they held in their hands. Mr. Balossino seemed to barely touch the steering wheel. Mattia's frightful hands traced the edges of the present that his mother had bought for Viola and which he now held on his knees.
"So you're in the same class as Mattia," Mr. Balossino forced himself to say, though without much conviction.
"Yeah," said Denis, in a shrill voice that seemed to have been trapped for too long in his throat. "We sit next to each other."
Mattia's father nodded seriously and then, his conscience assuaged, he returned to his thoughts. Mattia seemed not even to have noticed that scrap of conversation and didn't take his eyes off the window, through which he was trying to work out whether his perception that the dotted white line in the middle of the road was in fact a continuous line was due merely to his eye's slow response or to some more complicated mechanism.
Pietro Balossino braked a few feet away from the big gate of the Bai family's property and put on the hand brake as they were on a slight incline.
"She's pretty well off, your friend," he observed, leaning forward to see over the top of the gate.
Neither Denis nor Mattia admitted that they barely knew the girl's name.
"So I'll come back for you at midnight, okay?"
"Eleven," Mattia replied quickly. "Let's make it eleven."
"Eleven? But it's already nine o'clock. What are you going to do for only two hours?"
"Eleven," insisted Mattia.
Pietro Balossino shook his head and said okay.
Mattia got out of the car and Denis did likewise, reluctantly. He was worried that Mattia might make new friends at the party, fun, fashionable friends who, in the bat of an eye, would take him away forever. He was worried that he would never get into that car again.
He politely said good-bye to Mattia's father and, to seem like a grown-up, held out his hand. Pietro Balossino performed a clumsy acrobatic maneuver to shake it without unfastening his seat belt.
The boys stood stiffly at the gate and waited for the car to turn around before deciding to ring the bell.
Alice was crouching at one end of the white sofa. A glass of Sprite in her hand, from the corner of her eye she was peeking at Sara Turletti's voluminous thighs, crammed into a pair of dark tights. Squashed onto the sofa they became even bigger, almost twice as broad. Alice thought about the space she occupied compared to her classmate. The idea of being able to become so thin as to be invisible gave her a pleasant pang in the stomach.
When Mattia and Denis came into the room, she suddenly stiffened her back and looked around desperately for Viola. She noticed that Mattia wasn't wearing a bandage anymore and tried to see if he had a scar on his wrist. She instinctively ran her index finger along the trace of her own scar. She knew how to find it even under her clothes; it was like an earthworm lying against her skin.
The boys looked around like hunted prey, but in truth not one of the thirty or so kids scattered around the room paid them the least attention. No one except Alice.
Denis followed Mattia's movements, going where he went and looking where he looked. Mattia walked over to Viola, who was busy telling one of her made-up stories to a group of girls. He didn't even ask himself whether he'd ever seen those girls at school. He stood behind the birthday girl, holding the present stiffly to his chest. Viola turned around when she noticed that her friends had taken their eyes off her irresistible mouth and were looking instead over her shoulder.
"Ah, you're here," she said rudely.
"Here," said Mattia, placing the present in her arms. Then he added a mumbled happy birthday.
He was about to go when Viola shouted in an overexcited voice, "Alice, Alice, come quickly. Your friend's here."
Denis swallowed the lump in his throat. One of Viola's little friends cackled into another girl's ear.
Alice got up from the sofa. In the four paces that separated her from the group she tried to mask her syncopated gait, but she was sure that that was what they were all looking at.
She greeted Denis with a quick smile and then Mattia, bowing her head and saying hi in a faint voice. Mattia said hi back and his eyebrows jerked, making him appear even more spastic in Viola's eyes.
There followed an uncomfortably long silence that only she was able to break.
"I've discovered where my sister keeps the pills," she said, beaming. "Do you want some?"
She aimed her question at Mattia, certain that he wouldn't have the slightest idea what she was talking about. She was right.
"Girls, come with me, let's go get them," she said. "You too, Alice."
She took Alice by an arm and the five girls jostled one another as they disappeared down the hall.
Denis was alone with Mattia again and his heartbeat resumed its regular frequency. They both walked over to the drinks table.
"There's whiskey," Denis observed, slightly shocked. "And vodka too."
Mattia didn't reply. He took a plastic cup from the stack and filled it to the brim with Coca-Cola, trying to get as close as possible to that limit where the surface tension of the liquid prevents it from spilling over. Then he set it down on the table. Denis poured himself some whiskey, looking cautiously around and hoping secretly to impress Mattia, who didn't even notice.
Two rooms away, the girls had sat Alice down on Viola's sister's bed to instruct her about what to do.
"No blow jobs. Not even if he asks you, understand?" advised Giada Savarino. "The first time the max you can do is a hand job."
Alice laughed nervously and couldn't work out whether Giada was being serious.
"Now, you go back in there and start talking to him," explained Viola, who had a plan in mind and a very clear one. "Then you come up with an excuse to take him to my room, okay?"
"And what excuse am I supposed to come up with?"
"How do I know? Anything. Tell him you're fed up with the music and you want some peace and quiet."
"What about his friend? He's always glued to him," Alice said.
"We'll take care of him," said Viola with her most ruthless smile.
She climbed onto her sister's bed, trampling the light green cover with her shoes. Alice thought of her father, who wouldn't even let her walk on the carpet with her shoes on. For a second she wondered what he would have said if he had seen her there, but then she swallowed back the thought.
Viola opened a drawer in the cupboard above the bed. She rummaged around, not tall enough to see inside, and took out a little box covered with red fabric, adorned with gilded Chinese characters.
"Take this," she said. She held her hand out toward Alice. In the middle of her palm was a bright blue pill, square and with rounded corners. Carved in the center was a butterfly. For a second Alice saw the filthy fruit gumdrop she had accepted from that very same hand and felt it trapped in her throat again.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Take it. You'll have more fun."
Viola winked. Alice thought for a moment. They were all looking at her. She thought this must be another test. She took the pill from Viola's hand and placed it on her tongue.
"You're ready," Viola said with satisfaction. "Let's go."
The girls left the room single file, all looking down and with wicked smiles on their faces. Federica pleaded with Viola, please, let me have one too. And Viola brusquely told her wait your turn.
Alice was the last to leave. When all their backs were turned, she brought a hand to her mouth and spat out the pill. She put it in her pocket and turned out the light.
Like four beasts of prey, Viola, Giada, Federica, and Giulia surrounded Denis.
"Will you come with us?" Viola asked.
"Why?"
"We'll explain why later," Viola cackled.
Denis froze. He sought Mattia's help, but Mattia was still absorbed in the quivering Coca-Cola. The loud music that filled the room made the surface jerk with each beat of the bass drum. Mattia waited with strange trepidation for the moment when it would spill over the rim.
"I'd rather stay here," said Denis.
"God, how boring you are," Viola said, losing her patience. "You're coming with us and that's that."
She pulled him by the arm. Denis resisted feebly. Then Giada started pulling as well and he gave in. As they were pushing him into the kitchen, he looked once more at his friend, who was still motionless.
Mattia became aware of Alice's presence when she rested a hand on the table: the tension broke and a thin layer of liquid spilled over the rim and settled around the base in a dark ring.
He instinctively looked up and met her gaze.
"How's it going?" she asked.
Mattia nodded. "Fine," he said.
"Do you like the party?"
"Mmm."
"Music this loud gives me a headache."
Alice waited for Mattia to say something. She looked at him and it seemed to her that he wasn't breathing. His eyes were meek and pain-stricken. Like the first time, she suddenly wanted to draw those eyes toward her, to take Mattia's head in her hands and tell him everything would be okay.
"Will you come into the other room with me?" she ventured.
Mattia looked at the floor, as if he had been waiting for those very words.
"Okay," he said.
Alice headed down the hall and he followed a short distance behind. Mattia, as always, kept his head down and looked in front of him. He noticed that Alice's right leg bent gracefully at the knee, like every other leg in the world, and her foot brushed the floor without a sound. Her left leg, on the other hand, remained stiff. To push it forward she had to make it do a little arc outward. For a fraction of a second her pelvis was unbalanced, as if she were about to topple sideways. At last her left foot touched the ground as well, heavily, like a crutch.
Mattia concentrated on that gyroscopic rhythm, and without realizing it he synchronized his steps with hers.
When they got to Viola's room, Alice sidled up next to him and, with a daring that startled even her, closed the door. They were standing, he on the rug and she just off it.
Why doesn't he say anything? Alice wondered.
For a moment she wanted to drop the whole thing, to open the door again and leave, to breathe normally.
But what would I tell Viola? she thought.
"It's better in here, isn't it?" she said.
"Yeah," Mattia agreed, nodding. His arms dangled at his sides like a ventriloquist's dummy. With his right index finger he was folding a short, hard bit of skin that stuck out from beside his thumbnail. It was almost like piercing himself with a needle and the sting distracted him for a moment from the charged air in the room.
Alice sat on Viola's bed, balancing on the edge. The mattress didn't dip beneath her weight. She looked around, searching for something.
"Why don't you sit down here?" she asked Mattia at last.
He obeyed, sitting down carefully, about a foot away from her. The music in the living room sounded like the heavy, panting breath of the walls. Alice noticed Mattia's hands, clenched into fists.
"Is your hand better?" she asked.
"Nearly," he said.
"How did you do it?"
"I cut myself. In the biology lab. By accident."
"Can I see?"
Mattia tightened his fists still further. Then he slowly opened his left hand. A furrow, light in shade and perfectly straight, cut it diagonally. Around it, Alice made out scars that were shorter and paler, almost white. They filled the whole of his palm, intersecting like the branches of a leafless tree seen against the light.
"I've got one too, you know," she said.
Mattia clenched his fist again and trapped his hand between his legs, as if to hide it. Alice stood up, lifted her sweatshirt slightly, and unbuttoned her jeans. He was seized by panic. He turned his eyes to the floor, but still managed to see Alice's hands folding back the edge of her trousers, revealing a piece of white gauze framed by Scotch tape and, just below it, the top of a pair of pale gray underpants.
Alice lowered the elastic band a couple of inches and Mattia held his breath.
"Look," she said.
A long scar ran along her protruding pelvis bone. It was thick and in relief, and wider than Mattia's. The marks from the stitches, which intersected it perpendicularly and at regular intervals, made it look like the kind of scar children draw on their faces when they dress up as pirates.
Mattia couldn't think what to say. Alice buttoned up her jeans and tucked her undershirt inside them. Then she sat down again, a little closer to him.
The silence was almost unbearable for both of them, the empty space between their faces overflowing with expectation and embarrassment.
"Do you like your new school?" Alice asked, for the sake of saying something.
"Yes."
"They say you're a genius."
Mattia sucked in his cheeks and bit into them till he felt the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth.
"Do you really like studying?"
Mattia nodded.
"Why?"
"It's the only thing I know how to do," he said shortly. He wanted to tell her that he liked studying because you can do it alone, because all the things you study are already dead, cold, and chewed over. He wanted to tell her that the pages of the schoolbooks were all the same temperature, that they left you time to choose, that they never hurt you and you couldn't hurt them either. But he said nothing.
"And do you like me?" Alice went for it. Her voice came out rather shrilly and her face exploded with heat.
"I don't know," Mattia answered hastily, looking at the floor.
"Why?"
"I don't know," he insisted. "I haven't thought about it."
"You don't need to think about it."
"If I don't think, I can't understand anything."
"I like you," said Alice. "A bit. I think."
He nodded. He played at contracting and relaxing his retina, to make the geometric design of the carpet go in and out of focus.
"Do you want to kiss me?" Alice asked. She wasn't ashamed, but as she said it her empty stomach curled with terror that he might say no.
Mattia didn't move for a few seconds. Then he shook his head, slowly, still staring at the swirls in the carpet.
With a nervous impulse, Alice brought her hands to her hips and measured the circumference of her waist.
"It doesn't matter," she said quickly, in a different voice. "Please don't tell anyone," she added.
You're an idiot, she thought. Worse than a girl in kindergarten.
She stood up. Suddenly Viola's room seemed like a strange, hostile place. She felt herself becoming intoxicated by all the colors on the walls, the desk covered with makeup, the toe shoes hanging from the closet door, like a pair of severed feet, the big photo of Viola at the beach, lying on the sand looking beautiful, the cassettes stacked haphazardly beside the stereo, and the clothes piled up on the armchair.
"Let's go back," she said.
Mattia got up from the bed. He looked at her for a moment, apologetically, it seemed to her. She opened the door, letting the music flood the room. She walked partway down the hall alone. Then she thought of Viola's face. She turned around, took Mattia's stiff hand without asking his permission, and together they walked into the noisy living room.
The girls had trapped Denis in the corner, near the fridge, so as to have a little fun. They had arranged themselves in front of him, forming a barrier of excited eyes and flowing hair, through which he could no longer see Mattia in the other room.
"Truth or dare?" Viola asked him.
Denis shook his head timidly, to say that he didn't feel like playing this game. Viola rolled her eyes and then opened the fridge, forcing Denis to lean to the side to make room for the door. She pulled out a bottle of peach vodka and took a gulp, without bothering to find a glass. Then she offered him some, with a complicit smile.
He already felt dizzy and a little nauseated. The whiskey had left a bitter aftertaste suspended between his nose and his mouth, but there was something in Viola's behavior that prevented him from objecting. He took the bottle and took a sip. Then he passed it to Giada Savarino, who grabbed it greedily and started to pour it down her throat as if it were orangeade.
"So. Truth or dare?" repeated Viola. "Otherwise we'll choose."
"I don't like this game," Denis objected unconvincingly.
"Mmm, you and your friend really are a drag," she said. "Then I'll choose. Truth. Let's see."
She rested her index finger on her chin and with her eyes traced an imaginary circle on the ceiling, pretending to be deep in thought.
"I know!" she exclaimed. "You have to tell us which one of us you like best."
Denis shrugged, intimidated.
"Dunno," he said.
"What do you mean, dunno? You must like at least one of us, right?"
Denis thought he didn't like any of them, that he just wanted them to get out of his way and let him get back to Mattia. That he had only one more hour to be with him and watch him exist, even at night, when usually the only thing he could do was imagine him in his bedroom, sleeping under a sheet the color of which he didn't know.
If I choose one of them, they'll leave me alone, he thought.
"Her." He pointed to Giulia Mirandi, because she seemed the most harmless.
Giulia brought a hand to her mouth as if she'd just been elected prom queen. Viola turned up one corner of her mouth. The other two exploded into coarse laughter.
"Good," said Viola. "So now the dare."
"No, that's enough," protested Denis.
"You really are a bore. Here you are, surrounded by four girls, and you don't even want to play a bit. Certainly this doesn't happen to you every day."
"But now it's someone else's turn."
"And I say it's still your turn. You have to do the dare. What do you say, girls?"
The others nodded greedily. The bottle was once more in the hands of Giada, who at regular intervals threw back her head and took a swig, as if she wanted to finish it before the others noticed.
"See?" said Viola.
Denis snorted.
"What do I have to do?" he asked with resignation.
"Well, since I'm a generous hostess, I'm going to give you a nice dare," Viola said mysteriously. The other three hung on her words, eager to discover the new torture. "You have to kiss Giulia."
Giulia blushed. Denis felt a pang in his ribs.
"Are you crazy?" Giulia asked, shocked, perhaps pretending.
Viola gave a capricious shrug. Denis shook his head no, two, three times in a row.
"You were the one who said you liked her," she said.
"What if I don't do it?"
Suddenly dead serious, Viola looked him straight in the eyes.
"If you don't do it you'll have to choose truth again," she said. "You could tell us about your little friend, for example."
In her keen, bright stare Denis recognized all the things he had always thought were invisible. His neck stiffened.
His arms at his sides, he leaned his face toward Giulia Mirandi, narrowed his eyes, and kissed her. Then he tried to draw back, but Giulia held his head, her hand on the back of his neck. She forced her tongue through his pursed lips.
In his mouth Denis tasted saliva that wasn't his own and felt sick. In the middle of this, his first kiss, he opened his eyes just in time to see Mattia coming into the kitchen, hand in hand with the crippled girl.
The others were the first to notice what Alice and Mattia would come to understand only many years later. They walked into the room holding hands. They weren't smiling and were looking in opposite directions, but it was as if their bodies flowed smoothly into each other's, through their arms and fingers.
The marked contrast between Alice's light-colored hair, which framed the excessively pale skin of her face, and Mattia's dark hair, tousled forward to hide his black eyes, was erased by the slender arc that linked them. There was a shared space between their bodies, the confines of which were not well delineated, from which nothing seemed to be missing and in which the air seemed motionless, undisturbed.
Alice walked a step ahead of him and Mattia's slight drag balanced her cadence, erasing the imperfections of her faulty leg. He let himself be carried forward, his feet making not the slightest sound on the tiles. His scars were hidden and safe in her hand.
They stopped on the threshold of the kitchen, a little away from the cluster of girls and Denis. They tried to work out what was happening. They had a dreamy air about them, as if they had come from some distant place that only they knew.
Denis pushed Giulia violently away and their mouths separated with a smack. He looked at Mattia and sought in his expression the traces of the thing that terrified him. He thought that he and Alice had said something to each other, something he would never be able to know, and his brain filled with blood.
He ran out of the room, deliberately knocking into him, to destroy that equilibrium he loathed. For an instant Mattia met Denis's red and upset eyes. For some reason they reminded him of Michela's defenseless eyes that afternoon in the park. Over the years those two gazes would gradually merge in his memory into a single, indelible fear.
Mattia let go of Alice's hand. It was as if all his nerve endings were concentrated in that single point, and when he broke away, it seemed that his arm gave off sparks, as if from a bared cable.
"Excuse me," he whispered to her and left the kitchen to catch up with Denis.
Alice walked over to Viola, who was staring at her with eyes of stone.
"We-" she began.
"I don't care," Viola cut in. Looking at Alice and Mattia, she had remembered the boy at the beach, the moment when he had refused to hold her hand, while she would have loved to go back to the others on the beach holding hands just like that. She was jealous, a painful, violent jealousy. And she was furious, because the happiness she wanted for herself she had just given to someone else. She felt robbed, as if Alice had taken her share too.
Alice leaned over to say something in her ear, but Viola turned away.
"What do you want now?" she said.
"Nothing." Alice retreated in fear.
At that moment Giada bent forward, as if an invisible man had punched her in the stomach. With one hand she held on to the kitchen counter and with the other she gripped her belly.
"What's wrong?" Viola asked.
"I'm going to throw up," she moaned.
"Gross, go to the bathroom," Viola yelled.
But it was too late. With a jerk Giada emptied the contents of her stomach onto the floor, something reddish and alcoholic, a mixture of vodka and Soledad's dessert.
The others pulled back, horrified, while Alice tried to hold her up by the hips. The air immediately turned rancid.
"Well done, you idiot," said Viola. "What a fucking awful party."
She left the room, her fists clenched furiously, as if struggling to keep from smashing something. Alice looked at her anxiously and then went back to taking care of Giada, who was sobbing gently.
The other guests had scattered about in small groups around the living room. Most of the boys were bobbing their heads back and forth to the music, while the girls scanned the room. Some held drinks in their hands; six or seven were dancing to "A Question of Time." Mattia wondered how they could feel so at ease, moving around like that in front of everyone. Then he realized it was the most natural thing in the world, which was precisely why he was incapable of it.
Denis had disappeared. Mattia crossed the living room and went to look for him in Viola's room. He even looked in her sister's and her parents' rooms. He looked in both bathrooms and in one he found a boy and a girl from school. She was sitting on the toilet and he was on the floor in front of her, legs crossed. They both wore sad and questioning expressions and Mattia hastily closed the door.
He went back to the living room and out onto the balcony. The hill dropped away darkly and below them lay the entire city, a series of bright white dots arranged homogeneously, as far as the eye could see. Mattia leaned over the railing and looked through the trees of the grounds of Villa Bai, but he couldn't see anyone. He went back inside; anxiety began to shorten his breath.
A spiral staircase led from the sitting room to a dark attic. He climbed the first steps, then stopped.
Where has he gotten to? he thought.
He went on, up to the top. The light that filtered from below allowed him to make out the shadow of Denis, standing in the middle of the room.
He called to him. All through their friendship he had uttered his name only two or three times at the most. He had never needed to, because Denis was always right next to him, like a natural extension of his limbs.
"Go away," Denis replied.
Mattia looked for the switch and turned on the light. The room was enormous, lined with tall bookshelves. The only other furniture was a big, empty wooden desk. Mattia had the impression that no one had come up to this floor of the house for a long time.
"It's almost eleven. We have to go," he said.
Denis didn't reply. His back was turned, and he stood in the middle of a big rug. Mattia walked over to his friend. He saw that Denis had been crying. He was blowing through his teeth as he breathed, his eyes fixed straight ahead and his half-open lips trembling slightly.
It took Mattia a few seconds to notice a desk lamp that lay shattered at his feet.
"What have you done?" he asked.
Denis's breathing turned into a wheeze.
"Denis, what have you done?"
Mattia tried to touch his friend's shoulder, but Denis gave a violent start. Mattia shook him.
"What have you done?"
"I…" Denis began. Then he froze.
"You what?"
Denis opened his left hand and showed Mattia a fragment of the lamp, a splinter of green glass, grown opaque from sweat, that seemed to swallow up the light.
"I wanted to feel what you feel," he whispered.
Mattia didn't understand. He stumbled back, confused. A burning sensation exploded in his gut and filled his arms and legs.
"But then I couldn't do it," said Denis.
He held the palms of his hands upward, as if waiting for something.
Mattia was about to ask him why, but didn't. The music rose up, muffled, from below. The low frequencies passed through the floor, but the higher ones seemed trapped.
Denis sniffed. "Let's get out of here," he said.
Mattia nodded, but neither of them made a move. Then Denis turned and abruptly walked toward the stairs. Mattia followed him across the living room and then outside, where the cool night air was waiting to give them back their breath.
Viola decided if you were in or out. On Sunday morning Giada Savarino's father had phoned Viola's father, waking up the entire Bai household. It was a long phone call and Viola, still in pajamas, had pressed her ear to her parents' bedroom door, but she hadn't been able to catch a single word of the conversation.
When she heard the bed creak, she had run back to her room and hid under the blankets, pretending to be asleep. Her father had woken her up saying you can tell me what happened later, but for now let me tell you that there will be no more parties in this house and, in fact, you can forget about parties of any kind for a good long while. At lunch her mother had asked her to explain the broken lamp in the attic and her sister hadn't come to her defense, because she had noticed that Viola had laid her hands on her personal stock.
She locked herself away in her room all day, disheartened and banned from using the phone. She couldn't get Alice and Mattia, and their way of holding hands, out of her head. As she scratched away the last remnants of nail polish she decided: Alice was out.
On Monday morning, locked in her bathroom at home, Alice finally removed the gauze that covered her tattoo. She balled it up and then threw it in the toilet, along with the crumbled biscuits that she hadn't eaten for breakfast.
She looked at the violet reflected in the mirror and thought that, for the second time, she had changed her body forever. She shivered with a pleasant mixture of regret and trepidation. She thought that this body was hers alone, that if she felt like it she could even destroy it, lay waste to it with indelible marks, or let it dry out like a flower picked on a whim by a child and then left to die on the ground.
That morning she would show her tattoo to Viola and the others, in the girls' bathroom. She would tell them how she and Mattia had kissed for a long time. There was no need to invent anything more than that. If they asked her for details, she would merely go along with their fantasies.
In class she left her backpack on her chair and headed over to Viola's desk to join the others. As she approached, she heard Giulia Mirandi saying here she comes. She said hi to everyone, beaming, but no one replied. She leaned over to give Viola two kisses on the cheeks, as Viola had taught her to do, but her friend didn't move an inch.
Alice stood up again and found herself looking into four hostile faces.
"We were all ill yesterday," Viola began.
"Really?" Alice asked, with genuine concern. "What was wrong with you?"
"A terrible stomachache, all of us," Giada broke in aggressively.
Alice saw Giada vomiting on the floor again and felt like saying I'm not surprised with the amount you all drank.
"There was nothing wrong with me," she said.
"Of course," sneered Viola, looking at the others. "There was no doubt about that."
Giada and Federica laughed; Giulia lowered her eyes.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Alice asked, disoriented.
"You know very well what I mean," Viola retorted, suddenly changing her tone and fixing her with her marvelous, piercing eyes.
"No, I don't know," Alice defended herself.
Giada attacked. "You poisoned us."
"What are you saying? What do you mean 'poisoned'?"
Giulia butted in, timidly. "Come on, girls, that's not true."
"Yes, it is. She poisoned us," Giada repeated. "Who knows what disgusting things she put in that dessert."
She turned back toward Alice. "You wanted to make us all sick, didn't you? Well, it worked, well done."
Alice listened to the sequence of words, but it took her a few seconds to reconstruct their meaning. She looked at Giulia, who, with her big blue eyes, was saying sorry, there's nothing I can do. Then she sought shelter in Viola's eyes, but Viola returned an empty gaze.
Giada held a hand over her belly, as if she were still having convulsions.
"But I made it with Soledad. We bought all the ingredients at the supermarket."
No one replied. They looked in different directions, as if waiting for the murderer to leave.
"It wasn't Sol's dessert. I ate it too, and I didn't get sick," Alice lied.
"You're a liar," pounced Federica Mazzoldi, who hadn't said a word till then. "You didn't even taste it. Everyone knows that-"
She suddenly froze.
"Please, stop," Giulia begged. She looked as if she were about to burst into tears.
Alice put a hand over her flat stomach. She could feel her heart beating under her skin.
"Everyone knows what?" she asked them in a calm voice.
Viola Bai slowly shook her head. Alice stared at her former friend in silence, waiting for words that didn't come but that floated in the air like tongues of transparent smoke. She didn't even move when the bell rang. Ms. Tubaldo, the science teacher, had to call her twice before she finally went to sit in her place.
Denis hadn't come to school. On Saturday, on the way home, he and Mattia hadn't looked at each other once. Denis had responded to Mattia's father in monosyllables, and hadn't even said good-bye when he got out of the car.
Mattia rested a hand on the empty chair beside him. Now and again Denis's words in that dark attic ran through his head. Then they slipped away, too quickly for him to get to the bottom of their meaning.
He realized it didn't really matter to him to understand them. He merely wished Denis was there, to shield him from everything beyond his desk.
The day before, his parents had made him sit down on the sofa, in the living room. They had sat in the chairs opposite him. Then his father said so tell us about the party. Mattia had clenched his hands tightly, but then stretched them out on his knees so that his parents could see them. He had shrugged and replied in a quiet voice that there was nothing to tell. His mother had gotten nervously to her feet and disappeared into the kitchen. His father, on the other hand, had come over to him and clapped him twice on the shoulder, as if consoling him for something. Mattia remembered how, when he was little, on the hottest days of summer, his father would blow on his and Michela's faces in turn, to cool them down. He remembered what the sweat felt like as it evaporated from his skin, ever so lightly, and was filled with a searing nostalgia for a part of the world that had drowned in the river along with Michela.
He wondered if his classmates knew everything. Maybe even his teachers knew. He felt their furtive glances weaving together above his head like a fishing net.
He opened his history book at random and started learning by heart the whole sequence of dates that appeared from that page onward. The list of numbers, lined up without any logical meaning, formed an ever longer trail in his head. As he followed it, Mattia slowly moved away from the thought of Denis standing in the shadow and forgot the void that now sat in his place.
During break time Alice slipped into the infirmary on the second floor, a narrow white room furnished only with a hospital bed and a mirrored cabinet with the essentials for first aid. She had ended up there only once before, when she had fainted during PE because in the previous forty hours she had eaten only two whole-grain crackers and a low-calorie snack. That day the gym teacher, in his green Diadora tracksuit, his whistle, which he never used, around his neck, had said to her think carefully about what you're doing, think very carefully. Then he had gone out, leaving her alone under the fluorescent light, without anything to do or look at for the whole next hour.
Alice found the first-aid cabinet open. She took a wad of cotton wool the size of a plum and the bottle of rubbing alcohol. She closed the door and looked around for a heavy object. There was only the wastepaper basket, made of hard plastic, a dull color halfway between red and brown. She prayed that no one would hear the noise from outside and shattered the mirror of the little cupboard with the bottom of the basket.
Then, being careful not to cut herself, she picked up a big triangular splinter of glass. She caught the reflection of her own right eye and felt proud that she hadn't cried, not even a bit. She stuffed everything into the center pocket of the baggy sweatshirt she was wearing and went back to class.
She spent the rest of the morning in a state of torpor. She never even glanced at Viola and the others and didn't listen to a single word of the lesson on the theater of Aeschylus.
As she was leaving the class, behind all her classmates, Giulia Mirandi furtively took her hand.
"I'm sorry," she whispered into her ear. Then she kissed her on the cheek and ran after the others, who were already in the hallway.
Alice waited for Mattia in the atrium, at the bottom of the linoleum-covered staircase down which poured a chaotic stream of pupils headed for the exit. She rested a hand on the banister. The cold metal gave her a sense of tranquillity.
Mattia came down the stairs enveloped by that foot and a half of emptiness that no one other than Denis dared occupy. His black hair fell over his forehead in tousled curls. He watched carefully where he placed his feet, leaning slightly backward as he descended. Alice called out to him, but he didn't turn around. She called again, more loudly now, and he looked up, said an embarrassed hi, and made as if to head toward the glass doors.
Alice elbowed her way through the other students and joined him. She took him by the arm and he gave a start.
"You have to come with me," she said.
"Where?"
"You have to help me do something."
Mattia looked around nervously, in search of some kind of threat.
"My father's waiting for me outside," he said.
"Your father will wait. You have to help me. Now," said Alice.
Mattia snorted. Then he said okay but he couldn't have said why.
"Come."
Alice took him by the hand, as she had at Viola's party, but this time Mattia's fingers spontaneously closed around hers.
They left the crowd of students. Alice walked quickly, as if she were escaping from someone. They slipped into the deserted corridor on the second floor. The doors leading to the empty classrooms conveyed a sense of abandonment.
They went into the girls' bathroom. Mattia hesitated. He was about to say I'm not supposed to be here, but then he let her drag him in. When Alice took him inside a cubicle and locked the door they were so close that his legs started trembling. The space not taken up by the old-style hole-in-the-ground toilet was nothing more than a thin strip of tiles and there was barely room for their four feet. There were pieces of toilet paper scattered on the ground half-stuck to the floor.
Now she's going to kiss me, he thought. And all you have to do is kiss her back. It'll be easy; everyone knows how.
Alice unzipped her shiny jacket and started to undress, just as she had at Viola's house. She untucked her T-shirt and lowered the same pair of jeans halfway down her bottom. She didn't look at Mattia; it was as if she were there on her own.
In place of Saturday evening's white gauze she had a flower tattooed on her skin. Mattia was about to say something, but then fell silent and looked away. Something stirred between his legs and he tried to distract himself. He read some of the graffiti on the wall, without grasping its meaning. He noticed how none of the writing was parallel to the line of tiles. Almost all of it was at the same angle to the edge of the floor and Mattia worked out that it was somewhere between 30 and 45 degrees.
"Take this," said Alice.
She handed him a piece of glass, reflective on one side and black on the other, and as sharp as a dagger. Mattia didn't understand. She lifted his chin, just as she had imagined doing the first time they had met.
"You've got to get rid of it. I can't do it on my own," she said to him.
Mattia looked at the glass shard and then at Alice's right hand, which pointed at the tattoo on her belly.
She anticipated his protest.
"I know you know how to do it," she said. "I never want to see it again. Please, do it for me."
Mattia rolled the shard in his hand and a shiver ran down his arm.
"But-" he said.
"Do it for me," Alice interrupted him, putting a hand to his lips to shut him up and then removing it immediately.
Do it for me, thought Mattia. Those four words stuck in his ear and made him kneel in front of Alice.
His heels touched the wall behind him. He didn't know how to position himself. Uncertain, he touched the skin next to the tattoo, to stretch it better. His face had never been so close to a girl's body. The natural thing to do seemed to be to breathe in deeply, to discover its smell.
He brought the shard close to her flesh. His hand was steady as he made a little cut the size of a fingertip. Alice trembled and let out a cry.
Mattia recoiled and hid the piece of glass behind his back, as if to deny that it had been him.
"I can't do it," he said.
He looked up. Alice wept silently. Her eyes were closed, clenched in an expression of pain.
"But I don't want to see it anymore," she sobbed.
It was clear to him that she had lost her nerve, and he felt relieved. He stood up and wondered if it would be better to leave.
Alice wiped away the drop of blood trickling down her belly. She buttoned up her jeans, while Mattia tried to think of something reassuring to say.
"You'll get used to it. In the end you won't even notice it anymore," he said.
"How is that possible? It will always be there, right before my eyes."
"Exactly," said Mattia. "Which is precisely why you won't see it anymore."