Chapter 15
Nico bumps against my shoulder as we stand in the admissions line. “Irritabile?”
I snort. “Gee, what gave it away?”
“Well, you haven’t argued with me once all day. Or called me a murderer. I’d say that’s cause for concern.”
I turn away from him, annoyed, but he’s grinning.
“That, and you get a wrinkle between your eyebrows when you’re angry.”
“I do not,” I protest, but it’s there when I feel for it.
Nico shrugs. “My father used to say to feel your feelings, let them work themselves out of your body. This is a good place for that, I think.” And then his hand is on my upper back, gentle and concerned, before he leaves me to go talk to Anya, like I am supposed to be normal about any of that.
After purchasing our tickets for fifteen euro apiece, we walk into the preserved excavation area of Pompeii.
I’m not sure why I was expecting it to be smaller—it was a real-life city, a bustling coastal metropolis, and it strikes me that this was a place where people lived out their lives for centuries before it was blanketed in ash. And now it’s all gone.
We opted to forgo the formal tour, but we had downloaded a guided app with audio narration, and Nico studies Roman history, so he adds in his commentary as we move from one landmark to the next.
“These are the remains of the gladiator barracks,” he tells us as we approach a grid of prison-like cells that were used to house the gladiators that fought in the nearby arena.
We’re packed in with a crowd of tourists who push and scramble to read the posted plaques and catch glimpses of the inscriptions on the walls.
The rooms are small, damp, and dark, looking out onto an open green where Nico tells us they once trained.
We inch along, jostled by the current of the crowd, and are carried by it to the Casa dei Casti Amanti—the House of the Lovers.
“Look, there,” Nico reads off a wall. “The first person writes, ‘Amantes, ut apes, vitam mellitam exigent’—lovers, like bees, lead a honey-sweet life. Then someone else comes along and rebuts him: ‘I wish!’ ” He looks at us excitedly.
“History repeats itself, no? How many have said the same things to one another over wine and aperitivo? Maybe even here, among us, friends are having the very same conversation that Pompeiians did so long ago.”
He’s right. I’d known it before, I suppose, from the textbooks with photos of the mummified bodies, preserved forever in their contorted positions, but I hadn’t known it until I’d come: Mount Vesuvius erupted on a day like today.
It had been a beautiful morning just like this one until the ash came raining down.
I wonder how many of them had come here on vacation or were hanging out with friends.
How many of them were washing their faces or brushing their hair or had gone out for breakfast?
How many of them were madly in love—and on the other end of the spectrum, how many were being treated poorly by shitbag dudes?
And me? If I’d been here, I wouldn’t have been savoring my last moments on earth, enjoying the bright summer sun or the cool ocean breeze or the company of my friends.
I would have been moping after the same guy who had played me for a fool before, so absorbed in it—in him—that I may not have even noticed anything was wrong until far too late.
And then my last thoughts wouldn’t even have been about anything meaningful.
“I need a minute,” I say suddenly. “I’m going to explore a little on my own, okay?”
“Okay, Sora,” Mari says, her eyes wide with concern.
“I’ll catch up with you in a bit,” I assure them before slipping away from the crowd.
I wander through the streets. My audio track tells me about things I pass along the way—bars, bathhouses, brothels.
The amphitheater, which could hold five hundred more people than Madison Square Garden in New York.
I pause for a minute in front of the remains of a courthouse, staring up at its large pillars, which stretch to the sky like trees.
In the background, across the Bay of Naples, looms the ominous peak of Mount Vesuvius, an eternal reminder of what had happened here.
My wandering takes me to a thermopolium—a fast-food restaurant—and my stomach growls.
I regret not eating the lemon crème cookies.
Mari had been right; they are my favorite.
And then, as if on cue, the tinny voice of the audio guide is telling me about these two guys, Gaius and Aulus, who carved their names, and a celebration of their friendship, onto the entranceway.
Okay, okay, I get it.
I retrace my steps to the Casa dei Casti Amanti, but Anya and Mari are nowhere to be found.
Nico, though, is waiting on a bench outside.
I take a seat next to him, pull a granola bar out of my backpack, and take a bite.
With a full mouth, I extend it to him, and he takes me up on the offer.
We people-watch together—so many people from all different countries, every walk of life, have congregated.
It’s a little like fate has brought everyone together to this spot, Nico and me included.
We’re just sitting in silence until Nico asks, “So, what do you make of it here?”
“Here, Pompeii? Or here, Italy?”
“Both.”
For a moment, I consider lying to keep things light.
It’s all I’ve been doing for months now, from my parents to my friends, because I haven’t wanted to burden them with my angst, haven’t wanted them to feel sorry for me.
But there’s something about Nico—the honesty in his eyes, like he genuinely wants to know, like he wouldn’t care that I’m messy and sad and trying too hard.
And anyways, I rationalize, he won’t even know me after these next couple weeks.
It won’t matter what he knows, because I can’t let him down.
“Being here is… big, I guess. The ruins of what used to be people’s lives.
I keep imagining being a girl my age, upset about something stupid like a guy or a dress or something one day and then the next…
this. And in an instant, it didn’t matter anymore.
It makes everything that came before feel so small and insignificant. ”
“I don’t know about that,” Nico says, taking another bite of granola bar.
“How could they have known? Maybe for that girl, the stupid guy was the closest thing she’d experienced to the end of the world, up until her world actually ended.
It’s all relative. Until my dad died, I thought that getting the best grades and getting into the best school were the only things that mattered.
And then—bam. Everything shifted. But you can’t get that perspective if you’re still in the before. ”
This is the first time he’s really spoken about his father passing away.
His voice is soft, but not sad, and I wonder what sort of person Nico’s father must have been to make Nico the way he is.
Gentle, I’m sure, and kind, but thoughtful, too.
I want to ask for more, but I’m afraid to push too hard, push him away.
Instead, I admit, “I might still be in your ‘before,’ and maybe that’s why all this feels so…
overwhelming. Like… like I didn’t get into any of my dream schools, and sometimes it kind of feels like my life is over because of it.
Like I’m stuck in the ash too. My parents emigrated from Iran to give me a better life, left behind their families and their friends, all the food and the familiar things they grew up with, only for me to end up a failure.
I don’t want to be that girl who hasn’t done anything more meaningful than kiss boys before she dies. ”
It feels good to say this—I hadn’t realized how long I’d been holding it in.
My parents say they are proud of me, that they love me no matter what, and I believe them.
But I see their disappointment in the way their shoulders sag a little when they talk about me still living at home come fall, or when they are so celebratory of Anya and Mari as my rejection letters had rolled in from UCLA and NYU and UChicago.
Nico huffs out a laugh. “You’re allowed to feel sad about that, Sora; it doesn’t matter that you aren’t literally encased in the ash.
And anyway, even if you do get into your dream school, it doesn’t mean you won’t still feel trapped.
Take it from me. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’ll end up a failure.
You are bright and funny and you care about people.
Don’t you think that is a success in itself? ”
“And do you feel… like that?” I sneak a look at him. “Trapped?” His chestnut curls reveal flecks of gold in the sunlight, and the smell of his cedarwood deodorant mixes with the salt of his sweat in a way that makes me dizzy. He chews on his lip as if weighing something.
Finally, he says, “The hotel has been in my family for four generations. My whole life I’ve watched people come and go, listening to stories from everywhere—from Egypt, or China, or Romania, or Brazil.
The world felt so big, and Sorrento felt so small, so I worked and I worked and I got into Sapienza.
But then the accident happened, and my mom couldn’t cope, and I had to defer school for a year, and now… now my world’s shrunk again.”
“But do you think your mom would want that for you?” I can’t help asking. She doesn’t seem like the type to want her son to sacrifice his dreams for her.
“It isn’t that simple.” Nico stares off.
“I have obligations, responsibilities. And my mom… I can’t leave her alone to deal with all of this.
I do love the B and B. At least this way, I can still meet people from all over the world—I can meet people like you.
Adventure doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards for me. Maybe I’m not cut out for it anyway.”
I spare Nico my assessment, but I think he does want all those things.
It’s just easier to tell yourself otherwise when the chances are taken away from you.
I spot Anya and Mari up ahead. They’re reading a plaque together, using their fingers to trace along the words.
“You know, I’m right there with you in that shrinking world if you need company.
I’m the only one staying at home for school.
I have no one at my new college. I’ll be all alone. ”
Nico’s voice softens. “I don’t think they’re the kind of friends who would leave you behind, Sora.
I think they’re the kind of friends who will bring the world to you.
You should talk to them. Share your fears.
It might make you feel better, especially when you see how they react. They might surprise you.”
He shifts, hand skimming against mine, and it sends a little zing up my arm.
My next sentence catches in my throat. What was that?
My heart is racing. It’s so jarring that I stand up abruptly, brushing dust off my shorts.
“I’ll tell mine if you tell yours,” I say with a breathless laugh. “Should we get back to them?”
“Sure.” He jumps to his feet also, but we were sitting too close and now we’re standing too close, so he’s off-balance and stumbling into me and his chest brushes against mine as he braces himself against the back of the bench.
We both freeze. There’s a shiver working its way up my spine.
I’m sure my cheeks are burning, and I think I see his ears reddening too, though it could just be the scorching noontime sun.
For a second—just one second—I swear his eyes flick down to my lips.
He’s so close, only millimeters away, and I foolishly think that he could just lean forward to press his against mine.
But then he straightens, helps me right myself, and snatches his hand away to rub bashfully at the nape of his neck. “Ah, sorry.”
That snaps me back to reality again. Curse my overactive, boy-crazy imagination, reading more into things than any normal person would. This is the exact kind of behavior that got me here in the first place. I need to chill out.
So I do.
I brush it off and move on.