Chapter Twelve West
Chapter Twelve
West
Getting a life since I’ve been in Italy has really cut into my time sitting on the computer and ignoring the outside world.
The guys back home have noticed, too. They’ve all reached the hundreds in Project Euclid problems over the past few days.
I’m still stuck on seventy-two and have barely touched it since before Cammie told me about the dad search.
The jokes at my expense are piling up in the group chat.
It’s brutal, and makes me feel loved, in a way that can only be understood by those with a close circle of emotionally stunted nerd friends.
Still, I’m past due for a night of my particular brand of self-care. It just happens to work out that I also need a distraction from Cammie, who I’ve barely seen since we returned from our Capri excursion.
I’m still afraid the cornicello necklace was a bridge too far—the bridge, in this case, being the one with all those “love locks” that started to collapse under the weight of Too Much Love.
She gave me an ounce of understanding, forgiveness, friendship—whatever one could call our talk about our past—and what did I do, mere hours later?
Smothered her under the weight of thousands of cheap, heart-shaped padlocks inscribed with “CL + WJ 4EVR.” Or under one tiny necklace, that—in terms of romantic symbolism—might as well have weighed the same.
I’ve considered a multitude of ways to try to talk to her about it but worry I’d only end up making things even weirder. Like if I was all, “You know that was no big deal, right? I wasn’t trying to tell you I’m in love with you or something,” it kind of just sounds like the opposite.
If there is any hope left of upgrading from free-trial friendship, Cammie cannot see me this unhinged.
On the train back that night, she sheepishly admitted that she no longer had my phone number and asked me to give it to her so we could easily talk about any new plans or ideas for our search—and it does feel like ours now, for better or worse.
So far, we’ve only exchanged a couple texts about dad-hunt-related things—me requesting the list of names she’s assembled so I can keep looking into them, and pictures of her notes from the journal so far; her sending all of that back to me, adding that she was still thinking about next steps and would let me know when she came up with anything. I’ve done my own brainstorming, too.
But I’ve decided I need to put it aside for a second.
It’s a Saturday, the night is young, and these math problems aren’t going to solve themselves.
Laptop in my arms, I head for the library.
Dad and Dr. Alex went to a bar in town to see some live jazz or something similarly adult and European and classy.
I don’t know what Cammie is up to, and I’ve told myself I don’t care.
Our hall was loud and lively when I left it, more than I’ve seen on any other night, voices and music and people around my age coming in and out of each other’s rooms, talking about pre-gaming plans and which clubs and bars they’re headed to.
I doubt any of theirs involve live jazz.
The farther I get from the noise, the more my mind eases and my heart rate slows, and I almost feel like goofily smiling at nothing. I’m so looking forward to a few hours of complete peace and solitude.
I push open the heavy wooden door and my brain plays a record scratch sound, my feet coming to an abrupt halt.
Over the edge of the antique fainting couch on the opposite side of the room, I see two sock-covered feet propped against one of the bookshelves.
Their toes wiggle beneath a pattern of smiling croissants and baguettes.
Not wanting to startle the person, even though I have a sneaking suspicion I know who they are, I shuffle along the carpet the rest of the way so my feet barely make a sound.
“Um, hi,” I say, similarly soft and cautious.
The toes stop their wiggling.
“Oh, hey, West,” Cammie says, like she was expecting me any minute now.
I guess I should have expected her, too.
That’s the way of things lately, isn’t it?
Me, walking along, expecting silence and serenity.
Cammie, bursting through the wall like a pint-sized Kool-Aid Man who makes my hands sweat and my chest feel funny.
I cross the room and round the couch to find Cammie lying on the floor, her legs extended up against the shelves and her hair sprawled on the carpet around her like an auburn lion’s mane.
Her laptop and her mom’s journal both lie open a few feet away.
She’s wearing short pajama shorts and an oversized T-shirt that she’s definitely had since we were in middle school, the faded lettering on the front displaying the words Hey girl, are you a five-meter square of dirt covering up an ancient civilization?
I don’t need to see the back to know that it says ’cause I dig you. Dr. Alex got it for her at a conference in London where she and my dad gave a talk. I remember Cammie opening it at the hotel where we both stayed with Pops, and she didn’t stop laughing over it the rest of the trip.
I am so not doing any math tonight, am I?
“Hey, Cam,” I say, sliding a finger under each lens of the glasses I remembered to wear for once, rubbing my eyes. “Whatcha doing here?”
She blinks wide, slightly watery blue eyes at me, a little dent forming between her brows. “Using the good library Wi-Fi,” she says matter-of-factly, but there’s something off about her voice. “You wear glasses?”
“When I remember to. And I meant more like, what are you doing”—I wave to the L shape that her body forms between the floor and shelves—“here?”
She looks to her toes, uncurls them, and gives another wiggle. “I don’t know, this is supposed to help circulation or something. I kind of just wanted to see if staring at the ceiling instead of the wall would give me any new ideas of who my dad could be.”
I can’t help but smile at this unfortunately adorable wrench in all my best-laid plans as I take a seat on the rug, next to her head.
“One of the weirder sentences I’ve heard,” I comment.
She giggles and it ends on a hiccup, which is when my suspicions really take root. Even more so when her next words are noticeably slurred.
“Stick with me, kid. There’s a lot more where that came from.”
I study her face from this closer vantage point, asking carefully, “Cam, are you feeling okay?”
She hiccups again before answering, “Yes and no.” My eyes have just clocked a glass bottle that’s rolled under the fainting couch when she continues. “See, I was feeling thirsty.”
“Uh-oh,” I say under my breath, but she still hears it.
“No, no, it’s fine, it’s fine. It’s just, I thought this bottle I picked up in the kitchen said limonata.
But I was kind of distracted, since I was reading through the journal again, and I uncapped it and took a sip on my way back here before I realized the bottle I’d grabbed was limoncello.
I nearly spit it onto the floor but ultimately forced myself to swallow this cursed liquid that tastes like if lemonade and cough syrup had a baby and then poisoned that baby, I mean seriously blech… ”
“Oh no,” I sigh more than say. I crawl forward and reach for the bottle, rolling it out from under the couch. When I pick it up, I find that while it’s not very big, it has alarmingly little left in it.
“Cam,” I say more emphatically. “This is half empty.”
“Or is it half full, my dear Weston?” My unamused expression doesn’t keep her from laughing at herself as she insists, “It’s fine, West! I’m totally fine.”
“Why did you keep drinking it if it tasted so bad?” I ask in bewilderment.
She blows out a breath from her puffed cheeks that sounds like the air spluttering out of a balloon.
“I didn’t want to put it back when I’d put my whole mouth and all my germs on the bottle.
That seemed wasteful. But it also seemed wasteful to only have one sip, and I’ve never really had more than a few sips of any alcohol, and I thought, what the hell, you know?
I’m in Italy, I’m basically in my own secure, contained, homey little space, where there aren’t too many ways I can endanger myself or others.
Everybody else is out having a wild Saturday night, so why not experiment a little? Like, for science.”
The monologue is punctuated by a hiccup.
I could name several reasons why not, some of them included in her own explanation for why she did it.
But the last thing I want is to make a drunk Cammie into a sad drunk Cammie.
She seems pretty happy for now, she’s unharmed, and I can make sure she stays that way until she’s safely back in her room.
I suppose I don’t need to be the literal buzzkill.
Plus, she’s impossibly cute when tipsy. Because of course she is. But it could quickly get less cute if she ingests any more of this stuff, so I tuck the bottle discreetly into my open backpack behind me.
“Hey, just out of curiosity,” I say, feigning indifference to her answer, “have you eaten anything recently?”
“Okay, the country of Italy should, like, sue the Subway restaurant chain,” Cammie declares through a mouthful of bread.
The loaf was made by the kitchen staff for breakfast this morning, its leftovers placed in a wooden box for us to pick over during their day off tomorrow.
Or, as it so happens, tonight, when all the villa’s other residents have left the premises and there’s a first-time-drunk in need of something to soak up the limoncello in her stomach.
“They should?” I ask. I dip my own piece of bread into the plate of olive oil and some spice blend that I got from beside the bread box, then put it in my mouth.
“Mm-hmm,” she hums. “Because they call their plain white bread ‘Italian’ and it tastes nothing like the bread here. Honestly, it sucks compared to anything I’ve eaten in this country.”
“I’m sure the Italian government will be very glad you’ve brought this to their attention,” I say sincerely.