Chapter 13 Killing Peggy Meh #2
Younger Bianca had closed her eyes and waited a few long seconds, totally vulnerable in his presence, and then the sweetness of mostarda Bolognese, a preserve of pears, quinces, and apples, hit her tongue.
Her heart whistled with delight at the seductive flavors that were unlike anything she’d ever tasted.
Her eyes had eventually peeled open when he placed an unabashed kiss on her powdered-sugar lips, which left traces on his own lips as he pulled away.
“Attento! Attento!” a voice cried.
Bianca came out of her stupor to realize she was standing in the middle of the busy street. “Mi dispiace,” she said, dashing out of the way of a group of tourists moving in a flock toward her.
Collecting herself, she set eyes on the pasticceria.
No.
She couldn’t.
She had to stop eating. Like, completely stop and go on a soup diet. All she’d done was eat since she’d gotten here, her attitude being, “I’m going to shove Italy into my face till I’m healed.”
A rush of passion swept through her, carting her away. “When in Bologna,” she muttered to herself, accidentally wondering how this surrender to the sweet might fit into a new book. Surrender to the Sweet Life. Arrendersi alla Dolce Vita.
Moments later, standing exactly where she had in her memory, she closed her eyes and took a bite of Italy that nearly lifted her off the ground.
Harold didn’t change in the next couple of days. He thought about change. He pondered going shopping for clothes, getting a haircut, cleaning himself up. He considered working on his Italian.
The only thing Harold had actually done, other than blow more of his mom’s money and rack up more credit card debt, was up his social media game. Every time he put a post out there, he hoped that Alice might see it.
He’d begun posting his step count at the end of the day.
Not his actual steps, because he wasn’t walking that much.
He’d spent too much time trying to hack the step count on the Apple watch.
He’d even tried waving his arm in the air while playing video games.
Okay, he might have even strapped it to his ankle to see if the app would count his nervous habit of shaking his leg.
It ended up being easier to simply lie. Eighteen thousand steps today. Nearly walked to Modena!
He also stole images from the internet, plates of food, shots of the city, a peek down a shadowed alley, a sunrise over the Apennines, and he’d posted them in between his fake step counts.
Busy, so busy. Barely time to even register that Alice had left him.
She wasn’t even on his mind anymore. Alice who?
That’s what he hoped she’d think.
Meanwhile, he fell deeper into the void of heartache, racing to the door at even the faintest whisper of a knock, holding his phone and staring at it as if he could manifest a text message or call.
He scrolled her Insta and TikTok feeds, hoping to see a kink in the armor of this new life with Renzo.
Strangely, she’d been silent. Perhaps she didn’t want her parents to discover that she’d parked herself with an older boyfriend.
There was an idea. Maybe Harold should call her teetotaling parents. He’d never spoken to them, but with effort, he could find them in Colorado. They lived in Durango on a commune. Did they even have phones?
He also pondered looking into Renzo, maybe paying someone to do it, to find out if the man was hiding anything.
No way he could be that good looking, that successful, that well dressed, that perfect, without harboring a few weaknesses .
. . or secrets. But Harold didn’t want to beg his mom for more money to hire an Italian private investigator, and he definitely didn’t want to get busted spying on them again.
That’s why he hadn’t followed them since that shameful day that was burned into his memory, Renzo calling him Aroldo and patting his back and offering water, Harold wishing himself away from this earth, wishing he’d never been born.
Ultimately, he’d decided that waiting was the right call. And in all this waiting, while games loaded, when he went to drain the lizard, when he decided to change up his pizza routine and make some mac and cheese, what Sandy had said began to chip away at him, an axe going after a tree trunk.
What would it even look like to up his game?
Was he even capable? A haircut and a change of clothes, really?
Alice had fallen in love with him the way he was.
She’d never commented on his lazy approach to shaving or his sort of computer-programmer attire.
Just as she was perfect for him with her youth and beauty and bubbly persona, he was what she’d been looking for: the introspective, quiet, and brainy older man who was far too busy tackling things that mattered to worry about trivial things like wardrobe or sharpening his culinary game.
It hadn’t been enough, though, had it? He wasn’t enough. As Sandy had so astutely pointed out, he’d been a gelato flavor, a vaniglia, only to be surpassed by Renzo, the cioccolato e rhum. Chocolate with rum would always beat vanilla.
He was dumping powdered cheese into a half cup of milk when Sandy’s gelato analogy finally landed. He would become a new flavor. How absurd and also deviously wonderful at the same time.
What could beat cioccolato e rhum?
Flashes of a new Harold came to life in his mind, as he scrolled through the flavors he’d tried thus far in Bologna. Crema Libanese, Caffe Bianco, Pomegranate, Ricotta Reale. Come to think of it, he’d learned more Italian in the gelato shops than all the hours he’d suffered through Duolingo.
Later, as he shook himself off in the bathroom, he realized that he could no longer be Harold. As Wade Watts did in Ready Player One, Harold had to become his avatar, a higher version of himself. In a flash, he saw a much taller Harold, one with thicker hair, bigger muscles.
While washing his hands, Harold dressed his avatar in his imagination, wrapping one of those Euro scarves around his neck. Take that, Renzo.
He had to come up with a new name. Not one that he would share with others, but one that he could assume when addressing himself, a gamer tag that further enforced the illusion.
In the spirit of defeating Renzo, how about the name the stealer of girlfriends had bestowed upon him?
Aroldo.
Was that even Italian? It didn’t matter. It felt right.