and she doesn’t care about the fact that I love numbers more than her. Correction, she is in fact threatened by that. She doesn’t even try to understand that. But she wouldn’t because she’s a doctor and she fixes things. And so do I. Only with my pencil and my brain. I got top marks for calculus today. There are people who do that all day. Did you know there are people who do that all day, Alba?’
They fell into hungry silence for a moment, chomping down on their halves of crusty roll, flicking off the flakes crumbling onto their sweaters as they strode downhill from the high school. Its large yellow concrete façade rose up behind them, overlooking a small park space with a rusting slide and metal seesaw. They reached Piazza Cantareddu, where the buses pulled into take students back to the neighbouring smaller towns. Raffaele ran a hand through his floppy hair and sighed. ‘I don’t want to go home yet. Absolutely don’t want to be home.’
Alba drew to a stop and wiped her mouth of a final crumb. ‘Come to mine?’
‘What will your ma say?’
‘Eat.’
‘I could – is that OK? I mean, is that a bit weird or maybe rude just showing up again? Are your brothers going to give me that look like I’m-the-boyfriend look because I don’t know how to deal with that look like they’re going to eat me or kiss me or both or worse, I don’t like that look. Mamma’s visiting a hospital down in Nuoro. Dad’s in Sassari at the office.’
Alba pictured her mother’s face if Raffaele turned up on her doorstep. She made it no secret that she loved the boy. The fact that his mother was a doctor and his father a lawyer only served to cement her affections. Alba ignored the sensation that her mother had crafted secret plans for him to become her son-in-law at the soonest opportunity.
Alba grinned. ‘My brothers share a brain. My mum loves you.’
‘I thought you loved me for my physique.’ He pulled a face then and curled his bicep, which peeped up under his shirt in a feeble half moon.
‘I love you because you were the only boy in kindergarten who didn’t try and mutilate my toys.’
They began the climb behind the main square, passing several schoolmates. One girl looked them both up and down, scanning for gossip; she leaned into her friend and whispered something. They giggled. Then both of them, catching the eye of someone beyond Alba, separated, lengthened, and pushed their chests further out, displaying their breasts as a prize. It made Alba feel nauseous. The facile rules of adolescence were exhausting and surreal. She scanned the kids hanging out in groups waiting for their lifts, picking up the whispers in the air: who kissed whom, which eyeliner was best, which Levi’s showed off their hips. Another girl threw a look her way as she passed them with Raffaele, checking for make-up and chosen style, both a drawn blank. Alba wore whatever lay on her chair in the morning from the day before, ran an impatient hand through her hair, and left the house. The other girls’ expressions told Alba that such an intimate friendship with an awkward boy like Raffaele was beyond their understanding.
A voice yelled out from behind her towards the peacocking girls.
‘You asked her out yet?’
Alba swung round to see Mario jeering at Raffaele with a group of friends. She heard the girls simper pathetic laughter, high notes on a piano played with too frothy a touch.
Alba shot him a look.
‘Lover girl sticking up for her man. How sweet!’ Mario caressed his cheek with a girlish giggle. The pack of boys around him chuckled, thwacks of broken voices bracing boyhood.
Raffaele straightened. ‘Don’t talk to her like that.’
‘What you going to do? Write a calculation to shut me up?’ Mario snapped back, delighted his bait had been bitten.
The girls’ laughter spiked.
Alba watched Raffaele’s cheeks turn.
‘Don’t look at me like that, nerd,’ Mario jeered.
Raffaele’s frown creased in confusion.
‘I said, don’t look at me like that!’
Mario pounced from his throne at the metal table outside the bar where the teenagers congregated for soda, waiting for their buses home. He pushed off with such force that it tipped, sending the glasses smashing to the floor. In a breath, he was on top of Raffaele, pounding his back. Two of Mario’s friends jumped up and began kicking into his side. Alba watched her only friend being pummelled. Her chest burned. The sounds tunnelled into a pounding silence undercut with a familiar echo of scuffing feet, men’s voices. Her hand reached out to a large glass bottle on the table beside Mario’s. Her fingers tightened. She swung. The glass smashed against the back of Mario’s skull. A splat reached her face. Water? Blood? She didn’t care. Her arm cut through the air again and again. A hand on hers clamped her to stillness. The silence became a bass note, slow vibrations waving through the heat. The wetness on her hands turned red. A drip on her trousers blotted crimson. Someone held her.
The smash of the half bottle as it slipped from her hand onto the cobbles brought her attention down to Mario at her feet. There were men around him now. Some hollers. There was a cry, a beige blur of confusion.
Alba didn’t remember getting into the car until she noticed the heat of her grandfather’s passenger seat. The leather squeaked as Raffaele scooted into the back. They wound the vicoli to her house in silence but for the metallic simmer of the engine. As they stepped inside, Giovanna’s expression blanched into panic.
‘Found them in the square, Giovanna, killing each other like dogs.’ Her grandfather’s voice was a scrape of sandpaper.
Giovanna disappeared into the kitchen and came out with a bowl of warm water and some cloths. She sat Raffaele down and lifted his chin. He winced. He tried to swallow a tear before it tipped over his lashes but failed.
‘Which cretin did this to you?’ Giovanna puffed in between blotting. ‘You tell me who and we’ll sort him out.’
‘It was Mario!’ Alba cried out. ‘Who else?’
‘We will discuss this when Bruno is home,’ her grandfather interrupted. ‘You just get on and clean him up. Don’t want his father to think we’d sent him home without that. The very least we can do after what your child did.’
Alba didn’t meet his eye.
The door swung open. Alba’s brothers bounded in ahead of their father from the officina. Marcellino undid the two top buttons of his shirt; at nineteen he’d become the newest executive of the officina. His hair was black and thick like Alba’s, but his eyes lacked the probing intensity of hers. To him, life was a game and one that was sure to deal him a good hand. Her younger brother, Salvatore, flung his tie and shirt off to sit in just his vest, throwing the discarded uniform to the sofa in a thoughtless crumple. He ran his hand through his floppy light brown hair.
As he caught her eye his expression changed. ‘Christ! What the hell happened?’
‘O Dio – who did this?’ Marcellino bellowed, seeing Raffaele’s face. ‘Tell me his name and I’ll crumple his face for you.’
‘Back off,’ Alba hissed, her lips opening into a thin line.
‘That’s enough from you, Alba,’ her grandfather overruled.
‘What’s happening?’ Bruno asked, his voice urgent as he stepped in by the table.
‘I caught your wild daughter attacking our mechanic’s son, Mario, in the middle of the piazza just now. Any more swings with that broken bottle and she’d near enough have killed the boy.’
‘He’s a cretin!’ Alba blurted.
‘Quiet!’ Bruno spat. ‘Every week you have to make a fool of yourself. Of us!’
‘She’s hurt, Bruno,’ Giovanna eased.
‘You’ve spoiled this girl and you