Me and You. Niccolo Ammaniti

because they thought I was one of them.

      They put me on the team. Suddenly I had schoolmates who called me at home. My mother would answer and she was happy to be able to say: ‘Lorenzo, it’s for you.’

      I used to say I was going over to my friend’s house but really I went and hid out at Grandma Laura’s. She lived on the top floor of an apartment building near ours, with Pericle, an old Basset Hound, and Olga, her Russian carer. We spent our afternoons playing canasta. She would drink Bloody Marys and I would have tomato juice with pepper and salt. We had made a pact: she wouldn’t tell about my not going out with my friends and I wouldn’t tell about her drinking Bloody Marys.

      But middle school was soon over and my father called me into his study, sat me down in an armchair and said, ‘Lorenzo, I think it’s time you went to a public high school. You’ve had enough of these private schools for spoiled kids. So, what would you prefer, mathematics or history?’

      I glanced quickly at all his heavy volumes on the ancient Egyptians and on the Babylonians, neatly lined up on his bookshelf. ‘History.’

      He gave me a satisfied pat on the shoulder. ‘Excellent, old boy, we like the same things. You’ll enjoy the Classics high school, you’ll see.’

      When I walked up to the entrance of the high school on my first day I almost fainted.

      It was hell on earth. There were hundreds of kids. It felt like I was standing outside the gates of a rock concert. Some of them were way bigger than me. They even had beards. The girls had tits. They rode scooters, skateboards. Some were running. Some were laughing. Some were yelling. They were going in and out of the cafeteria. One guy climbed up a tree and hung a girl’s backpack on a branch and she threw stones at him.

      Anxiety took my breath away. I leaned up against a wall covered in graffiti. Why did I have to go to school? Why did the world work like this? You are born, you go to school, you work and you die. Who had decided that that was the right way? Couldn’t we live differently? Like primitive man? Like Grandma Laura, who when she was little had studied at home and had the teachers come to her. Why couldn’t I do that too? Why didn’t they just leave me alone? Why did I have to be just like the others? Couldn’t I live by myself in a forest in Canada?

      ‘I am not like them. I have an inflated sense of self-importance,’ I whispered, as three colossal beasts walking arm in arm pushed me aside like I was a bowling pin. ‘Piss off, shrimp.’

      In a trance I felt my legs as stiff as tree trunks walk me into class. I sat in the second last row, near the window, and tried to make myself invisible. But I realised that the camouflage technique didn’t work in this hostile planet. In this school the predators had evolved, were much more aggressive and they moved in herds. Any introversion, any unusual behaviour, was immediately noticed and punished.

      They called me out. They picked on me for the way I dressed, because I didn’t talk. And then they stoned me with chalk dusters.

      I begged my parents to let me change schools – one for misfits or deaf and dumb students would be perfect. I came up with every excuse in the book to stay home. I stopped studying. In class I spent my time counting the minutes left before I could get out of that jail.

      One morning I was at home with a fake headache and I saw a documentary on television about insects that mimic other insects.

      Somewhere, in the tropics, lives a fly that imitates wasps. He has four wings, just like the other flies, but he keeps them one on top of the other, so that they look like two. He has a black and yellow striped belly, antennae and bulbous eyes and even a fake stinger. He can’t hurt you, he’s a nice insect, but dressed up as a wasp, the birds, the lizards, even human beings fear him. He can mosey into a wasp nest, one of the most dangerous and well-protected places in the world, and go unrecognised.

      I had been going about it the wrong way.

      Here’s what I had to do.

      Imitate the dangerous ones.

      I wore the same things the others wore. Adidas trainers, jeans with holes in them, a black hoodie. I messed up the parting in my hair and let it grow long. I even wanted to get my ear pierced but my mother forbade me. To make up for it, for Christmas, my parents gave me a scooter. The most popular one.

      I walked like them, with my legs wide apart. I threw my backpack on the ground and kicked it around.

      I mimicked them discreetly. There’s a fine line between imitation and caricature.

      During the lessons I sat at my desk pretending to listen – but in actual fact I was thinking about my own stuff, making up science-fiction stories. I even went to PE classes. I laughed at the others’ jokes, I played stupid tricks on the girls. A couple of times I even answered back to the teachers. And I handed in a class test without answering a single question.

      The fly had managed to trick them all, integrating perfectly with the waspian society. They thought I was one of them. That I was all right.

      When I got home I told my parents that at school everyone said I was cool, and I made up funny stories about things that had happened to me.

      But the longer I put on this show, the more different I felt. The chasm that separated me from the others grew deeper. On my own I was happy, with the others I always had to pretend.

      Sometimes this scared me. Would I have to imitate them for the rest of my life?

      It was like the fly was inside me, telling me how things really were. It told me that it only took a second for friends to forget about you, that girls are mean and they make fun of you, that the world outside your house is filled with competition, violence and suffocation.

      One night I had a nightmare and I woke up screaming. I discovered that my T-shirt and jeans were my skin and my trainers were my feet. My jacket was as hard as an exoskeleton, and under it wriggled one hundred insect feet.