I was still pretty sure I was right about our direction. Sitting down next to her, I pointed. "Here"s where we are on the map. It"ll get easier at the top of this rise. Then I"ll find somebody who can tell us the way."
But before we got to the crest, a nondescript car pulled onto the shoulder. The driver looked perhaps a few years younger than my dad. I had no idea what he was asking or saying, but I"m sure he could tell we were lost Americans. Trying to communicate, we looked like we were playing roadside charades. But between his spa.r.s.e English and my slight Italian vocabulary, we found two of the few words we had in common: Holiday Inn. He pointed to his car and traced his finger along the full length of our map, offering us a ride.
I"m trusting by nature-too trusting, as my dad had said-and I just a.s.sumed our driver was a decent guy. Really, what choice did we have? It"s not like we could turn around. I was so relieved to find someone who knew how to get us to our hotel that I was happy to take a risk.
"Grazie," I said.
I rode shotgun and did all the talking. On the off chance that he did anything crazy, I"d be the buffer between him and Deanna. As the oldest, I automatically reacted this way to any possibly dicey situation that included a sibling. I also felt safer when I had the illusion of being in control. Now, looking back, I see that I had a ridiculous amount of unwarranted self-confidence. Why did I a.s.sume I knew the way to a hotel in a country I"d been in once, years before, and a city I"d never been in at all? I hadn"t been in a physical fight in my life. What could I have done to protect Deanna if the ride had gone wrong?
Fortunately, my take on our driver was better than my grasp of kilometers. After exiting the freeway, he made a series of sharp turns-there were no street signs-while c.o.c.king his head toward me to make small talk. I gathered that he either owned a disco or was inviting us to go dancing. I understood when he asked, "Disco stasera?"-"tonight." For ten tedious minutes I smiled and said no-the same word in English and Italian. Our driver wore an expression of cheerful, you-can"t-blame-a-guy-for-trying resilience when he dropped us at our hotel.
By the time we"d checked in and left our bags in our room, we"d lost four crucial hours of apartment hunting. It could have been a lot worse. Done with walking, we took a bus back to town, where I bought a cheap mobile phone with prepaid minutes. Deanna and I stopped at a coffee bar on the main drag, spent five minutes trying to describe a mocha (espresso + latte + cioccolato!) to the good-humored barista, and I searched Perugia"s cla.s.sifieds for an apartment to rent-without success. My anxiety shot up. This trip had begun awkwardly. I wasn"t superst.i.tious, but I hoped it wasn"t a sign of the way my year in Italy would go.
Deanna and I walked down a steep cobblestone street to the university and went into the ornate administration building. If I couldn"t snag a place to live, at least I could find out how to register. Dozens of flags waved on poles on the balcony above the entrance, making the building look like a scaled-down United Nations. The students attending the university came from as many different countries as there were flags. As we were leaving, I saw a skinny brunette who looked a little older than I was. Wearing super-short cut-offs and a yellow tank top, she was taping a sign on a wooden railing crowded with all kinds of notices. She looked like a student, and I could see a phone number on her sign. I grabbed at the possibility. "Do you have an apartment to lease?" I asked tentatively in English. She answered-also in English, luckily-that she and her best friend were subletting two rooms in their rented house.
"How far is it?" I asked.
"It"s right here, down this lane-two seconds," she answered. "Do you want to see it?" I couldn"t believe that a likely solution to my biggest worry was standing right in front of me.
Her name was Laura Mezzetti, and I liked her immediately. Deanna and I followed Laura across the tree-lined piazza and past a series of redbrick high-rises. We were practically sprinting from one busy street to an even busier one. We crossed an intersection and came to a tall iron gate. Laura stopped and swung it open. We stood at the end of a driveway in front of a cream-colored stone villa with a terracotta roof fit for a fairy tale. It was on top of a hill that sloped down to a tangled, untended garden. I was flabbergasted. A villa in the middle of downtown!
"No way," I whispered to Deanna. "This is too perfect."
"The top floor is ours," Laura said. "The bas.e.m.e.nt is rented by a group of guys-students."
Laura and her roommate, Filomena Romanelli, led us through the kitchen/living area. The house had four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a terrace. One of the available bedrooms faced the driveway, with just a sliver of the valley view. The room next to it was slightly larger and had a picture window looking out on the countryside. Both cost the same, but I liked the smaller room better. It had everything I hoped for-a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, and a cozy feeling. The rent-three hundred euros, or just over four hundred dollars at the time-seemed expensive, but the place was close to the university, and a villa. It was worth it.
No. 7, Via della Pergola also felt like a happy place, probably because Laura and Filomena had a go-with-the-flow att.i.tude toward life. "We go to work, we come home, we watch soap operas, we cook dinner, we hang out with friends," Laura said.
They were both in their late twenties and working at law firms. Laura was offbeat, with multiple piercings in both ears. Filomena seemed more girly but, like Laura, relaxed-a little bit of a hippie-and really funny. They reminded me of my friends in Seattle. I felt it was a good fit.
Laura"s English was better than Filomena"s. When she asked me about myself, I told her that I played the guitar but hadn"t been able to bring mine to Perugia.
"Oh, I have one," Laura said. "You can use it anytime."
And when I said I did yoga, she replied, "Wow, can you teach me? I"ve always wanted to learn."
"You"ll love the jazz and chocolate festivals," Filomena added. She offered Deanna and me fresh figs from the garden.
They said I wasn"t the first roommate they"d interviewed. A guy they called "totally uptight" was interested in renting, until he found out they smoked-cigarettes and marijuana. "Are you okay with that?" Filomena asked.
"I"m from Seattle. I"m laid back," I answered. "I don"t smoke cigarettes, but I"ll share a joint." A few minutes later they rolled one and pa.s.sed it around. I inhaled deeply and relaxed. I felt so lucky-and capable. Six thousand miles from home and without the help of my mom or dad, I"d organized the next chapter of my life. I"d found this amazing place to stay, and I would get to live as a local-Laura, Filomena, and their four downstairs neighbors were all Italian.
"I love it," I said. "I"ll bring my deposit tomorrow. As soon as I can get to an ATM." Before we left, Deanna took a picture of Laura, Filomena, and me at the front door, smiling and with our arms around each other"s backs.
Mission accomplished, Deanna and I left for Hamburg to stay with Aunt Dolly. I figured that when I returned in mid-September the last bedroom would be rented. Laura and Filomena had said they"d prefer another female but cared most about finding someone easygoing who would fit in. I liked them so much that I knew I"d get along with anyone they chose.
About a week after I got to Germany, Filomena and Laura e-mailed me that a British exchange student named Meredith Kercher was moving in. They said she was quiet and nice-from outside London. They urged me to come back soon so we could "get the party started."
I couldn"t wait to return. But I"d also been chastened by my first trip to Perugia. A few days after Deanna and I got to Germany, I broke out with a gigantic cold sore on my top lip that Dolly and I figured must be oral herpes-from Cristiano. To my great embarra.s.sment, Dolly had to take me to the pharmacy to find out how to treat it. I couldn"t believe this was the first wild thing I"d done in my entire life and-bam! I"d made an impulsive decision, and now I"d have to pay a lifelong consequence.
I was b.u.mmed knowing I"d have to take medication forever. Even more humiliating was that from here on out I"d have to explain to potential partners that I might be a risk. I gave myself a hard time, but after a few days and a lot of conversations with myself, I settled down. I vowed I"d be more careful in the future. After my luck had changed in finding the villa, I"d had a stroke of bad. I told myself if this was the worst thing that happened, I could deal with it.
Chapter 3
September 2007
Perugia, Italy
I met Meredith on September 20, 2007, the day I moved into No. 7, Via della Pergola. Half Indian, she was exotically beautiful, a Brit majoring in European studies. In the month she"d been in Perugia, she had already become part of a close-knit group of British girls. As she stood in my doorway chatting while I unpacked, I understood how that had happened so fast. She was friendly and game. "Come out with me tonight and meet my friends," she said. "I"ll introduce you to all the people and places I"ve gotten to know in Perugia. You"re going to love it here."
The newest and youngest of four roommates, Meredith and I had a lot in common. We were both children of middle-cla.s.s, divorced parents, and, at twenty-one, she was just a year ahead of me in school. We"d each pushed ourselves hard to make this year in Italy happen. Now that I was finally here, the hours and hours I"d worked in Seattle-early in the morning as a barista, late into the night for a local catering company, and training a girls" soccer team in between-seemed unquestionably worthwhile. Meredith, a longtime Italophile, had been crushed when her British university turned her down for the program abroad, but she fought the decision and won. Maybe that"s why we each brought once-in-a-lifetime determination to our experience.
Talking to her that first day, I was shocked to find how truly little I knew about my new city. I a.s.sumed Meredith and I would be cla.s.smates at the University for Foreigners, but she was enrolled at the University of Perugia. I couldn"t believe I"d been so laser-focused on my own program that I"d overlooked a local college, with a whopping thirty-four thousand students, just a ten-minute walk from our villa. I could have found out all about it if I"d only bothered to do a search on Google. But I had such a brochure image stuck in my head of Perugia as a tranquil, almost monastic place. As it turned out, more than a quarter of the city"s population were students, and while Perugia is more than two millennia older and way more picturesque, it"s a college town much like Ann Arbor or Berkeley or Chapel Hill.
It was my first day here and reality had already punctured my expectations.
At dinner, I discovered that Meredith"s friends fit the reserved British profile. I"m sure I struck them as a stereotypically loud American. I was energetic and outspoken, even by nonconformist Seattle"s standards, and I was probably louder than I meant to be. While we were sitting around the restaurant table sipping wine and eating pizza, I started singing some song that was popular then. But what drew laughs in Seattle got embarra.s.sed looks in Perugia. It hadn"t dawned on me that the same quirks my friends at home found endearing could actually offend people who were less accepting of differences. A person more attuned to social norms would probably have realized that immature antics didn"t play well here.
So I was glad I could hang out with Laura, Filomena, and Meredith at home. Even though Meredith was definitely more mainstream and demure than I"d ever be, and Laura and Filomena were older and more sophisticated, I felt comfortable in their company. They seemed to accept me for me right from the start.
During my first month in Perugia I spent more time with Meredith than anyone else. I liked her a lot, and she seemed to enjoy being with me. I could already see us keeping in touch by e-mail when our year abroad was over. Maybe we"d even end up visiting each other in our hometowns.
The University of Perugia started earlier than the University for Foreigners, so Meredith was in cla.s.s on my first full day living in Perugia. I went exploring alone, stopping at the only place that was familiar-a small cafe where Deanna and I had eaten all our meals in late August. I decided to go and say hi to the tall, balding, good-humored barista who"d figured out our ridiculous espresso + milk + chocolate mixture. I couldn"t remember his name, but when you arrive knowing no one, you"re grateful for any friendly acquaintance. It turned out, however, that he"d moved on. His replacement was an athletic guy about my age named Mirko. He had black hair, blue eyes, and a huge grin. I told him I was new in town, a student. He said he was more into work than study. By the time I left for home that day I had the slimmest inklings of a crush.
During the lull before my semester began I dropped by the cafe several afternoons for a caffe macchiato or a gla.s.s of white wine and a little flirting. After my oral-cold-sore-inducing make-out session with Cristiano, this was sweet and innocent.
My new favorite pastime was the old Italian custom of long, relaxed lunches at home. Meredith and I ate with Laura and Filomena, who changed from skirt suits into cut-offs and flipped on the TV. Their soap opera was just background noise for me. I"m not a TV person at all, much less a soap opera fan, but I thought it was funny that the dialogue in theirs sounded exactly the same as any American soap. Understanding about one word in five, I could still follow what was happening. You slept with WHO?! Let"s run away together! Soap operas, I learned, are another universal language.
When Filomena and Laura went back to work, Meredith and I would sunbathe on the terrace and talk. She read mysteries. I was teaching myself to play Beatles songs on the guitar. One day she said it reminded her of when she and her older sister used to turn their CD player way up and sing along.
I loved our easy togetherness. We told each other about life back home and what we were thinking about doing after we graduated. She said she might want to become a journalist, like her dad. She lent me clothes-her feminine look was more in keeping with Perugia than my old jeans and boyish T-shirts-and she helped me with my Italian grammar. Before beginning cla.s.ses at the University of Perugia, Meredith had taken a crash course at the University for Foreigners, to brush up on her language skills. I introduced her to new music and listened to her stories about her family, especially her mom, whose bad health worried Meredith so much that she didn"t go to the corner bottega without her British cell phone in her pocket.
I told her about my parents and stepparents-that Dad had been with Ca.s.sandra since I was little, and Mom had met her husband, Chris, when I was ten.
And we did what all girls do: we talked about the guys we liked in Perugia and the ones we"d left behind. I told her about my growing crush on Mirko and about my ex-boyfriend from Seattle, DJ. "DJ and I were together for eight months," I said. "We broke up because I was coming here and he was going to China for the year. We"re still friends, though."
"What"s he like?" Meredith asked.
"Completely eccentric," I said. "He has a Mohawk, wears this shabby red kilt, and goes everywhere barefoot, except when he goes climbing. Then, I promise, he wears shorts and shoes."
Meredith laughed. "He sounds like your type. Do you think you"ll get back together?"
"I can"t tell," I said. "What about you? Do you have a boyfriend?"