A Semester Abroad Read Online Free PDF Page A

dinner to hang out with her,” said Olivia in a type of explanation. I tried to explain that I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in Kurt. It was just something to do.
    “Don’t worry about it. He’s not my type. We were just talking.”
    We drank for a while, taking the scene in, smiling at everything. The boys in Olivia’s group reenacted scenes from their favorite movies. The girls danced to the songs on the jukebox. The Italians who were upstairs were watching and whispering even though we wouldn’t have understood them in their regular voices. I liked that neither Olivia nor I needed to talk. We could just hang out and chill.
    “Do you smoke?” I asked Olivia.
    “Sometimes.”
    I laughed and said I sometimes smoked, too, when I drank. I held up my beer to indicate that I was, in fact, drinking.
    “Will you help me smoke one if I can bum it?”
    Olivia nodded.
    Beer brave, I walked a couple of steps to a table of Italian boys in leather jackets of varying colors. Hesitantly, I pointed to the pack on the table. “
Cigaretta
?”
    “
Prego
,” said one of them, holding the pack out to me. The other three shot out their lighters like it was some kind of standoff at the end of a Western. The boy who was the quickest draw smiled as he lit my cigarette.
    “
Grazie
.”
    “
Prego
,” three of the boys said and the other, the one who held the pack out to me, said something that made the rest of the table laugh.
    “I think he called me a 
fumacina
,” I told Olivia when I retreated to her corner, offering the cigarette. “Do you know what that means?”
    She shrugged. I wasn’t sure if I was being made fun of. But it didn’t matter.
    I hoped I had found a friend of my own.

    Michelle found me upstairs with Olivia and her friends. Michelle hugged me with the affection only a too drunk girl can find. She lost Janine in this bar after a marathon of other bars, she explained slurring. The details were hard to understand. It seemed to me that Janine might have purposely lost Michelle. I doubted she would have wanted to hang, as we did, upstairs drinking big cheap beers. Janine wanted something more exciting. She wanted action.
    When Olivia was ready to leave, I hung behind with Michelle to look for Janine. I didn’t really want to, but it seemed the right thing to do. Downstairs, the bartender said. “
Quella bionda è andata via
.” He flicked his hand several times. I squinted my eyes as if I could understand better by seeing better. He laughed at me, which was no longer a surprise, and dumbed it down in my language. “You friend go.”
    I understood some Italian words that night. I thought I heard one of the tray women sitting at the bar saying 
quella bionda
, the blonde, as the bartender referred to Janine. As we turned to leave I heard her laugh and say 
putana
 and 
americana
. American whore.
    I walked unsteadily arm in arm with Michelle back to the apartment through the empty streets. There were lanterns with dim white light flush against the side of the buildings, but the streets were still dark enough to see the stars.
    It was like Michelle was sleepwalking. Her eyes didn’t focus on anything, but everything was hazy for me, too. I hoped I was going the right way.

    When we finally reached the apartment, it was freezing. Michelle went straight for the refrigerator. She pulled out a tub of Nutella. She found a spoon and started shoveling spoonfuls of the hazelnut-chocolate sauce into her mouth. She did not even taste it. She was a savage, eating it ferociously. A little bit fell on the floor, and Michelle crouched on the ground and wiped it up with her hand. Then she ate it. She was a junkie. She didn’t care where the fix came from. She just wanted the Nutella high. I watched her, stunned, shivering.
    “You’re hungry, huh, Michelle?” It was all I could think to ask the girl who was turning into an animal before my eyes.
    “Yes, and it won’t stay closed,” Michelle said, twisting the