A Semester Abroad Read Online Free PDF

top of the tub off again. She had abandoned the spoon now. She was reaching in with her fingers shoving them into her mouth again and again. The chocolate sauce fell out of her mouth onto her pretty pink shirt. She didn’t care. She rubbed the stains with the back of her hand, licking it. Any minute, she might peel off the shirt and suck on the material to maximize the taste.
    I didn’t want anyone else to see her like this. I didn’t want to see it. I was embarrassed for her. I didn’t know her. I didn’t think I should see this part of her.
    “Well, I’m going to bed, Michelle, good night.”
    “G’nigh.” Michelle said, barely looked up from the tub. Her teeth and lips were covered in brown chocolate sauce. She was moaning with the delight of having the freedom to eat like this.
    I walked through the hallway that Lisa slept in. Her face was turned into the pillow. She was awake, I thought, and crying. Lisa hadn’t gone out. No one had asked her. I had thought about it and decided I didn’t want to be saddled with entertaining her. I didn’t want Olivia to associate me with her, because I didn’t really like her. So there she was crying in her bed and I felt guilty. But I was too tired and drunk to see if she was okay.
    I climbed into my little bed. I didn’t bother to brush my teeth. I was careful not to let my hands touch my body. The last thing I wanted was to remind myself of his touch. Many nights I went to Jonas’s room after a night like this, with my lipstick smeared.
    “Did they love you for your mind?” he asked me about all the nameless boys I met. He wanted to remind me that they didn’t. He wanted to show me again how different he was from the rest. I was waiting for him, waiting for him to kiss me.
    But he didn’t kiss me, not that night. I was used to nights of just waiting and not being kissed. He reached across to wipe off some of the lipstick on my mouth.
    “You know your lips are a beautiful color without all this crap.”
    I couldn’t look at him, then but I could feel him looking at me, feel his words spread through my body out into my legs.
    It was too much.
    “And hers?” I asked, meeting those eyes again in time to see the hurt. He got up and left his own dorm room.
    He was not going to her. She was sick. She was far away and I was there. But now she was well. She was back and I was gone.
    Just fall asleep, I told myself, don’t think. For once. 
This scene is too weird and you have drunk too much to deal.
    I drifted off, but then I felt the chill in the air, the blanket being pulled back. I started to smile a bit, in anticipation, but it wasn’t him. It was Michelle, smelling of booze and burps and chocolate that was certain to stain my shitty pillow.
    “They’re doing it,” she said. “Janine and some guy. Going at it in my room.”
    “Shit.” I moved over as much as I could in the bed to let Michelle in. I could hear the distant sounds of sex, the screeching of the bed, thumps. A woman was moaning, a man speaking a language I didn’t really know yet. Michelle promptly fell asleep, taking up more of the bed than seemed possible and staying that way, a stiff rock, for the rest of the night. Not even my bed was my own anymore.
    This is only the first whole day, I thought, and tried to imagine what the next 150 would be like.

 
3.
    The Università per Stranieri di Siena was across the Piazza del Campo from the apartment at Via Stalloreggi 6. It was there that I spent some of the most frustrating moments of life. But unlike my apartment, the
universita
always had heat.
    There were two buildings to the school, with a small piazza between them. The school was for
stranieri,
meaning foreigners, not just Americans. It was full of people from all over the world. The only language we would ever share was Italian.
    Each time I walked to school from the apartment, sometimes with my roommates, sometimes without, I worried that I would slip down the steep hill into the
campo
.