Advice for Italian Boys Read Online Free Page A

Jessica countered. “That would be the gentlemanly thing to do.” The word gentlemanly emerged from her shiny mouth with a slick coating of something, mockery or irony or an unnameable quality in between. Nicolo shifted one shoulder and then the other under the grey suit jacket that he had borrowed from his older brother, and then turned to look squarely at Jessica.
    “Look,” he said. “Smoking isn’t good for you. You’re what, sixteen years old? I’m supposed to be responsible for you. I am not buying you cigarettes.”
    Jessica frowned. She gave Nicolo a hard, considering look.
    “Okay, but we’d better not be the first people here.”
    No more than a dozen people were in the staff room when they got there, mostly caterers and teachers and parents and student council members moving tables and setting out chafing dishes and stacks of plates and cutlery. The room was stiflingly hot. One or two other early couples hovered uncertainly near the doors. Nicolo saw Carmina Vitale, the chair of student council, struggling to untangle the legs of a table. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said to Jessica, and he went to help Carmina. Moments later, Sandra DiNardo came up and asked if he could figure out the system of ropes and pulleys that opened the upper bank of windows to let airinto the room. When Nicolo got back to where he had left Jessica, she had disappeared. He reflected for a moment on where she might have gone, and then walked along the main corridor to the east end of the school, to the door where student smokers congregated. Jessica was there with a half-dozen boys and girls, dragging hard on the last inch of a cigarette. A lively conversation stopped and several sets of eyes fixed themselves on Nicolo.
    “Hey, Nicco,” Jessica said. She waved her right hand toward him, trailing a plume of blue smoke from between her first and second fingers. “I’ll come find you in about half an hour, okay?” she proposed.
    Nicolo nodded. He was still struggling to think the best of Jessica; it was possible that she had joined the group at the side door out of an overdeveloped sense of social obligation and that she would come to spend the rest of the evening at Nicolo’s side after spending a requisite few minutes with her friends. He went back to the staff room, where rectangular stainless-steel containers of pasta and meatballs and sausages and potato gnocchi and broccoli were being set out over gas warmers.
    He located Jessica three times more during the evening, once when he took her a plate of spaghetti and wilted salad and a glass of warm pink punch. She was sitting on the same steps where she had been smoking an hour earlier, talking intently to a skinny, short-haired boy Nicolo didn’t recognize. An hour later, Nicolo pulled her by the hand into the gym and they danced together without exchanging a word to “I’ll Be There” by Mariah Carey, and to Eric Clapton lamenting about “Tears in Heaven.” Two dances were enough, apparently. “I’ll be outside,” Jessica breathed into his ear, and she pulled herself out of his clasp. Her skin was soft and damp and she smelled of some perfume sweet as bubblegum, and of sweat and cigarette smoke. Still later, when all the food had been eaten, and the banners and crepe ribbons had begun to droop, and it was time to go home, Nicolo found her on the same back steps, with the same guy, although this time Jessica was sitting on his lap, her round rump nested into his faded jeans, nuzzling at his thin neck, her pink tongue sweeping her lips, and murmuring who-knows-what into the boy’s ear.
    “I told your mom and dad I’d have you home by eleven,” said Nicolo into the smoky air above Jessica’s glossy head. He felt stiff, parental, ridiculous, but he was determined to play by the rules, unsure, in fact, what he could do differently. His brain had begun to trace the beginning of a connection between Jessica and certain customers who came into the Rossis’