Advice for Italian Boys Read Online Free Page B

store, the kind who pressed their thumb too deeply into the peaches and then either complained about the damage and asked for a reduced price, or pushed the bruised fruit to the back of the pile and selected something fresh and unhandled from the front of the display.
    “You see? ” said Jessica to the unknown boy. But she stood up, smoothed her skirt, and ran her right hand several times through her hair, which made a dismissive sound as it swished through a loop she formed from the fingers and thumb of her hand.
    She walked to the car alongside Nicolo, a disdainful half-armspan distant from his right elbow. On the drive home, she reversed the process she had gone through earlier, reconstructing her second, more-modest layer of clothes. AsJessica wriggled in her seat, Nicolo couldn’t help observing several brief exposures of bare skin the colour of late-summer cream, a red lacy bra and matching thong panties. As they got closer to the Santacroce house, there came into Nicolo’s mind, as perfectly formed as a photograph, a picture of Jessica being spanked, hard, with an open hand, his hand, on her taut miniskirted bottom. He could feel the smack of contact, how his palm would tingle with it, how the air in the car would resonate after the strike, and he could imagine the result—a brilliant red hand-print emblazoned on Jessica’s silver-rose skin—a compelling, repellent image. He blinked rapidly, flexed and then tensed his fingers around the steering wheel, and concentrated on driving steadily along the quiet, dark streets.
    “You’re a nice boy, Nick,” Jessica said when he pulled up in front of her house. Gloom or disappointment or something else tugged the pitch of her voice an octave lower.
    She surprised him then by inclining toward him, raising her wide face and pressing a kiss full onto his right cheek. Her eyelashes were trimmed with clots of black stuff and spangled with pearls of moisture, and her lips were wet and cold and rough. Jessica’s kiss had the sharp, quick, inevitable sting of a mosquito bite, one that both extracted a taste of blood and injected a virus or germ.
    “Just wait here until I get inside, okay?”
    At home, it took Nicolo many swipes with the soapy corner of a wet towel to remove all traces of purple lipstick from his skin, and it took longer, several years, to get over the shame and horror of that kiss, his first from a girl, bestowed in something like pity. Bacio di bocca spesso cuor non tocca, hisnonna might have said. A kiss from the lips may sometimes leave the heart untouched.
    In the same instant that Nicolo, mortified, infuriated, white-faced apart from the purple smear near the hinge of his jaw, was passing through the front door into the house, Nonna was in her bed, being tossed by the winds of a dream.
    A half hour earlier, in the kitchen, before they went to their separate beds, she and Paola had been discussing Nicolo.
    “He shouldn’t be out so late. When I was a girl, people understood that young people are better off under their own roof than out in the streets.”
    “You don’t need to worry. We know where he is and who he’s with.”
    “And with a girl. I can’t understand why her parents allow it.”
    “It’s only little Jessica Santacroce. He’s played with Mario and Jessica since they were babies. It’s good for him. Good for them both.”
    “When I was young a girl was kept in her parents’ sight until it was time to get married, so there could be no doubt that she was honesta.”
    “That may have worked then, but times have changed. You have to let them make their own mistakes. That’s how they learn, from their own experiences, not from ours.”
    Filomena doesn’t hear the door open and close as Nicolo comes home. With age her eyes have softened and dimmed,while her dreams have become more vivid. They are now more sharply detailed than any of the hours of her waking world. She falls into her dreams headlong, eager for the places they take