Pasta Imperfect Read Online Free Page B

completely, then posed close beside him and smiled up at me. “Pizza!” she yelled.
    CLICK. I listened to her camera rewind itself. “You’re out of film!” I yelled.
    “You gotta take one more for insurance!” She fished inside her shoulder bag and brandished another cartridge in the air at me. “You want me to throw it to you?”
    I gauged the distance between the guardhouse and me. Unh-oh. Not a good idea. Given her recent sex change, she probably threw like a girl. “I’ll come down and get it!”
    Casting a final look behind me at the basilica, I hurried down the ramp. The rest of the group was filing helter-skelter through the nearest columns and emerging onto what looked like a street beyond where the bus would no doubt pick us up. I jogged toward the sentry house, reloaded Jackie’s camera, and snapped a shot of her standing on the other side of the guardsman.
    “Thanks, Emily.” She retrieved her camera. “You want me to get a shot of you with Mr. Personality?”
    I waved her off. There was only one man I wanted to have my picture taken with, and he was in Switzerland.
    As we hotfooted it back down the road, Jackie threw on her sunglasses and looked perplexed as she glanced around her. “Where’d everybody go?”
    I pointed to our right. “Through those columns.”
    Jackie stopped short. “Hold up. I want one last picture of the square. Have you noticed that the square really isn’t square? Why do they call it a square if it’s an oval?”
    “Jack! Come
on
! Everyone’s gone. They’re probably on the bus already!” I hurried toward the shadow of Bernini’s columns and passed through the relative coolness of the roofed colonnade, ending up on what looked like a residential street. But as I paused on the sidewalk, I noticed a minor problem.
    Fifty-three people had come this way, right?
    I looked left at the deserted street and sidewalk. I looked right at the deserted street and sidewalk.
    So if fifty-three people had come this way, WHERE WERE THEY NOW?

Chapter 2

     
    C
lick click click click.
“Ten seconds!” Jackie complained as her heels clacked on the pavement behind me. “You couldn’t wait ten seconds while I took my picture?”
    “They’re gone!” I cried in a semipanic. “How can they be gone? They were here a minute ago. I
saw
them!” The street dead-ended to my right, but to my left, it intersected with a noisy artery of traffic about a block away. I ran to the opposite sidewalk and peered down a long pedestrian walkway that tunneled beneath the main road and emerged on the other side.
    Empty.
    “Where’s the bus?” Jackie called out to me.
    Fifty-three people could
not
disappear into thin air! I squinted toward the street, where small, angry cars chased after each other. That had to be where the bus was picking us up. I gestured wildly in that direction and took off at a dead run.
    Click click click click.
Jackie pulled abreast of me halfway down the street, a throwback to her high school track days when she’d laced herself into running shoes instead of satin corsets. “Emily…” she gasped out beside me, “why are we running like this?”
    We skidded to a halt at the traffic-jammed street running perpendicular to us. I looked left. I looked right.
    No bus. No group. No nothing.
    “They’ve disappeared,” I choked out, numb with disbelief. “They were here a minute ago; now they’re gone. How is that possible? HOW CAN THEY HAVE VANISHED?”
    Jackie dug a tissue out of her bag and mopped her throat, looking curiously left and right. “Gotta be alien abduction. I bet it happens a lot more than people realize.”
    “I
knew
something like this was going to happen. I
knew
someone was going to get left behind. But it was supposed to happen to someone else! It wasn’t supposed to happen to me!”
    Jackie’s face lit up. “Female intuition! That is
so
cool. I’m dying to have my first flash of female intuition, but it hasn’t kicked in yet. I hope I don’t