Love & Gelato (30 page)

Okay.

Okay, okay, okay.

“Right this way.” Matteo walked briskly into the next room and I followed after him, my mind scrambling like a bad TV connection. What was happening? Did he just want to talk in private?

He walked up to the far wall, then pointed to a photograph of a young woman, her face half in shadow. Definitely my mom's.

“You see?”

“Yes.” I took a deep breath, keeping my eyes focused on the photograph for courage. “Matteo, I'm here because I'm—”

“I know who you are.”

My head snapped up. He was looking at me like something that had attached itself to the bottom of his shoe. “You're your mother in a pair of skinny jeans and Converse sneakers. The real question is, what are you doing here?”

“What am I . . . doing here?” I took a step back, fumbling to pull the journal out of my purse. “I read about you in my mom's journal.”

“So?”

“She was . . . in love with you.”

He laughed bitterly. “In
love.
She was a stupid child, in love with her instructor. She'd had no exposure to life outside of that small town she came from, and when she got here she thought her life would be transformed into some sort of fairy tale. But regardless of what her fantasies were, I was her teacher, nothing more. And whatever ideas you have in your mind, you'd better erase them immediately, Carolina.” He spat out my name like a rotten piece of fruit.

Heat spread through my body. “It wasn't
nothing
. You dated. You kept it a secret from everyone and then you broke up with her when she went to visit you in Rome.”

He shook his head slowly. “No. Those are lies. She spun an elaborate fantasy about us being in a relationship and then went so far as to believe it herself.” His lips curled in an ugly smile. “Your mother was unbalanced. A liar.”

“No, she wasn't.” My voice echoed through the room. “She wasn't delusional. She didn't make up your relationship.”

“Oh, really.” His voice rose. “Ask anyone who was there. Did any of them ever see us together? Have you ever spoken with anyone who confirmed her story?”

“Francesca Bernardi.”

He rolled his eyes. “Francesca. She was your mother's best friend. Of course she believed her. But did she ever actually see us together? Did she have anything more to go on than your mother's ridiculous fairy tale?”

Did she?
A merry-go-round of thoughts started whirling through my head. Francesca had
sounded
sure. . . .

“I didn't think so. But since you've made the effort of coming here, I'll tell you exactly what happened. Your mother was struggling with her course work and asked if I would tutor her outside of school. At first I was happy to help, but then she started calling me at strange hours. During class she would stare at me, then leave things on my desk for me to find. Sometimes it was lines of poetry; other times it was photographs of herself.” He shook his head. “At first I thought it was just a crush, harmless. But then she became more intense. One night she came to my apartment and told me she'd fallen in love with me. She said her life would have no meaning if we weren't together. I tried to be kind. I told her that as her teacher a relationship simply would not be allowed. I told her she'd be happier dating people closer to her own age. Like that Howard Mercer.”

Howard.
I flinched, but Matteo didn't notice. He was looking past me, like he was watching the scene unfold on a big-screen TV.

“That's when she snapped. She started screaming, telling me that she was going straight to the school director to tell him I'd taken advantage of her. I told her that no one would believe her. And then she pulled out a journal—
that
journal, I'm guessing—and told me that it was all there. She'd filled it with a fantasy—a vision—of what she'd wished had happened between us, and told me she would give it an unhappy ending and offer it up as proof.

“The next day I requested a meeting with the school director, and we agreed that even though I'd committed no fault, it was best for me to resign. Later I heard she began sleeping with any man who looked her way. I'm guessing you're a product of that.” He met my eyes, and a cold burst of air moved through me. “I wanted nothing to do with your mother, and I want nothing to do with you.”

“You're a
liar
.” My voice trembled. “And a complete coward. Look at me. I look just like you.”

He shook his head slowly, a pained smile on his face. “No, Carolina. You look just like
her
. And whatever poor man she suckered into her pathetic imaginations.” In one quick motion he stepped forward, snatching the journal out of my hands.

“Hey!” I tried to grab it back, but he whipped around, blocking me with his shoulder.

“Ah, yes. The famous journal.” He began flipping through it. “I guess she called me X? Clever, wasn't she? ‘The only hard part about being with X is not telling anyone about it' . . . ‘Sometimes I feel like my time is divided into two categories: time with X, and time spent waiting to be with X' . . .” He turned around, fanning the pages lazily. “Carolina, you seem like a smart girl. Does this sound real to you? Does it seem likely that your mother was in a relationship that she managed to keep entirely secret?”

“She didn't make it up.”

He glanced down at the book. It had fallen open to the front cover, and he held it up to me. ‘I made the wrong choice.' You see? Even in her craziness she knew that faking this journal was wrong. She was so talented, but
folle
. I hate to tell you this, Carolina, but science has proven that the parts of the brain responsible for creativity and madness are the same. At least you can take comfort in the fact that it wasn't really her fault. Your mother was a genius, but her mind was weak.”

Suddenly all I could see was hot, boiling red. Before I could think, I lunged at him, twisting the journal out of his hands and running for the foyer.

“Lina?” Ren looked up from the desk. He had a clipboard in front of him. “Are you okay?”

I pulled the door open and burst out onto the sidewalk, Ren chasing after me. I turned and ran up the street, my legs heavy as sandbags.
Her mind was weak.

Finally Ren caught up to me, grabbing my arm.

“Lina, what happened? What happened in there?”

A wave of nausea washed over me and I ran over to the edge of the street and started dry heaving. Finally the feeling passed and I sank to the ground, the pavement hard under my knees.

Ren was kneeling next to me. “Lina, what just happened?”

I turned and pressed my face into his chest and suddenly I wasn't just crying. I was
sobbing
. Like splitting-at-the-seams, exploding-into-a-million-pieces, falling-
apart
crying. The weight of the last ten months was dumping down on me, and I couldn't do a thing about it.

I cried and cried and cried. Hot, noisy tears that didn't care who was watching. The kind of crying I'd never done in front of anyone.

“Lina, it's okay,” Ren said over and over, his arms wrapped around me. “It's going to be okay.”

But no, it wasn't. And it never would be. My mom was gone. And I missed her so much I sometimes wondered how I was breathing. Howard wasn't my father. And Matteo . . . I don't know how long I cried for, but finally I felt my feet reach the bottom, my last few sobs coming out in shudders.

I opened my eyes. We were both still kneeling on the ground, and I was smooshed into Ren, my face buried in his neck, his skin hot and sticky. I pulled back. Ren's shirt had a giant soggy puddle on it, and he looked mortified.

This was
so
much more than he'd bargained for.

“I'm sorry,” I said hoarsely.

“What just happened?”

I wiped my face, then pulled him up to standing. “He said my mom made it all up. She was obsessed with him and she wrote a fake journal to get him in trouble with the school.”

“
Che bastardo.
That's not even that good of a story.” He looked at me closer. “Wait. You didn't believe him, did you?”

I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head hard, my hair sticking to my wet cheeks. “No. At first it scared me. But that wasn't her. She never would have hurt someone she loved.”

He exhaled. “You scared me for a minute.”

“I just can't believe that she loved
him
. He was horrible. And Howard is so . . .” I looked up.

Ren's face was like six inches away from mine, and suddenly we locked eyes and I wasn't thinking about Matteo and Howard anymore.

IT WASN'T A LITTLE KISS.
Not like your first peck or like the time you made out with your junior high boyfriend behind the movie theater. It was throw-your-arms-around-his-neck, bury-your-fingers-in-his-hair, why-haven't-we-done-this-before kissing straight through all the salt on my face. Ren circled his hands around my waist and for five seconds everything was perfect, and then—

He pushed me off him.

Pushed.

Me.

Off.

Him.

I wanted the sidewalk to swallow me up.

He wouldn't look at me.

Seriously, why hadn't it swallowed me up yet?

“Ren . . . I don't know what just happened.” He'd been kissing me back, hadn't he?
Hadn't
he?

He was staring at the ground. “No, no. It's okay. I just don't think that the timing's the best, you know?”

TIMING. My face went up in flames. Not only had he just had to peel me off of him, but he was being
nice
about it.
Lina, fix this.
Words started pouring out of my mouth.

“You're right. You're totally right. I think I just got carried away after what happened in there—it was really emotional, and I think I just redirected and . . .” I squeezed my eyes shut. “We're just friends. I know that. And I've never, ever, ever thought of you as anything more.”

Does it count as a lie if you're denying something you've only fully admitted to yourself for about a minute? Also: One too many “evers” there. But I was going for believable.

Ren's gaze shot up, meeting mine with literally the most unreadable expression on the planet. And then he was gone again. “It's okay. Don't worry about it.”

Why, why, why did I do that?
I slumped against my door of the taxi. Ren was sitting as far away from me as was physically possible, and he was staring out the window like he was trying to memorize the streets or something.

Couldn't I have a repeat? Go back twenty minutes to when I hadn't already lost my head and kissed my best friend who had a girlfriend and clearly didn't want
me
? Back before I'd noticed how much I loved his shaggy hair and sense of humor or the fact that even though I'd known him for less than a week I somehow felt comfortable sharing all my crazy history with him?