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It is in the afternoon sun, when the streets are peppered with children walking home from school, that Giorno thinks of fairness.
Laughter fills the air as Mista, stationed a few yards ahead of him, is handed a slingshot by the cluster of schoolchildren before him. They know this gangster, know him unlike the others of the past year who have disappeared, deaths their mothers prayed for heard by Giorno’s fleet of assassins. The kids’ confidence in Mista’s skill is as strong as their confidence that his sure shot is always marbles hitting the rocks they toss high in the sky, and not bullets into bodies. They don’t know the things he’s done, and under Giorno’s command, they never will.
Giorno leans against his car, with fingers marking pages in the book Trish was assigned to read in literature class, the paper rough and browned. She left it in his office and he found it, pressed his nose against the binding, remembering his fifteen years spent gazing out of windows in stuffy classrooms, waiting on this dream he lives to start.
He wonders if the children his age, distinct in their blue uniforms with checkered jacket hems, see him behind the Passione gate entrance and know how old he is. This april he will be seventeen. It is as old as Narancia was, and he could have been among these streets. No knives in his pockets, but crumpled notes passed in classes among new friends. Giorno always imagines he would have been liked in school.
There is a sudden quiet and Giorno looks up from the street, to the children around Mista. His hand pulls the slingshot as far back as it can go, the slight sweat on his arms and face turning him to bronze like the statues of gods littered around the country. The children stare with open mouths as the line of his arm follows the rock swallowed by the light of the sun. They hear the clack of glass against stone and watch the rock be spit from the sky, and a tear of children break away to find the fallen pieces.
Mista looks over his shoulder to Giorno, who only nods, and lets Mista get lost among the children to look for marbles.
Mista had cried the most out of the survivors. Mista was best at it, never with the sobs that shook Trish’s sunburnt shoulders, or Giorno’s own secret tears muffled by towels in the bathroom. Mista had cried while running back to the safety of Napoli, and, unlike Giorno’s tight fists, he was never angry. The deaths were accepted as soon as they happened, which Giorno thought cold until a month had passed. They were at a market, and he found Mista holding as many bottles of white wine as he could manage, with tears running down his cheeks, slipping into the corners of his smile.
“Abbacchio’s favorite,” he said, and bought as many as the seller had. The unused wine cellar was cleared by Mista, and that evening they split a bottle between them and his dusty fingers.
“Boss!” Mista shouts now, shaking away Giorno’s cool evening memory. Mista tosses something to him, and Giorno catches instinctually, finding in his palm the curved, colored pupil of a marble.
Giorno smiles at the gift and Mista laughs before turning back to the children. His gaze is interrupted, catching something in the distance, and he starts telling them to go home, gesturing lazily and acting with disinterest in them now.
The sun is properly in Giorno’s eyes now when he looks up to see what Mista has to tell the kids to leave. The streets are nearly empty, returning to their old state to bake dry and old in the heat. Trish’s shadow points towards the gate as she walks across the square in her brown leather loafers, their gold zippers shining.
It is always good to see her, legs stretching out from her skirt as she walks. A knot ties itself in Giorno’s throat, and knowing mourning now, he thinks about the empty space around her. He wants to fill the space the same way Buccellati would, by meeting her at the front steps of her school each day and walking back to Passione, carrying her book bag. But it was never Giorno’s role to fill, so Trish hands her bag to Mista before lying back against the hood of the car next to Giorno.
“You’re late,” Giorno says.
“Yeah. My lit teacher chewed me out for not having - is that my book?”
Giorno lifts the book in his hands and nods, before she takes it, his fingers slipping from the passages he read that he had been saving. She holds it above her head and flips past the pages, breezing against her thumb, before she sighs and tosses her arm over her eyes to block out the sun.
“I’m so glad it’s the weekend,” she mutters. Giorno laughs.
Footsteps on the cobblestones disrupt them, and they both look up to Mista, book bag over his shoulder. He jerks his thumb back to the car waiting at the gate, in the place where the children are missing.
“Your appointment about -”
“- Right, of course. Let’s walk back before sending them in.”
Mista nods and walks to the car. Giorno and Trish peel themselves off the hot hood, and Mista soon jogs over to meet them, bag hitting his side as the three of them walk to Passione’s villa.
Their shadows lead them in. Short, dark smudges, betraying nothing of the people they belong to except what they carry. One holds a bag, the other a book, and in this light, they could be returning home from school.