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Look, I know you aren't going to tell me the real story, Giulia wants to say as Alberto tosses their grocery bags of Nyquil and condoms and near-expired candy into the backseat of their father’s car. But go ahead and tell me the heavily redacted version.
It’s what she’s going to get, anyway. But no, too combative. Gotta be strategic. Gotta Approach Brother like an anxious wild cat.
Instead she says, “I have a question.”
“About the date?” Alberto catches his laugh right before it comes out, not looking back at her as the fingers of one hand form a circle. "This is his cervix, see?" And then he smashes his fist through it. "And then he died."
He slams the truck’s door shut, finally turning to her, his face falling.
“No, about —well, yes about the date, but really about this.” Giulia shoves her hand out, fist wrapped around a pair of white sunglasses. Streaks on the lens, sand stuck between the golden overlapping Gs embossed along each side. “Luca said you could have them back, by the way.”
He lets her drop them into his hand.
“They’re sunglasses,” he says flatly, sliding them into his sweatshirt pocket. “Luca had some sun in his eyes, I had extra sunglasses, so I told him he could have these. What’s wrong with that?”
She looks at him. Around them are blood clots of people coming out of the restaurant right beside the store, cars circling hungrily for a space.
Alberto shrugs. “They’re fakes.” He starts to circle around to the driver’s side, yanking open the door. “Which I told him, by the way.”
She asks, “Is the watch fake, too?”
“Yes,” he calls through the passenger’s side open window.
In the low, buttery light of the streetlamps, his eyes are starting to shine.
She stands there, watching him through the window, arms crossed over her chest. “Then why do I feel like you’re lying to me?”
Alberto revs the engine. “You tell me.”
Giulia sighs, “Alright, how about this,” as she gets into the car. “Is it from that Patrick Bateman guy?”
Alberto sighs, rubs the heel of his palm into one of his eyes. Eventually: “Yeah.”
“How long were you seeing him for?”
“Why are you pestering me about this now?” Alberto snaps. “I’m done with him. I don’t want the glasses anymore, so I gave them to Luca. That’s it.”
And to a certain extent, he’s right. She should’ve asked when she came back to Portorosso and Alberto had a silver stud in his right ear. She should’ve asked when she came back to Portorosso and he had a little white scar above his right eye.
But she was too young, then, to know what it meant. She feels too young, still, but she knows that she isn’t.
“You can’t just give your shitty ex’s stuff away to your new boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend. We had one date.”
“Which you could’ve fucked up by making Luca feel too embarrassed.”
“I was doing something nice for him!”
Giulia fights the urge to roll her eyes, the hand still on her seatbelt tightening. “Sure,” she says, as evenly as she can muster. “I’m just saying that for any normal guy, you just gave him a bouquet full of red flags.”
“Our date went fucking amazing.” Alberto revs the car. “Thanks for asking.”
I’d already asked you yesterday.
“Yeah.” She sinks back into her seat. “Luca said that, too.”
She knows because she’d walked with Luca beside his bike on the way to the gelato shop, having met him along an alcove away from the main beach, its shore more palm-sized rocks than sand. He’d said his parents would be “weird” if they saw her. He’d said he had something to give back to Alberto for him. Which would be all fine and good if she could get down the hill without nearly tripping and dying, like, three different times.
Luca had grabbed her arm protectively the last time, leaving his bike to fall in the water. As he fished it out and she shook pebbles from her shoes, she asked what it was he’d wanted her to return.
To which he’d flushed and fumbled the glasses out his bicycle’s front basket—"I mean, he said they were fakes, but I-I dunno, it doesn’t feel right. And he paid for the whole date, too, it’s just— too much. I just feel bad because I didn’t get him anything.”
She’d furrowed her brows in confusion, the weight of the glasses light in her hand, but decided not to say anything further. Let them dangle off her fingertips and change the subject. Best strategy was always to approach Luca like a frightened deer, though sometimes, she admits, she was less the curious forest ranger and more the car with faulty brakes.
“So how was the rest of the date?”
He’d flushed a brighter red and looked away and laughed. His hand over his neck, as he so often did.
She’d poked him in the stomach, then, “Tell me, tell me, tell me.”
“It was pretty good.” Another high, nervous laugh as he bowed away from her. “What did Alberto say?”
“Well, I asked him right afterwards and sent me a bunch of these—” and she’d scrolled through her phone to show him the several pictures of crudely drawn figures chewing through wood with a heart filter applied.
Careful to zoom into the pictures so Luca cant see where Albert had added, you calling him a baby deer was super accurate .
‘Oh, wow,” Luca said. “What’s it mean?”
“I think it means he had fun.”
“Oh.” Luca forces another laugh, smiling wide. “Oh, okay, great.”
“And how was the movie?”
“Interesting! I didn’t know you could just drive up to a theatre like that.”
Yeah, and he hadn’t known movies until she’d caught him while he was walking away from the student center with a late-night bowl of nachos on her and her friends’ designated Childhood Nostalgia Movie Night.
Luca had told her he’d been homeschooled, had told her his solo dorm was because of his anxiety, had told her he didn’t know how to swim and yet never let her teach him, ripping his hand out of her hands when she’d tried to lead him towards the gym.
Hadn’t known how to make coffee, hadn’t had any social media before, hadn’t known anything about football.
She remembered, then, the night they’d stolen a traffic cone for a weapon as they went to the only restaurant still open at one am, how for a brief second she’d swung her phone around to light the way across dew-soaked grass and could’ve sworn his eyes shone like a cat’s.
She remembered nights in her car, getting a peep at his YouTube history after she’d grabbed his phone to look up a song—all tutorial videos for boiling water, doing laundry, tying his shoes.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he asked. The sun was hanging high and bright, children chasing birds and rattling dice, men smoking, women chatting, the water in the town’s great fountain glittering like crystals.
Then his eyes caught on the fountain, at the sea serpent with its eyes bulging out as it was strangled. “Is there anything in this town that’s not about killing sea monsters?”
“No,” she’d laughed. “C’mon, you should know that.—Oh wait, wait, right, your parents kept you locked in the basement, I remember.”
Back at school, his story had always been that he was from “the Southern coast.”
Back at school, he’d never said he was from Portorosso until Giulia had said it first.
She wondered how he would look if she shoved him into the water, but that would be rude, wouldn’t it? So she had to be content with the same poor attempts at telepathy she normally would use for the cutest girls in class: sending smoke signals through her clothes, the placement of earrings, the color of stripes, the invisible words between each line.
So she added, “They really should get over sea monsters, though. I mean, they can’t be that evil if they haven’t eaten any kids during the Portorosso race.” Realizing only after speaking that she probably sounded insane.
She remembered then and remembers now when her brother had bitten her that third week at home—over why she can’t quite recall, but what else could it have been but her father?
This dark, purple thing whose eyes shone at night, whose teeth turned sharp as soon as they touched her blood, who left tearstains in her bed but wouldn’t talk to her for more than a few words—what else could she have called Alberto then but a monster?
He’d spat back something about how humans didn’t even taste good, Or maybe it’s just you .
“Maybe they’re more scared of people than —” Luca paused, then said slowly, more carefully, “than we are of them.”
If Giulia were at home and not in a car with her brother, she’d roll her wrist inward for the tiny patch of crisscrossed flesh still there right beside the crease of her elbow. At first, back when it was still an angry brown scab, it had been a reminder to keep being mad at him, to hold onto it as though it proved every single hurt inside of her was true, even—no, especially the ones that came before him.
Once the scab had fallen off, though, and the fresh pinkness of new skin faded, she was back in Genova, and it became a reminder that her new sea monster brother was real.
She remembers sitting outside in the treehouse, an ice pack on her arm. She remembers that being the first time since Mamma had left that she’d ever heard her father raise his voice.
She remembers hearing Alberto up in the middle of the night in the bathroom that shares a wall with her bedroom, dunking something again and again into the sink and swearing until she’d banged on the door and told him to come out. He did, with his arm drawn up in red welts.
She remembers the two of them, after several tense days of speaking without talking and touching only to brush past tight corners, in the treehouse again, quietly watching the fireflies. He’d said “I’m sorry” again, and without her father looming over his shoulder, she could finally let herself start to believe him.
The band-aids along her arm still hadn’t come off. Maybe she was doing that just to spite him.
“And I got you this—” and he’d pulled from his pocket, then, a wooden stamp with a chipped black handle, the rubber stained red and embossed with the blind cat, the lamed fox, and the happy, foolish wooden boy. “I found this in my dad’s junk awhile back and it reminded me of a book you have in your room.” The one I’d tried to get you to read with me. “So I thought you’d like it. I know it’s dumb, but—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” she’d said, rising up to her feet. “Do I even have an ink pad?”
“A what?”
“It’s a stamp. Hang on.”
No, no ink pad—she must have been thinking of the one at her mother’s place—, but she did still have markers.
“Did you read the book?” she’d asked as she rolled the stamp over the back of Alberto’s hand, leaving it wet with red ink. Alberto stopped temporarily sniffing at the tip of an old purple marker to shake his head, so she continued: “It’s about a wooden puppet who gets brought to life by a fairy and has to figure out how to become a real boy.”
He raised his brow.
Giulia plucked a different marker from her box. “If I could just go without strings, I probably would’ve stayed a puppet, honestly. I don’t really see what’s so special about being human.”
Alberto replied, “My dad always said that humans have all the coolest stuff and that sea monsters were all boring.”
“Really? How can being a sea monster who can swim at high speeds and turn into a human and—and—do sea monsters have any special powers?”
“Is talking to fish a power?”
“Yes!” She’d answered a little too loudly.
“Well,” Alberto said, leaning back up as Giulia realized herself and got out of his face. “My dad always said that sea monsters are so scared of their own shadows that they just stay underwater and do, like, farming or whatever. There used to be whole sea monster towns that were half underwater and half on the surface, but people got too scared of being found out. So then you had to pick. And my dad didn’t want to give up cool human stuff, so they told him to—how could a human say it? Kick bricks?”
She’d felt deflated, to say the least. It wasn’t until last summer she’d take him back up to Portorosso’s telescope and admitted, “You know, back when we were kids, I just to—I don’t know if resent is the right word—”
“No,” Alberto had said rather matter-of-factly, looking up still at the stars. “You did resent me.”
“And you resented me, too. Now let me finish. When Papa first found you, I thought Oh, this is great, I’m gonna have a cool new brother to take me on adventures, and show me underwaters castles and, I dunno, talking dolphins or something.”
She’d asked him that night in the treehouse and he’d simply said, “ Nope,” so she’d let herself fall onto her back and reply, “Well that sucks.”
A little laugh, I know, right?
And they’d giggled, and she’d wanted to say that when Mamma and Papa were fighting she’d wished, sometimes, that a good fairy would come and tell her that her real parents were waiting for her, that she was special, a changeling, a lost princess to some kingdom of roses and gold.
Alberto had looked up from the telescope, slowly. “But I wasn’t that?”
“No,” a forced laugh, a sweaty grip on the safety bars. “Not at all.”
Mamma had always told her that she’d know this was all for the better when she was older. But Giulia knew they wanted her to be older now, too, so she’d tried her best, pretending to them that she couldn’t still remember a time when they were all happy.
And she’s fine with it now , really she is. But back then she was twelve, and by the time Alberto came around she was still convinced the world could be more for her, if only she waited for it.
Instead he’d asked to stamp her hand, smiling with curious glee as he watched the purple ink dry on her skin.
The ink was so dark she could only barely make the picture out as she turned her hand around. “Sometimes I have dreams about being a sea monster,” she said.
“Sometimes I dream about being a human.”
“What a nightmare.”
“Yeah, totally.”
And now they’re lying side by side watching the moon through the leaves and Alberto admits he doesn’t know any other sea monsters, besides his dad.
And now they’re standing side by side at the telescope looking out blankly at the stars, and Alberto admits that when Massimo found him, he’d been sure in his bones that if Massimo loved his daughter at all, he’d love his new son so much less.
And now she’s back in the observatory with Luca pretending to study, drawing dragons in chalk and drinking hot chocolate with coffee and watching old cartoons on one of the school computers, the old man hitting his puppet son about the head, Stay wood, boy, stay wood!
“Sounds like my mom,” Luca had said, quickly wiping a trail of unmixed chocolate off his lip.
“So you’re a failed child star, too?” Giulia knocked his shoulder with her own. “Whatcha do? Sing? Tap dance? Magic tricks?”
A laughed “No.” He was rubbing the side of his neck again, as he did so often, and fish breathe by swallowing water and pushing it out through those cuts in their neck but Alberto had never said anything about that to her, so maybe–
Luca chuckled again, more like a sigh. “That would be waaaaayyy too interesting.”
“You know what’s fucked up?” she says as Alberto pulls the keys out of the ignition. The car ride home had been music and dumb jokes, but mostly just music. “I used to be kind of jealous of you whenever you brought out some fancy expensive thing this—well, I’m presuming this guy bought for you.”
Alberto laughs, still looking straight ahead at the garden’s old wall. “Oh yeah, I could tell.” A crooked smile, a jiggling of keys. “The benefits of being some trust fund kid’s official-unofficial rent boy.”
Horror like a hole in her stomach, slowly growing wider. “Kid? So he’s our age?”
Alberto scrunches his nose, tightens his grip, but makes no move to get out of the car. Without the headlights on, Portorosso is dark, save for the fingernail of moon hanging in the sky. “He’s a few years older. But it doesn’t matter anymore; I’m done with him.” Alberto sighs like it could drop all his bones and baggage onto the floor, rubbing at the watch on his wrist, the silver clicking softly. “He got me this watch last month when I went on that trip to Berlin for my birthday, you know? I was really meeting up with him—”
“Was this an online thing?”
“No, we’d met before, but he lives in the States, and—” Alberto waves the sentence away. His leg is starting to shake. “Anyway, we met up again in Berlin and I thought things were… were finally going to be okay. We had such a great time, for the most part, and we had a lot of breakthroughs on things I’d been wanting from him for years. He was being so, so nice. Took me to all these romantic dinners, out shopping, to museums and concerts, he bought me all these birthday presents, and—” Alberto runs a hand through his hair. “We’d… we’d had some problems, but I thought, finally, it’s all over, we can be a normal, real couple for the first time. And then the week ends, a few months go by and… well, I’m sure you can fill in the blanks. I should’ve known it was too good to be true but I’m a fucking idiot, so—!”
Another crooked, thin-lipped smile, before he lets his body slump against the steering wheel. A protracted groan, like a zombie being torn limb from limb.
This time, he lets her rub her hand across his back.
“Sure Luca doesn’t want the glasses back?” Alberto asks without lifting his head.
She shakes her own, quietly says, “No—I mean, yes, no he does—you know what I'm trying to say."
He lifts himself up, then, and pastes on a smirk, mischief sparking in his eyes. “Wanna go smash ‘em, then?”
Giulia claps him on the back, pulls him in for a quick side-hug, and grins. “Absolutely.”
Luca had refused to say anything more about sea monsters, looking down at his hands as he guided the bike over the cobblestone street, so Giulia had taken the moment to look down at her own, catching the flash of two gold Gs on the side of each lens.
It's strange, isn’t it, how you can know someone’s biggest secret and they still feel like a stranger?
Only sometimes, though. Only sometimes.
She shoved the sunglasses into her pocket and threw her arm around Luca’s shoulder. “So tell me more about your date.”