

English version

This ebook, in origin "Zed Experiments series", was published as an experiment in English language with Zed Lab.

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### Carla Cucchiarelli

## I killed Bambi

www.quellidized.it

Exams  
Copyright © 2012  
Zerounoundici Edizioni

Published by Zerounoundici  
Cover: Picture Shutterstock.com

Ho ucciso Bambi

Copyright © 2012

_Zerounoundici Edizioni_  
_ISBN:_ 978-88-6578-148-7

Cover: image by Shutterstock.com

Any reference to actual events, places and people is purely coincidental, being the result of the author's imagination.
"... The silicon chip inside her head

Gets switched to overload

And nobody is gonna go to school today

She's gonna make them stay at home

And daddy doesn't understand it

He always said she was good as gold

And he can see no reason

'Cos there are no reasons

What reason do you need?

Tell me why I don't like Mondays

Tell me why I don't like Mondays

Tell me why I don't like Mondays

I wanna shoot the whole day down..."

("I don't like Mondays", Bob Geldof)

#

#

### Surprise party

"In my stomach I am always alone, in your stomach, you're always alone, what I feel, what you feel, they'll never know... at least say if the trip is unique and if it's sunny there, if you're laughing, I won't mind though, why why not an answers to my whys why don't you at least make me try on your beautiful waistcoat."

("Hai un momento, Dio?" Ligabue)

"Then I decided. Let's do it tomorrow, my birthday, at least we finish with a bang."

"It was about time Silvia. Surprise party?"

"Yeah, it will really be a surprise for everyone."

"OK. Let's check the list then."

"Okay, Debby. But this is the last time, I'm fed up of making plans. We must act."

"What about Sara?"

"Come on. What are you thinking? Saturday she passed me her school test, she's not a nuisance and she's nice too. My dear darling..."

"OK, one less. Marina?"

"Are you kidding? Marina is untouchable. She brought me to the last rave party in Viterbo, and you know how badly I wanted to go. Marina is a friend."

"And... Eleonora?"

"Come on... the party is for her. Little miss perfection will have a blast."

Debby smiles with her satisfied-cat look. The party will be done, I'm sure.

We already played the yes-and-no game a hundred times. Let's say it's our last obsession. I pass her a joint. I rolled it a little while ago. Meanwhile, she neatly writes the names on the sheet of a notebook she split in two halves with a crooked pen line. Yes on one side, no on the other. She's serious, she looks like a diligent child doing her homework. Instead she sits as we like to, knees crossed on the chair and chest thrust forward. She seems to be lying on the large white desk, where makeup tools, crayons and three ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts chase one another. Anyone happening to come into my room would be aware of being in the bunker of a teenage western female, of average tastes and culture. I can't help it, I am a daughter of my time. I am the Queen, and I love my world. I wanted it this way. Two large posters of Ligabue dominate the pink walls, the stereo blares rock music at full volume. On the floor – I count them in my mind – there are a pair of pants, two shirts and some socks thrown at random. On the bed, resting on a tray, two giant Coke-sized glasses, standing next to two half-empty backpacks. Not far away, lying on a small heart-shaped red plaid, my kitten. It is a Persian, all gray, my father gave it to me a year ago and I called it Cocaine. My father laughed. What the fuck was there to laugh?

Here we go again, Debby starts again, going right to the chase.

"What is the minimum score?"

"Eight, if they're less than eight we'll seem like two assholes."

"And for a strike?"

"Twenty-two, no, better twenty-three, it brings good luck. We can settle for twenty-three. We will be on the front page of every newspaper. Can you imagine? They will talk about us for days. We'll be famous. Sure, the Korean did more than thirty, but he was a professional and he had twenty thousand students available in Virginia. Lucky him. We have but a hundred."

"Well, the Norwegian, I never remember his name, killed more than ninety."

"Come on, don't be mystified. It was not a student and we are no racists."

I almost laugh as I say it. It's true, we are no racists. We only bear a grudge against Her and the world. Deborah doesn't answer. She's not following me anymore. She's grabbed a professional make-up mirror and she's applying eyeliner with determination. Debby is not beautiful, she's not in tune with the times. She's too fat, I keep telling her that, but she dresses in black like me and she has a small feminism symbol tattooed on her right hand. Right now, quite unusually, she's smoking.

"Are you sure we'll become as famous as the people at Columbine?"

She asks the question absently. I know she wants it as much as me.

"Come on. Eric and Dylan are inimitable. They were the first."

"Yeah, but we're gonna be the first too. The first women to carry out a slaughter in a school. We'll finally show that we can really be like men. Bad like them. Strong like them. Let me see the creatures. Have you hidden them between the books? They're there, aren't they?"

She's jumped up and approached the library, discreetly rummaging through my stuffed animals and the books I dutifully catalogued, with numbers on the covers. One "Satanic Crimes", two "Massacres in schools over the past decade", three "The drawings of the serial killer", four " I haven't yet killed anyone today", five "How to build a bomb in your house". I haven't been reading anything else for two years. Slaughters cannot be improvised, they are created.

"You're so neat! I'm shocked."

"Maniac, you mean. But only for sacred texts. The maid does the rest. You know what a drag, cleaning all day? Come on. She has such a life..."

Deborah laughs as if struck by a sudden thought. Hers is a high, shrill laugh that resembles the neighing of a horse. It always makes me happy.

"What about her too? Sending her with everybody else?"

"Come on, no kidding. At least Daddy will have someone to count on when I'm, like, busy with other things. So, have you got at least twenty-three on the list? Say yes and I take the creatures."

This time it's my turn to get up and walk across the room with the unsteady gait.

"Shit, you made me drink too much", I tell her, turning around to look at her with a mock air of reproach, then I resume walking.

With her, there is never the risk to contain oneself. I mean from the point of view of tonics. Food, tobacco and alcohol to the nth degree. I barely reach the large white wardrobe, covered with multicoloured writings – "hooliganism final frontier" is my favourite – I open a door and I virtually enter the cabinet. I am thin. Of course, I haven't been eating for two years. Fasting must well do something. Here I am, coming out. I am holding a large yellow cardboard box containing a similar, but smaller, one, which in turn contains a package wrapped in a pink and yellow scarf. Deborah leaps and snatches away the envelope from me.

The two guns are now on the floor. In front of us. Deborah starts caressing one with the tip of her fingers, slowly, gently. She likes to, God how she likes to.

"It's beautiful", she says with an ecstatic expression.

This is love. We hug, smug and excited. The room is slowly turning into a gas chamber, invaded by the pungent, very intense smell of hashish. But who cares. We have the creatures.

"Are you sure your father won't come back?"

"Come on. Again? Haven't you understood?"

I play acting as a model across the room, a set expression and a cigarette in my hand. Debby is not like me, she's always late to the point.

"He wouldn't even notice if I smoked a joint in front of him. He's out! Since when my mother left, he's been living like a zombie. And anyway he's in Milan until tomorrow. A business trip he says, but you think he works on Sunday? Guess he has an affair with some Nordic."

Deborah keeps playing with the gun in front of the mirror. She stretches out her arm and points the gun at her reflection, aiming for the heart.

"So, what do you say? Don't I look like the incredible woman?"

"Wonder Woman. Yes, yes. That's who you are. I can't wait to see Elenonora's face tomorrow. How about a murder party? Come on, let's put more music on. What do you want now? Marilyn Manson or the Killers?"

"Whatever you want. I'm too happy. It's too cool!"

And while she's talking, Deborah has started to dance, clutching the gun in her arms like an imaginary partner. She draws pirouettes in the air, smiling and showing her tongue irreverently. Cocaine, as if bothered by the smell and volume of the stereo, moved to another wing of the house some time ago. It left only its Persian hairs in the air and on rug.

"I swear Debby. We'll look great."

"Another joint?"

Here is my incredible girl. In a flash she is again sitting at the desk and burning the small butt of smoke left with a lighter. She's compulsive.

"I think we won't make it 'til tomorrow like this. Already I can't keep my eyes open", I say, worried and resigned.

When Debby starts, she starts. And there's no way to stop her, like with eating. She smokes and eats the same way. But I don't want to argue today.

"These are our last. Why do you care?"

We stopped suddenly, as if struck by lightning, and now we look into each other's eyes. I don't know what dying means. But surely dying is better than living.

"Dying for an idea. To show that we are equal to males. Isn't it bullshit?"

"No."

"Come on. Aren't you afraid?"

"No."

"Well. About males. Did you put Alessandro in the list? I can't stand him. He tried to grope my ass. His breath reeks, surely his feet too. And he dresses like vomit. You have to kill him."

"Keep cool Silvia. We have the list, we'll stick to it. Now let's go over the plan. Shortly before recreation, you ask to go to the bathroom, once out you take the creatures from the backpack, and get ready. I come and you give me mine. We open the door, enter the classroom and start shooting. If we are lucky we clean up at least two or three classrooms."

"Come on. Sure you're not afraid?"

"Stop it!"

"Good, 'cos if you change your mind I'm gonna kill you myself."

I seriously think so. We can't go back, everything is already written. We decided, it's our big chance, we won't have a chance like this ever again. However – I can't tell Deborah – I am a bit afraid. What if things don't go as we planned, if there is even one unexpected event, a mistake, a problem we haven't considered? But I mustn't think about that now. Now I've got perpetual motion, I started walking again around the room with my unsteady gait, and I wish I were a thousand miles away. I look out the window, watching the houses of the opposite building. It's dinner time by now, there are women laying the table, little hurried gestures tasting like home, quiet lives, habit. I wish I was there, in one of those rooms, playing at being a good girl with her mother. But I'm a bad girl. I don't stop, I go. Deborah doesn't understand, she shakes me by an arm and brings me back to the here and now by simply passing me her cell phone. If you look at a phone you know at once what kind of person is the one who chose it. Debby's is pink, plump, anonymous. Like her.

"Let's watch the video again, so tomorrow morning, before leaving, we load it on Youtube."

"The Finnish nicked our idea."

"Yes, but ours is better, Silvia. You're a genius."

"Come on. It was child's play."

Really a joke, far too easy. I took the video I shot last year in the garden of the nursery school next to my house. I wonder why that scene struck me so much. It gave me a sense of peace and recovered tranquillity. There were a dozen girls with white and blue aprons playing ring-a-ring-o'roses, singing serenely. They laughed as if nothing could touch them. I edited the video at the computer for hours and hours, trying to obtain a fading effect. In the end I just froze the picture, leaving the screen black and adding the sound of distant gunfire, the music of "Death of the Swan" and then the sentence "No longer different". I had to be a film director, not study Latin and Greek. I am cinema.

"Child's play for you!"

"Are you sure they will show it?"

"Are you kidding? You're a legend!"

I'm happy again. We both are, we hug, we go back to sit at the desk and finish the Bayles stolen from the cocktail cabinet as our eyes slowly start to close. I probe the ground a little more.

"So tomorrow I will be seventeen and have a nice party with lots of fireworks. The most beautiful of all!"

"You can bet on it."

Debby is totally stoned and serene, I got up again, I feel like a caged lion. Now I am in front of the big orange billboard where the photos of a lifetime are collected. My first cry in Mom's arms, my first day of school, my first boyfriend, the trip with the scouts, the first miniskirt. Fuck. I want to spit.

"Come on. You see this? It's my mother a few centuries ago, when we looked like the Mulino Bianco family. Me, her and Dad. Pathetic. Then that guy came and brought her away. Tomorrow, exactly tomorrow, it will be two years since I last saw her. She even gave me a brother I don't know. And he's super-rich, he lives in a mansion in London. You see? I don't even have a moped... Wow, look at this picture, I'd forgotten it. Look carefully, it's me, three years old, with a toy gun in hand."

"Can you imagine those psycoeverything assholes? They will say you were born for this, that you have the serial killer syndrome."

"Let's hope they take me for Joan of Arc. We go to bed?"

"Yes, my eyes are closing."

We've settled on the bed, fully dressed, on the covers, one with her head on one side, the other lying in the opposite direction.

"Happy birthday Silvia."

"It will be the best party in the world."

"I promise. But promise me that tomorrow morning, before going to school, no matter what, we make ourselves up."

### Young and beautiful

"But I have her picture in my imagination,  
heroes are all young and beautiful, heroes are all young and beautiful."

("La locomotiva", Francesco Guccini)

One, two, three, five, seven. Inspector Renato Pascucci still could not believe it. He kept thinking about those bodies lying on the ground, the faces of kids in shock, desperate parents, shocked teachers, stunned by feelings of guilt and anxiety and repeated that never in his professional life, he had had a case like that. He had known murderers and rapists, aristocratic thieves and petty criminals, refined drug dealers and defrauded care workers, he had seen accusations go and bounce back to where they had started from, child prostitutes and raped teens, but he had never found himself in front of a school devastated by a slaughter, made by and of minors moreover. Never before he had seen such horror. Sort of a nightmare come true. Days and days hearing the same words over and over, complaining with the world around, going up and down between the school and the office, running, targeted by reporters. Even the Minister of Internal Affairs, the most excellent honourable Dr. Mario Montanari, had called him on the phone, in person, not through his secretary, asking for an explanation and an immediate resolution of the story. His voice was grave and composed. The voice you'd expect from a statesman. A few dry, firm sentences.

"Parents must send their children to school safely, you understand? The idea that now you can shoot comfortably in a classroom, or even that I should send military at the entrance of each institution, cannot pass. Put order in this case, as soon as possible. At least find out how those two deranged girls found guns. Someone must have given them to them, don't you think? It's not so easy to get weapons in Italy. We are not in the United States. There they are accustomed to slaughters in colleges. Find the criminal who gave them guns. As soon as possible. We should make a point... I repeat, as soon as possible."

The inspector had mumbled a "I will", turning off the phone with a vague sense of discomfort. The most excellent Dr. Montanari certainly had not officially said that his job was hanging by a thread, he had not threatened to transfer him to some distant place, but the tone allowed no argument. It was all implied. It was implied that public opinion must be appeased, it was implied that he was to find a way to do that. Immediately. Pascucci shrugged, resigned, leaving the phone on the table. He had never liked the power, neither he liked orders. And now, in front of the mirror, while struggling with his tie, Renato thought, with both rage and tenderness, about the day awaiting him, the words he had to say, the questionings he had to make, and especially about Silvia and Deborah. About the secret those girls were taking away with them, without appeal. About the death they had sown. About their children faces with too much make up. Their children faces, despite everything. As hard as he tried to understand, to find a reason, any explanation, the way the tragedy had grown was still an enigma. He could not understand. More than thirty years of age difference, the social role, and especially the choice of the side, dug a deep chasm between them. Silvia and Deborah were two drugged girls shooting on their classmates, he was the inspector who, if necessary, brought children to the juvenile court. They only had in common the love for Italian music and the fact that they had entered, overwhelmingly, as protagonists, a page of the town history that it would be impossible to forget. Silvia and Deborah and the other friends – innocent teenagers that should only have opened their curious eyes on life, and that instead had closed them for good – somehow had become legends.

"Heroes are all young and beautiful", the inspector repeated to himself. But he felt like a man rather dramatically plain, and it was a bit sadder when he looked in the mirror, dressed as a bank clerk. He wore important suits only for exceptional events. To go to work, among people, he preferred long-sleeved polo shirts, or shirts left sportingly undone, the only things allowing him to keep his pretended dynamism that made him feel in step with the times, closer to the world he had to face. Yet that day, for the funeral, he had forced himself to wear a sober black suit. It was a debt he had with the children. So dressed up, he was even ready to face the risk of being recognized: at best it would cost him an embarrassing conversation with family members, teachers and nosy people. They would ask him, with words suited to the occasion, how investigations were going after one week from the slaughter, how could that have happened, and why. Inspector Renato Pascucci – a life spent chasing thieves and criminals, solving puzzles and murders in one of the most affluent and tourist-friendly areas of the capital – would not know how to answer, which indications to provide, how to change the subject of the conversation. At worst, however, he would be surrounded by reporters, armed with cameras and microphones, they too increasingly younger, more and more relentless, in search of a scoop to break through. "Give us a comment at least", they would tell him, pleadingly surrounding him. He would avoid them, running, extending his hand like shields to protect himself from the lenses of the cameras, without saying a single word. There would come a time for statements and press conferences, explanations and comments. They just had to wait. Just wait and investigate.

"Heroes are all young and beautiful", he repeated, and inevitably he caressed his son, Stefano, with his mind. The memory was still there. "But I have her picture in my imagination", Guccini had written. He too had just to close his eyes to see a tall boy, holding a guitar, come through the door, ash-blond hair ruffled on his forehead, as if he had just got out of bed. He too fond of music like all teenagers, ready to strum up mixed chords until late at night.

"So, Dad? Will you take me to the match Sunday?"

And he chuckled, he who had to patrol matches, making sure that other young men of his child's age did not hurt themselves, did not come to blows or, even worse, used iron bars.

"Again? Why don't you go with your friends, Stefano? You know that I must work."

"But I'd like to go with you once."

"I work, definitely I can't take a day off to come with you at the match. Do you realize that you're grown up?"

"You're right Dad."

Ah so he went, disappointed, with the slow gait of a bored bum. At sixteen, what can you do beside going to school, dreaming of the holidays and of a sunny afternoon enjoying goals? Renato only had to re-open his eyes, and then the whole scenario changed, the memory began to twitch without hope, then became outlined. He arrived at that afternoon, a different sun, different words. They had brought him in an emergency car to the Aurelia Hospital, in a hushed silence that already said everything. Sixteen years, far too few to go. The inspector had never resigned to that goodbye, sudden, unexpected, unfair. He had stood, frozen, staring at a bloodstained sheet. Even then, who knows why, he thought about "The locomotive". He had brooded about that song of Guccini for years, it always rose from his guts at important moments. The anger of a man against the locomotive, against the progress which changes myths and steals jobs, the anger of those who cannot find a place in society. You have to be young to feel it and keep it going. He had felt it when he was studying law at the Sapienza university, and there was the movement of '77. It wouldn't have taken much to slip by the terrorists' side, the side of those fighting against the power. But inspector Renato Pascucci hadn't. He had chosen the right door, decided to fight in the name of the institutions, of the law, to change the rules. In the book of dreams of a twenty-year-old, he saw himself as a kind of Robin Hood, ready to fight injustice and punish the rich. His revolutionary idea, he knew, had then been overwhelmed by events, sank back behind the reality, the lost causes, the times he had failed to take the guilty to justice, or even worse, he had seen them acquitted on the benches of the tribunal. But you cannot die at sixteen. It is then that you strongly feel the unfairness of life.

That morning, seven days after the "girls slaughter" – so reporters had called it in their nine-columns titles – the anger of the locomotive was again his own. He would have gladly thrown himself under that train, as a protest against the age of Youtube and kids toting guns, sort of a modern Don Quixote, who must fight against a reality he doesn't understand and cannot stop. And now, he even had to attend the funeral. Suffer once again the smell of incense and the bells tolling, see again tears and black dresses, pity parents on the verge of fainting, take upon himself screams and unspoken words. He knew well the alienating agony of that day, as long as a lifetime. No, there wasn't Stefano to cry for this time, but the hushed "it's impossible", whispered in a low voice, the amazement in the eyes, the stunned surprise death brings when it comes unexpectedly – a moment that can stop tomorrow forever – would be the same. He would find other children in the church, other anxious eyes to comfort, other parents bent by fate or by a cruel God. Five coffins together, and he had never seen so many. Boys and girls of fifteen and sixteen, along with their teacher, a woman of his own age, just fifty-two. And for him the tragedy would not end there. There was another teenager at the morgue, still to be buried, that Deborah already condemned by the events. Certainly they would not reserve for her a funeral with so much fanfare. Soon, her accomplice, Silvia, the mind behind the slaughter, would follow her. The diagnosis of the primary of the Santo Spirito hospital was clear: irreversible coma. Dr. Spezziani had looked Pascucci in the eyes and told him, spreading his arms: "Don't expect any truth from her. She will never talk again. It's a miracle she even breathes."

The inspector increasingly felt like screaming. He knew pain very well, the pain of a tortured parent, of a mother ready to commit suicide rather than face the loss, of tears filling the hours, memories like a dead weight that will not leave you anymore. Empathy, that was what he felt. But he didn't know how to contain five devastating pains joined together. Not to mention the desperation of classmates who would come en masse to fill the church of Santa Maria in Traspontina, a stone's throw from the Vatican on Via della Conciliazione. Even the Pope, in his general audience, Wednesday, had had words of sympathy and outrage for that massacre. "Watch your young, love them, protect them", he had said, raising his arms to heaven. Such a tragedy, Pascucci had never even thought it could happen, in Rome, at a good school, attended by the children of the middle-class families of Prati-Borgo. He felt the eyes of the world upon him. He owed answers to all.

"Then you really decided to go?"

His wife Paola had come quietly into the room, a cup of coffee in her hand. She was turning the spoon with a carefully absent-minded air.

"Of course."

"It will be tough."

"I must go."

"Poor children, I can't even think about their parents. Why do you think they did it? I mean, what drives two girls to kill their classmates?"

"I don't know... a dare... anger, sorrow, envy, stupidity, recklessness. And then for me this is really the least of the problems. Who gave them the guns? How did they plan this? I have to find out, if I can... oh, well, I hope to find some answers, to put an end to this. I'm tired. You know that yesterday a crew of El Arabia, the Arab television, wanted to interview me? Can you believe it? Ah, I always say it... heroes are all young and beautiful."

Paola had handed him the cup and sat on the edge of the bed, her hair still dishevelled from the trauma of waking up, her eyes half closed, her blue dressing gown innocently open on the pyjamas of the same colour. She raised her eyebrows in surprise. Fifty years had passed on her in anger, like a cyclone. The death of Stefano had done the rest. It had stripped her of all charm. Thus cleansed, with wrinkles prematurely marking her face, she looked like one of those old ladies found in small towns, sitting outside the door, watching the world go by and making comments.

"They're not heroes."

Renato had turned to look at her wearily. They did not understand each other. Maybe he should just give in to reality. They had nothing more to say to each other. Stefano had taken away the reason of their being together as well.

"Actually, I was talking of their classmates."

"They too are gone."

Her wife never used the word "death".

"The killers? One is still alive. She's in a coma in hospital."

"And their parents?"

"Like us."

"Don't you dare. Stefano was a good kid."

"Yeah."

She had stood up resolutely, she wanted to move away quickly from her husband and his looming presence. Paola just needed another day of nothing to taste to the last bit. That slaughter of teenagers made her feel bad, even more than usual. It reopened her wounds, leaving other unanswered questions. She just had to find ways to pass the time. The house to clean, clothes to be washed, shopping at the supermarket. Like an automaton, go, come, give a faint smile, pretend. Pretend to live when she was now only borderline, in perpetual oscillation between the present and the past. No future. The future had been taken away by a car accident, one Sunday in July, at the sea. She had not even a reason left to feel guilty. Even that privilege had been denied to her. What could have been her fault? Her complicity in what happened? Sure, she might have refused to buy her son a scooter, but it would have been like wrapping him up in cotton wool, preventing him from living like any other sixteen-year-old boy. And Stefano had insisted so much.

"I will use the scooters of my friends, I swear. I'll be sitting behind on the saddle and it's more dangerous. I'm not a child. I always wear a helmet, respect the law, don't drink and don't do drugs. Why can't I have a scooter like everyone else? All of my friends have one. Why not me?"

He was a good guy, Paola said to comfort herself. A really good guy. He hadn't been stopped by drugs, a gun or a human error. Only by fate. That Sunday, for some reason, perhaps blinded by the sun, he had skidded on two wheels and ended up crashing against a tree on the Aurelia. Paola was at home, watching television, her husband at work. They had gathered them at a run with a squad car, wrapped them in white lies for the whole trip, taken them to the hospital, accompanied them into a private room, close to the small local emergency room. The news, the chill, the horror of that moment. She could not remember anymore what she had said or how she had fallen to the ground. She only heard her scream, that "no" she had cried against the sky. For the whole trip she had been hoping to find Stefano alive, perhaps injured, but alive. Her child to comfort and hug, to hold and take care of. All those useless words whispered by Renato's colleagues. There was nothing left to hope for. If I hadn't said yes to the scooter, if I had prevented him from joining his friends at the sea, if... All of the ifs in the world were useless. Paola knew that, they would not give her child back to her. That was when she had stopped believing in God. She had replaced him with drugs and sleeping pills. She used them to sleep at night, sometimes, secretly, even during the day. They gave her the strength to go forward. Dazed perhaps, but present.

Six years later, for her, it was as if time had stopped. Stefano was still around, hovered in the house. Paola would never admit that to anyone, but she knew, she felt that he was still alive. Present. Sometimes she distinctly heard his voice in the hall, deep and nasal.

"Mom, have you ironed my blue sweatshirt? I'm late. Where did you put my socks?"

She no longer ran to look for him, as in the early days, when she roamed the rooms, breathless, wandering as if possessed, chasing that whisper. She opened doors and looked around. She even looked under armchairs, behind curtains, inside closets. Stefano was there, she felt it, hidden somewhere, ready to come out if only she had found a way to locate him. Then and only then, she would be able to look in his eyes again, hug him, cry for joy, come out of the nightmare. Instead, each time she ended her desperate race in her son's bedroom. There she stopped, astonished. There she awoke from the dream. There lived the memory. Everything was like it had been that Sunday, the bed linen immaculate, the books resting disorderly on the desk, the guitar in a corner, the signatures book of the day of the funeral. Then, and only then, Paola understood again that he was gone forever, and she threw herself on the floor in tears. When she got up, when the storm of grief and madness left her free and returned her to the world of the living, she felt powerless and she put back the mask on her face, to become again the good wife, silent and discreet. She had nothing more to say to Renato. It just took ironing enough of his shirts with more zeal than usual to make him happy.

Six years after, Paola had learned to mastered both her husband and her son. When she heard the voice of Stefano chase her around the house, she brought her hands to her ears and repeated that it was just a fantasy. She suspended any activity, she remained with the iron in hand, or the broom suspended motionless in the air, and breathed hard, containing the urge to reach out to that whisper, look once again for her child, hug him, hold him, look into his eyes, smile for nothing like when he was so little and she changed his diaper, and he kicked the air making the verses that newborns make. She had convinced herself that the mysterious sounds she heard from time to time in the house were only one final act of love. Stefano, from the mysterious galaxy that had swallowed him, just wanted to let her know that he had not abandoned her, that he was there, always and no matter what, that he had not cut the umbilical cord. So Paola whispered softly "Ste", and she sat in the armchair, motionless but with all senses alert, hoping to glimpse a shadow, a light, a nod. She let hours pass, dreaming that he could show up again. In silence. The tears, her tears, stopped just inside her eyes, they did not even have the strength to roll down and wet her cheeks. She did not say her son's name in full, she no longer whispered to her husband, as she had done the first few times that Stefano had visited her. She was afraid of being considered mad, she was afraid she really was. She remained motionless, reaching for nothing. Only her son could take that posthumous caress.

"Yeah", she echoed her husband, at the door, slipping quickly away without another word.

"I will not come for lunch. Maybe even for dinner, I have to work like crazy these days", Renato called after her.

He neither turned to look at her. He was distracted. He had stopped long since to worry about the mental health of the woman, had long since ceased to care for her. At first yes, the first few days after Stefano's death, he had tried to hug her, to share emotions and words. But Paola was too far away and he was, in turn, on the brink of madness. For days he had not shaved, he had not washed, he had not gone to work. He had dug a furrow in the bed in the time spent looking at the ceiling, looking for the image of his child. He saw him on the soccer field, running, with happiness and physical exertion showing on his face. He found him again with the guitar in hand, asking him for an explanation about some chord, or in the car, singing along to songs of De Andrè after an old cassette player. Renato cried, silent. Paola stirred in the room, silent. She never approached him. She cried and ironed shirts. Sometimes she confided with a wink to Renato that Stefano had returned and talked to her. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows. They never touched, intimacy belonged to a bygone era. He was afraid to touch her, to take her suffering on his shoulder too. He was afraid they could infect one another with the disease death brings. Then, by tacit agreement, she had stopped telling him about her hallucinations and Renato was back at work, dressed as an inspector, washed and perfumed. As if it all had been just a bad dream. Only his hair had turned white at once, had lost consistency and vigour. And Paola's face had gathered the signs of aging, wrinkles suddenly scattered around her eyes and lips. The loss of a son is something devastating, a wound that splits you in two. It doesn't heal, you don't accept it. You just learn to live with the pain like you do after an amputation. In the evening at home, after dinner, Renato watched television in the living room while his wife was busy in the kitchen, with another TV on, showing some family drama. At night the bed was a parade ground in which it was impossible to meet, one facing left, the other right. In silence they had also chosen never to go to the sea. Not to go anymore, not even by accident, along the Aurelia.

"Heroes are all young and beautiful." Renato had sung that song a thousand times, thinking about Stefano, and with that quote in mind he had begun to write his first poem, an evening in late October.

"To you, my son, who were young and beautiful..."

An inspector who sings songs and writes poetry is not quite normal, he told himself, blaming himself, but then he acquitted himself. There are inspectors who write novels and even become famous, and there are those who go fishing. He had the soul of an artist in a body devoted by choice to law and order. A modern-day Cyrano, with his uniform hiding the inner passion. And the poet who lived in him would not stop fantasizing.

"I'll never know how you would have been as an adult", he thought, stopping in front of a picture of Stefano, a giant poster showing him while strumming the guitar. Paola had wanted to place it right in the bedroom, near the mirror.

The whole house spoke of the dead boy. His wife had scattered pictures and memories in every room, even in the bathroom, on the medicine cabinet, she had built an altar. Every day the woman lit a candle, each week she replaced the bouquet of fresh flowers in the bedroom of the boy. There was always a special occasion. It became impossible for Renato not to continually think about that child of whom they could not talk. He left home, mentally picturing his face. They resembled each other physically. How would he have been, now, at twenty-two? What faculty would he have chosen? Would they discuss about politics, the destination for holiday trips, and for his friendships? He speculated about the subtle pleasure he would have felt when accompanying him in the morning to the exams, or in asking him with complicity, and only apparent distraction, "Are you coming back for dinner tonight?"

What had he done wrong? Why had Stefano gone? This thought sent him back to the collective pain that he was about to face at the church, in front of other parents suffering with the same pain. He owed them to do a great job, give them at least one certainty. Who had given the guns to Silvia and Deborah? How had all that ruckus been born, and why blood had been shed in the halls of a high school in Rome? Why? Finding answers would not change the course of history, but perhaps it would prevent more slaughters in other schools. And also, there must be a hidden guilty. Maybe more than one. He could already think about at least two accomplices of that execution: the owner of the weapons used by the two killers and the pusher who gave them drugs. He got in the patrol car, deep in thought, and went to the church, his heart pulsing in his throat. He had decided to arrive early, before the funeral cars, to avoid having to be escorted inside. He still had to do an effort to move within the crowd before the arrival of the coffins. White coffins, dragged with effort by the children who had survived the massacre, touched as they passed by, touched gently as you do with the effigies of saints, drenched with tears, in poignant, intense applauses. In the background, a slow dirge played on a guitar. It took a few minutes before the devastating procession could walk the length of the aisle. One, two, three, four, five. It took a few minutes before the church found again a semblance of order, studied by the direction of priests and teachers. With the parents of the victims slumped in the front row, holding hands, until they merged into a pain that had neither beginning nor end.

Hundreds of people thronged the entrance, the strong smell of flowers and lit candles invaded the air, a soft whispering filled the large interior of the church. On the left, halfway down the aisle, the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmelo, with the child in her arms, was illuminated by a multitude of candles, lit relentlessly by desperate mothers and students, but what left truly breathless were the pictures of the children which dominated the place. On each coffin was resting a giant photo. The photographer who took care of group snapshots at school had made some small jewels, a work commissioned in record time by the principal of the school. The inspector lost himself watching those portraits, recognizing in each of them "his victims". Eleonora, the first from the right, had a beautiful face, with delicate features. She had curly red hair and intense green eyes. Almost all students had repeated to Pascucci that she was the real target of the slaughter, that Silvia and Deborah had been targeting her since the first day of school. They had threatened and humiliated her. The girl who was smiling for the camera, instead, seemed quiet and happy, a young adult aware of her charm, confident in dealing with life. The coffin, at the foot of the altar, was completely covered in yellow roses and white daisies. Right there, in front of it, someone had placed a pink backpack, next to the sign written by her classmates: "We will not forget you."

The parade of coffins was impressive, Pascucci looked at it like at a nightmare. Next to Eleonora's coffin there was that of Luca, it too covered in red and yellow daisies. On it, the uniform of the Roma football club that probably the boy used to play soccer. There was also the captain's shirt, autographed. Luca was a boy of Moroccan origin, slightly dark skin, black, curly, and thick hair, dark, intense, cunning eyes, bold and lively. "A lively boy", the inspector told himself, looking at the giant picture. Then there was Alessandro, who instead looked like a bully, one of those you meet at the exit of the Olympic stadium, with a beer in hand and some joints hidden in the pocket of the shirt. He had a piercing on his right eyebrow and a gelled-up hairdo, following the fashion of the time. A challenging smile, eyes wide open to look at the photographer. At the foot of his coffin there were some roller skates, and a sign made by his friends: "We will always wait for you, your rollers and your jokes. The guys of Mole Adriana." The little face of Alessia made her look like a small child rather than a high school girl. Long black hair framed her face. She had a shy smile, and she looked scared. For her, too, many people had brought flowers, but this time sunflowers, and there was a musical score to soften the farewell.

There was no photo of professor Rossigni instead. Maybe none was found, maybe her death was shrouded in a sort of reserve, Pascucci found himself thinking. It was certainly on the background in newspapers and in the several TV specials. All articles and services concerned the teenagers. The collective trauma was still in the air seven days after the "girls slaughter". On the coffin of the teacher, the only mahogany one, wild flowers and several yellow post-it notes, handwritten by the students.

The inspector, sitting quietly on the benches of the left aisle, almost halfway in the church, to merge with the mass, listened in silence to the whispers and the insistent sermon of Don Mario, the priest, asking forgiveness and prayers for the two killers.

"They too are victims and they have already paid. One is dead, the other is dying. We are left with the bitter task of admitting we are to blame and ponder on the level of barbarism that we have reached."

Renato nodded quietly, turning slightly to look around. The boys of the fifth E were sitting right behind parents and relatives, most of them could not contain their tears. The teaching staff had found a place on the opposite side of the church. Dazed expressions, carved faces. He wondered whether it was right to ill-treat people already so tried by the events. They had a burden too heavy to carry. But the priest went on, inflexible. He was a tall and powerful man, with white hair, thick glasses and a confident speech. From the pulpit he was reading with professional vigour pages and pages, probably handwritten, integrating them with improvised parts. It was an important homily, Don Mario knew that. It was going to be in the newspapers. It would make an impression to the students.

"Where were the parents of these girls when Silvia and Deborah took the guns and left their houses? Where were their teachers when they planned to kill? Is it possible that no one noticed anything? I ask you to be alert and attentive in school, not to close your eyes to alarming episodes. I would like never to hear the word bullying anymore, I would like never to hear again threats and petty theft described as if they were pranks, goliardic jokes. That's where they lead, dear teachers and parents. Is it possible that young guys can keep taking drugs without anybody doing anything? That guys hit each other for some small change? That they hate each other because one has high heels and makeup and another chooses to wear sneakers? What kind of world is this? Is it possible that we still hear about boys offended by a different colour of the skin? Is it possible that gangs of teenagers keep teasing the weakest, steal their pocket money, burn paper sheets in the classroom just to shoot everything with their phones and send the video to Youtube? Then shut this modern deviltry, or check the videos, filter them. Do your role as educators. Is it possible that we have to read about teenagers selling themselves to charge their phones? There are girls who let themselves be photographed nude at fifteen, do you understand? At fifteen, naked, for twenty dollars? I pray you to be careful. When we close our eyes to all this we are already guilty. I ask you to make one step back, parents and teachers. Stop, stop them. We are the first to be responsible for their behaviour, even when we choose not to see, not to comment, to be silent. We are all guilty."

Renato restrained a nervous movement of his body. He wanted to stand up and shout. Answer his own way. It wasn't so simple. There are guilty in flesh and bones, he thought, ruthless people selling drugs outside schools, buying the dreams of little girls for a few euro, giving out weapons and cocaine, broadcasting videos in which people can learn how to make a Molotov or shoot, spreading the theory that the more you mistreat a poor wretch the more you become a hero. The guilty in flesh and blood must be exposed and condemned, Renato repeated to himself. They must be distinguished from the silent accomplices who simply record the dominant culture, and from the careless parents who are not aware of having a drugged child at home. What fault could Youtube have, aside from annotating inflexibly the progressive disruption of a generation adrift? You can't sow the tares with the wheat, he told himself, breathing an anger that would soon lead him to leave the church and search, by every possible means, for who had given the guns to the two killers. He went back to hearing the priest carefully, hardly breathing the smell of flowers and incense. The homily had almost come to an end, he thought with relief.

"If you can understand this", Don Mario was saying, "you'll understand why I am asking you, on this day of endless pain, not only to pray for these innocent victims who are going today before God, but also for Silvia and Deborah, who are themselves victims and who are already paying for this unspeakable guilt. Forgiveness, this is what I ask. Forgive Silvia and Deborah."

His words fell into silence. Here and there, suppressed sobs could be heard. Nobody dared to say it was too early, no voice was raised to say, "No, not yet." Parents, students, teachers, onlookers stood still. It could be a sign of agreement or just respect for the priest, it could also be a clear sign of contempt. Renato Pascucci fidgeted on the bench, he feared an answer full of anger, a scream, a scene for which all of the hardcore journalists would have no pity, raising new controversies. He waited a minute, then calmed. The officers in plain clothes, discreetly scattered among the people in the church, drew in turn a sigh of relief. Nothing happened.

One by one, instead, the friends of the victims began to speak, called upon the altar to commemorate the dead. Greetings, fragments of memories, accompanied by silences and even some timid applause. Boys and girls with troubled faces, with notes nervously wrinkled in their hands. The attention of the inspector was drawn only by two of them. The first introduced herself as the sister of Alessia, the baby-looking victim. Claudia, that was her name, stood still on the pulpit, staring into space. She seemed to be looking far away, at a point lost in infinity, while tears fell without shame from her eyes. She took a few minutes before finding the strength to whisper her gaunt speech. She could be two or three years older than the other students. Long blond hair caressed her face, which look like a blade for how emaciated it was. Beautiful, of that kind of beauty that youth gives, a little Madonna of Sorrows, with a dark miniskirt worn with aplomb under a long black coat.

"Claudia is in pieces. She hasn't been eating anything for a week... since the death of Alessia", someone whispered in the bench behind him.

"It must be terrible to lose a sister like that", another voice replied in a grave tone.

This, more than anything else, led Pascucci to look at her carefully. Not the weight of the investigations – the desire to learn more about the children and their past – but the pain, the empathy.

"I never understood you, Alessia. We were so different. You played that damned piano with a love that I could not explain. You only troubled me, you made so much noise, you were always there, thinking about music... now, if you came back, I would leave you alone. I would let you play all the time. Forgive me, everyone forgive me... if you have someone you love, tell them, don't waste time. How can I tell now to Alessia that I will even miss her terrible music? I love you, little sister."

The girl got off the little pulpit with a shrug. She hadn't stopped crying for a moment while she had been reading her last farewell, in the general silence. Death carries along a cloud of unspoken words, a sense of guilt that no one can heal, a pain that you do not sew up. This was what the inspector was thinking, as he remembered how much he wanted to have said more to his son Stefano how he loved him, desperately, the way you can love only a piece of yourself.

Finally, it was the turn of a girl who looked like a pole, so tall and thin she was. She was dressed all in black, pants, sweater, even her coat and clothes made her look even more skeletal, another kind of embodiment of the pain, compared to the one Claudia had talked about. Her black hair was pulled back in a high ponytail. She was clenching her hands in punches that she let slip along her body. Rigid yet fragile at the same time. Something in her appearance made her look like a suicide bomber ready to explode, with dynamite hidden under clothes, on her stomach. There was in her the sense of death and yet the anger, the despair and the desire to end it, hate and love. She alternated words to tears. But it was in her intense eyes that you could glimpse a secret she would never reveal, maybe not even to herself. Inspector Pascucci remembered having heard her a few times in his office, even though he could not remember her name. She was a classmate of Silvia and Deborah.

"Sara, I am Sara", he heard her say in the end, with a faint low voice, amplified by the microphone. "Goodbye boys. Stay close and keep each other company... we of the fifth year love you so much and you will always be in our hearts, always. Eleonora, Luca, Alessia, Alessandro, professor Rossigni, we will miss you. Nothing at school will ever be the same without you, without Silvia and Deborah. I never, ever thought I would say goodbye to you like this. Nobody would have imagined. Perhaps we really are all guilty, as the reverend said... I would like to pray for my friends and their parents. I hope that one day, somewhere, we will meet again... let me say how sorry I am to be here, still alive... that if I had known, if only I had understood..."

She said no more. She walked away, crying, and jumped into the arms of a woman who had to be her mother, who was sobbing in turn like a raging river. The aisle was now illuminated by a mysterious beam of light coming from above. It came from an opening on the dome, kissing the flowers and the altar. A hidden choir of parishioners began singing softly "God is dead", and inspector Pascucci almost jumped on the bench. There was still Guccini to accompany his life. He turned and noticed that the kids knew the song and its words by heart. This too seemed strange to him. He decided he had seen what there was to be seen, and that he could not take it anymore. It was time to leave. The smell of incense made him dizzy, reopened hidden wounds that had never healed. He walked towards the precinct with crazy thoughts and he was happy that no one recognized him. Days of backbreaking work awaited, and he knew that he would bring only one dominant thought with him: what is the perception of death for a teenager? What do they feel or think when they decide to kill a peer? Do they really understand the harm they are doing, or do they think they are the stars of a TV show? Do they really understand what it means to die? Evil is a chain, it has a domino effect, starting from a point and going on endlessly, jotting down everything it meets. Silvia and Deborah, he was sure, had not even imagined this. And neither had that Sara, the little suicide bomber who must have sensed something instead. He decided he had to call her and listen to her again, enter her secret. Whatever it was.

### I killed Bambi

"Murder murder murder. Someone should be angry. The crime of the century. Who shot little Bambi? Never trust a hippie. 'Cause I love punky Bambi."

("Who Killed Bambi?", Sex Pistols)

The music comes on strong. "Who Killed Bambi?" A ballad. Only they sing it like that. The Sex Pistols. I discovered them because of their name. I bought all the CDs I could find. Dad paid. Dad always pays for my culture. Whatever makes him happy... Ah ah ah ah. Sex Pistols, what an idea. The name goes right to my blood. It's mine. I want it, I claim it. Pistols, sex, sex, pistols. Ah ah ah. Bambi! But Eleonora was not Bambi. She was just a bitch. A snob. I didn't give a damn about her. Deborah, yes. Deborah was Bambi: defenceless, friend, sister. I killed Bambi, and God killed me. There is a difference. A fucking pain in the back. Something that could kill you. Ah ah ah. A hole as precise as a drill turning inside you. A devastating shout. Shit. It happened, it happened to me. I see only dark. Death. Dark and guns. Who shoots with me? Who shoots behind me? A man, a car, an army? Thanks God there is Cocaine. He looks at me quietly and purrs. He loves me. He's is the only one in the world to see through me. The cat of the naughty little girl who now became the witch of fairy tales. Meow. That's me. Come on, what a blast.

Here, it's another day. I don't take it. I don't cry. I'm sitting at the computer and playing. I het high. Go. One shot, then another and another. I keep the gun in my hand, take aim with the mouse. I practice. I must learn. It takes discipline to learn. The moving targets are moving. There is the red cross which is worth ten points, and then the bouncing circle. Here and there. Up, down, up, down. Every so often the coloured hands appear to distract you. You need to hit the mark. You have to be careful. You have a supply of ten bullets, when you finish them you press the R button. You reload. You can shoot again. But if you wait a moment longer, you lose your turn. Only the score appears, and it is low. I write my name, "Silvia", the game recognizes me, it knows everything. It analyzes my score, compares it with others. I'm good, I admit it. I'm among the top scorers. Silvia shooting, Silvia dancing with the gun. Silvia, Silvia, Silvia, here, this is my name and I had forgotten it, but the computer does not forget anything, everything comes to light. It's smart. You search inside it and discover the life of a person, who he was, what he thought, what he subscribed too, which marks he had in elementary school. The computer is better than Sherlock Holmes, if you know how to use it. Now that I think about it, I never searched for Eleonora. But it was not worth the effort. She was all the evil in the world. You don't study bitches. You bring them down. First with thoughts. Then with guns. The true ones, those which go boom, boom, boom. "I shot the sheriff...", Bob Marley sang. I shot the sheriff, but I swear it was in self-defence. That's what he said, I am sure. Give me my music at least. I have a right to it. I want it back.

I really don't know how it started. If it was for the guns, the smoke or because we really wanted to. There was that little bitch in our class and we had to get rid of her. I thought that from day one. She came in looking like the princess on the pea, with red hair falling over her shoulders, a white Lacoste and trendy jeans. I even liked her shoes, the perfect white Converse with pink laces and embroidered flowers. A terrific physique. A living provocation.

"That one eats men", Deborah said in a whisper. I hadn't even noticed her.

"Who eats whom?"

"That one."

Take the gun, take the gun right away and shoot the bitch, little Silvia. Get rid of the shitty girl who wants to bring order to the fifth E, the class of anarchy, peace and continuous pissing about. Everything dances in front of her, shapes and words, contacts and friends. I think about it. Friends. Fuck. And who are they? I had one, called Deborah, and now she's gone. I shot her. I, myself. It happened a few days – maybe a few hours – ago and it was not at the computer. Here, I can see myself. I am in the middle of a room and the people around me is afraid. Silvia shooting, shooting and dancing with the gun. Silvia, Silvia, Silvia. I try to shed light and see better, I cannot. Everything around me is dark. A silence full of fear. But I'm not afraid. I am elsewhere. I pray. God of the universe, make all of the evil ones disappear. One shot and they go down, all fall down. And this is a ring-a-ring-o'roses.

This morning, inspector Pascucci came again, the eternal stoned. I felt his angry eyes on my face, my body, piercing me. I'm sure that his eyes light up when he sees me. I am his prey, his moving target. The game reversed. He does not have a gun, he has words. He slips them one after the other. He seems to be complaining, but it's an indictment. He says that I have to tell him about the weapon. Who gave it to me, who taught me to shoot. What did I have in my head and blah blah blah. He looks like a mad priest, such scary tirades. To me, really to me? Come on, go away, you are ridiculous. He says a flood of things, I am not hearing. I'm lying on the bed in this fucking hospital. Every now and then they remove the IV needle. Every now and then I have fun at the computer. Every now and then I dream. My world now is populated by nurses. Entering and leaving. They look at me with sorrow and disapproval. They come in and leave again. They check my temperature, take my blood. They are only shadows. I could delete them with the gun if I only knew where it ended. I keep thinking. Lord who created everything, give back to me my legs and voice. Let me get out of bed and pull me out of this nightmare. But nobody listens to me. I am always in the middle of the ring-a-ring-o'roses. I lead it. I dance and I'm good. Light, I hover in the air. Hip hop, the body loosens up, following the music, it wiggles. Electricity, I'm electricity, like Billy Eliott. I know, I can fly. Forward, backward, I bend my back, touch the floor. Fall on the floor. I am in the labyrinth, I run, run, so many rooms and I don't know where the door to leave is, assuming that there is any. I feel like I am my cat when we sterilized him. He stood lying on the floor, motionless. For two days he refused food, moved aside if I tried to pet him. No purring, no cuddling. Nothing at all. Stop. Cocaine, the cat without sex, in love with his own pain. Oh Cocaine, I wish I could pick you up and make you purr, caress you with my hands, smoke a joint while you're napping. Shit, I can't do that anymore. I will stay here forever, lying on the bed. I'm already dead.

You die in many ways. Without realizing it. You die, period. I resume the game, now there are frogs, they pass by in groups, hopping, and you have to shoot. You shoots them in the head, and if you hit them they jump in the air, it's very funny. Frogs running headless. They are green, the grass is yellow, so you don't get confused. Crocodiles you shoot between the eyes, otherwise they don't die. Their heads blow off too. They have no imagination, the ones who create these pastimes. And in the cemetery (this is nicer) you must hit the bandits, running, gun in hand, among the tombstones. The game name and atmosphere come from a film, titled "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", and also has a music, the soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. Every time you hit it's silenced. Then it starts again. Your opponents come right in front of you, you have to be quick. At the end, a guy with a hat appears and tells you that you have been good. You have won another game. I play it in English, it is in English only. When you're using your computer you need to know English, because all the information are in that language. I wonder why I understand them correctly. I even understand the Sex Pistols, but that's another story.

I look at myself, I don't see me, I don't exist. I'm seventeen and I'm trapped in a bed. Spinning around in my head. And it's all off around me. Only dark. Nobody knows if I will heal, if I'll be able to talk and walk again. If I will stand again and tell the story they want to hear, and say that I am sorry, that I didn't know. This is what everyone is expecting from me; reassurance. They wait for me to say that I had gone crazy. That for a moment I had lost my head. So they could be at peace, they will not have to condemn themselves, take decisions, or think, feel guilty and forgive themselves, look beyond the wall that divides us. They will forget in a hurry, move forward. But I really don't know on which side I am and on which side they are. Too many years divide us. And even language. They have one, I have another. They don't meet, don't even collide. They move on two parallel tracks. Mine and theirs. My age and theirs.

Look at my father, who comes here and holds my hand, caresses my hair, and cries. I didn't think he knew tears. Pain and defeat, yes, I always knew he had them in himself since when he lost Mom. But tears, tears stream down the cheeks of children when they got hurt. I thought he had lost them, but they slipped from his face to mine, like a flooding river. I felt them. I wanted to say "Con, so you love me", but I have no way of communicating with him. Poor thing, he makes me feel tenderness for him. But he says a lot of lies. He whispers nice words, and at the same time he thinks I am a monster, no, maybe he thinks he didn't understand anything, that I am a stranger. Someone that one day pulled out a gun from the hat and started shooting.

"Silvia, Silvia, don't die, come back to your dad. I love you."

He says that with conviction, I will end up believing him. But understanding one another, no, Dad. You are on another planet, each one of us is on a different planet. Even Deborah was on a different planet. And now I miss her. My little sister. Shit.

I'm back in the classroom, with the wild-eyed bitch looking at us. That Eleonora with ten and honours in Latin and Greek. She must be shoot in the heart. If you shoot at her heart you hit her and she falls down. Our classmates don't understand, they wave in jubilation when I spurt jokes, and always know on which side to be. I'm the general, they follow me. They don't think, they obey. They don't know the Sex Pistols, but they know Vasco, yes, and Liga. They belong to these days, I am beyond. Eleonora is the outcast, the other, the rich, the swot who wants to divide and convert. They all realized. Immediately. The declaration of war was delivered instantly. I felt like a kind of Indira Gandhi. The true revolutionary. And her, miss Northern League, understood from day one where she had ended up and what was going to happen. We knew which was the toy of the new school year.

We always picks up a target on the first day of school. It helps to keep in practice. Last year, Debby and I had selected in the pile two twins of the first year, the sisters Chiara and Giada Whothehellknows. They were two absolute nonentities, and occasionally, just to keep in practice, we would have them give us their snacks. Sometimes we also stole the change they had in their pockets.

"If you say it to anyone", we threatened them, "we'll let everyone know that you ratted out and no one will talk to you anymore."

It was too easy, they didn't even object. Not once they complained to their parents or the teachers, not a hint with the principal or the priest, who is the only one who can really make us the sermon. It wasn't even fun to torture them, they seemed stoned. After a while we stopped looking for them. It really wasn't fun.

The secretary, on the contrary, she was so hilarious, at least initially. Adrenaline? I don't know. Mrs. heavy-ass, so called because she was constantly sitting, came to our school from the central branch with a letter of transfer in January. After the Christmas holidays, to be precise. In my opinion, she must have had a strange disease, because I remember her perpetually hazed. Perhaps she took tranquilizers or psychotropic drugs, I don't know. Anyway, you could pass in front of her and she didn't realize it. You could go into her office and make photocopies or take books and she didn't even look up to see what was happening. One like that is a moving target. At least for someone like me. During the break, Deborah and I took documents from her desk, or moved her things around until she became hysterical.

"Who took the red folder with the receipts of payments?" she screamed going down the hall.

And everyone, without exception, came out of classrooms and laughed at her. Miss heavy-ass was getting on in years and her legs were too big to run. I still distinctly see her elephant-like calves covered by horrible black stockings that outlined them perfectly. Under the stockings she must have had hair like a boy, thick and straight, but we could not verify. She was short, say around five feet one, give or take one inch, and she dared sporting some disturbing hairdo, usually wave upon wave. To make matters worse, she dressed always in the same, depressing style; skirt, blouse and golf. Blue or beige, there was no way out. Come mid-April, we no longer saw her. She sent in a medical certificate and the principal explained to us that she would not return to school. She had chosen to go straight from sick leave to retirement, without striking a blow. In the end it wasn't fun. With Eleonora it was.

She was different. Not only for how she dressed.

She was a swot, a terrible swot.

And toady.

She always knew what the teacher asked during examinations.

She had become, in a few days, the darling of professor Boschi.

Come on. She had to pay.

We waited for her outside the school. I remember it very well. She was walking straight, with the iPod in her ears. Obviously the latest model, very small, pink. Be quiet, Northern Leaguer. We explained her who was in command. And what was her place. But she didn't understand anything. And that's why we decided to kill her. We had to delete her. We did.

Here, now they come to turn the light off.

I recognize the steps of the bad nurse. She has a heavy thread. She slaps the switch with violence and chases my father out of the room as if he were an illegal alien. I have the feeling that she's getting convinced that the hospital belongs to her, that it relies on her, for better or for worse. One day I heard her arguing with the policeman stationed at the door of my room.

"It is useless to stay here, how do I have to say that? She cannot escape, we are here. And then, she is in a coma, you know? We don't know whether she will ever recover."

She screamed as a woman possessed. And he even answered her.

"It doesn't depend on me. Order of the inspector."

"We were just missing the sentinel", she replied in a huff.

That's how I understood that I was hovering between life and death. And I saw myself: I'm turning around the Earth, hung from an IV drip. If nothing happens and they don't remove the needle from my arm, I can stay here. But why should I? Of course my brain still works. I can tell day from night by the slow flow of nurses and noises. Now, for example, is time to go to bed in homes. And here, too. The voices that were strong and able to come thundering in my ears, now became a whisper, and the frenzy became quiet. Silence. Panic. It is time to curl up in bed and think, how did the poet say? Ah, here: "some people know the names of the stars by heart, I recites absences". That should be Nazim Hikmet. I studied him at school, he was a myth.

I have absences, I just have to organize them, arrange them, put them in place, waiting to open my eyes again and talk, stand up again. If I move my legs I do not feel them, better to say I cannot move them. My body goes on its own, detached from me. I should be afraid, I know, afraid of being on a wheelchair or worse, of dying, of never coming out of this coma. I should have some strong, devastating feeling, roll around in the bed, draw attention, scream that I hear them all. But I can't. I am here, suspended, even with emotions. I just like to get high with my thought. To imagine being at my computer. That's the real world, I talk, I can chat, I play, I study, I think. Me and it. The rest will come later. Now I feel my physiological needs. I pee automatically, without shame. Sometimes I even poo.

When the good nurse cleans me she pats me. She gently removes the bed-pan and whispers: "Poor creature. You're so skinny."

Her colleague gasps something instead: "When you wake up, brat, they will make you clean the shit."

What a bigoted bitch! She's so cowardly! She says these horrible things only when she thinks no one can hear her. I am sure that then she goes to the church and prays, maybe hoping I will find redemption. She'd better mind her own business. However, all things said, I prefer her over the good one. When they are together in my room, they talk about me. Free-wheeling speeches.

"Doesn't this little girl have a mother?" the compassionate one said once as she was removing the IV needle to put it in the other arm.

"It is clear that she doesn't. She must be dead. If she had one, she would be here", the other one replied, muttering.

I started rooting for her.

"So that's why she is like that."

"Like what?" I would have asked if I had still had a voice, and if there is a gift that I have never lacked is the ability to use words properly. I have the gift of gab.

"I think you are born like that, and that's it", the commander sentenced in a dry tone. She thinks she has innate knowledge. She is arrogant, hateful and angry with me.

"Do you think she will ever come out of her coma?"

"What do I know? I have no crystal ball."

The hag is tough. Convinced and of the utmost integrity. Come on, say it, say another little word, ugly old witch. She turns around, I hear her moving in the room, she removes the needle, puts it in again.

"With what she did, she'd rather die soon. As soon as possible."

The other one opens the window, a river of air comes in, caressing me. What nostalgia. God, how I would like to go for a walk. But what did I do that is so terrible?

"Death must not be wished to anyone", the good one says, and she closes the window.

The end of a moment. I'm immersed again in this soporific mud. Sleep, get high. I'm in the circle, they take me, raise me, throw me down. I am a doll for them. Two nurses all for me, still I'm alone, motionless, forced to listen and never reply. I must go forward. I don't know where yet. Instead, they are gone, their aggressive steps on the floor, four hooves leaving. Clop clop clop. No one comes to keep me company. Not even Sarah. Only my father and the inspector. So nice! Two men all to myself. What else can you ask for? Redeem myself? Ouch, ouch. My head hurts, I feel it wants to break away from the body. It wants to go get cleaned up. A discharge. Like the frogs, like crocodiles. If you shoot, even my head jumps. Shit, Deborah, you had to do it, and instead you got lost. You left me to them. You betrayed the pact. We had an agreement. I trusted you. I got high with you. If you leave you're shit. You wanted it. All fall down, Deborah. Do you remember? Do you remember? I do remember you.

And the first thing that comes to mind is your voice, bullying, always a tone higher than the others. The way you talked attracted attention. Sometimes you talked like a clown, in falsetto, you sounded like a character in a cartoon. On other occasions you played acting like a teacher, then you became serious and melodramatic. You used your voice as if it were a camouflage, to hide the real you. You put the sunglasses on your nose, a bit sloping, and did your best impression of a psychoanalyst face. You had copied it from a movie.

"So you are suffering? And tell me, how much are you suffering?"

We laughed so much. We invented the levelmeter of suffering. From zero up. The maximum score was for the evenings alone at home as punishment. But only you got them, and they took away your computer, mobile phone and TV. Enough to be sent to an asylum. I've always said that you were born into a family of crazies.

"So you are suffering? And how much are you suffering?"

That voice now rings in my ears. I would do anything to turn it off. Not to listen. Stop Deborah, stop talking. I can't take it, I have a headache. You drill into my head. I drilled yours. I can't take it, please. I start playing again, one, two, three. I hit, I hit, I hit again. Silvia is my name, but I have not fallen yet. But I killed Bambi. Someone please forgive me...

### Eleonora, the Northern Leaguer

"At school the seat is empty, Marco is inside me... huge distances seem to divide us. But my heart beats strong within me. I wonder if you'll think about me.

If you ever speak with your parents.

If you hide like me."

("La Solitudine", Laura Pausini)

Eleonora Cremaschi, with her face like a Northern Leaguer and her fifteen years of protected life in Milan, had arrived in Rome in the middle of August, with her heart in turmoil.

"We'll find less traffic on the highway, the desert city, we will do everything more quickly", her mother had sentenced. She seemed more tired every passing day.

She had packed some suitcase of colourful Summer clothes, colourful sandals and makeup tools. She had entrusted a dozen diligently prepared boxes to the terrible and vibrating cares of the transport company. Inside she had stuffed books, clothes, accessories, trinkets, shoes, boots, her collection of small perfume bottles – with the small pink wooden show-case on which she used to expose them in her bedroom – and the collection of fashion magazines she had been accumulating for some months. On each package she had attached a blue label on which the contents of the box was handwritten. She had then followed with her eyes the precious boxes as they were being loaded onto the truck by two labourers who didn't even speak Italian, and had jumped for the way in which they were putting one package on top of the other at top speed, without even caring about the "fragile" sign. At each collision, even small, she felt a sting: she felt like she was seeing parts of her life being shattered. Having to pack her things in a hurry had cost her, but not as much as the choice of her parents to move town, to change work and lifestyle. For her it had meant leaving her nest in Corso Sempione – where she had grown up – her great love, Marco, her friends, pretty much everything.

"You'll see, you'll like Rome, it's beautiful, and you will have more chances... I understand, it will be difficult at the beginning, but I could not do otherwise, I had to accept the transfer... It's a professional opportunity I can't afford to lose. Really, believe me, eventually you will like it. Moving will be good for you too", her father had said, looking good-naturedly at her as he was giving her the solemn announcement.

She only nodded, in shock. She was accustomed not to complain at home. Obedient and well-bred, that was her fate, she thought. That was how she had been brought up. Even during the trip in the car she had just stood in silence, obstinately looking out the window, the iPod in her ears endlessly repeating the song by Laura Pausini that better described her at the time, "The loneliness". She had shed on it a few tears, hidden by her Prada sunglasses. She did not know that it was going to be the last journey of her life.

Rome was hot – perhaps more than Milan – full of monuments – for sure more than Milan – made of shops in every street – more than Milan – and almost closed for holidays, like Milan. The first days of the new life in the capital had been spent emptying boxes and walking in the neighbourhood to explore the city and find a school dance worthy of the great passion that animated her. She had worn a tutu for the first time at five years of age, before the eyes of a hundred enthralled parents. Since then she had always loved to have the looks on her, her red hair tied in an elegant chignon, her hands outstretched towards success. Yeah, success. Eleonora saw it close at hand, just like perfection. She had learned that from her father, Francesco. From an early age she had been admiring him, bent over books at night, in a small study he had obtained in the loft. She looked at him from below, lying on the carpet with her elbows on the ground to hold her head facing up, in love with her father like every girl. One day, she used to think, she would do the same, wrapped in that aura of sacred respect that the house took when he came back. Everything seemed to stand on attention, from books to items, even the dishes, and especially her mother. That was why studying wasn't hard for her, on the contrary it seemed natural. It was only the prelude to a triumphal march towards a future as princess of the court, diaphanous and elegant, like a crossbreed between a popular fashion model and a career woman. Or so she imagined before coming to Rome and becoming a student at the Marco Polo high, fifth E, the class of "illiterate peasants", as she labelled it after the first day of school.

Having no new acquaintances to pass the time with, neither new boyfriends, Eleonora kept venting evening after evening with her best friend. She sat at the computer, opened the chat room and talked with Chicca in Milan. By then she was the only confidant she had left, the only contact with the life she had led before moving to Rome, the life she had so loved. Between her and Marco, after the first days of phone calls and text messages, silence had fallen, as if by tacit agreement they no longer knew what to say or no longer wanted to hurt each other too much. Sometimes Eleonora stopped to stare, with nostalgia, at the photos on Facebook portraying them together, hugging, in love. She stared at them intently, as if they belonged to a distant time, but when she was about to write a greeting, just a simple hello, her hand stood suspended in mid-air and she could not even type a letter. Then she resumed her woes to her best friend.

"I can't stand it, Chicca. I can't. I'm losing the will to go to school, study, dress, eat. I'm desperate."

"You were always the best. Professors were crazy for you. Do you remember Sister Agnes? She said you were too good to be in class with us. She made me mad... but I was happy for you, proud to be your best friend."

"It was totally different. A different time! Now every time I have to go to school I get a stomach ache."

"You are strange. I don't recognize you you, Ele."

"If you only knew. It's a madhouse. They treat me like an enemy, a danger. They even call me the Northern Leaguer."

"You must denounce them. You have to stop accepting this, talk to someone, the principal, a teacher... You must seek help, and soon."

"I don't think so. They'll think I'm a spy."

"Please Ele, I don't know what they did to you in Rome, but come to your senses. I don't know you anymore. Do you want me to call your parents? They would listen, they trust me."

"No, please do not drag my parents in this! Mom is too sick."

"And you? How are you? "

"Like shit."

"You see? Please listen to me. Do something, you can't live like this."

Eleonora spent this way even the evening before the slaughter, talking with her best friend. They had always been like sisters; same friends, same tastes, same dance class twice a week. As children on the tips of their feet, then with hip hop music as the soundtrack of their rhythm. They had chosen each other in first grade, a look and that empty desk for two to be filled had been enough. Since then they had kept walking together, they shared secrets, affinities, anxieties and certainties, until the day in which the news of Eleonora's family moving to Rome had come. But those six hundred kilometres were not enough to separate them. They kept living in symbiosis in some way, constantly talking on the phone or via the internet, with mails and chat.

"I miss you Chicca."

"I miss you too, sweetie."

"At eighteen, however, we're going to live together."

"Yes, in London. We'll have a lot of laughs."

"We'll study as well."

"We have to. I want to shake the world, go on the most important stage, be remembered as a great actress."

"And I'll be your legal advisor. Everyone will keep asking you who is the beautiful lady who takes care of your possessions. Hey, how is Marco?"

"How do you think? He misses you."

"Maybe..."

"Why not give him a call?"

"Come on, don't start again. I don't feel like doing that."

"It seems madness to me."

"I'm not talking about it."

"Ok. Do you remember the Slim? "

"Sure! He was an item with Laura."

"Yeah, but now they broke and he invited me to dance, next Saturday."

"Good Chicca. I too have had an invitation. At a football game."

"And Marco?"

"You know. I have to forget him."

As if it were easy, she thought. Marco was a curious boy, tall just enough to seem protective, always wearing a baseball hat, tight jeans, his black hair cropped short. A few break dance steps made up on the fly, the books he read compulsively, his polished and polite way of speaking. Eleonora had learned to love him on the school desks. Classmates and life mates first, best friends and sweethearts later. When they kissed for the first time, under the front door, it had really seemed to her to hear bells, like in an old fairy tale. And it would not even be easy to replace Chicca, another breed compared to the girls she was getting to know in Rome. She had something more, a deep inner wisdom which already made an adult of her. Eleonora considered her the best possible confidante, a kind of psychoanalyst at hand. Nobody could ever call her beautiful; she was physically insignificant, she still looked like a little girl with thick glasses and devastating braces on her teeth, of which she was very ashamed. But when she climbed on a stage to dance or play a character, she became someone else, she changed, she lived the typical metamorphosis of the actress and pulled out the best of her. The life of Eleonora stopped with them. She repeated that in her mind at night, curled up in bed crying, avoiding being seen or heard. Alone. That's how she felt, a little abandoned girl. Despite the many technological possibilities available to her, Milan had become unreachable, near the heart and the sky, but so far to the touch. In Milan, there were the Navigli, the old and whooping convent school where she had studied since the time of nursery-school, the park where she met her friends, the disco on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the bar where she went to chat, the walks with Marco, who reached out with his hands and made blood rush to her head, but she didn't want to think about that now.

From a few days she had been having more serious problems than homesickness to deal with. Now she had to decide about the present and the future, about study and especially about how to survive in a class of hooligans.

The blame, she repeated, was all on her parents. They had decided to leave Milan in a flash, without consulting her, transplanting her in a city of lunatics and putting her into a public school, chosen simply for its location.

"Stop complaining. You just have to study", they had boomed when Eleonora had stubbornly asked for further assurances about the choice of the school.

"We do it for your own good", they had replied.

So she had found herself drawn into a small high school in the heart of Prati, which sole merit was being two steps away from their new apartment, that one actually chosen with care, a few meters from the Court of Cassation. It was there that her father would work, after his years as a magistrate in Milan. An improvement just for him, Eleonora thought with hidden resentment.

"Thugs, they are just thugs", she had vented with Chicca after the first day of school. "They immediately said I was of the Northern League because I am from Milan. They called me a bitch because I'm cute and dress well. They treated me like shit. And you don't know how they are. Scary. I don't know how long I will be able to resist with those illiterate. I miss you, I miss you all."

And in writing these words, she had started to cry, but she had not told that to her friend. She had kept it to herself, for fear of appearing suddenly too fragile, at the mercy of some fifteen aliens who looked at her as if she was an alien herself. There was no possibility of contact between them. They were too different.

Yet she had tried hard to be polite and up to the situation. She had dressed with particular care for her debut in the classroom, designer low-waist jeans, white sneakers with flowers, the polo highlighting her quite good cleavage, freshly shampooed hair, light but determined makeup. I am really cute, she had thought a few steps from the entrance gate, plucking up courage to face the new adventure. Soon after, however, she had had to hide a grimace of disgust. The school had made a bad impression on her. The boys and girls were different from those she usually frequented. There weren't the faces of loved ones waiting for her, but disordered groups of teenagers with caps, earrings, piercings, and boys with their hair held high and erect with gel, like columns on their heads. A totally Roman disorder, she had said herself, slipping fearfully amid that chaos. On the floor, writings immortalized in white chalk. " I love you vale" or "One, ten, a hundred, a thousand Raciti." A great desire to turn around and go home, to start shouting, had overcome her.

She missed Milan and her friends, the nun who ringed the bell and the large yard where they could chat and where everybody knew everybody. She had spent ten happy years in that school. She even remembered distinctly the stones of the building, the hiding places, the makeshift outdoor seats where her and Chicca sat, talking about boys, the stairs to be climbed to go to the classroom, the thrills of fear when the mother superior arrived and someone was smoking, the voices of students she would have recognized even with her eyes closed. And there she was now, transplanted in a disorderly Rome where everyone seemed friendly and was not at all.

"You'll see, you'll make new friends and fall in love with another boy, and soon Milan will be but a memory", her mother had told her not long ago, kissing her on the doormat, still in her night gown, her hair tousled, looking sleepy.

Eleonora had looked at her aghast. How couldn't she understand how difficult it was to start over, how hard it was going to be for her to join a different class without even Marco's presence as consolation? No, that woman could not remember having been fifteen anymore.

She made up her mind, took courage, entered the school.

"Hello everybody. I am Eleonora."

In the classroom she had been met with a chilled silence. A horrible classroom, she had thought, watching the walls daubed with graffiti and faded posters. She had sat quietly in the only available desk, near the window, suffering a little for having to settle for a wobbling chair covered in ink stains. She had started to place pens and pencils in random order. That sloppiness gave her a sense of nausea.

"So you're the newcomer. I'm Silvia. Where do you come from?"

A very skinny girl had approached her aggressively, some kind of spider dressed in black, heavy lines of eye-pencil over her eyes, hair pulled up, supported by a series of coloured pegs, a piercing just below her lower lip. She looked older than her.

Eleonora had swallowed, answering politely.

"Milan. I moved a few days ago."

"Milan? Come on. Don't you know we hate Milanese? We're fucking Roman!"

Silvia had stretched her face towards her as if she wanted to get inside her. Eleonora had felt a chill pass through her back. They say the first impression when you meet a person is what counts. She had to be afraid of her.

"Fuck, guys, charge, we have a Northern Leaguer in the classroom."

Silvia had labelled her such, turning away with contempt. It had been the signal, a declaration of war to which the loyalists had immediately associated. A kind of ringleader, Eleonora called her. She was accustomed to perceive the moods of others by sensitivity, empathy. In the old school, in Milan, she had been on the other side, having always been considered one of the most popular girls, one to be imitated. She had never had to assert themselves or struggle up the slope.

"Actually I have nothing to do with Bossi and his people", she tried to say, embarrassed, forcing a smile.

"Ah, Nordic, speak Italian", a stocky boy, who was to good manners as she was to karate, told her. She discovered soon after that he was called Alessandro.

"Sure you won't always come so attired to school!" a plump, haunted-looking girl had addressed her.

"Go Deborah", Silvia had cried, and she had approached her, lifting from her bench, with a touch of envy, the Prada sunglasses that Eleonora had absentmindedly placed next to her diary.

"Can I have them? No? Such a louse you are, than take them."

With scorn, Deborah had let them fall. Eleonora had taken them mid-fall by a miracle, and of course she had carefully refrained from adding that she had two other pairs and alternated between them, matching the colour of her clothes. If she had still been in Milan there wouldn't have been any problem. She could have proudly announced it to Chicca and her friends, who would just start to compete for primacy in the field of looking good.

"What does your father do to buy you Prada, the pimp?" Alessandro had said this new compliment, and Eleonora had looked at him, startled by the piercing he boldly wore on his right eyebrow.

"See that rich-girl backpack! Have you been sent here to make us angry? What do you think Marina? Isn't it an insult?", Deborah had added with a touch of arrogance, in the midst of the general clamour, turning to the friend close to her.

"I say it is pure crap! This one's really a Northern Leaguer", the addressed girl had commented. She was the most striking of the class, with a long, tight-fitting, white tee shirt worn over black leggings. Her hair was black, cropped short, and she had coloured earrings and a heavy makeup that Eleonora mentally branded as vulgar. Marina, meanwhile, had gotten close to Alessandro, hugging him as if to show he was her property, and began beating her diary on the desk, as if it were a drum.

"It takes the wave, guys", she said laughing, and at that point they had all stood up and had started singing in choir, rhythmically "Nor-thern Lea-guer. Nor-thern Lea-guer ".

Eleonora had not responded. She had just blushed. Embarrassed. Humiliated. On the verge of a panic attack. She had looked around, shocked. Looking for a touch of humanity. She had noticed the little Alessia – a petite teenager who, half-hidden behind her backpack, was pretending that nothing had happened – and a young man with curly hair and a skin darker than that of the others, who looked at her from the other side of the room, motionless, undecided about what to do. Eleonora had found herself praying that the bell rung as soon as possible.

It had gone like that, there was nothing she could do. That classroom was some kind of Dante circle. On one side stood Silvia and Deborah, laying down the law, then two or three people who carried out their orders. Then came the rest of the class, a silent and apathetic group hiding in the general chaos. Choosing the path of abstention. However and wherever she turned, Eleonora felt hostility. The two leaders called her "the Leaguer", for all others she was a stranger to be avoided, a danger, the "red-haired vamp". They looked disgusted at her clothes and turned around. On her desk, on the third day of school, someone had written in large letters "lousy Milanese." She had brought alcohol from home to delete the epithet, among the laughter and jeers of Silvia.

"Come on. Lousy and Leaguer, you're hygienist too! Boring to death."

Eleonora had looked down and kept rubbing the cotton swab hard on the writing, with the same ardour with which she would have willingly deleted from her eyesight Silvia and the rest of her party. She did not know what to say. She had nothing to say, but in order to survive she had decided to adapt to what seemed to be the hypothetical typical Roman student at Marco Polo high. She went to school always with the same pair of jeans and only indulged in an occasional colourful golf and some trendy short jackets she had started to buy at the stalls in via Cola di Rienzo or at the little market in Viale Tiziano.

Her new style hadn't gone unnoticed with her mother.

"Rome is really changing you, or maybe you're just growing up. You have become sober, almost discreet, as if you were hiding. Don't you like those boots you made me pay an arm and a leg last winter anymore? Back then it seemed that you'd be dead without them. And why don't you make up anymore? Not that it hurts, mind you. I like you even so, but you look different. What's wrong?" she asked her one morning before she left to go to school. But Eleonora did not answer. By then she lacked the words.

"I know it's hard, it is difficult even for me to settle down. Milan is another world, and we know few people here, I still take the wrong turn with the car and struggle with the parking for hours and hours. But it could have been worse, what if we had moved to Palermo or Naples, or in a small suburban town. Are you really so unhappy?"

"I'm unhappy, but this is not the point, Dad has to work", she whispered at the end of the sermon, with her head down.

Her mother had stopped talking, pleased by the sensible answer that sounded like an acquittal. She had caressed her cheek, convinced she had understood everything. She ignored, however, that Eleonora had started to be seriously afraid of going to school, after what had happened the day of the first history examination.

"Eleonora, you want to come?"

Professor Maria Boschi had an easy-going air of respectability printed on her forehead, huge Mary Poppins-style bags from which pens, class assignments, books, records and colourful shawls – in which she wrapped when the atmosphere in the classroom seemed stifling – came out at random. Her hair were cut just below the ears. She wore baggy pants, oriental style. She was a school teacher who had passed through the Sixties, feminism and the occupations of the first university, before seeing TV and showgirls turn off the light of reason. She knew how to treat the kids and what to expect from them. An old suffragette, she had not forgotten that the job of a teacher can be revolutionary, and she tried, with tenacity, with all means. She was irreducible. She entered the class with a copy of the Republic, waved it and then sighed.

"You should read a newspaper sometime. Hegel said that the newspaper is the morning prayer of the modern man."

"Negative, we have the iPod. We can't read and listen to the music at the same time, professor ", Alessandro retorted, and the class laughed.

Mrs. Boschi laughed too, to keep the pace. She worked hard to remain at their level, even in physical appearance. Despite her merciless wrinkles, she still retained a young dressing style, like an enlightened intellectual. Pearl gray hair, result of a skilful dye, glasses with a light black rim, kept tied around the neck with a silver chain, coloured short jackets. Eleonora, who was looking for someone in which she could mirror, thought she had taste.

"Well, Eleonora, how do you find Rome? You come from Milan, right? I saw your votes, you look like a model student."

She had smiled awkwardly.

"I still have to get used to this city. I arrived only a few weeks ago. I like it, of course, it is rich in history and monuments. So many things to discover and understand and I can't wait. I don't ever pull back, especially if I have to study."

Someone had booed behind her, Mrs. Boschi had ignored the comment, waving down her hand as if to invite the class to silence.

"Then, since we are repeating for the umpteenth time Ancient Romans, you could begin by telling me something about the chapters that we reviewed."

Eleonora had stood in front of the teacher's desk, hands behind her back, and had started to declaim notions with her heavy Milanese accent. She was a good talker and she didn't know about that period of history only from textbooks. She had recently visited the Coliseum, following the words of the guide as if they had been a lesson in the open, and she had also read some novels set during the early years of Christianity. In her own way she had prepared herself to approach the capital, and she was pleased to be able to talk about the world she had discovered.

"Congratulations. I'm really happy to have you with us. Do you like reading Eleonora? "

"Actually... it's one of my favourite pastimes."

"What do you like to read? Tell us."

"I read a bit of everything, from the Trilogy of the Submerged World to Harry Potter, from mysteries to novels I find in my house. My parents have a great library and I can read everything I want, I just have to ask for permission. Lately, for example, I was forbidden to read Lolita. I would have liked it, but they claim that I am too young."

"They are absolutely right. There is a time for everything. Go back to your place and keep up the good work."

Eleonora had turned back to sit down, flushed and happy, but looking up at her companions she had found herself instantly executed by some thirty eyes full of hatred and envy. On a sheet she found on her desk, somebody had written "Swot". She looked around, turned it into a ball and put it in her backpack. Professor Boschi, who had started talking about the decline of the Roman Empire, didn't notice anything.

"Keep up like that, Leaguer, and you'll pay."

Eleonora looked up and saw them. Silvia and Deborah, the two terrible black-dressed classmates. They were sitting on a low wall, right in the street bordering the school, their legs stretched out, their backpacks resting nearby. They chewed gums with their mouths open, holding a cigarette between their fingers. If not for the difference in their body shapes, they would have looked like twins. She tried to ignore and surpass them, but Silvia outstretched one arm to stop her.

"Come on, when we talk to you, you have to look at us and answer, you understand, Leaguer?"

"I don't know what you want from me. Let me go. I haven't done anything."

"Don't worry, we're not going to hit you sweetie. Then you would go to the police and we would even have to apologize. But... you fucked professor Boschi in front of our eyes and you call that nothing?"

"She was drooling in front of you. She doesn't treat us like that."

Eleonora had opened her mouth and said nothing. She had looked at them as if they had been crazy. She had never found herself having to face an aggression, she would never have expected one from two classmates.

"You have to stop it, get it? You have to stop studying. You're too good for our class. You make us look like assholes."

"But I..."

"If you keep being such a swot you'll be black and blue all over."

"Let me go home. My father is waiting for me."

"Yes, go and cry to daddy, so he buys you another pair of sunglasses."

Deborah had gotten up and stood in front of her with a threatening move, head to head. They faced each other like in a duel. Eleonora had been afraid that she could receive a slap or a punch at any moment. She was afraid, but unexpectedly Silvia had rescued her, reaching out to move her friend away.

"Come on. Think very well about it bitch", she had said, as if weighing her words, with eyes like the ones of a crazed preacher. "Go fuck anyone you want, but not Mrs. Boschi and not in our presence. In class we don't study. Are you connected? Do you understand? Here at best you get a promotion with a strained six. Nothing more. Who makes a mistake is out and pays for it. Do you understand?"

"You want money? I have none."

Eleonora had kept looking at them as if she were living a nightmare. Bewildered, incredulous, scared.

"We're not thieves. You'll find out what we want. And now go, Nordic, we hate dolls and you still smell of mom, milk, books and who knows what else. Don't you smoke?"

"Not at all."

"So you don't drink, don't smoke weed, don't fuck. What the fuck do you live for? To study?"

Silvia had stopped, bothered, picked up her backpack and pulled her friend's arm.

"Calm down Deborah. Let's go. Don't you see she's out? Come on. She doesn't know a fuck. We told her what we had to. Leaguer, you have been warned. Consider it a gift. Truly a welcome gift. If you keep being a swot you will pay! You will fucking pay."

Eleonora had looked at them moving boldly on the sidewalk. She had stood watching them from behind as they walked away, their steps made heavy by their military boots. Only when she hadn't been able to see them any longer, she had started to cry. Her tears had fallen slowly down her cheeks, as if they had been frightened too, and could not find their way. She had trembled with fear and anger and helplessness. She did not know what to do and had felt like she was in a waking nightmare. If only she had had Marco or her friends in Milan to talk to. If only it had been easier to live her life and study, without feeling threatened by those two little nonentities!

"Please. Tell me what I can do."

As soon as she had been back home she had ran to the computer to let off steam with Chicca.

"Oh God! What a story. Are you being threatened by a baby gang? One of those mentioned in the news? I beg you, you have to do something. Talk to your, teachers. Seek help."

"Seriously? Those two would take revenge. No, I have to pretend nothing happened."

"Next questioning will be a mess, Ele. I know you, you are not able to study just for sufficiency. You have always been the first of the class."

"I know, but if I denounce them, the teachers will try to intervene, they will talk to the crazies, and they will break me to pieces."

"They are two girls like us. How can they beat you?"

"I don't know. But I know they could. You haven't seen their faces. They are crazy or sick. I'm afraid. More than if they were males."

"Then speak with your parents. Have them come to pick you up after school for a few days maybe."

"Chicca, you don't understand. They already called me the Leaguer, add my parents picking me up and I will really become a caricature."

"What about your mother?"  
"My mother? No, I don't want to tell her. What can she understand of these barbarians? And then she's been feeling bad since we came to live in Rome. She's increasingly depressed. I don't want to scare her unnecessarily."

"Do as you like, but it seems nonsense to me. And at least leave the school with other students, walk in groups. Don't go alone."

"I'll try. Bye Chicca, see you later. I love you."

"Me too. "

### Neverland __

"I'm not calling for a second chance.  
I'm screaming at the top of my voice.  
Give me reason, but don't give me choice.  
Cause I'll just make the same mistake again."

("Same Mistake", James Blunt)

The computer, fucking bitch, give me that damn computer. I can't stay still here any longer. Come on. I'm going crazy. For doctors and nurses I'm already as good as dead. They wander, whisper, come in, go out, IV me, annoy me all the time. What the fuck do they think they're doing? Keeping me forcibly alive? It's me who will decide when to go, anyway. Only me, okay? And now I want the computer back, mine. Immediately. The laptop is my life. Without it, it's social death... my brain leaks, leaks. I move, I go, I walk. I walk on the beach, the sea touches my feet, I have a swimsuit and a diaper under it. Mommy holds my hand and I'm happy, happy and safe. How beautiful is my lady mother, I look at her from below. She's a spectacle. She spends her life organizing exhibitions and events, something like, "You let me expose that Leonardo for the period of the exhibition at the Louvre, I in return I'll find you a Raphael to be exposed at Scuderie del Quirinale". Crazy stuff, and they even listen to her. Always with a snobbish "only-I-have-it" look. I would never even lend her a sock, she's not reliable, but it is better not to say this around. But when I walked hand in hand with her it was cool. She met my father, the thin man in pain, at an exhibition. It was an exhibition of Modigliani in Paris, they must have told me a thousand times, both in front of that picture. Smiles, compliments, "Are you Italian too?" And then the evening looking in each other's eyes in front of the Pont Neuf, and love, the bed, me. The arguments they had thinking I could not hear. Once Dad smashed the whole kitchen. Shit. Come on. It was bound to end badly. Modigliani is the favourite painter of both, who knows why, with the end he did... a loser like my father... He is an architect, he can't even build dreams, go figure buildings. Okay, not everyone is a genius, and then I didn't grow with a long, swan-like neck. I have only grown with neurosis... fuck it!

At twelve I started to lock myself in the bathroom with my computer. At that time I mostly needed a place to chat in peace without anyone asking me what I was doing, and especially why I wasn't studying. I started off at great speed and in silence.

"Where are you Silvia?" my mother asked occasionally.

"I'm in the bathroom", I cried serenely.

Who would have gone as far as to drive me out from my hole, as to open the door forbidden by smells and physiological needs? No one dared to disturb my quiet body production. I happily sat on the toilet, like great thinkers do, with the computer on my legs, and played endlessly. There must well be a quiet corner, in a house where everyone constantly asks you about the books you should read or the essays you should write. Come on. It's horrible to be born into a family that has put culture at the first place. The laptop allows you to escape without being seen, staying exactly where you are. It's not just the ability to communicate with friends. I liked to wander from one website to another, discover singers and actors, new faces, cities, countries and borders, geographies and oddities. I believe that there, in the bathroom, my new world was born. The one that is not a tangible world, but an infinite space with no rules or barriers, where everything seems near and close at hand. A place that exists nowhere but in a computer, a non-place that makes the impossible possible. So, like Peter Pan would say, I found Neverland.

"Second button to the right, this is the way, and then straight up to the cursor, then you find the way yourself, leading to the mouse that is with you..."

If Bennato could hear me... it was he who sang the story of the boy who would not grow up, I remember it very well. I know it by heart. Come on. You sit in front of the laptop and you can talk with your best friend and no one else hears you, you can watch an episode of Hannah Montana or a clip of Happy Tree Family (Debby used to say that those cartoons without morals give stomach ache, but I've always found them exciting) even visit the shop of a great designer and dream of wearing his clothes. Me in black evening dress with the boobs I don't have in open air... ha ha ha.

Anne Hathaway is my hero, skinny, beautiful, as white as a sheet. I loved that movie: "The Devil Wears Prada." I like all movies. Not Italian ones, they suck. I love cinema. It seems to me that the first jewel of my life was "Anastasia". All those colours and the music and Paris. I stood there, blessed, in the auditorium, with a pillow on the armchair, and I wanted to stay there forever. Watching films has always been my specialty. If they had let me study direction like I asked, if they had given me permission to enter that world, now I would not be here. But no. According to my parents I must attend classic high school. But I'm not a good daughter of Mary. And then, right at the beginning of the first year, Mom was gone. In classic school and without her. No punishment could have been worse. I can't stand my father – the whiny one – teachers, rules, my classmates, impositions. I did not want to know anything about Latin and Greek. From the first two mark to the last that rained on me, I always rejoiced. Two plus zero two, two plus three four... forty-four cats, ring-a-ring-o'roses... But where can Cocaine be? Only the cats will know, Pavese wrote before committing suicide. Cats are for witches, but I'm not bad. I'm not bad but neither one of them. I am not aligned.

To be aligned you need to have long hair, a slightly skeletal face, fashionable sunglasses, breath-taking smiles, a few piercings in the right places, and you have to dress like an advertisement. I was not like that before high school. My size wasn't thirty-eight or so, maybe forty-four, sometimes even forty-six, but I would never confess that, not even under torture. And I liked to eat... pizza with potatoes and then Nutella... what's better than that? Perhaps only a crispy roll with Bologna, and pasta with butter and parmesan cheese like my mother cooked it. When she put those good things on a plate for me, I loved her like a devoted daughter, and sometimes, at the peak of emotion, I gave her a kiss. With all my heart. Come on. It was so unusual that she cooked spaghetti. Or rather it was unusual that she cooked. At best, she thawed something. And also I should not eat carbohydrates, it was the rule. At home they wanted to keep me on a diet. Since I was eight. I was a tiny and lonely little ball. I stood in front of the TV, secretly eating chocolate. And they tortured me. They hid food in the oven or on the terrace, in the closet among clothes or in drawers. I always found everything, I was very good, once I even found the jar of Nutella among mom's underwear. I say, seriously? I hated them, hated them, I didn't care about being slim, I wanted to eat. Then one day I was no longer in the mood. Mom was already gone.

"You have to eat Silvia, you won't even be able to stand up this way", my father started saying. "You must stop eating like a Biafran. You're too thin. Eat... eat... eat."

Oh, I answered him, are you crazy? Not fat, not thin, how should I be? Come on. What do you want from me? And who are Biafrans? I never heard of them.

I didn't care anymore. I had already chosen a side. The side of Ana, my goddess.

"Dear Ana, I offer you my life. Make me thin and light as a feather."

Come on. Ever since I read that sentence, on I don't know which web site, my horizons expanded and I started exchanging mails with a girl in Turin. She signed them Ladyslim, she was nice and she gave me a lot of dietary advice. She followed the dissociated diet; one day just pasta, another just fruit, and then potatoes, meat and so on. I wanted to do the same. I distinctly remember a weekend spent crying. There were three boiled eggs in my diet. I was so hungry, so hungry, that I could devour a table, but I tried hard to stay there, lying on the bed, doing nothing so not to waste energy and reach the next day safe and sound. Ladyslim was able to, or so she wrote. We studied a way to check on and help each other: we weighed ourselves every day and wrote how it was going. I cheated, I always took off a few pounds, maybe more, and I weighed myself only once a day because I found that the balance needle tilted differently depending on the hour. In the evening, after dinner, you are heavier, and in the early morning too. The best, the time of maximum brightness, is around two, when you have not yet eaten and you have been fasting since the night before. Then you are at the top of the figure. You should always weigh yourself around two, on an empty stomach. It takes will and brutal physical force to achieve all this without everyone else noticing. Pretend, pretend, pretend. Be thin, thin, thin, thinner and thinner.

I love you, Ana, girls write in their blogs. Every so often I find them no more. Sites are regularly obscured by some censor because they, the adults, those who want to control our thoughts and even the contents of our plates, they think they are illegal. They speak about incitement to suicide. But what does it mean? They created the world of thin people, the advertisements for models who live on cocaine to look like mannequins, and now they want to wipe us? Pretend that we became a problem because we get on the nerves of our families and they complain? As I said, they don't think. They only think about money, success, power, but you can't tell this in their faces, if you do you immediately end up being in the wrong. And Ladyslim... come on. I would have liked to meet her at least once and look into her eyes. To know if she, too, cried because she didn't want to eat when she was little.

When I was thirteen they made fun of me for my size at school. I was the worst loser of the school. They called me "Superfat" and even, when they wanted to be really bad, cow Silvia. I could never find a dress my size. Shops only sell clothes for anorexics. In some of them only the one-size fits-all reigns, which is to say forty. If yours is forty-six, they will spit at you. You are out. Ah, I remember it very well. One afternoon we went out in group. All of us. I was in eighth grade. We must have been six or seven, males and females, happy to wander alone without parents. I didn't do that often, I was not aligned, in class I was the bad one, the loser, the one to be avoided.

"We go in there?" someone said, and we landed in one of those boutique for little "bonbon" girls, in the centre.

You go down the stairs, two or three, and you're in the midst of a lot of tee shirts, pants and beautiful sweaters. A riot of buttons attached to the walls, colourful curtains and blossoming girls swarming in groups or alone. There are always anxious mothers too. There is also a space where they stick coloured post-it notes with messages like "I love you Paolo", "Friends Forever", and a bunch of crap like that. I immediately started snooping around, if I could I would have bought everything. There was a black T-shirt that read "Wanted Frog Prince" that I just loved. The drawing on it was obviously that of a fat toad with a crown on his head. It was perfect, right for me, witty, delightful. I would have looked great wearing it, but I would never ever manage to get in it. It rolled over my stomach as if it were a rattlesnake. There wasn't a piece, not one, for me, in that store for size maniacs. Nothing, not even a pair of pants I could wear, nothing. The clerk told me that "large" size was not contemplated. She actually said that.

"It doesn't exist here."

She looked disgusted while looking at me. Kaput. Marked in blood. Then I left in silence, unnoticed, and once in the street I started crying like a fountain. I was in the grip of a real crisis. But, damn, someone came to comfort me, but yes, it was him: Alessandro. It was Alessandro who followed me out like a loving puppy. At that time he was my friend, even if he's younger than me. Nearly two years. He had a ridiculous pair of pants, long sweaty hair, sticking to his cheeks. Some kind of monster, in short. He too was a bit chubby, but on his face he wore the fraternal expression of a good boy. You can trust someone like him, I thought at the time. He was always following me back then, who knows why.

"Silvia, Silvia, why are you crying? Did someone say something to you? "

"That's not a shop for me. I can't wear those shirts even if I try pulling them on me."

"Then we go to another. What do you care? Here everyone dresses the same!"

Fuck. Alessandro was tender at that time. Maybe I was a bit in love with him. What a treasure. He began to ape the squeals and faces of the girls in the group until I started to laugh like a monkey myself.

Alessandro, dammit. I shot him too. Shoot, shoot Silvia, and you'll win a prize. We were like brothers that year, always together. I comforted him and he me. Now he's obsessed with roller-skates. He always has those things on, even in his house, because he lives in a two hundred square meters apartment and his mother, who is a distinguished hospital consultant, is never there. So if you call him he talks to you with his cordless phones and meanwhile he races, from the kitchen to the bathroom and back. He can make it in six seconds flat. He thinks of breaking records, maybe go to the Olympic games. When we were kids I talked to him about everything, we spent hours and hours talking in the courtyard, on the phone or in chat. But then I grew up, I went to high school and I met Deborah and Ana. Instead he started running after the girls, all of them. His hormones are racing. He says that sex is the new frontier, he adds even football and roller-skates, supporting speed as a lifestyle. Maybe he's just a bit confused. We haven't spoken, not seriously I mean, ever since. Now we're in the same class again, at Marco Polo high, because I'm repeating. One day he sat at the desk behind me, laughing, and put a hand on my ass. Strong, bold, as if I were a Barbie. I wasn't expecting that. I slapped him. He laughed as if he had been expecting it. As if he wanted to play, send me a message, assert his power as a male. This is why I put him on the blacklist. The list of those I have to shoot. I want to shoot all those who hurt me. But now that I'm here, in this bed, alone, I could not really say any longer why Alessandro hurt me. Oh God, maybe I am the one who is confused. And I have no more friends. I mean I have no living friends.

"You can enter my site only if you love Ana, if you believe in the same Goddess as me, otherwise go away. Do not set foot here."

So my friend Ladyslim used to say, but something must have happened to her, because at some point I no longer found her in the net. She disappeared. She no longer answered me, not a single word, and she disappeared along with her blog. I wonder if she resumed eating and allowed her parents to ruin her life? Or maybe she died like Debby, or ended up in a hospital like me, attached to an IV drip to store calories. She had a beautiful picture of Audrey Hepburn on her page. Audrey is one of our heroines, not only because she was a good actress, but because she was skinny and she had style. The creators of fashion for teenagers have noticed that. They made money with our Muse. They pulled out tee-shirts with her picture printed, books and posters. I wanted to be like her. We all want to become like her. I have been starving and I became Audrey and I have no longer allowed anyone to make fun of me. Not once, ever. Deborah, instead, could not lose weight and she didn't even try to vomit after eating. I tried to teach her all the tricks, I tried to stop her from eating compulsively.

"Silvia, I disgust myself, but I'm too hungry."

This is what Debby said. She liked sweets, buns with cream and doughnuts with sugar on top. We left school and, before going back home, she stopped at the bar and guzzled a lethal dose of calories. I kept repeating her that it was too much.

"Sweetie, now you're going to have lunch, why are you eating this crap?"

"My mother keeps me on a diet", she replied, serious, serious and hungry.

It was impossible to restrain her. She even made me feel tenderness. I loved Deborah, and I defended her. I have never allowed anyone to do to her what had been done to me, from primary school onwards. And this, just this, is the reason why we became inseparable. The blonde and the brunette, the brain and the muscle, Thelma and Louise, the killers of the Marco Polo high.

Girls look innocent, but they are cruel. Nobody knows how bad they are when they are beautiful, perfect, well dressed and combed like Barbie. If you're different, you don't dress like a doll, don't always have a brush in your pocket and you're not a walking skeleton, they make fun of you and cast you aside. I spent whole school breaks sitting in the classroom, looking at the desk, quietly eating the snacks my mother sent me. She had an obsession for sandwiches with bresaola, she said they are healthy and not fattening. They suck. They, my classmates, didn't talk to me. They ate apples and pears, they gloated in white lace blouse with embroidered collars and short skirts. They wore delicious wool pantyhose with drawings of flowers and teddy bears. I would have died to be that way, like them: small, sweet, skinny, perfect, ready for a fashion show. Instead I was fat and unresolved, but if Mom tried to get me to diet or gave me fruit to eat I held a grudge. Apples sucked and my alleged friends avoided me like the plague. They whispered secrets into one another's ear, and when I approached they suddenly fell silent. They always had a commitment for the afternoon to live together, they went for a walk to Mole Adriana, or gathered for homework and snacks in the houses from which I have always been excluded. And every time I felt more alone and helpless, a little fat useless nonentity who had to find a way not to die. Wouldn't you shoot those assholes? Wouldn't you make them pay for all the evil they did? I did, I did. Shit, please, now I told you everything, take this IV away from me. Let me go. But beware, if you pull me out of here I'll do it again and again and again. I have to avenge myself, I have to scream my anger, get back at those who hurt me. I'd do what I did over and over again. "Give me reason, but don't give me choice. Cause I'll just make the same mistake again", James Blunt sings with his perfect teddy bear voice. I would do it again too. Thousands of times. And nobody can stop me. No one. Not even an IV needle. Because I am convinced, to the end, that it wasn't a mistake.

### End of the world...

"Because life is a thrill that flies away, it's all a balance above the madness..."

("Sally", Vasco Rossi)

I must not say a word. I must not say a word. I have to pretend that nothing happened, that I don't care, that I don't have hard feelings, that they cannot scare me, that I will not let them delete me. Eleonora was repeating this to herself, the morning after the threats, resignedly going to school. She had opted for silence and a submissive behaviour, wearing innocent-looking jeans and an anonymous blue sweatshirt. In her heart she hoped that this tendency to become invisible would convince the two terrible girls to leave her alone. Not that she had much hope, though. The words of Silvia and Deborah still rang in her ears. She still saw them in the street, threatening, aggressive. Hard to believe they would surrender. There was something about them that went beyond rational and she just could not understand what they had against her. It couldn't be just because she was admittedly a "swot". Did they hate her because she was beautiful, rich, or just because she came from Milan? Or perhaps, more simply, did they feel allowed to torture her because she was alone, without friends, without anyone who could defend her?

And as she walked, step by step, anger was rising in her again. Anger was a feeling she had never felt before, which left her helpless and weaker. She felt disoriented and even cowardly, as if in moving from Milan to Rome she had lost her physical and moral strength, her ability to react and respond in kind. She badly wanted to run away, go back home, get back under the covers and sleep. Her mood was walking at the same speed of her feet. The initial anger had turned into addiction, weakness, cowardice, and finally became forgetfulness, inability, pain. The thousand Eleonora who were in her marched towards the Marco Polo high with the devastating fragility of the fifteen years. She felt like she had been deported to a foreign land. Yet, she liked what she saw around her.

She felt in the air the delicate aroma of the city waking up, at that time in which Rome was a fair lady, still unaware of the chaos that would cross it during the day. The limited traffic, the voices of transporters, the confident children, hand in hand with their parents, the colourful backpacks, the dogs moving proudly as if they were the real masters of the city, the bowls for kittens ostentatiously left on sidewalks by anonymous kind animal lovers. Here, Rome must necessarily be something more than Marco Polo high. For once, she would have liked to change course, forget about school and things to do and jump on a bus – any bus – and venture in the capital like a metropolitan Indiana Jones discovering hidden beauties. She would program a song of Blasco in her iPod, something like "Sally", and hum happily that "life is a thrill that flies away, it's all a balance above the madness..."

But no, she was already in Borgo Pio, with its separate world. The narrow alleys, the cobblestones and the dreary palace of horrors, the court of miracles that awaited her.

The Marco Polo high was harboured in an elegant two-story building that, until a few years ago, had hosted the Saint Peter hotel, a small hotel very popular with tourists both for its location and for the contained price. The facility, closed overnight for the failure of the English-Italian company that had been running it, had been turned in record time into a school to house the section E of a famous school in the capital, that needed restoration works. According to the initial project, upon completion of the work, the students would be moved back to the illustrious high school on the Lungotevere, and the building would become the youth hostel that Rome badly needed. Facts, however, had taken a different turn. The branch had become a popular destination for parents and children for its human dimension, so much so that now no one wanted to go back to the main school. Indeed, a waiting list for new enrolments had formed. The principal, Paola Maresco, called the Marco Polo "my jewel", and when she wanted to find a moment of peace she sheltered there. She was a lively lady, always elegantly dressed, with a tiny physique, a kind smile. She used to wear her gray, short hair with a well-kept fringe that she deliberately left white, which highlighted her curious eyes. Over the years, however, her expression of career woman had lost intensity, as well as the passion that – early in her career – had led her to throw herself heart and soul into work. She had become convinced that teachers had no future, that school was a dead institution, and she had hung her head, she had adapted. Now she stood looking the nothingness that reigned in the classrooms, counting the time left before her retirement, indifferent, more accustomed to say "I obey" than to take initiatives.

Eleonora didn't esteem her. She thought she was more interested in chasing the hairdresser for her perfect dye than her students. She wasn't the right person to trust with the problems she had to face daily with Silvia and Deborah, but in lack of anyone better – she repeated herself – she could tell her about the harassments she had been subjected to, and hope for her to take a definitive position in her favour. There was another person from whom maybe she might seek advice before going into the classroom: Lavinia, the young lady who ran the little shop of fair trade opposite the school. Lavinia knew how to deal with teenagers. She was a beautiful girl with hair dyed of an orange hue, long nails varnished in black and an infectious laugh that attracted customers. She was always on first name terms with anyone, and she was particularly kind to the guys of the school, as if she were their older sister.

"Are you new?" she had asked Eleonora the first time she had entered her temple, driven by the need to escape the petulant mass gathered outside the school, "I've never seen you before... yet by now I know you all."

"I come from Milan, I moved recently", Eleonora had repeated wearily, having learned that litany by heart.

"Milan, how beautiful, I remember it with nostalgia. You know? I lived there two years. It is very different from Rome, you have to understand it. I loved that kind of apparent calm, the greyness of the sky, the frantic and distant people, all well dressed and efficient... and then I had a boyfriend, you know... a crazy Milanese. Enrico, the cyclist. I called him so because he used to ride his bicycle for hours and hours, and he supported Inter like a man possessed. He went to the stadium every Sunday, he even followed the team for away matches. I don't quite know what we had in common, he and I", and at that she had laughed, throwing her head back, as if struck by a sudden thought, "maybe just health consciousness. Enrico was so sweet... look what you made me remember. Enrico had nothing to do with me, but I liked him. Hmm, how I liked him. It's been a while. Want a ginger biscuit?"

Eleonora had said yes, watching the girl with undisguised curiosity while she held out a glass jar full of biscuits, and meanwhile let go a burst of words. The flavour of ginger slipped into her like a gentle caress, as she lingered there, asking questions and admiring little mother of pearl rings and cloth necklaces. She had bought one of the latter, because its bright colours - ranging from red to orange to yellow to red again – reminded her of summer. She had never been able to wear it, though, as it did not fit her style. Lavinia too, with her extravagant hair, her clusters of silver earrings and her gypsy-like clothes, was very different from her, but Eleonora had returned often to visit her in her shop, because there she felt at home. But that morning, the day after the threats, the shop shutters were still dramatically closed. Eleonora felt abandoned once again by the events and concluded that there was no escape. She had to meet her enemies.

She climbed the stairs with her heart pounding and went into the classroom, gathering all her strengths, with small, bold steps. She sat at the desk, slowly pulled out her notebooks and her colourful pencil box. She loved to put them in meticulous order, without looking up. After all she had nothing to fantasize about. She could feel the eyes of Silvia and Deborah on her skin, piercing her neck. She could feel the hatred of the predator, even the fear. Now she was running the show, she, with her moods, was dictating the rules. She could denounce then, tell the teachers of their conversation. Someone would intervene, the game would come to an end, temporarily giving her an advantage, but Eleonora knew perfectly well that winning a battle was not enough to win the war. They would find another way to hurt her. Now she was shaking, terrified. She felt like she was just a moving target, a girl condemned to death, waiting to see how it will come. In the classroom, no one had noticed her tension, with the exception of Luca, who was also her only classmate who spoke to her.

"Can I sit next to you? You're always alone...", he had said, moving the chair with a sudden gesture and sitting down without waiting for a reply, his backpack, pens and even a motorcycle helmet going under the desk. Surprised, Eleonora had nodded and she had felt protected. Eventually, a smile had even escaped her. She was imagining the surprise and resentment painted in the eyes of Silvia and Deborah. She liked Luca because he was simple and direct. Clean. Well-bred. For some time she had been noticing she was the object of his attentions, but she felt she could never feel for him the same emotions that Marco aroused in her. It wasn't a sensation under her skin, butterflies in her stomach, a vortex that sucked her in. Luca suggested her a different feeling, partly dictated from maternal instinct, partly by rationality, perhaps even empathy. Her new friend was very similar to her, different from others, he too a possible target of the two crazies. Luca was of Moroccan origins, his skin dark but not too much. He had been born and raised in the capital by foreign parents. He spoke Roman dialect splendidly and dreamed of becoming the goalkeeper of the Italian national football team.

"So, would you like to come to the game next Sunday? I play on the back of my house."

"I don't know. We'll see. It depends on my parents... if they let me out!"

"We play at three, at five you'll be back home. Sure they can't wall you alive. On Sundays we party, and mom makes very good desserts. If you can't come, don't worry. I'll bring some to school so you can taste them. You're gonna lick your chops."

"Luca, I don't know, we'll see..."

Eleonora was answering absently, watching from the corner of an eye her two enemies, who were doing the same from the other side of the classroom. From bench to bench. Insistently.

"I'll pick you up. I'm a good boy, I swear. I will even take you back home."

"Okay, okay. Provided my father agrees, though. And now let's be silent, Mrs. Boschi's coming in."

The morning passed quickly. In the end, going home at lunchtime, in the midst of hurrying passersby and students of Catholic teaching on leave on the cobblestones of Borgo Pio, Eleonora thought that she had exaggerated, that she had worried unnecessarily. Silvia and Deborah, since the sound of the bell, had begun to ignore her as if they didn't even know her. They had made themselves invisible. Leaving the school, they had walked away without even a glance. So, the threats of the previous day would not be repeated. At least for now.

"They must have resigned", she immediately wrote to Chicca, who answered with a terse, "Be careful anyway. Don't trust them."

Eleonora quickly changed topic. She wanted to convince herself that she had worried unnecessarily, and basked in the conversation with her friend. The hours she spent chatting with her favourite confidante, or rather with her only confidante, were the best of her days in Rome. Had she been in Milan, she would have gone straight at Chicca's. In Rome, instead, she had to live in that precarious balance of moods and situations, studying and talking to the computer as if it were a person in flesh and bones. She had to go on, she repeated. Going on meant putting a good face on things, attending with enthusiasm the dance class, keeping studying with passion. After all, for everyone in class she was simply the swot, and nobody, except for Luca, wanted anything to do with her. Provided that they leave her alone – Eleonora thought – she could live in that forced monastic seclusion, made of books and solitude.

For some days she lived in that blessed limbo, looking over her shoulder but without much anxiety. The presence of Luca by her side shielded her from the general indifference, and Silvia and Deborah kept ignoring her. The situation, however, came to a head again after the class-exercise in Italian. It was an essay concerning the expectations of adolescence, and the one written by Eleonora was rated the best by Mrs. Boschi. The professor was so enthusiastic that she read a passage from it during the lesson, deliberately ignoring the envy it could trigger in the pupils. She hadn't met a talented student – or at least one seriously willing to learn – in years, and it seemed to her that she could start again to teach something in earnest. Or rather she hoped that the dedication to the study of Eleonora, her commitment, could inspire others to change their behaviour.

"I am only fifteen, but already I see myself projected in adulthood and dream of being eighteen, twenty, to know what will happen tomorrow, where I will take my dreams and whether I will manage to preserve my values and expectations. Whether I will remain a clean person, or how I will lose all the pieces of my current innocence. I think this is the meaning of adolescence: waiting and building. Waiting for what will be, if only for the trivial curiosity to know how many inches taller we will become. And building the palace in which we will live as adults, with its foundations, that is the goods we start to put aside, like study , friendships, values. I want to be in a solid building, full of sunshine and with lots of windows that open onto the world every day. "

At this point, Mrs. Boschi stopped, put the sheet on the desk and, looking around, asked her stunned students: "So, does this sentence makes you think of anything?"

There was only a moment of awkward silence.

"Eleonora is right. We are all here to build our future. I never thought about it, but we do it every day. For example, when I play football and dream of being the best. If I didn't train, I could never compete with others. I'm building my palace."

When Luca spoke in the classroom he sported a perfect Italian and Mrs. Boschi also appreciated this effort.

"I see that since Eleonora arrived you are making progresses too, Luca. I am very proud of you two this year."

But Luca was the only one to comment on the issue. The others remained motionless, watching Eleonora.

"Well done Milanese. Mrs. Boschi was not enough, now you want to fuck even Morocco."

This time Silvia and Deborah had been waiting in the middle of the street: they appeared in front of her while she was walking, distracted by a thousand thoughts. Eleonora was happy for the appreciation of the teacher, but she would have preferred to receive a more discreet one, maybe apart from the class. Since she had arrived at Marco Polo high, she had changed. A sort of Copernican revolution had turned her into a fragile and insecure girl. She no longer loved compliments, she did not know how to live them and especially feared the wrath of her classmates. She sprang back when they faced her. For a moment, blood stopped flowing in her body. She froze in fear, eyes fixed on their anxious faces. They stood there, like two angry bitches, in front of her, legs apart. Silvia was carrying a yellow toy gun that she pointed at her.

"Come on. I'll kill you off, swot that you are. Don't kid with me."

Eleonora sighed, she was afraid, but at the same time she felt ridiculous to be frightened by two classmates with a plastic gun. Once she found the strength to speak, she thought she had to react. She was within walking distance from home, in a busy street. Nothing could happen to her.

"Listen to me, you just got on my nerves. I don't do anything wrong, I try to study and graduate as soon as possible because I want to leave Rome and find a job. I really don't do anything wrong, I have not even reported you for last time."

"And you did well. You know all too well that your life would have become hell."

Now it was Deborah talking. She had a pair of scissors in hand, perhaps pulled out from her jacket pocket, and was waving them menacingly in the air.

Eleonora started to back away, terrified.

"What's coming over you? What do you want from me?"

Silvia had grabbed one of her arms, boldly, with the strength that only anorexic girls have.

"Come on. We told you that you would pay."

Eleonora, frightened, was unable to shake off, and instinctively raised her right hand to protect her face.

"You two are crazy, completely crazy."

Deborah grabbed her free hand and pushed it down with a sharp, determined gesture, gripping her wrist with strength. Laughing, she passed it to Silvia, who now held her securely captive, brazenly blocking both of her arms, while she was trying with all the strength in her body to escape.

"Let me go, let me go."

Deborah took a lock of hair between her fingers. She kept laughing.

"See how soft it is", she said, slightly pulling her hair, "it's too good for you, so red, so well cared for, you really don't deserve it."

"You are crazy. What are you doing? What are you doing? Help. Help."

Eleonora tried to wriggle away, but before she could say anything more, Deborah fumbled with the scissors and cut the lock of hair. A sudden and determined gesture. Only then Silvia let her wrists go. Eleonora jumped back, close to tears.

"A bit a day we will pull it all off, sweet pussy."

They looked at her smugly. Deborah was waving her lock back and forth, with an amused expression. The girl, terrified and at the same time swollen with rage, had put a safe distance between her and them.

"You are crazy, crazy."

"Come on, bitch. Consider it the last warning."

For a moment Eleonora wanted to reach and beat them, but she knew she would get the worst of it. She looked away and ran toward her house, not even able to cry. She ran into the apartment after a furious struggle with her keys and threw herself on the sofa, panting. She concluded that there was no more time to lose, she must talk to her mother. Maybe she could even change school without losing the year. Leave that place where anything could happen to her, where she couldn't be quiet. She began to run down the hallway, opening the doors of the rooms. The study of her father, her bedroom, the kitchen with the smell of grilled meat lingering from the night before, the bathroom. There was no one. It seemed to her the clear sign that she had been abandoned. No one cared about her any longer. Not even lunch was ready. She had been finally delivered to Rome, to her mouth like that of a killer wolf, to that high school of troglodyte thugs. Crying desperately, she grabbed the phone.

"Mom, Mom, where are you?"

"Honey, I'm at the hospital. No, don't worry. It's nothing. I came just for some checks, but they have decided to keep me here for a couple of days. I'll leave on Monday morning, Tuesday at the latest. No, no, nothing serious. It's just that they are so fussy here in Rome, then they say about us Milanese. For sure you and dad will be able to survive this weekend without me. Sure you can come and pay me a visit. Write down the address, but it's right in the backyard anyway. Would you bring me some laundry?"

### The ballad of the smoke

"Baby, this town rips the bones from your back. It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap. We gotta get out while we were young. 'cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run."

("Born to Run", Bruce Springsteen)

I smoked the first cigarette when I was fourteen, in Berlin, on a school trip. It tasted good, of Rolling Stones and hotel room. We were five that day in the room, three males and two females.

"Want some?" they told me.

"Yes", and I wanted it.

It tasted of lungs opening, it was the unknown finally known, and I suddenly became stronger, accepted, part of a group. I felt grown. I also immediately fell in love with Berlin. Come on. I instantly liked the Postdammer with its colourful lights and the unreal fountain. The beautiful museum of cinema, the beer, that I'd never tasted before, the zoo with the stories of young girls on the run and Nefertiti, small and badly lit in a museum where you could get lost. Thanks to smoke and makeshift friends I could withstand even the teachers and the tourist guides.

The first joint, instead, came shortly after that, at the concert of Ligabue, Olympic stadium, summer. I had already failed the year at school, and my father had looked at me with the dry face he puts on when he's angry. When it happens, his face stretches and it seems that he's ready to enter the gas chamber at Auschwitz. God, how I hate that face. Only Liga makes me forget it. He has a determined, fighter face, and jeans that tastes of rock.

Music, only music is life. And hashish follows in its wake. There and then I didn't even understand. He passed me this thing and I took it. His name was Giorgio and he touched my tits. We sang "Certe notti" at the top of our lungs, with a bottle of beer in hand. The smoke and you are already into "Happy hour and vivere costa la metà". I love Liga, he's my calm after the storm. My father is only able to send me into a tailspin. If he said just a word, gave me a real punishment. Shit, he's only able to wear that fucking face and send mixed messages. He condemns me as if he were the Holy Inquisition, then turns into worker-priest, and gives me absolution. But maybe he hopes to become the Pope, who knows. When I was ploughed in school, after swallowing and meditating for some time on his bad luck of failed architect and father, he said the epic phrase: "At least next year you have to pass."

He actually said that, I remember it very well. I was almost about to laugh, or spit on his shirt. Fuck Dad, life is now. Here and now. However he can't complain, I was able to pass the following year. It is true that I have been given a lot of debts, but eventually I made it, and Debby made it with me, because we march together, we are that generation, the one "born to run", says Bruce, who is terrifically cool and has the physique of a biker to drool over. It's true that he's short, but guys, you can't have it all. And then I will never meet him and I will not even finish high school. Enough, for me the race is over.

Some nights you smoke joints, the smoke gets inside you, you feel your legs growing smaller and more powerful, all in one second, and I feel big. After the first joint I even felt revolutionary, ready to send them all to fuck off. Me like Che Guevara. With Debby we smoked a lot of joints in my house, especially on Sundays when the housemaid is not there. We got up and smoked. We had a crazy face, that of when your eyes become small and the world suddenly seems possible to accept. I did everything, as always, with her. She was my shadow, unable to think without me.

Too insecure, I was her strength. But she was fat and everyone made fun of her until I came and defended her. Now no one tries to say even a word to my little friend. They know I'd beat them, I can, and I can make a super joint. I use only soft Camel. First you remove all the tobacco from the cigarette, then burn the piece of smoke and mix it all in the palm of your hand, carefully. Finally you roll it and light it without inhaling, or Debby lights it. The joint. The trip doesn't start immediately. It starts after a while. And immediately you smoke a butt. So the trip is better. And you smoke in company, because it's better.

And anyone who smokes with you is a friend. Who doesn't smoke is an Eleonora, thus a spy and a swot. Well, no. You can say everything about Eleonora except that she ratted. Kudos to her, but this didn't save her. God, if only I could have a joint. Here and now. Immediately!

Sex, instead, I had it for the first time in a bathroom, during a party. Losing my virginity was a decision I had taken long before, I just needed the right guy, one who didn't get on my nerves with fussing. I have no time for fussing, neither time nor desire. Mom taught me. Take only what you need, don't make bonds, don't become attached. It's only you that counts. Only you are worth. This one, the one who came inside me for the first time, was a cute kid. Especially, he was in a hurry to finish, while I just wanted to know what was there behind the gasps you see in movies. Why women cry for pleasure, in other words. How it feels to let go. It seems the coolest thing of all times. I've seen a thousand times those scenes in movies or on television. When I was little I thought they sucked, I was ashamed, I thought it wasn't right to show it all like that. Then, growing up, I started to feel like I wanted to be the star of that intercourse. My legs shook, I got enfeebled, I wanted to scream like that too. Well, his name was Pietro and he was a PR for parties in the clubs. He was seventeen, he was so cool, and every girl queued up to have sex with him. It was a sign of success, a recognition of one's charm. Fucking with the PR of the party means you are at the top.

I was glad that he drooled on me. After all he was fast, fast like a gag from Ridolini. He lowered his pants, lifted my skirt, slammed me against the wall. I didn't gasp, I didn't like it, I have to say it was terribly painful, and we couldn't even roll on the floor, in a half-dirty bathroom. Come on, movies say a lot of crap. Afterwards I even threw up, but I guess it was because of smoke and cocaine. Yeah, cocaine. I also have a lot of Bayles, I love coffee. Pietro has a lot of sex, if you say yes he jumps you like a man possessed. I like to feel desire, it kindles in me too the urge to click. I've had more sex, with a guy in the third year of the high school, Francesco, who had goofy hair, an emo fringe, and who played the guitar like a god. An emo, he said he was an emo, fragile and sensitive. Sometimes he cut his arms to see if he could suffer better. Like Deborah pulls off her hair. They look all crazy to me. I think it's best to avoid suffering, if anything to harm others, but hurt yourself... come on. That's really for crazies.

Francesco was languid and knew fussing. At first he used to say he loved me, that's right, he said he loved me. I was silent and he scared me. Love is not for me. It's a game from which I've been excluded. Mom taught me. I'm out of this bullshit. However, I admit it in a whisper, I liked that affair. With him, everything seemed different, almost normal. I could become a little girl like any other, in love and happily reciprocated. Science fiction. We were together for three months, then he dumped me. He said I was too thin and too angry, he always said that my anger spilled from my eyes. I must admit that he knew me like few others. Not even Debby ever understood me so well. I am the anger. The anger has no boundaries and if it explodes you're fucked. The anger doesn't stop, doesn't forgive, doesn't come back.

I'm in bed and I think about it. I think about what I could have become if the anger hadn't been there. A good student who studies like Eleonora. Instead I killed her, because it made me angry that she was so perfect. She was exactly like I wanted to be. If I could, I would have been different, but it would have been another story, another Silvia, in another world. Joints are better. Massimo, my pusher, gave me the smoke, Pakistani. He wanted sex too. Some nights I had to pay him in kind. I didn't like him, but it just took closing my eyes and lowering my zipper. He does everything by himself, he plays and he sings. Either me or someone else is the same, as long as he enjoys himself. Massimo is really spoilt, he has money coming out of his eyes. Now he's in Thailand because smoke is better there – at least so he says – and he has tattoos on his chest. Terrific stuff, he has drawn life on his body, it looks like a fairy tale; he has a dancer, a cobweb, a sword piercing a heart. But the best is the carabineer he had immortalized under his foot. He says that so it crushes him when he walks. What laughter. Max hates the police, or better he must be very careful, because if they find him with the stuff they put him in the cooler.

I owe much to my pusher. He gave me the package. A red and yellow scarf with something heavy inside. He pulled it out of his backpack and said – with the tone reserved for great occasions – that if I kept it stored for him, hidden, he would stock me with free smoke for one year.

"You are clean, you can keep it."

I thought there was a lot of smoke or some terrible acid to guard, so I said that one year seemed too short. My father could have found it – he doesn't rummage in my closet, but Massimo can't know that – not to mention Neli, the Filipina, who instead puts her hands everywhere.

"Listen kid, that's not the danger. The danger are the carabineers, and they are not coming to your house. There is no reason."

"Okay, but if I have to become an outlaw you have to pay me more."

I tried, I had the right to.

"Ok, chick. Smoke and cocaine, when you want, even when I am not in town. Until I take the package back. Are you in?"

"Come on. I am."

He also gave me two mobile phone numbers. Those of the friends from whom I get the stuff now. Then he left, after fucking me for good, long, angrily, as I like it. God if I like it. Maybe it was the story of the package, maybe the adrenaline in my body or the joints I had smoked, who knows, but it was the most beautiful fuck of my life. We had sex furiously in the parking lot of a shopping centre, hidden between the columns. I was scared to death that someone could arrive, and at the same time I was wishing it would never end, ever, ever. When I cried, Massimo put his hand over my mouth so I could not be heard.

"You're a real bitch", he whispered in my hear. And I was happy, until, at home, I opened the package.

I'm not entirely dumb. Come on. There were two guns. Nice, clean, and I thought that piece of shit had me fooled. I don't want to end in jail. I hid the package in a box in the closet and I thought I would take my revenge for that trick. Except that... the next day I saw Eleonora, and it was then, only then, that I blessed Massimo and his fuck. He had given me the trump card.

However, since I am good and I care for friends, the day before the slaughter I deleted his number from my phone, and also those of his accomplices. If the inspector knew he would kill me with his hands, but I'm not stupid, my dear Dr. Pascucci. You will never have the evidence you are looking for. No one will ever know my secret, no one will find out where the guns came from.

Fuck it. All the time I spent reading newspapers and books. I have learned.

### The world falls down...

"Lights in San Siro, in that evening. What's so funny, we've all been there. Remember playing in the fog, you hide and if I find you I love you there."

("Luci a San Siro," Roberto Vecchioni)

E. Bitch piece of shit! Today you'll pay everything!

Marked in chalk, the words shone on the cobblestones, just a few steps from the door of the Marco Polo high. They were the news of the day in the square that housed the high school. The students stopped to look at them curiously, looking down, careful not to step on the letters.

"Who might E be? Who wrote this? What does it mean?"

Questions bounced fast on the sleepy faces of that Monday morning. That sentence could have quickly become the gossip of the week. Generally it was there, in that square of sidewalk, that new loves, quarrels, apologies, declarations of love without hope were made public.

Anna I love you

Valeria forgive me

You're My Life

There was always a chalk somewhere, and a writing made in the night to tell feelings that were hard to admit while looking in the eyes, as if being glaring could give more value to the words. The week before, a pink Smart had arrived, dressed as Cupid. Early in the morning, just before entering the school, the kids had found the car wrapped in giant sheets of white cardboard on which a gentle hand had written a redundant declaration of love. The him in question had even left a bouquet of roses resting on the roof of the car. The extravagance of the operation alone had left everyone speechless, then they had immediately guessed who was behind that gesture, and someone had even enjoyed recording the scene with their mobile phones to send it to Youtube. But that day, the message left on the sidewalk did not make people think of a broken heart, it felt more like a warning like the mafia use to send. And nobody wanted to know too many details.

Eleonora came to school on time as usual. She advanced slowly, thinking about the day that lay ahead with its thousands of unknowns. Seeing from afar the cluster of students she felt a pang of anxiety.

"What happens? What are you talking about?" she asked, peering behind the group of students.

E. Bitch piece of shit! Today you'll pay everything!

She did not need a soothsayer to interpret the writing. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was meant for her, but she could not imagine what new punishment she would have to suffer. More insults, bad words, hair cut? The situation had become really unbearable. This reinforced the decision she had taken in the night, talking on the phone with Chicca. During the break she would talk to professor Boschi, and possibly also with the principal. She would denounce the harassment suffered, the threats, and even the "cutting of the scalp" which had occurred in the street. Actually, looking at herself in the mirror, she had seen that no one would ever notice anything – Deborah had only taken away a small tuft of her many red curls, and also from a place discreetly hidden by her hair – but this was not a valid reason for silence. She had no intention of submitting herself again to the blackmail of the two crazies, nor of deliberately worsening her school performances to fit in that group of lunatics.

She had not said anything to her mother. She hadn't even tried. Immediately after talking to her on the phone she had run scared to the hospital, without stopping to think. She had put at random some underwear – panties, bras, a nightgown, a dressing gown – in a shopping bag, the first she had found. In Milan she would never do anything like that, she had thought absently. She would have considered impolite to leave home with a supermarket plastic bag in hand. But that was Rome, outlandish city where no one cared for her, and where not even by doing a triple somersault she would have been able to get noticed. Moreover, the most important thing was her mother's health. The Santo Spirito hospital was a five minute walk from home, more or less the same distance she walked to go to school every morning. But that afternoon, her body still trembling with the offense received from her classmates, and at the same time with the eagerness to meet her sick mother, she no longer felt a tourist. She was finally home, she was beginning to perceive that she was becoming an adult, that her mother, or her father, or both, might need her help right when she needed theirs the most.

"I must learn to defend myself", she repeated, walking cautiously around in the long hospital corridors. Everything seemed huge to her.

"Mom, Mom", she shouted when she saw her lying on the bed – half-hidden by a pile of pillows – and she seemed to her smaller than she remembered. She looked sleepy.

"Mom, Mom. You scared me", she repeated, flinging her arms around her mother's neck, crying and laughing, as the woman regained the smile she knew. In fact, she started to laugh.

"What are you worrying about, darling? There is nothing wrong. The doctor says I have to undergo some tests, that I am a bit weak. Too much stress. First granny died, then we moved. I am a bit exhausted, that's all. But you know how I am... I don't take much care of myself. I always have so much to do. The doctor has me stuck here for a few days. Don't worry darling, on Monday I'll be back home", she concluded, rising up in bed.

"Good thing you brought me a change. I'd had enough. Will you take me out of here to smoke a cigarette?"

"A cigarette? Mom, when are you going to stop hurting yourself?"

Heartened for having seen her so quiet, Eleonora followed her docilely. It seemed to her that at that very moment, while she walked beside her in the huge hall of the hospital, they were celebrating an ideal handover. By now they were two women of the same height, of very similar build. Only the colour of their hair and the health of their skins denounced the age difference. Eleonora studied her mother as if she had been a stranger, noticing every detail, from the sunken face to the sudden smile, from the way she moved her hands to the funny gesture she made to brush ashes. She had that habit, she remembered her always having it. She never managed to reach the ashtray in time. She was distracted, perhaps she had always been. A mysterious woman, defenceless, eaten by a perennial worm, yet sick of sense of duty. Dreamy, far away, then suddenly attentive, precise as a computer. A precision that belonged to her as well. And now hers was the task to be a mother to her mother, to protect her. She didn't know exactly what illness she suffered, but she remember that also when she was little she had left her for an extended period.

"She's in the clinic", was the only explanation that Eleonora had received.

Only a few years later, her father had confided something – in a confused way – to her. Eleonora had understood only that her mother did not suffer from a defined disease, such as diabetes or hypertension. No, her mother suffered from a kind of fragility of the soul, an underlying latent despair, that could explode at any adversity of life. The man had actually said that, without looking in her eyes; "Fragility of the soul." A phrase that could mean everything as well as nothing.

"Are we talking about depression?" Eleonora had asked, worried.

"No, no, but you have to be careful with her, treat her like a flower, because we might hurt her without realizing it."

And with these words, in spite of her insistence, the matter had been settled. Now that conversation came back to her mind. She saw again her father's face as he spoke with an expression so worried that Eleonora had felt close to tears. She stared sweetly at her sick mother who was smoking, as if nothing had happened, her second consecutive cigarette. It sure wasn't the time to explain to her that she had decided to change school, that she was not settling at all with her classmates, and on the contrary she was being threatened and subjected to every kind of oppression just because she loved to study and the professors esteemed her.

Her eyes melted for a second with those of her mother, like a caress. She knew she was mistaking her tension for filial concern.

"I love you Mom, I can't wait for you to come home, I already miss you so much", she finally said with a hint of embarrassment to divert her thoughts.

"I miss you so much too baby, but I'm sure you will get by fine with dad. You look sad though, is there something I don't know? Maybe Marco?"

"What are you saying? Sure, I miss him, but now I am only thinking about you."

Her mother made a gesture as if to say it was fine, then jerked.

"I'm cold baby, and you have to go home before it's too late, or I'll worry."

They walked toward the room. Eleonora greeted her sick mother with a kiss, and tenderly tucked her sheets.

"Hello little woman", she said, stroking her cheek.

The girl picked up her backpack and ran down the wide staircase, wondering why, at the threshold of fifteen years of age, she had to be so adult and self-sufficient, when all she wanted was to be hugged and cuddled like a baby.

She put on the earphones of her iPod and chose a sad song to keep her company while she walked home, an old song by Roberto Vecchioni which made her think about Marco and her Milan. She often listened to it, in Rome, when she was in a sad mood. "Lights in San Siro, in that evening. What's so strange, we've all been there. Remember playing in the fog?", she repeated the words as if she were in a trance. Actually she had never been to San Siro with Marco, but the author's melancholy, the nostalgia for the old days were the same feelings she felt at that moment. And she also harboured a number of questions which she found difficult to answer. Where had her adventure as a teenager started? Before the choosy class? Why had she become so mature before her time? Eleonora could not give herself a precise answer. She thought it depended on how she had been educated, with a mania for tidiness, on the books she had read, or maybe just on the curiosity that pushed her to go beyond the surface of things and people. She couldn't really help being different from others. Hadn't there been Deborah and Silvia, her relationship with the capital would have been different. Of course, now it was even harder, there was also the health of her mother at risk. The transfer to Rome must have been much harder for her than she had shown. Eleonora felt guilty for not having understood that earlier, for not having helped her. She also speculated that her father might be feeling the same anxiety, but she found him serene, keeping himself busy in the kitchen.

"How about a pizza, miss?"

He was putting frozen food in the oven. They had even joked while eating. Talking to him about what was happening in class? As an hypothesis it was suggestive, but not feasible. She was not in too friendly terms with her father, he was a lonely man. They had never communicated. She hadn't even tried. Telling him, "Sorry dad, I want to change school because everyone at the Marco Polo high is a bully and threatens me, insults me and calls me the Leaguer", would be like saying that the day before she had happened to score a goal playing with the national male football team.

"I repeat that you cannot miss this year, you only have to study."

Duty first, then pleasure. First important things, then trivial ones. First the law, then everything else. This was her father, a man of exemplary integrity. And that was her, Eleonora the swot, no matter what. But she had the right to live in peace, to be herself even in a class of illiterate troublemakers. She had to talk to professor Boschi, it was the only option left, even though she disliked the very idea, again because of the good manners she had been taught. "You don't tell tales of other people. You don't talk behind people's back. You face them looking in their eyes", their parents had repeated until she was exhausted. Chicca, on the other hand, was categorical on the phone.

"The more you wait the most they will feel entitled to treat you like a doormat. You realize that, right?"

Eleonora hadn't answered, she knew she was right. She had to report Silvia and Deborah. With this awareness, she had gone to school that Monday morning. To make herself courage, she kept repeating that the operation would be quick and that, returning home, she would find the welcoming arms of her mother at the door. As for the two bullies, reproached by the teachers after her complaints, they would change their target, they would definitely leave her alone. She had the energy reserved for big events, the determination coming from her decision. Then she had been hit in the face by the new warning that had appeared on the sidewalk.

What could "today you will pay everything" mean? She entered the classroom with her nerves tensed, ready to defend herself. Silvia and Deborah were already there, wearing make-up as if they were about to go to a party in a disco.

"Hello Northern Leaguer", they said in chorus, with the usual contempt.

Eleonora hinted a sort of grimace, refraining from responding in kind.

"You will see what I am going to do to you later", that's what she would have liked to tell them, that's what she would tell them one day. She was certain of that.  
Luca arrived breathless. He was there, as usual, right before the bell, late, his hair dishevelled on his forehead, a smile that tasted of reproach. Eleonora found him almost handsome, he gave her a sense of safety, protection. The boy threw his backpack on the desk, hurriedly sitting down next to her.

"You didn't come to the game even yesterday. We won five to two. I scored two goals, one on a penalty kick. It was beautiful. You'll see that we'll qualify for the high schools final. It's true that the league just started, but I like to dream... oh, look. My mother sends these sweets she made especially for you. We'll eat them during the break, so you can tell me if you like them as much as those of Lavinia."

She looked at the package curiously, thinking wistfully that she would have to disappoint again the only friend she had, and thanked him politely.

"Sorry, I had some problems at home. I'll come next Sunday if you play another game. Listen, thank your mom for the cookies, but tell her not to exaggerate. I can't become all fat."

"Come on, you're beautiful. In perfect shape."

While saying these words he looked away, embarrassed. It was the arrival of professor Boschi to get everyone to silence, at least for a few minutes.

"So guys, have you had a nice weekend? Have you also studied anything? I'd love to hear quite a convincing yes. Anyone of you wants to talk to me about Renzo and Lucia? Have you thought about my proposal to rewrite them in modern terms? And how would Lucy dress today? Would she wear a gray suit or a pair of pants, possibly jeans, what do you think?"

She moved in the classroom, smiling, a sort of agitated elf. She had put the registry and a few books on the desk, closed the window, taken off her black wool coat and the big pink foulard, and now she was looking at them anxiously, arms folded, standing in front of her desk. Her look, straight and firm, embraced them all, charmingly. It was a way to seek approval, to offer a back door to school subjects. Making "The Betrothed" a kind of television drama seemed to her a possible compromise in order to finally teach them something.

"Professor, you always talk too fast. How can we answer?"

"For once I must say you're right, Alessandro", Mrs. Boschi had answered gently, winking in a friendly way and giving everyone an opportunity to laugh heartily.

Alessandro, also called the grim, or just roller, due to his passion for roller skates, was still a mystery to Eleonora. Perhaps more than many other classmates. He seemed to be increasingly over the top, exaggerated in every expression, and she could not stand his language. He used Italian as an option, or better it could be said that he used the Roman dialect as a challenge. There was in him, like in Silvia and Deborah, something that sounded ostentatious, too, like wearing jeans two sizes too big, always ready to slide down his legs, showing coloured cotton underwear, or like the tattoo he wore on his left arm.

"It's the name of my girlfriend, Marina, in Japanese. She asked me to do it", he explained once to Eleonora, "to show my love."

Alessandro was short, stocky, and had a graceless voice, like a baritone. He used industrial quantities of hair gel, and Eleonora had the impression that it was some kind of animal signals, a warning of the suitor who is ready for a new sentimental conquest. But she did not feel him to be bad or uneasy like her two enemies, he rather gave the impression of a complex and complicated boy, even sensitive and well-mannered, behind that cheap macho armour.

"I thought, Professor, that Lucy dressed like a soubrette, so Renzo no longer wants her and we finally get rid of Manzoni. Do you like the idea, Professor?"

Everyone had started laughing. Marina had looked blissfully at Alessandro, as if he had been Benigni reciting the Divine Comedy in his own way. Alessia had bowed her head to hide her mirth, like the good, shy girl she was, in awe of Mrs. Boschi. But Silvia and Deborah had not taken part in that wave of collective enthusiasm. They were light years away.  
Eleonora looked at Silvia from the corner of one eye. Two desks separated them diagonally. Silvia was checking the clock every minute, moving her feet back and forth. Deborah seemed about to stand up, nervous as a cat. She fidgeted, she rocked in her chair, she drummed her fingers on her legs, wrapped in black stockings as usual. They sat close together, stuck together like Siamese twins. They must have had an argument, Eleonora told herself, but she continued to think about the writing she had just seen on the sidewalk. She recalled the violence with which they had blocked her in the street two days ago, the toy gun, the hair cut. She knew that the event was coming. It was in the air. Now Eleonora was afraid again. Her determination was gradually dissipating. Those two were about to do something and she knew it, felt it. She would be the victim of the day, the sacrificial lamb of their folly, the scapegoat for their inability to study, the target to be deleted to bring back apathy and ignorance to the classroom. She wondered why she had waited so long before talking to Mrs. Boschi, why she hadn't stayed home, at least that day, waiting for her mother coming back from the hospital. She hated her damn sense of duty. From Thelma and Louise she could expect nothing but evil. What deviltry had they contrived? What was she supposed to face? She reasoned quickly, while Mrs. Boschi spoke about Manzoni and love, urged the class to define the character of Renzo and Lucia, suggested affinities with modern characters. Eleonora thought that perhaps she could say she had a stomach ache, ask to go to the bathroom, or even better be allowed to return home immediately. The principal could call her father and he would run to fetch her, and maybe together they would go to visit her mother.

"May I go to the bathroom professor?"

Oh, no! Silvia had preceded her. She was white as a sheet, she explained that she felt bad. Eleonora watched her going out, so thin, so small, and for a moment she saw her for what she really was: a sick little girl who could barely walk. She felt compassion for her. Luca had explained her that she had serious family problems, that she had been abandoned by her mother and had stopped studying, always hovering between anorexia and bulimia. Maybe she was angry with women because they reminded her of her mother, he had added with that funny expression he had when he felt particularly insightful. That must be it. That must be the explanation. Mrs. Boschi kept talking and Alessandro kept retorting with one-liners. He probably hadn't read a single page of The Betrothed, but now he was even proposing their classmates to write a song inspired by Lucia.

"Excuse me professor, but Silvia is sick. May I go and see how she is? Maybe she needs a hand, after all it's almost break time."

Eleonora turned to look at Deborah and noticed that her lower lip was trembling, she seemed to her that she was going to faint too. They probably smoked too much, she thought, but she was restless.

"Go, go, your presence is absolutely useless in the classroom anyway. But don't stay out talking, I would notice."

Mrs. Boschi gave her permission in a low voice, with a hint of resignation. She had no longer been expecting anything from those two girls for a long time. She just hoped that they didn't disturb too much, that they did not go too far in their total nihilism. With them, school failures had been useless, reprimands and notices sent to their parents in years had amounted to nothing. It was as if they were just gravitating through school, five hours of time stolen from life to annoy teachers.

"And what actors would you see playing the roles of Renzo and Lucia instead?"

She had diverted her gaze and attention.

"Riccardo Scamarcio."

"Anne Hathaway."

"Beautiful couple. What about Arcuri?"

"Too hot... it rather takes a nun..."

And while everyone found something to say, Deborah approached the door very slowly, as if impeded by something. She stopped for a second and her eyes wandered into space. Astonished. Her eyes seemed devoid of expression, then they revived meeting those of Eleonora. She stared at her sternly and ostentatiously. With hatred. Eleonora shivered. She felt threatened. Fear and anxiety were rising inside her uncontrollably. She could not wait for the bell to ring and the break to begin. She had to leave the classroom as soon as possible, breathe some fresh air, be taken home by her father. She kept blaming herself for being there, sitting, after having read the writing on the sidewalk, after having been looked at that way.

"What are they thinking?" she wondered, and meanwhile listened to the class shouting, but it was like a disturbing element in the distance that slid on a parallel track to her thoughts.

It was only a few minutes to the break now. She just had to wait. And for a moment she was taken by the words of Mrs. Boschi, who had opened an old edition of The Betrothed and started reading with an inspired expression the third chapter of the book.

"... Blessed Virgin!" Lucy exclaimed, "who would have thought that things could get to this!"

And, in a voice broken with tears, she recounted how, a few days before, while returning from the mill, left behind by her companions, Don Rodrigo had passed before her, in company with another gentleman; that the former had tried to hold her with chatter, as she said, not at all nice; but her, paying no attention to him, had quickened her pace, and reached her companions, and meanwhile she had heard that other gentleman laughing loudly, and Don Rodrigo say, "I bet..."

Silvia and Deborah came back to the classroom just then, slowly, one after the other, with their heads down. They did almost no noise, they were so quiet. They closed the door behind them gingerly and stood there, looking at the class. Nobody turned to look at them. The shout came as a surprise.

"Don't say a word or we shoot!"

A chilled silence crossed the classroom. They turned to look. Eleonora swallowed, stiffening on the desk. Sara moved as if to rise, but stopped immediately, and Marina put her hand over her mouth. Amazement and fear. Wonder and panic. Silvia was still in a position she could have stolen from a television series about police. Her legs were spread apart, slightly bent, arms joined, holding a gun. She was ready to pounce. Deborah had a weapon too. She held it in her right hand in a completely natural way, as if it were a pen pointed at the class. For a moment no one moved or said a word. Surprise was hovering in the classroom, in the eyes, in the hands, but it still wasn't terror.

"What are you doing? What are you doing?" said Alessandro, who no longer had the air of a bully, only that of a frightened teenager.

"Silvia, please don't scare us", Marina whispered in a trembling voice, and Sara immediately echoed her.

"We are friends, girls..."

"Shit... Come on. Shut up. This is not a game. Stand up. Even friends. There are no more friends. Come on, I want to see you standing!" Silvia shouted. She had straightened her legs, still holding the gun firmly in hand.

"Be quick or I shoot."

They obeyed instantly, throwing chairs on the floor, someone tried to hide under their desk.

"Less noise. I'll kill the first who screams. It makes no difference for me. Put your hands on your head. Then in single file all at the back of the classroom, back against the wall."

"Girls, have you gone crazy? Put down the weapons immediately or I'm going to call the police, I'll have you suspended... Silvia, Deborah, stop it. I order you to sit down and immediately put the guns away, or I'll call the principal."

Professor Boschi was white as a sheet. She knew she had said something absurd. How could she call Mrs. Maresco, and what could they do together in front of a gun? She feared for the lives of everyone more than for her own. She tried to use what little authority she had left, but without success. She didn't have the faintest idea of what to do. She found herself shaking like everyone else in the room. Standing behind the chair, she felt like a ghost.

"Shut up and freeze. We're in command now, we don't give a damn about the principal!" Deborah yelled, pointing the gun at her and gesturing her to go closer to the back wall, along with everyone else.

She accompanied her with her eyes. Hard. Silvia had moved too, and she was walking in the classroom while keeping the gun outstretched in front of her. Alessia had started crying. Tears rolled down her face, unstoppable. She was the most fragile of all, or so she felt. Alessandro stood next to Marina, his girlfriend, as if to protect her. Eleonora slowly retreated, looking forward. Fear stopped her breath.

"Shoulder to the wall or window, okay? I want to look in your faces."

Silvia was tense too. All the rehearsals she had done so far in her bedroom – with or without Deborah, in front of the mirror or walking around the room – were of no use to her now. She was improvising again. A true amateur of crime, a mass murderer by chance. She didn't even remember any longer how her heroes – Eric and Dylan at Columbine – had acted. She could not remember anything, and she had to act fast. She kept repeating that in her mind. Everything had to happen before the break, before someone came to check what was happening in the classroom. A siren was sounding out of the building. Perhaps an ambulance, or maybe the police, already arriving at Marco Polo high. It was time. Now or never. But did she really want to kill Eleonora and the others? She looked at them and thought that she was not sure about anything, but now she could not go back. Emotion caused her a sort of hesitation, she tripped over a backpack that had probably slid to the ground from a chair into the vortex of movements. It was a moment. Eleonora read the hesitation in her eyes and thought it was the right moment to try and escape. She knew she was the target of that scene. She jumped forward to get away, heading at a run toward the door, but Silvia was faster and caught her by the arm, pulling her back.

"Ugly bitch, where do you think you're going? This time you're done getting on my nerves. I told you, I warned you. Come on, you know. I told you that you had to stop studying, ugly Milanese bitch. And now you want to run too?"

"But what do you want? What have you got against me?" Eleonora whispered, terrified, trying to set herself free.

They looked at each other with hatred. A fraction of a second.

"I hate you", Silvia answered with determination.

She shot her in the chest, at close range, pulling the trigger with all the strength in her body. She wasn't sure of what would really happen. She didn't know what would really happen. One, two, three shots. She stopped in amazement. They had started, echoed in the air, reached their destination. The last thing Eleonora saw was that look of hatred focused on her eyes.

"Shit", she heard whispering.

Then nothing. Darkness, silence, absolute nothing. She was gone.

"Lights in San Siro, they will not turn them on anymore."

### Debby's choice

"Then shoot me too I am one of them shoot I'm an Arab and you shoot I was wrong to be born I'm an immigrant and you shoot and I'm poor and you..."

("Spara", 99 Posse)

"What about these?"

There, now I remember. I remember very well the face of Deborah when she saw the guns. For a moment she assumed the idiotic expression she has when she doesn't understand. She widens her eyes, opens them as if she wanted to look inside of you, find out who knows what hidden mystery.

"What about these?" she repeated, staring seriously.

It was obvious that she didn't dare to ask anything more, but she thought I was gone crazy. She looked down to the table, incredulously, then moved away from me, pushing with her feet to move the chair as far away from the table as possible, as if unwilling to have contact with the mysterious entity.

"Have I missed something? Where did you get them?"

She didn't dare to touch them. We were smoking in my house, it was one of those cheap afternoons, with Liga playing like crazy from the computer – I use the PC for listening to CDs too – and I could think about nothing but convincing her to shoot Eleonora with me. I had already imagined the whole scene, I had seen it in my imagination a thousand times: us in the classroom, the carnage, us masters of the situation and the other kneeling on the floor, ready to be executed. The Northern Leaguer in tears, begging for mercy, and us laughing before killing her. Epic movie stuff. A total blast. Debby was still keeping her eyes lowered, an unprepared student in front of a professor. We were not in tune, we really were not in tune. That's what I thought.

"Come on. Meet the solution to our problems", I announced triumphantly, putting down the little animals on the table, still wrapped in a red and yellow scarf.

Then I opened the envelope in front of her. Gently, as if they were eggs just delivered by the farmer, fresh, fresh, still a bit dirty of straw, ready to be drunk. My mother always made the same gesture when I was little and she returned from shopping, happy. She pulled out that little gem of nature from the white towel and immediately prepared a beaten egg for me. It is one of the tastiest memories of my childhood. I loved that ritual, my mouth waters at the simple thought. I remember with joy how I dived the spoon into the cup. I was blessed. Sure, eggs and guns are not the same thing, but I in front of Debby, in that moment, I felt like that, a mother who's offering her daughter a delicious treat.

"Where did you get them?" my baby repeated, incredulous and worried.

When Deborah is tense or distracted she pulls hair off her head. She starts touching it with apparent indifference, slowly, then rolls a curl around a finger, turns, turns, turns, then pulls violently and the lock comes off. At that point I always choke up because I think that it hurts, that she feels pain. I would not be able to pull off my hair, I even have trouble when I have to remove a patch. She says that's fine, that it is an instinctive gesture. Sure it hurts, she explained once, but at least it takes away her thoughts. Over the years she made a hole, like a bald spot right in the centre of her head, by continuously pulling hair. Crazy stuff. Sometimes I helped her to conceal the crime by combing other tufts over it. Fortunately no one ever notices it. Who looks at you on the head? Deborah claims that hers is a little obsession, a tic, that she's been doing that since she was a baby. It's like a habit, a rash gesture. Besides, we all have our way of venting anger. I, for example, kick when I am anxious. I sit down and kick, feet back and forth and I feel like a football player. Or a boxer, maybe, who knows. I do that at school too, and the teachers never notice. No one notices our tics. I do it at home, when I think about Eleonora and her red and curly hair. I do it if I think about my mother or my new brother I've never seen.

"Massimo gave them to me. A gift, and if I keep them he will give us free smoke and cocaine."

"Free? But what are they, stolen?"

Deborah doesn't understand when she doesn't want to. But now she seems quieter, she stopped tormenting her hair and she's sitting, almost lying on the chair, with her hands folded in her lap. She seems thoughtful, and a thoughtful Deborah is dangerous because you never know what she will do.

"I don't know, maybe his friends used them. Suppose they made a robbery or killed someone with those. But what do we care, tell me? We do not give a damn about it. Massimo only has to hide them, and he gave them to me, because I'm clean."

"Clean?"

"Come on. Wake up Debby. It means I have a clean record, no one would suspect me. I'm just a student who smokes weed, who might think that I have two guns?"

"Yeah, well, so what?"

"Then I thought, what if we used them?"

"You and I?"

Here she goes again with her hand in her hair. Oh dear oh dear, fuck Deborah, you'll hurt yourself.

"To kill Eleonora."  
"To kill Eleonora?"

She remain motionless, she swallows, she looks serious, grave. I think she will say no, we won't do anything, I'll have to shoot alone. Cause I won't stop. She knows, and I'm sure she will not betray me, she won't tell anyone.

"To kill Eleonora, yes, do a carnage like American students do. They do one every two or three months and us? Shit, we just watch? You know what it means to shoot in your classroom? You turn from a failed nonentity into a terrific bitch. You are the only one star in control of the situation. We'll become famous, end up on the internet. We will show that we are cooler than males, that we too are able to think and act big. A slaughter. You and I – two stupid and ignorant students, only considered like goats to be killed – getting the opening of the newscast and forcing Bruno Vespa to conduct hours and hours of programs to explain how violence in schools is born. Can you imagine? They click our names and thousands of websites dedicated to us pop up. Silvia and Deborah, together and famous, forever. And you know what? Before shooting this way and that, we send a video to YouTube and everybody will watch it. You and I, forever famous."

She smiles, smiles at last, no, better yet. She starts laughing. She's bent over and she laughs.

"You're completely crazy, totally."

She laughs, laughs like crazy. I've never seen her like this.

"If you make another joint and explain well I think we can do that. But what is gonna happen to us?"

She stops laughing and looks at me seriously.

"They put us in jail? I don't want to go there."

"Either they kill us or we do."

Silence. She doesn't say anything. And I started kicking with my feet

"We kill ourselves. I don't want to go to prison", she says seriously.

It's done. I know it doesn't take me much to convince Deborah. She doesn't like to let me go alone in important events, she comes with me, no matter what. This is friendship. Bosom friends.

"Then it's done! Are you in?"

"Fuck, I'm not gonna let you become famous alone. But..."

"Yes?"

"May I touch them?"

And she stretches her hands. Her slightly stubby hands that always make me smile. She takes one of the two Beretta and she pretends to pull the trigger, pointing the weapon at me.

"Come on. Be careful, if it shoots we're done."

"Cool. Do you remember the song by 99 Posse? "

"Which one?"

"Then shoot me too... I think. I like it."

"Shit, I don't remember."

"Fuck it... I'd like to be Carl Brandt."

"Carl Brandt? The one who killed his family twice and enjoyed decapitating the corpses? Or that sixteen-year-old boy who killed twelve people? What's his name?"

"What the fuck do I know? Debby, we are a team, we should not imitate anybody, but create a new genre. The slaughtering students. The female rebels, the kick-ass of the school..."

"Cool."

And she kept looking at the gun, studying it with meticulous attention.

"A Beretta you said?"

"That's how it's called. I studied all over the internet."

"You know, I've never shot."

"Even an idiot can. Remember we did that research on child soldiers? Those shoot like crazy. It's like a game, you pull the trigger and it does everything."

"If you say so. I trust you."

"And then, come on, first we make some tests in the country, alone. Maybe kill some dog. I've never stood them. We'll have a nice day out."

"Tests, yes, it will be better. I'm not really sure I could shoot. But if you say so, I will."

"You must. You are my accomplice. And then there's the computer."

"The computer? Silvia, what the fuck are you saying?"

"Come on, don't act dumb. You know how many shooting games are there on the internet? You stay there, take aim and learn."

"What luck. The computer too. You always know everything."

"I know where I want to go. And who has to pay."

We decided like that. We did it like that. I believed it. I believed in Debby.

### The end

"Shoot on me, target missed, try again, it's a minefield, what remains of our past don't deny it, it's time wasted, indelible stains, covering them is a crime, let him cast the stone who is without sin."

("Mentre tutto scorre", Negramaro)

"Come on, fuck, I shot! It works, the Beretta works. Shoot, shoot. I'm a myth. I did it! I killed her. Have you seen? I did it! I did it!"

Silvia turned to Deborah. Their classmates were staring at them in silence, terrified, shocked, each fearing to be the next victim. Mrs. Boschi leaned against the wall, ready to faint. A nightmare, she felt like she was in the midst of a nightmare. The worst of her life. Eleonora, lying face down in the middle of the room, with a trickle of blood staining the floor, showed no signs of life. Maybe she could still be saved, she repeated. But how could she convince the two crazies to drop the weapons? How could she restore order and discipline, rationality in a word? She looked around cautiously. No one dared to make a gesture.

"Fuck. I really shot."

Silvia, the boss, that she had always protected because she seemed the most unhappy and problematic student of the class, bad-mannered and spoiled, yes, but still a little girl to be understood, had revealed to be a girl possessed. From the tension of the moment before holding the weapon, she had passed to euphoria. She was jumping in the middle of the room as if she had achieved a strike at bowling.

"I did it! I did it! "

She kept screaming, kicking at an imaginary ball in the room.

"I'm a myth, I'm a myth!"

Around her all was frozen, even Debby was still. Dazed. Silvia was there, but she wasn't really there. Killing or scoring a goal, taking the life of a peer or winning the New Year lottery were the same thing for her right at that moment. She had lost touch with reality, she had entered the circle ready to fly high and then fall to the ground, delete, tear down and be torn down, a vortex that she could not control, but that gave her a feeling of drunkenness, sensation, omnipotence.

"Come on. I did it! I killed her!"

She looked at the body on the ground, the girl whose life she had taken, with the same enthusiasm with which a good housewife looks at the cake she has baked, happy with the result. A happy housewife at the end of a hard day's work.

Around her, the silence.

"Are you crazy? Are you craaaazy? What the fuck have you done? You killed Eleonora. You killed Eleonora. Bastard! You're a bastard! Silvia, you're a bastard!"

Luca was the only one to react, after absorbing the shock. He had always been the only one in the class to take the side of the classmate, not to slavishly obey the overwhelming power of the two bullies. Instinctively he advanced from the bottom of the classroom, with the rage of a wounded beast, and bounded towards Silvia to take her gun away, hurt her, stop her, but he only made a few steps. He was hit by a bullet full in the chest, instinctively shot at close range by Deborah. He fell to the ground, broken, not far from the body of the teenager he loved.

Marina started to scream but she stopped immediately, remaining paralyzed with her mouth open. Sara threw herself on the floor, hiding under the nearest desk, curling up almost as if she had been a contortionist. She started to pray.

Nobody paid any attention to her.

"Shit, he was not in the list Deborah. Be careful, shit, be careful. Come on. This way you spoil everything. And you, stay away, stand still, don't come any closer, don't come any closer. Shut up. Just one gesture and I kill you all."

Silvia was shouting as she walked across the room. She seemed like a ferocious beast ready to rebel against her trainer. She zigzagged with the gun in her hand, burning with anger. Deborah's move had given her the feeling that she wasn't going to be able to face the situation. And now she was afraid that the slaughter could go out of her hand. She was full of anger toward her accomplice, who had dared to defy her, make an unplanned move.

"Shit, Deborah. Come on. You have to be careful. You mustn't do it your way. No crap."

Silvia felt the ground slip under her feet. She no longer understood too well where she was and what she was doing. She had massive doses of hashish and limoncello in her system. She had upended her parents' bottle before leaving the house, along with Deborah, and she had put two more joints on top of it. It was then that she had decided to leave the last warning to Eleonora on the sidewalk before the event.

"You'll see she'll be scared shitless all morning", she had said, laughing, to Debby, who had immediately hidden in her backpack a box of white chalks.

Since she had entered the classroom she hadn't stopped checking the Leaguer. She had spied on her with her senses altered by drugs and alcohol. She knew that her enemy was afraid. She felt it. She could feel her breathing, her anxiety, her thoughts, from bench to bench. She felt and enjoyed her surrendering. That angel-faced cunt was everything she hated. Too beautiful, too popular, too bookish, too well-dressed, too perfect. She imagined her house, her quiet family, happy parents, the world opening its arms to embrace her. Everything she would never have. She wanted to demolish her. Make her disappear. Maybe if Eleonora had bowed to her, recognized her power, if she had rebelled, cried, begged forgiveness, tried to defend herself, Silvia would have been magnanimous, she would have left her alone. But no, not her, Eleonora the redhead was better. She was arrogant. With that attitude, she seemed to be saying "Shoot on me", like in that song by Negramaro. Yes, she had asked for it. She had to die.

She looked around. She saw the terror in the eyes of her classmates. She saw Deborah looking at her, puzzled.

"What the fuck is wrong with you Silvia? Calm down, stay calm. He wanted to hurt you, didn't you see? He wanted to hurt you and I saved you. It's all right, be quiet... all right", her friend eventually muttered, waving the gun around, but in spite of her reassuring tone, she was scared.

"Shit, we're not serial killers. It's the first time I shoot. I must learn. Do you forgive me, Silvia?"

She was stuttering. If those dead bodies hadn't been on the floor, it might have seemed a farce. But Eleonora and Luca were there, in the middle of the classroom. They reeked of blood, they were scary. And Silvia and Deborah had guns and were ready to shoot again and again. Nobody had even the strength to breathe left.

"Where is he, where is Alessandro? Come on. Where are you, grim shitter?"

Silvia had recovered and was now looking for her other target, swinging her arm and the gun in the room. She saw Mrs. Boschi pressed against the wall, behind the teacher's desk, and Sara hidden under the desk, hands over ears, still. She saw Marina, pale as a sheet, hugging her backpack, shaken by sobs she was trying to muff. She looked at them with disdain. Those little cry-babies did not interest her now, she wanted him, her long-time friend/enemy.

"Come on. Alessandro come out. Noooow! Or I'll kill them all!"

Deborah had moved behind her, watching her back.

Alessandro called the grim was sixteen, he had tough-boy jeans and the tattoo in Japanese on his arm. He would have liked to be big and strong, act like an adult, but he was only sixteen and so afraid he could not think clearly.

"Come on, come here. Get on your knees, asshole."

"Why?"

Roller-man obeyed, swallowing. He could not escape. The time had come. He knelt on the floor, just a few steps from the bodies of Eleonora and Luca. His face was red, his eyes small, his hair tousled. He trembled. He didn't want to die.

"What's wrong with you, why are you angry with me? I beg you, don't shoot, please don't shoot. We are friends, I don't want to die", he started to beg, raising his arms in surrender.

"We will not say anything to anyone, we will help you get away, please, please don't shoot me."

As he was speaking, staring into space, Alessandro had bent his head on his legs, crying. He looked like a child about to be punished.

"Silvia. Leave him alone. We're friends, don't you remember?", Marina cried, taking a step forward."Alessandro, I love you. I love you."

"Shut up asshole, don't interfere. Go back to your place or I shoot you too", Deborah said, pointing the gun on her. She was careful, now, she didn't want to pull the trigger by mistake. Marina stepped back, terrified.

Silvia hadn't even turned to look at her. She was staring at Alessandro.

"Come on. Come on. You must die, little asshole. You must die."

She didn't hesitate any longer. Two more fatal shots rang out in the room. Alessandro felt like he had been suddenly catapulted on his roller skates, a waist-bag tied at his waist, knees and wrists secured by the special bumpers. He had done that even the night before, pirouetting with his friends at Mole Adriana, down and up the slopes of Muro Torto. It was their secret pact. They texted one another and met in less than an hour, running through the streets of Rome wearing only speed and fear. The speed that challenged cars and cobblestones, potholes on the road and the difficulty of keeping in proper footing and balance. Then there was the fear, the terror of falling, getting hurt, meeting the police just around the corner. "This time we get caught", Marina had said, holding his hand, frightened, and he had smiled like the macho he felt he was. Strong. Bold. A different boy. Here, while his heart was going away on its own, while his life was going away on its own, he still felt that intoxication, that lightness that takes the body when it is thrown into the unknown. He let himself go, imagining himself launched like a rocket against a moving car. He felt the crash. He thought he saw his mother running toward him, arms outstretched, like when he was a child and slid in the midst of the football field. Back then it was nice and sweet to feel protected. He surrendered to her embrace. A little man bending in front of life and its oddities. Then he felt nothing more. He had stopped flying.

His classmates saw him fall to the floor as if he were curling. They watched with horror the blood that stained the floor. Marina was biting her lip to keep from screaming, about to faint. She just said a muffled "no", feeling that her life too had ended in that moment. Mrs. Boschi looked at her stealthily, ready to stop her if she had run again in the middle of the classroom to reach her lover. She thought she would try to save her at least. She hesitated. What is the role of an educator in front of a gun? Interfere, get killed, stay hidden, cry, pull out a useless register? Silvia had remained motionless, unrecognizable, she stared at her with silent hatred. If the teacher had even lifted a finger, it would have been her end.

Deborah, instead, was standing near the door, ready to leave.

"Silvia, hurry up, come on, hurry up. The police is coming."

But the words died in her mouth. The door of the opposite classroom had opened. The girl turned quickly and instinctively fired two more shots that reached professor Rossigni, the math teacher, in the chest. The woman fell to the floor, in her eyes a look of terror mixed with surprise.

"Shit, she had nothing to do with this", Silvia muttered. "You've fucked up again, Deborah. Come on. You're the usual asshole. What did Mrs. Rossigni have to do with this? Shit, shit!"

As if caught by a sudden rush of anger, she started shooting wildly at the classroom window, the one overlooking the lungotevere. The kids moved away, swaying and screaming. The glass broke into a thousand pieces. A splinter slightly wounded Alessia, the youngest of the class, who had taken shelter next to the radiator and was now crying softly, clutching her hand.

"You make me sick, you make me sick", Deborah, now in the corridor, shouted, the gun firmly in her hand.

"Be still. Got it? If you move I'll kill you!" Silvia said to her classmates," I'll kill you, you understand? Come on. For me nothing can change by now. Stay still."

She loudly walked away from the classroom, closing the door behind her.

Everybody stood there, petrified. Marina started to moan, as if she were repeating a mantra, "Alessandro, Alessandro."

Sara closed her eyes, she refused to look, feel, even breathe. Alessia Bruni, huddled in a corner, was crying and looking desperately at her wound.

"It hit a tendon, it hit a tendon. I'm sure. I will not be able to play anymore. It hit a tendon, I know."

Alessia had small hands and a dream tied to those hands: using them to play. It had always been like that. When, in the evening, she sat in front of the large piano, sitting down with a stylish pose in front of the keyboard, she felt that the world, the whole world, stopped spinning, and that in that moment, with her will alone, she was taking control of the strings that drive life. The exercises, the scores and tunes she could play – while everyone in the house was fiddling nervously, waiting for the dinner, the news, the ring of the phone – were hers only, a motion of the soul, a continuous flow that brooked no argument .

"What are you doing? Starting again? Always at this hour? But mom that's not possible. Tell her to stop, I can't stand it any longer", her sister Claudia thundered, slamming the door of the living room in anger, "the same thing every night. When you're at that damn piano I can't do anything, not even talk on the phone."

Their mother had to intervene, acting as a peacemaker, screaming in turn from the kitchen.

"You'll end up making me go crazy. Claudia, if you have to talk to your boyfriend take the cordless and go to your room. Alessiaaa... make less noise, the lady downstairs complained again about your exercises."

"Noise? But how can one complain about Beethoven?" Alessia whispered quietly.

She felt offended by the lack of artistic sensibility of the entire condo. If a man had been able to write something like the Moonlight Sonata, there must necessarily be a God capable of creating beauty, abstraction, and the perfect harmony of a chord. Then she threw down her hands with more force on the keyboard and focused.

"Art is art, miss you-make-me-sick."

And she felt even more determination within herself.

Music was her true life, not books, not the Marco Polo high, not the companions with whom she could at best go to a concert or dancing on Sunday afternoons. Music was for her something more than a soundtrack. She put on her iPod earphones when she went to bed, and she fell asleep listening either to Bach or Francesco De Gregori, Beethoven or Vasco Rossi. Sometimes even U2. She did not have a favourite genre. She favoured the sound. And with sounds she had grown up, since when, at about six years of age, she had serenely said the sentence that would change her life. "I want to play the piano."

It was New Year's Day, and from the TV came live the arias of the inaugural concert in Vienna. Alessia followed them swinging in the room like a ballerina rehearsing a new choreography. Her grandfather Vincenzo, sitting in an armchair, rhythmically pounded his hand on his leg. In silence, lost in thought.

"I want to play the piano", she had repeated, not knowing where that desire had suddenly come from. She wasn't even certain that someone would really listen.

"I'll buy you a piano then", grandpa had muttered, "as long as you behave. I want to listen to the Blue Danube."

And on those notes, in the general silence, with the ecstatic smile of a child, the musical career of Alessia had been born.

"What do you find so wonderful in a room full of old people?" Claudia asked her when she saw her preparing with care, on Sunday afternoons, to go with their grandfather to St. Cecilia.

"Art is art, you ugly witch", Alessia replied, intent on tying coloured ribbons to her braids.

Then she left, in her good dress, her hand confidently entrusted to that of her grandfather, to whom a past as general had left the habit to command and put everyone in line. But for her he always made an exception. He had always granted her any extravagance, for virtue of their being so different, in love not with material possessions but with music.

"Art is art, grandpa", she said seriously.

Alessia Bruni was a tiny teenager – whose physique reminded those of the young girls mastering gymnastics – with an absolute willpower when it came to study music. The only break she allowed herself from music was to ride her bicycle. She loved the wind brushing her face and the feeling of danger while dodging cars in the traffic of Rome. On two wheels she went and came back from school, on two wheels she got lost in the fields in the Summer, when her whole family moved to the villa in San Nicola, a few steps from the sea. Alessia suffered in silence that deportation, sighing. Each time it was three months of partial silence. Claudia was always taken by some love and spent her time at the beach, acting like a diva. She slept in, calmly prepared, adjusted her shorts, tied her long hair with a rubber band, put on lip gloss and started towards the sea, holding a book of which she didn't even know the title.

"This way I can watch the boys without being seen", she explained to Alessia, who instead really read books, and even talked about them, with her cousin Enrico who lived a stone's throw away, and had a dream in turn, that of becoming an actor. In the evening they went to the movies in the arena, then they gladly stopped to eat an ice cream, commenting emphatically on the plot and the interpretation, obviously including the soundtrack. Enrico, who acted like an adult, pulled out of his shorts pocket a packet of cigarettes.

"Want one?"

"Isn't it too soon, Enrico? They are bad for health."

"Go figure, with all the poison we breathe."

"You're right too. Would you let me try? Let's say just once..."

"Sure."

It had been like that, it had been with him, one evening at the sea, a few months before that Monday morning at school, that Alessia had learned to smoke. She wondered why she was remembering it then, in the classroom, while everyone was crying and sobbing, while she too was crying and had a bleeding wound and was wondering whether her hand would ever be right again, whether she would be able to play again, whether she would come out of that nightmare alive.

"Please God, save me, let all this end, let me play the piano again, and I promise I will not smoke ever again, for the rest of my life. Even more, I promise that I will start studying too, and become as good as Eleonora. Oh God, but Eleonora is sick. Maybe she's dead."

It was this thought that prompted her to leave her shelter near the radiator. The sight of Eleonora – who was lying there, with her beautiful red hair lying on the floor, motionless, helpless – pulled her back to the here and now. She also looked with compassion at Alessandro and Luca. Maybe she could help them somehow. She moved forward without thinking, sitting down beside the girl. She didn't have the courage to touch her, but she was convinced that something needed to be done. She thought it was immoral to stand by and watch a person die without at least trying to save her. She thought that all that was happening was absurd. Then the door suddenly opened. Silvia was back in the classroom, like in a horror movie, reaching out with the gun, pointing it in the direction of Alessia.

"Come on. Didn't you understand me, bitch? What the fuck are you doing there?"

And before the girl could answer, she angrily approached her and fired two dry shots at close range that struck as two cannonballs, and threw her on the ground, her head turned back looking at the ceiling. Alessia could not even understand that she would never see her beloved piano again.

### Ring-a-ring-o'roses for two

"We'll meet again, older and more sincere in a tear, and we'll talk again of immense skies and we will have new truths. Tell me if I disappointed you and how much you cried without me. I never stopped thinking about you, not even for a moment, and how long eternity lasts."

("Eternità, Giorgia)

I always hated tears. Tears of women, to be clear, those they pull out when they are excited, when their boyfriend dumped them or when they quarrelled at home and their parents forced them to go to their room and study, without TV. I too brought those tears with me. When needed I pulled them out, when I still wasn't and still didn't understand, when I felt big and nasty, without any friend. Then I became Silvia the tough and I met the black. From that day, my life changed. Piazza del Popolo, on Saturday afternoon: we all dressed in dark style, with jackets tied at the waist and long, weird skirts. Adults, other people in general, even kids, called us neo punk. But it doesn't mean anything, I don't think there is an ideology behind a colour. A colour is your state of mind at a moment. Mine was black, and it doesn't mean death. Black reflects other colours and takes a life on its own. Black does not mean sad or funeral. Black is life slamming like the paintings of Mark Rotko. A genius. I went to see his exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni. The idea that someone made entirely black canvases had made me horny. Nice, I said to myself, I could become his student. Too bad I can't draw, but maybe I don't need to, maybe only ideas are needed. And then he died, but there must be a place where all those who are gone and love the black meet and become friends. In Piazza del Popolo and Via del Corso it happens already. Except they are alive. On Saturday afternoon. The youngest, aged twelve and up, start arriving at two o'clock, swarming out from the MacDonald. Then the others, the older ones, join them. At night you can even find twenty-year-old guys. Deborah and I went there, when we had the whim, just to look around. We wore heavy makeup and tights with holes artfully made with scissors. Sometimes we rolled a joint, sitting on the stairs of the church of artists. It makes adrenaline rise. You always start thinking that the police is gonna come by. You think, they will find me and bring me to the precinct, call my parents, it will be a mess. I was never caught though.

There, I hear it again, that sucks. Another shot. God, it came out of the barrel. I thought by now my Beretta was empty. How many bullets can a gun shoot? Ten, twelve? They never end. It's not like the computer, it's not a game, in the classroom I really hit the target and delete people. If only I could remember right. For days I have been trying to overcome boredom and find out why I killed Alessia too, given I really did, but I think I did because inspector Maigret repeated it to me and slammed in my face several times. He always repeats all the names, angrily. One after another, to make me feel guilty. Eleonora, Alessandro, Alessia, Deborah... he lists them and then stops, short of breath, like a truffle dog in my room full of IVs and nothing. What a personage, this detective. Renato. Renato Pascucci. One day I heard the nurse call him, but I have never been able to see his face. I wonder if he has stars on his sleeves, if he wears a uniform or dressed like everyone else. And most of all, who knows if he moves around the hospital like the guys in CSI, and at home he studies everything on the computer, collecting his notes in orderly cards with the pictures of my victims, their data, height, weight, memories and statements of the witnesses. He must, he can't have the memory of Pico della Mirandola. He would be a genius. I can imagine him, there. Come on, I can even see him. He is tall and big, his nose is like that of Depardieu when he played Cyrano, and his walk is a bit dragged, typical of someone who carries a lot of extra pounds. For sure his hair is white and he walks with the determined expression of those who move the world. He could not have such a determined attitude if he was not in the police. That is his strength. Once he told me about his son. He mumbled something that made me think he was dead, who knows. He said that we young people don't understand the meaning of life and death, we take unnecessary risks, we fiddle as if we were invincible, made of rubber. Funny, isn't it? I think he used exactly those words. He repeated that we think we are made of rubber. I don't understand him, I don't know what it means to die, but for sure it is better than staying still here, wasting time. The inspector is a pain in the ass, he comes here every day and I'm sure that after that he wanders around the hospital asking doctors about me and my health.

He just wants me to live and go to prison, like Erica and Omar, but it's not like I killed my mother. Only a few schoolmates, the punishment must be different, no? I did not shed the blood of my blood. Beautiful expression, almost literary. Ah well, about letters, those two received a lot of them in prison. They are regarded as heroes. And Erica is beautiful. I too am a hero. A mythical, very cool heroin, but I'm not as pretty as her.

Among the other characters in this sitcom that I am living in my mind, imprisoned in a body in poor shape, there is also Doctor House, who in real life is the mythical professor Spezziani instead, the one who takes care of me. Good one. He came only once in my room and he was in a dreadful hurry. I think he doesn't wear the white coats, but for sure he wears latex gloves. Cream coloured. It seemed to me to feel them as he was touching me, assessing my wounds, lungs, heart. He said "Double dose of IV" and rocketed out of my room. As if suffering from tarantism. But what am I thinking? I can't have felt the latex gloves, I must have imagined them. I feel nothing, I have been completely deleted. My body, I think, is already gone, only my mind is still here; it works, but in its own fucking way. And it chases the Silvia who is me and who is also someone else, because we are two, but nobody knows. There is a good Silvia who wants to live, and a bad Silvia who hates everyone. The little plump girl who has a mother who holds her hand and brings her to the cinema, and the very skinny girl who lives with Neli and a useless father, and doesn't see anything but her computer. You can never tell which of us is winning, because we are always fighting. But the very skinny one is also very strong, and she always wants to be the centre of attention. And she has a gun, and a Silvia with a gun knows exactly how to get what she wants.

With that gun I killed Eleonora, then Alessandro, who offended me, and I had no pity. Then Deborah took care of Luca and Mrs. Rossigni. We only killed two each. Too few to go down in history. I didn't like it that way. Because I wanted to line them up and shoot on everyone, classmates, friends and teachers, as if we were a firing squad. Tatatatataaata. I've seen that in a lot of movies. It's a military thing. And I would have avenged all that I suffered in recent years, when they treated me like a retarded because I didn't have a mother and I failed at school. Rubbish, that's what I was for them, rubbish without a present or a future. And I wanted to delete them and become famous. The scene went too fast, this is our fault, and Debby and I had no time to kill twenty-three. When the other students, the secretarial staff and even the caretaker understood what was happening, they barricaded themselves inside, in the classrooms, and there was no way to get them out. They must have taken the phones and called 113, 112 and the army, I bet. We tried to open the doors, but there was nothing more we could do. Everything was locked, everything blocked. We should have understood that it was over and run away. I'm not so sure.

Did I want to leave or not? I don't really know. I just wanted to be the one to tell the rules, to lay down the law, me and no one else. For once I wanted to be the one. Deborah, instead, interfered. Usually she is a perfect partner. That day, the day of my birthday and of the slaughter, she did everything wrong.

"Stand still, stand still or I'll kill you all!"

I see myself, I am there, I shout and shoot. Tatatata... but I don't really kill them. Because now I can't get my record and I am pissed off too. I just break the glass and I don't know why. I no longer remember the list, oh God, I don't remember it. I knew it by heart and now I no longer know what to do. What might the right choice be? Leave or go back and kill them all. Run away from the corpses, to St. Peter's, pretending to be a tourist on a school trip, or stay in the school and wait until the end, the one we had decided early on that Sunday afternoon in my house, with Liga singing "What time is the end of the world"?

There we were, me and Deborah, looking with worry at one another, guns in hand and no desire to continue that game. Eleonora, Luca and Alessandro, even Mrs. Rossigni on the floor, lifeless. I had my heart in my throat and I was foaming with anger. We went out in the corridor, that shitty all-white corridor with the doors of all classrooms, those too as white as snow. Ahead of us the stairs, the escape route, the only possible one. A second would have been enough to slip away. The school, sometimes I didn't even think of calling it that. It was a small hotel before we came. And on its walls an air of briskly recovered space still hung, it's not like it seemed a place to study and be good guys, in spite of all changes and work done quickly. Mrs. Maresco, the headmistress of my boots, always dressed as if she had to go to a meeting with the Minister, over the years had the walls plastered by social posters, like "I don't do drugs", "I don't drink when I drive", "I don't do this", "I don't do that". They would give a rash to a sane person. There's nothing else than prohibitions and punishments in the life of a high-school student. Every time we went to some theatre, some event, the distinguished principal with half-black half-white hair came back with at least two or three new posters and hung them in the corridor. Deborah and I once started scribbling on them and she sent me home with a report. Dad, however, never saw it, I signed it myself.

Come on, I am in the corridor of the prohibitions, with all doors closed in front of me. I see and I see again myself. Shit, I wanted to make a slaughter but I could not. Deborah followed me like a puppy. She only said in a low tone, almost in a whisper, "Silvia, we must go. We must run away, I don't want to die."

And I didn't want to run away, not before I was finished, before I had closed my account with history. That's when I thought, Debby wait here, I go back to the classroom and see what happens, if they are afraid of me or they are laughing because I am gone, if they have at least a little fear or they keep seeing me as an absolute nonentity. Because closed doors make me even more angry. When I was little, my parents fussed a bit with me and then went to sleep, barricading themselves inside their bedroom. I was never allowed to lie on the big bed with them. What a memory, dammit. It must have been twelve or thirteen years ago. One night I approached their bunker because I could not sleep. I wanted the stories that only my mother was able to tell me. But the door was locked and I cried. I knew they were in there, I could hear them whispering. No one deigned to come and see how I was and what was happening. I crouched on the floor and stayed there, with the pillow under my head. In the morning I felt my father taking me in his arms and taking me to bed gently. He said "We shouldn't do this anymore", but he was not speaking to me, he was looking at Mom, who had finally repented. That day they were nicer than usual with me. Come on, fuck it! They could fuck when they brought me to the kindergarten.

If I had followed Deborah, the day of the slaughter, when it was still possible and she was pleading with her eyes and words; if I had listened, if I had listened to the best part that hides in me, maybe I could have saved Alessia. But instead I followed the angry Silvia, the one who can't forgive and forget. I went back to the classroom, it was the only open door left. I saw Alessia near Eleonora and I lost my mind. I made another mistake, because it was useless to shoot her. Completely useless. Alessia was a quiet girl. She never treated me badly. She lived for music and she even liked Ligabue. We talked about it. I remember that she made me listen to "The day of pain that one has" with the earphones of her iPod. It's a song that says something like: "when did you realize that you will never go back... when this shit around will always be shit... that life is much more than easy". He's right. No turning Back. I just wanted to leave this place one day. Deborah, where have you gone? I know, I know that we'll meet again, maybe inside a tear "... and we'll ask the world what harm have we done to stay here..."

Giorgia docet.

### All fall down...

"A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down."

("Ring a ring o'roses", nursery rhyme)

The silence now marked the fear. That classroom that had heard laughter and words, sneering and questions, smiles and tears, now seemed devoted to the chill of a cloistered convent. Everyone was looking at Silvia, frozen, not knowing what more to expect from her. Twenty compact eyes examined her hands, peered at her expression, like that of a captive tiger ready to take a leap, lingered on the gun she was holding with anger. They wondered why she had come back, the reason of that ferocity against little Alessia, who had always been the darling of the class, of that hatred against Eleonora, against them, against the Marco Polo high. Thoughts chased one another, flew fast from student to student, from hand to hand, from tremble to tremble. The beast was there, ready to tear them apart. Until a few minutes ago she had been Silvia, the warrior. With her they had shared boredom and excitement, and now she had turned into an exterminating angel who was slaughtering her classmates, at a whim, following a strictly personal choice of revenge. Now she had raised herself to the ranks of God and was deciding about their lives, about the present and the future. Now she was a monster without a tomorrow who wanted to precipitate them into the vortex, throw them in a cauldron, make of them, all of them, an army of despaired. And Silvia, in turn, looked at them as if she were seeing them for the first time, scared kids who just wanted to get out of a nightmare. And that nightmare had her hair and her hands, her gun and her choices. Her rebellious age.

"Come on. If you move you end like Alessia. Is it clear now?" she suddenly roared in a tone of voice that seemed to come from the depths of a crater.

She was as tense as a violin string. Her plan was not going as she had thought, and having had to shoot Alessia had made her vulnerable. She had never had any friction with her, she considered her only a small nonentity who never bothered her. Never bothered, she repeated to herself. And now she had shot her. She had to kill someone else to comply with the list. Eighteen more accurate shots. This she had decided. The bullets she had probably wouldn't be enough. It didn't matter, she must go forward. This was the path she had chosen. Why did she lack the courage? Why those faces – foaming at the mouths and with terror painted on them – kept her from completing the established mission? Why couldn't she simply click and then click and then click endlessly and throw them down one after another to the floor like bowling pins? She couldn't, she wasn't able to, there was no way. She had failed. She would not go down in history. Neither she, nor Deborah, nor their carefully studied video, nor the music of Swan Lake. The gun was dying in her hands and she felt lost facing all that silence.

"Deborah, shit. Where are you?"

"I'm here, I keep them under control", her friend said, appearing like a cat behind the door of the open classroom.

The corridor was deserted. No one was coming out of the other classrooms. Everybody was barricaded inside. The school seemed abandoned, as in a vacation day.

"I'm here", Deborah repeated, with a strange, whimpering voice.

"Is there anybody out there?"

"No one."

"Then let's go. And you, still and silent. Got it?"

"Don't talk, huh? All right. Don't say shit... after all you always knew who was boss here. You liked it, didn't you? It was convenient... little stupid asses... useless assholes..."

Silvia and Deborah went away quickly, closing the classroom door. The others remained frozen, staring amazed and astonished at the corpses. Their faces, their images, their eyes like those of caged animals, remained in the memory, for a long time and much more. They were immortalized on the walls, the benches, the broken glass. They laid on the blackboard, on the teacher's desk, in the air. It would no longer be possible to go into that room, in years to come, without breathing again the fear, seeing the colour of blood, smelling the stench of death. Nobody dared to make even a gesture. Like a flash mob, they remained frozen. Outside, Silvia and Deborah were still in the corridor. They could hear them scream.

"What a mess, Deborah, shit! You made a big mess, you did everything wrong... first Luca... then Mrs. Rossigni. They weren't involved, they were not in the list. I had nothing to do with them. You took them, you decided. You broke the pact."

"Why, what did Alessia have to do with it?"

"Come on. She moved. I warned them."

"You can make mistakes and I can't. This is the game."

"Mrs. Rossigni was not involved."

"You're crazy, batshit crazy", the other yelled against her, "we had to kill twenty-three, twenty-three you said... and now you tell me about the list. Take it easy. I'm not a killer, I don't know how to do this. You disgust me, you scare me. You scare me. What am I doing here? I don't want to die, I didn't want this. You make me sick."

Deborah had thrown the gun on the floor and was crying in the throes of a fit of hysteria, desperate. She was starting to realize what was happening, as if suddenly the veil had fallen from her eyes.

"It's not a fucking game, not a ring-a-ring-o'roses. Here people really fall down and never get up again. I didn't want all this. I thought it was funny. It's not! It's not nice to shoot on people. See them die. I don't know what we did, Silvia. I don't know."

Her friend stood in front of her with arrogance, and she was no longer the girl in black she knew. She was not her companion, the one with whom she smoked joints and spent afternoons planning murders. She was another person, a stranger. She looked at her while she felt scrutinized with hatred, and found that she was suddenly alone, with no defences left. Silvia grimaced angrily and pushed her violently, with her right hand on her shoulder, to hurt her. Deborah stepped back, refusing to fight. She bowed her head and began to see only her tears. Silvia gave her no respite, she put her hand under her chin, lifting her face to look into her eyes. She kept screaming.

"You said you were convinced. You said that we had to do it. That it was right, that we would go down in history, and now you pull back. It is you who make me sick. You're a coward and a traitor. You cheated."

Deborah had no desire left to talk, she just wanted to get away, run away, erase the memory of what had happened. Silvia had separated from her, still holding the gun firmly in her left hand, pointed to the floor, and had taken to rhythmically stomp her feet.

"I didn't understand. I didn't understand."

Silvia was walking up and down in front of her. Frothing with rage.

"Bitch, and beggar. I thought you were my friend."

"I am your friend but I don't want to die, I don't want to die. I'm scared."

Deborah slumped to the ground. She had no strength left. She felt her heart go on its own, like a crazy butterfly trapped in a spider web. If only Silvia could go back to being her friend-mother, her affectionate accomplice able to help her get out of that nightmare. But no, she was bad now. She was only Judas. She was not going to save her.

"Come on. Now you're scared? Piece of shit, now? And look at me bitch!"

Deborah tried to look up, she was tasting her tears, but they weren't giving her strength. She saw Silvia straight in front of her, with the gun facing her. She could not believe what was going to happen.

"No, what are you doing? Silvia, I'm Deborah, I'm your friend..."

The shot hit her full in the chest, then there was another and another. She fell backward in surprise, her legs folded under her body, and while life was leaving her she thought it wasn't happening to her, the end could not be like that, not by the hand of her sister and accomplice, the one who had always protected her from everything and everyone, until she had become sort of a leader. Then she felt nothing more.

Silvia spat on her with anger. Even Deborah had betrayed her, disappointed her, humiliated her. Even Deborah had proved to be a failure, a wrong choice. Even Deborah had abandoned her in the time of need.

"It's you who make me sick", she said, kicking the body of her friend. And then again and again. When she tried to turn and run away, she heard the explosion behind her, as violent as a body hitting you with the full force of a bomb. She fell on Deborah's face, cheek to cheek, with no time to understand. Behind her, a policeman was waving a gun and now, after swallowing, running from door to door to immediately let the kids out from the classrooms.

"Come on, come on. Everybody out, it's over. It's over. No one can shoot anymore. All out, fast."

Silvia hoped that her time had finally come.

### The dance does not stop

"I'm thirsty means I'm alive. Who cares if the first or last. The heart wants to beat again, again. Oh, red sand and desert. I feel it in my eyes, in the bottom of my eyes, rising from the sea passing through the heart."

("Fata Morgana", Litfiba)

"The heart wants to beat, it still wants to beat", so Liftiba sing. It's all rock, pure rock, beautiful and full of adrenaline, and there's the desert. Come on. I am in the desert, nothing happens here and I will end up not even dying any more. Messalina, the naughty nurse, actually said that this morning, shaking me. She moved me round and round as if I were a sack of potatoes. It is true that I feel nothing, physically speaking, but she might as well care a little more for my beautiful body.

"Did you understand? It turns out that this one won't die, and we'll have to wipe her ass for years", she complained to the other one, the good one, who must have a face like a nun's, dark socks, a beautiful natural breasts and eyes turned down like a beaten dog.

Sister Chamomile didn't answer. In addition to the now overt pangs of love, she dislikes Messalina and doesn't understand her. She just sighed.

"We'll have to wipe her ass forever", the virago repeated with scorn. I believe that she has fake nails, she's always showing her tits and slips into the beds of every emergency room doctor.

Ah, ah, she must be some kind of brothel madam. She can't stand having to wipe my ass. I must not be pleasant for her, I understand, but it's not like she realizes that it's the worst of the worst for me. Then Messalina used another shitty word. She called me "baby killer". I'm sure she borrowed that from some newspaper. So at least someone has written and talked about me, so I suppose I have become famous, and maybe I really ended up on the internet. What I'd give to know what is happening at school, whether Eleonora is really dead or got well, even whether Mrs. Boschi still talks or finally shut up. Whether, total incompetent that she is, she gave up teaching. However I should also talk to reporters. How is it possible that if one is less than eighteen years old they keep calling her "baby"? To them, even if we have been smoking everything for centuries, have had our monthly since eleven, and we happily fuck even better than adults, we are still and forever babies, as if we had three years and wore the diaper. Ridiculous!

I, alone, am the unique and unrepeatable Silvia Giardini and I am an adult , not a baby killer. I have been the protagonist of a season of rebellion and youth violence to the nth degree. I killed and I could do it again, provided someone is so nice as to give me another lovely little gun with the serial number abraded. It was the inspector to tell me that the serial number had been deleted, so I suppose they can't go back to the fool who allowed me to make a slaughter. The other tracks I got rid of myself. Let's see what adults with a capital A do now, facing a well-informed baby killer. The good Sherlock Holmes talks to me in his short visits to clear his conscience. Since he's no good at investigations, he comes here and waits for me to resurrect and tell him the name of the rightful owner of the weapons. Asshole. Apart from the fact that I will for sure become a case like those who are in a coma for twenty years and then, when they wake up, are turned into test subjects for scientists – at which point they'll build golden bridges for me, I'll be in the papers again and I will be able to tell my drama as a survivor, and be pampered and worshiped – do you really think I would betray a friend? That I would help him and not Massimo? This inspector really is a stewed sausage. What has been done with those weapons before us, I don't know and I don't care. Why they were loaded and ready to fire, I don't know and I don't care. Why I made a slaughter, I don't know and I don't care. The only thing I know is that I am a Goddess with a bang, one that knows how to kill, really does, even if I lost my best and only friend. The only person I cared about.

Before Debby, I didn't give a damn about people. As a child you know a lot of girls, spend time with them, play with them, try to be like them, they try to imitate you, everyone looks for something they don't know they have within. We walk together for a little while, dreaming safety, but it's not like we become like sisters, it's not like you are in their heads like I was in Deborah's. I loved her, I would do anything for her. I even tried to prevent her from pulling her hair off her head, and I could control her. We do this, we say this, she would listen to me because she liked me and she was insecure. I became a leader, a leader thanks to her. It's true, I killed her and I'm sorry for that. But she asked for it. She wanted to rebel, change, become a coward like Alessia. I had to kill her.

The ring-a-ring-o'roses. Last night I dreamed of it again. The girls with white dresses, the large skirt, the organza. Could it be a first communion dress? I don't know. Everything was muffled as never in my life. There was music in the distance, like a carillon, one of those you hear in the crib, with spinning butterflies, and you look at the colours and think about how beautiful your life will be. It will be a sparkling of colours, you will always have a mother with soft tits holding you and cuddling you, and sounds to feel yourself at home, smiles bending over you, warm and tender. Someone who takes care of you and protects you from the world, changes your diaper, feeds you and hums. Here, those butterflies and those carillons are a ton of bullshit, but in the crib you don't know and you believe them. You believe that the world will bow at your passage. Silvia, you're beautiful, Silvia you're unique, Silvia you're cool. Then you grow up and the music changes. And they reproach you, and you dress by yourself, and you are no longer the centre of the world. Your anger is born. Every time they pull your leg and say no. Every time they leave you alone or with the babysitter. And you no longer exist. Here comes the first communion and everything changes. You grow; the middle school, the home works running after you, hours and hours watching books and television alone. Friends, all bitches, who trust one another with secrets from which you are always excluded. Teachers who repeat that you have to study, punishments. And you go to high school and there begins another round and you're always fighting, full of anger. Against the world. Anger, yes, I feel it. Because you have grown and nobody cares about you as a grownup. They expect from you things you don't want to do. Studying Greek for example. Why should I give a damn? At least I could study Hollywood. And be good, go to bed at eleven, read selected and elected books, don't smoke, neither cigarettes nor joints, don't look at boys, don't let them get their hands on me. Everything, just everything in front of you and you can't touch anything. Torture.

In the ring-a-ring-o'roses of the dream I was fine up to a certain point, then suddenly we were called up by the school bell. A teacher came who looked a lot like my mother, she clapped her hands to call us to order and said, "In the classroom children, the break is over". We lined up for two, hand in hand, and they led us along a long, white corridor. The classroom doors were all closed. The corridor seemed endless, it stretched, stretched, stretched. The girl who was holding my hand, at some point said, "Silvia, I'm tired. Please, stop, I think we're being kidnapped."

Only then I turned to face her. My God, it was Debby, as an adult, the way I remember her now, and her face was completely covered with blood. I got scared, and I screamed. Around me, all of the children had grown up, my classmates, and they were all stained with blood. Even my hands were dropping red river after red river. The teacher now no longer looked like my mom, it was Eleonora. Her red hair, covering her skeletal body, came down to the ground. She looked like Lady Godiva, and she was missing her eyes.

"You two, yes you two", she said, pointing at me and Deborah, "you'll suffer a terrible punishment for what you did to me. You will die with me, you will die with me", and she pulled out a gun from her pocket and started shooting like crazy.

I hid behind Deborah. But I was not scared. I watched her, the Eleonora gone crazy, the one I killed – maybe, if I hit her right – and I thought that, in her place, I would have done the same. I'd have come back to avenge myself, to take revenge even on death. And I didn't feel sorry for her. No, I felt nothing for her. Strange, not even the hatred I felt when I decided to kill her. I don't care any longer about Eleonora, I don't give a damn about the fifth E and the Marco Polo high, Mrs. Boschi, Luca, Alessia, Deborah. They no longer exist for me, because now I have learned one thing. Now I know, the ring-a-ring-o'roses never ends. And I won't die. I will no longer die because I am the best. The only, the inimitable Silvia Giardini.

### We are all "Americans"

"Born in the USA, I was born in the USA, I was born in the USA."

("Born in the USA", Bruce Springsteen)

All that had to happen already had, and all there was left now were fear, a vague sense of dizziness and the incredible feeling of being still alive, graced for a mysterious reason by God or by chance. Sara and Andrea looked incredulous at each other, from opposite sides of the classroom, not daring to move or say a word. Their classroom had been crossed by a cyclone, a tornado that brought death and now had suddenly stopped, leaving only devastation. The scream of sirens coming from the outside was deafening, it bounced on the skin, hit them like a slap in the face, leaving only desolation.

All that had to happen already had, Sara repeated like a refrain. She could again stand up, walk, run, eat, go to the bathroom, pray, curse, dance, kiss a boy, be kissed, cry or laugh. She brushed her face. She was alive, she was sure, once again. She slid out from under the desk and stood up, gently, careful not to make noise, as she heard excited voices in the corridor, moving away. She took a step, then another, clambering over the dead bodies next to her with her eyes half-closed. She didn't want to look at the bodies, they scared her. She just wanted out of that room.

Sara stood as dazed in the doorway, looking. Again. There no longer was anything to laugh about. She felt the urge to vomit. Eleonora, with her cascade of red curls, and Luca, the stewed fish who was always next to her, begging for a kiss he never got, were there, lying on the floor, in an unnatural position, covered in blood and inseparably joined, not for their choice. Alessandro was not far away, his jeans for once in the right place, but he had taken away his Roman dialect, his fingers in his nose, his roller skates and irreverent jokes. They would not be back. Alessia was curled up next to Eleonora, her chest and hands still bleeding, eyes wide and staring. Sara took her left hand to her mouth to suppress a cry. It was not a game. They were really dead. What had made the difference between her and them? Why was she now watching them instead of being stretched sprawling on the floor? There was no explanation. The girl did not know whether her classmates had surrendered to death immediately, surprised by the ferocity of the shots, or had still lived for a moment, struggling not to give themselves to Charon, listening and understanding what had happened, even suffering physically. She had only heard the voices, then the screams, the gunshots and the threats, and she had thrown herself to the floor, trying to make herself smaller and smaller and covering her ears with her hands, crouching under the desk as much as possible. She could do like a contortionist and overcome anxiety. She knew how to control fear.

She had learned from an early age, under the pretext of controlling her breathing. It was her Achilles heel. She had noticed that the first time in the yard, while playing with the neighbours' children. Sometimes her breath stopped in her throat, closed her mouth. It happened even at night, in bed. Running and playing had become a nightmare. "Asthma", this was the terrible word that hung in her house, only whispered when she was there. Her parents had started chasing specialists and medicines, then, in this order, analysis of food allergies and homeopathy had come. She was allergic to milk and all of its by-products, never a cookie or a piece of cake. When she was about ten, everything had subsided altogether. She no longer emitted that mysterious whistle. She began to breathe like everyone else. The doctor said that it was normal, that allergies subside with growth, and problems disappear. Occasionally, however, when she was scared or upset, when she had some concern, she still had a fit, the devastating feeling of losing control of her breath. Then she stopped still and waited for it to pass, her body shaken by a vibrating motion. She had chosen to control her breathing with the power of thought, with yoga classes, two afternoons a week, lying on a mat. She wanted to learn to concentrate, focus her thoughts, find herself. Strong, she wanted to be strong to face life and events. That's why she had stood motionless in the classroom while shots echoed one another. She had controlled her breathing and anxiety. Maybe it was this that had saved her.

She usually sat in the back row, because she hated to speak or be questioned, and she was also tall, too tall for a fifteen-year-old girl. Or so she thought when the doctor measured her.

"Five feet ten, Sara", her mother said, proud.

"I will become taller and taller and no one will ever want to hang out with me", she replied, annoyed.

No more now. After everything that had happened in the classroom, she would no longer ask her mother, "Tell me, am I so ugly?" Now she would be content to live and feel her long body on her, without wounds or signs of violence. She only had to watch her hands and feet and bless the choice of the back row and yoga that had saved her present and her tomorrow, the days to come and the memories of past ones.

"Andrea", she said softly but firmly, "why don't you move? Come on, let's get out."

He was there, not far away, his hair gone crazy on his head and his glasses half-crooked on his nose. He was crying.

"Please, Andrea, come on, let's get out of here, I can't stay. I can't stand it."

She was moving her arms forward as if to call him, but it seemed to her to be speaking to a deaf man. Her classmate was motionless, petrified.

"I wetted myself", the boy whispered eventually, in shock. Sara crossed the classroom and reached him, firmly, shaking his arm.

"We must go away from here, you understand? Don't give up right now, please. We must live!"

He would never change, she thought with contempt and, in a split second, she saw him again as a child in first grade, when they had met. Andrea had always needed a hand to drag him, it didn't matter if it was that of his mother, a teacher or even a friend. He needed to be towed. Growing up he had kept his shyness in dealing with life, his indecision, his fear, intact, and his friends had taken to call him "rabbit", sometimes in secret, other times openly, especially if he called himself out of a joke or a game of the class.

"Whiner, rabbit, are you connected or are you out? You're still in the stone age!" Alessandro thundered like a chant, and everyone else laughed heartily. Andrea the rabbit looked down and didn't say a word. Sara had a nickname too, she had known for some time. She was "spindle-shanks", because of her height. She would rather be "the giraffe", it seemed more feminine and romantic, but for sure she could not suggest it.  
What she could and should do was leave the classroom/morgue as soon as possible. She roughly grabbed Andrea and dragged him behind like a mother running away with her son by the hand after an earthquake. She saw Silvia and Deborah on the floor, one on top of the other, their blood around them. She closed her eyes in anger. There was no reason to rejoice in their death. She held tighter the hand of the rabbit and tried to look elsewhere. She only saw pain. In front of the next classroom there was professor Rossigni, who no longer looked like the composed and smiling math teacher, only like a poor woman killed for no reason. Sara jumped, surprised and stunned. Those two had killed the professor too. It wasn't possible it had happened for real, she thought, it wasn't possible. She wanted to scream and run, but she regained control. She looked at Andrea, dazed at her side, and walked on. The corridor in front of them was empty, spooky, the classroom doors were all open, but no living being was coming out of the rooms. Spindle-shanks and the rabbit were walking as if they were Neil Armstrong and his companions on the day of the conquest of the moon. Small hesitant steps toward life. There was the stairs, leading down to the exit, the incoherent voices, life, freedom. On a normal day, at that time, the boys would be on break, out in the square smoking a cigarette, and she would have found a place right there, looking at Marco with her eyes and her heart in the hope of being reciprocated in the game of looks preceding love. But not now, it wasn't a day like any other. They had to invent gestures and answers, write everything from scratch, for better or for worse.

They came to the door as if by a miracle, they passed the ford. For a long moment they found themselves invisible. No one noticed them. The survivors, their classmates, were outside, in tears, hugging, comforting one another, talking about themselves. There was also Marco. Alive. Professor Boschi, in tears, was talking to a policeman, but actually she was in despair, screaming, she seemed on the verge of a panic attack. Don Silvio, the religion teacher, ran spirited among students, waving a Bible. Anna, Marina, Giulia, Simone and the other refugees of fifth E eventually saw them and ran to meet them. Sara abandoned Andrea to his fate and the game of hugs started wearily. She was destroyed. Stretchers covered with white sheets came out on pilgrimage from the door of the school. On each of those, the girl told herself with terror, there could have been her. She counted them; one, two, three... she saw six of them, not seven, and it seemed she was living in a wrong nightmare. Maybe she was just dreaming, imagining. Maybe.

She had already seen something like that on the news, but she had always thought that it would never happen in Rome, go figure in her school... She had never believed the words of Silvia, her murderous plans. Not in Marco Polo high, no one would shoot. Some petty theft at worst, a few euro slipped away from the pockets of coats or backpacks. At worst a bit of drug, quietly sold in the courtyard and smoked not far away, in the gardens of Mole Adriana. What had happened that day belonged only to the Americans, to their culture marred by war movies. Americans, yes, they knew the twin towers and the bombings, Al Qaeda and Vietnam. Yes, they would know what to do with all those dead. "Born in the USA, born in the USA", sang the legendary Bruce, the boss, but she was different, she was born in Italy, she was born in Rome and belonged to another culture.

Sara left the group and stood watching the scene from afar, like at the cinema, discovering that parents were starting to arrive, in shock. There were ambulances parked along the sidewalk in front of the cops, who sought words and witnesses, with the assault of reporters cameras. She half-saw a good-looking lady watch the scene then threw herself on the ground as if desperate. The woman, maybe the mother of one of the victims, stayed sitting on the pavement, as if waiting for a verdict. Could Silvia and Deborah had done this, might they have taken two guns and fired in the classroom against other classmates? Silvia had always hated Eleonora, she knew, from the very first time they had met, but from this to killing her! God, killing someone, and how you feel afterwards, and what happens to your hands, your head, your body? How does it feel to die? How does it feel to kill? Would there still be school after all this? Would it be possible to go through that door again? Would they ever be able to go back to that classroom, open their backpacks, pull out their diaries, their books, read and study, forgetting the blood, the words, the tears, Eleonora, Luca, Alessandro, Alessia, the nicknames they had given one another, the pranks, the jokes, the antipathies, the sympathies, the years spent together? Forget, this was the refrain that would accompany their days for the days to come. And what would have happened if she had really understood what Silvia wanted to do? If she had told someone about the confidence she had made her, saying that she wanted to kill Eleonora? If she had really listened to her and looked inside her, not in the shallow way in which you live human relationships? Sara started to cry. First a tear, then another, then many, sobs, jerks.

She felt guilty for all the times she hadn't understood, she hadn't intervened, she hadn't reported or said a word in defence of Eleonora, when Silvia called her the "Leaguer", when Deborah made fun of her. And now their deranged hatred had become a real thing, from which they would never turn back. She too was guilty, she knew and she had said nothing, she had never suspected that the insanity would became reality, not once had she dared to say to those two crazies that they were exaggerating, that they were not alone, that there is also the right to be different and study. She should have talked to someone, she thought, explained to her parents that things were not going too well at school. But she was poised. Silvia and Deborah were her excuse for not studying too much, for not taking responsibilities. They were the ones calling the shots and she did not obey neither object. Indeed at times, when she could, she helped them, handing them the answers to their class assignments, laughing at their jokes, stupidly, so not to have problems. She liked them, she even loved Silvia for how she was always boldly sincere, and now Silvia had forced her to be accomplice to a mass murder. She would forever bear the burden of her silence. She stared at her hands, long, lanky, girlish, and realized that they were stained with blood. Then she went home, her breath gradually becoming more laboured.

### "Darling, you don't understand..."

"Sincerity, a requirement for a stable relationship that points to eternity."

("Sincerità", Arisa)

"Trulli trulli who makes the toys", "One swallow does not make a summer", "The pitcher goes so often that it leaves a hand". I must do something, keep the brain in shape, or I'll go crazy. Now I'm listing all proverbs and sayings that come to my mind, at least I won't go stupid by dint of twisting and turning around my memories. My grandmother knew a lot of this bullshit, she kept repeating them since I was a little girl. She knew all of them. Shit. And she pulled them out in context, when you least expected them. "Thirty days hath November through April, June and September", "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight".

My grandmother was the first person I saw dead. I was about twelve or so. She lay motionless on the bed, alone. She seemed to be asleep. They had put a black suit on her, the good one for the big events, and a necklace of pearls around her neck. Pearls bring tears, she always told me, they must not be gifted. Don't accept them from a man or you'll lose him. Fuck Granny, I'll never have the age at which someone, a husband, a lover, a boyfriend, makes you such an important gift! But I don't think that the wrecks of my generation will ever make such gifts. At most a... oh, well, I don't know. I'll never know. Sure, you left with the pearls and left us in tears. You were elegant on the goodbye bed. You wore kid shoes I'd never seen before. At home you always wore comfortable slippers, because of the bunionette that had grown on your feet, both of them, right on the inside. You said it gave you so much trouble, but you refused surgery. You said there was a risk of paralysis. Mom laughed.

"You're a coward!"

Do you remember, Grandma? Mom was always so strong and determined. The teacher with the red pen. She put everyone in line, even you. I loved you, Grandma. Really. Seeing you there, motionless. That day. I felt like choking, I was almost afraid you could wake up and talk to me. Maybe not, maybe I wanted you to wake up and talk. What do I know? You went too soon.

God, how frightening. The longest day of my life. Everyone was crying at home and no one cared about me. I snuck into your room and I watched you for a long time. The bed seemed taller than it was before. I felt like a dwarf. I stayed afar, watching you. Your white hair – that seemed to be fake – still, your eyes closed as if you were asleep. It even seemed to me that you were smiling blissfully, but also that your skin was swollen, that it was about to explode. I approached you and touched your hand. Your face was like stone and I was afraid. I tried to kiss you. You were cold as marble. Oh God. That cold comes back to me now. Are we all like that when the light is out? Do we become in an instant just like a stone with no before or after? A stone that rolled so long, then stopped. I wonder whether when I die I will also frighten in the same way those who will look at me? Will I become a sort of absurd wax mask, without breath, without heat? I'll be like that, I know. Maybe somehow I already am. I'm frozen, motionless, like you were that day. I will become marble. Have even Eleonora and Debby become like that too? What have I done to bring to life all this death?

She was beautiful, my grandmother. Beautiful and good. She was the best of the family, and when I visited her, in secret, she always gave me some candy or a chocolate.

"Life is so bitter, darling."

And she said that "darling" with strength, as if it were a compliment, like a caress. Sara called me darling too, where she had caught that nickname I don't know, but the fact that she used it gave me some strength. I trusted her. That's why I told her. I was sure that she wouldn't betray me. Neither me nor Debby. She was the only one who knew our secret.

"I'll kill her one day."

"Who do you want to kill? The redhead?"

We were lying on the ground in front of the school, in the little square, with that October sun that turns Rome into an earthly paradise. Her so long, me so small. I had my head resting on her legs. The Leaguer had just passed by, swaying with that "only I have it" expression, and had slipped into the doorway of Marco Polo high. It's not like she could afford to be a minute late, the swot, and then she was never friendly with anyone but Lavinia. She came and went by her shop with broad smiles, as if they had who knows what in common.

"I hate her."

"Never mind. Look, one like that in the class is a fortune for us. Finally Mrs. Boschi found someone to question and she no longer cares about us. For her there is only the Leaguer now."

Sara had a philosophy of her own to live, it was not a hot-blooded like me. She always thought before speaking, and always seemed careful to control herself. Now that I think about it, she wasn't only a "spindle-shanks", she was tough, granite, sturdy. I too am strong, but different. I have to explode not to feel bad. She keeps it in.

"I can't stand her. She gives me a pain in the neck."

"Why do you give a damn at all? Look what a beautiful day. On Sunday we might go to the beach. Never mind the redhead, darling. Do you know how many fucking problems she has too?"

"Money comes out of her ears..."

"So what? It's not her fault."

"It's beautiful and a swot too..."

"Yes, but she's quite alone too. No one cares about her except Luca, but she doesn't even see him. What could she do with someone like Morocco?"

It was then that I decided to tell her. The fact that she could feel sorry for the Leaguer horrified me. Debby had not yet arrived and I absolutely needed to share my hatred with someone, to confront, to hear the effect of the greatest idea of my life.

"I have a clear plan. I'm going to kill her. So I rid the school from her presence."

Sara laughed, as if I had said something completely insane and impossible. Fun. Shit. She though my stroke of genius was fun.

"Okay, okay. And how are you doing that? You want to put a bomb under her desk or push her under the first passing car? Maybe choke her while Mrs. Boschi is reading us the latest chapter of The Betrothed? A nice coup de theâtre in the classroom would be nice."

"No... I will be less original. I'll cut her to pieces or maybe shoot her. What if I shoot her?"

"If you really want... but where would you get a gun? It's not like they sell them at the supermarket."

"I already have it. I already prepared everything. Debby and I could..."

"Listen, darling, you are very funny but I think you just watch too many movies, really too many... come on, you'll tell me another time. Now let's go to the classroom, it's late and I haven't studied a fuck. Today if I get caught they kill me."

Giving me a blow on the shoulder, she pushed me gently away. Oblivious. A passing car threw at full volume a catchy song, an old song I had completely forgotten that spoke about "Sincerity". Sara burst into singing along with ease, as if nothing had happened, as if she had not understood the tragedy that I had announced. I stood up and watched her collecting her backpack from the ground and adjusting her shirt. I felt a growing anger. How could she not believe me? Why wouldn't she listen to my confidence? Had I made a mistake in choosing her as a friend? For a long moment I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs about the guns, the massacre, the pact I had made with Debby. But I stood silent. "Don't count your chicken before they are hatched", the popular wisdom says. Or at least I think so. We went up to the classroom in silence, she sheltered in the back row, I went to my desk. We didn't happen to talk again. But I'm sure, I am really sure, that when I really started to shoot that day, my words rang in Sara's ears. She must have understood that – granny knew it well - "Joking and kidding, Pulcinella said the truth", my dear darling.

### The music is over

"What wouldn't I give to hold you, what wouldn't I do for this love to become stronger than ever, here, the music is over, the friends are leaving."

("La musica è finita", Franco Califano)

The call reached Mario Giardini at 12.25. He was sitting on the train which would take him back from Milan to Rome and was absently reading the latest issue of Espresso. He was nervous and unsatisfied. He had spent a weekend with a colleague, planning a job they probably would not get, and he would have given anything for a cigarette, but there was still half an hour before reaching his destination. When the phone rang, he absently looked at the display, saw that the call came from a private number and answered with the tone of who is expecting a nuisance.

"Hello?" he said absent-mindedly.

"Dr. Giardini? I'm calling about your daughter Silvia. There was an accident at school."

"An accident? Silvia... how is Silvia?"

The architect was vomiting questions, one after another, with a worried expression, while his thoughts ran as fast as the worst fantasies. He was afraid that his daughter might have slipped on the stairs or fainted, or that a glass might have broken and hit her eyes. He imagined a fall from a chair or an accidental injury.

"Dr. Giardini, I can't give you more information on the phone. You should come to the Santo Spirito hospital as soon as possible."

"I am in a train. I should be in Termini at about one o'clock."

"Maybe your wife could come?"

"I am divorced. My ex wife is abroad."

"I understand."

No comments from his interlocutor. An official of the school? A nurse? A teacher? Mario didn't know

"Listen, don't leave me this way. Tell me at least how serious it is."

"Come to the hospital Dr. Giardini."

"But is she alive?"

"Yes, she's alive."

Mario Giardini looked at his watch and started counting the minutes. He kept suspecting he had been told a merciful lie on the phone. Of course his daughter had never been a model student, but that didn't mean anything. Fallen from a window? But how could that have happened? What then? Had she tried to commit suicide? Girls are weird when they grow up. And Silvia had never accepted that her mother had abandoned her. Might she have felt sick because she was hungry? He picked up the phone to call the school directly, but nobody answered at the other side. Eventually he resigned to wait, anxiety devouring him, and reached the Santo Spirito hospital like a man possessed. By taxi.

He was detained at the information desk by a nurse who, rather than bringing him to see the girl, escorted him directly to the police station.

"I must immediately see my daughter. I am the father of Silvia Giardini. Why am I here? What happened?"

He was standing with his briefcase in hand and kept pulling the neck of his shirt as he watched the inspector with a mixture of bewilderment, anxiety and anger.

"What happened to my daughter?"

Inspector Renato Pascucci could not stand that look. He was a father, he had lived the same concern a few years ago, in another hospital. He knew the pain of Mario Giardini. He looked down and stared at the tips of his shoes. What he had to say wasn't easy. He cursed his task.

"Dr. Giardini, calm down and sit down. Something happened today at your daughter's school."

"What?"

"Please, sit down."

Mario Giardini fell on the chair like a sack.

"There was a shooting."

"A shooting? At school? Like in American campuses?"

"Yeah."

Giardini straightened on his chair, running his hand through his hair. He did not care anything about sociology.

"Is Silvia dead? How is she?"

"I told you she's not dead. She is in a coma."

"Will she make it?"

"I hope so. But..."

"But..."

Inspector Pascucci decided to take action. He would have rather been miles away. He moved his body closer to his interlocutor, bending forward on his desk to make his words more human and confidential. Words that were impossible to listen to for a father, and he knew it.

"Dr. Giardini. It was your daughter to shoot... your daughter and her friend, Deborah Volpini. The girls, for reasons still unclear, went to school with weapons, guns, and shot their classmates."

"Shot? It can't be. Silvia and Deborah with guns?"

The Inspector looked up at his interlocutor. And his look was deliberately blank. He was trying to remember what had been said to him that day, the day that Stefano died. Who had told him that his son, his only son, was gone forever? It didn't come to his mind. He only found emptiness.

"What happened? Has someone... has someone died?"

Renato Pascucci closed his eyes for a second, as if searching for a picture in his memory. Actually he was only looking for words.

"Six... six dead. Five students and a teacher. Witnesses say your daughter was the first to shoot. Did she ever mention Eleonora Cremaschi?"

"Never. Why?"

"It's one of the girls they killed. Maybe the real target of the slaughter."

The inspector ran his hand through his hair. He was sweating.

"I only know Deborah. She is always at our house. They lock themselves in Silvia's room for hours, listening to the music. But from here to kill five, six people... they are just two little girls."

"I understand you. I had a sixteen-years-old son. I understand Dr. Giardini. Children are not predictable."

Mario Giardini ran his hand over his face and looked at the inspector as if he were seeing a Martian. He thought and didn't think.

"My daughter. A killer... will she make it?"

"You have to talk to the doctor about that. I think that she will undergo surgery. I only know that she is in a coma."

"Someone shot her?"

"A policeman, to stop her. Silvia was... she had just shot Deborah."

"It's impossible that she shot Deborah. She's her best friend."

"From what I understand, in the end they had a fight."

The inspector looked down again.

"What does it mean? I don't understand."

"Deborah had shot a professor who was not in their list."

"List?"

"Yes. It seems that the two girls had a clear plan."

"They had a list of people to kill? Science Fiction."

"Are you aware that your daughter was using drugs?"

"Excuse me. I need a cigarette. I don't believe that my daughter uses drugs. At worst she could have smoked some joint. Who hasn't at her age?"

"You really did not realize that your daughter was addicted to drugs?"

"No, I said no. I knew she wasn't eating, wasn't studying. But after the mess with her mother, I turned a blind eye. What could I ask my daughter after her mother left? I was not able to support her, to help her grow and digest the solitude of our home. I just let it go. I wasn't myself. What could I do? I thought it would pass with time. I really didn't check too thoroughly. Drugs? What kind of drugs?"

The inspector was fiddling with a pen, turning it over and over between his fingers.

"Hashish surely, and cocaine. It is very fashionable among young people. A single dose costs as much as an allowance. Teachers never called you from school? She never got a report?"

"They called me once from school a few years ago. Then I stopped going and they stopped looking for me."

"I understand."

"Excuse me, inspector, but, is it easy to shoot? I mean, to a girl who has never fired a gun...?"

"Shooting at close range is not difficult, believe me. Even a child could do it."

"Really?"

"Do you have any weapon at home Dr. Giardini? Even collectibles, old family memoires?"

"I hate guns. I never had guns at home. I wouldn't even know how to touch them."

"I thought so. But you know, I must investigate. Do you have any idea where Silvia took the gun?"

"Are you kidding?"

"No particular friend? A company a little, let's say, alternative? Criminals, drug dealers, delinquents?"

"Not at all."

"Someone must has given her weed. You know who supplied her?"

"I'm not even sure that Silvia smoked joints."

"Dr. Giardini. Search your memory and give me a hand! I must find out who gave the weapons to the girls."

"I understand. I wish I knew too. I will do what I can to help you with investigations. If needed. She will tell you the truth when she comes out of the coma, if she will..."

"Well. I'll give you my phone number, call me at any time if something comes to your mind. Now go to Silvia, maybe they will let you see her. Have professor Spezziani accompany you. He's the one who's treating your daughter. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."

The inspector stood still, watching him go away. He didn't even stand up to shake hands with him, he didn't even escort him to the door. He felt sad, invaded by the melancholy of defeated fathers, and found himself humming an old song by Califano, "The music is over, the friends are leaving, what a useless night my love..." His work was still in deep water and there was another man who, like him, would no longer find peace of mind. He snorted before answering the phone. Mario Giardini left incredulously the police station, bearing a load of coffins and pain on his shoulders. He was stunned, shocked, scared. His daughter was dying, his daughter, a killer who had just made a slaughter at school. He walked like a whipped dog, he felt stunned by the events. He couldn't understand well. Indeed, he didn't understand anything. He just wanted to see Silvia and watch her breathe. Outside the room a short queue had formed. He saw against the light other faces and other pains, but he didn't have the courage to look at them. What could he say to the parents of children his daughter had killed? He hoped not to be identified. Life, at that moment, was delivering him a devastating bill he still could not rationalize. He kept thinking there must be some mistake, surely they were wrong, because his little Silvia – so young and so frail – could not really have taken a gun and fired. Why? And on whom? On Deborah, the inseparable friend with whom she had shared years of school and talk? Only the hope that there was a mistake acted for him as an anchor to get upstairs and reach, dragging himself, the ICU.

"We can only wait. We are doing everything possible. You have to wait, Dr. Giardini. For now she is in a coma. I cannot tell you more than this", a young, intimidated-looking doctor explained him.

The man put his coat and mask on, and tiptoed with a lost expression in the suspended word of sick people fighting against death. Silvia was there, with an IV drip attached to her arm, so helpless in a bed too big. His daughter, his child, the one he looked at with pride despite her bad marks at school and her habit of not eating. Who was this stranger with the gun? Where was his little, beloved Silvia, who was moved by cartoons? Where had she gone? What was left of her? How can you give birth to a child, keep her in your arms, feed her, buy her sweatshirts, jeans and an iPod, cuddle her after arguments with her boyfriend, and one day find out that she uses drugs, that she has a gun and shoots? Whose body was the one before him, still and silent? A stranger, just a stranger. Mario Giardini wiped his sweat. Then he stopped thinking. He stood staring at her the way one watches his child struggling against death, and he did something he hadn't been able to do for so many years. He took her hand, gently, like when she was little and she had a fever, and started wetting it with his tears.

### Down on the floor

"I'll protect you from the fears of the hypochondria, from the disturbances you'll meet in your life from today, from the injustices and the deceits of your time, from failures."

("La cura", Franco Battiato)

She's here. I recognized the scent. A distinctive smell, halfway between baby powder and soap. Intoxicating. Chanel No. 5. She used floods of it. She says, "it's my way of being retro". I liked it. She took me in her arms and I smelled it. It seemed to me that mom had just came out of a bath of flowers. When she took me to school she let it into the air. I was proud of her. She was beautiful, with her black hair – cropped short, slipping over her ears – and her easy look. Impressive. I think she intimidated teachers. She always looked down upon them. It was her and no one else. My mother. She came here in my room in the hospital and for the first time, in all these days, I felt my blood stop in the veins. It was funny, as if everything had stopped spinning. Even my head reassembled on my neck, and every corner of my body celebrated the event by remaining vigilant, waiting.

"Silvia", she whispered.

And she stood upright, standing, in front of me. Her breathing a bit laboured. My mother is tall. I feel her presence like that of a giant looming over my bed. Motionless. Her perfume enters my nose and caresses my skin. She does nothing. Says nothing. She looks at me, I know, searches inside of me. I am stiller than usual. I have nothing to move and I can't wag a tail. My mother is here with me, in a hospital room, and looks at me, after two years of absence. Two years. How has she become? What colour might her hair be? Is she always lean and elegant like I remember her? Who gives a damn, though? I'm excited. And what happens now? She moves a hand, pats my face lightly, as if to make sure I can feel her, as if to tell me she is here, she is back. She's with me. Our skins melt for a moment, a fleeting moment. I would like to lock her on me. Crush her, eat her. Devour her. Make her mine. Possess her. Definitely kill her. Possess and hurt her at the same time. My mother.

"I only found out yesterday. I don't read Italian newspapers anymore. Nobody called me, informed me, or told me what had happened. Forgive me honey. I would have come sooner, if only I had known."

There, she took my hand in hers and sat on the edge of the bed. Next to me, like she did when I was a child and she told me a good night story. I feel my body vibrate, crazed. Hers too trembles slightly. Is it possible? Is it possible that she's here and perceives me like I perceive her?

"You've changed. Even the colour of your hair. You've become very thin, look at that little hands, my child. Little, little Silvia, love. I'd love to see you standing. You must be almost a woman now. I hope you can hear me. What am I saying? You hear me, I'm sure. I am here, honey, and now I will not let you alone again. Never more. You hear me, don't you Silvia?"

I can lie to everyone but her. We don't need words. I am her and she is me. Skin of my skin, blood of my blood. I'd like to cry. Hug her. Crush her. Love her.

"I had to talk to you for so long, but I always postponed. For you rather than for me. There are things that a daughter should not know. Forgive me, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I talk too much. Today I feel so desperately guilty. I keep thinking that if we had been together, if I'd brought you away with me, all this would not have happened. But life is made of junctions and intersections. We are the result of our choices. We chose a road and move on. You never know if it is the right one."

She stops, leaves my hand, stands up. Where is she going now? I can't see her, I can't see her, I can't see her. I'd give anything to see her.

She must have approached the window. I hear her elegant steps. She has discreet heels, I perceive by the ticking of the shoes. Dad always begged her not to choose heels too high, otherwise, he said, he would disappear. She teased him and called him "my prince consort", which was nasty by the way, because mom always earned twice as much as him.

"You were born lucky, not me, I made myself from scratch", he shouted when he was infuriated by yet another professional failure.

Then she made herself small and didn't answer. Just a minute, just long enough to muster forces and thoughts.

"It's not a matter of luck or birth. There are no castes. I'm good, I go on because I work hard, I think, I react, I never give up, I build, I create. I am the best and I never let anyone put me with my back at the wall. I don't whine like you, who can only blame others for your failure and your incompetence. Things are done, and that's it. You always think and never act."

Of the two of them Mom has always been the resolute one, the one making radical choices. White or black, she never knew gray. Even now, she doesn't stop in front of me, dying. She goes for the solo and looks for forgiveness. She presses, between a whisper and another. I'd just want a kiss, a real kiss.

"I live in London, you know. I never invited you nor come to visit in these two years because... because... it's hard to say, Silvia."

Hard Mom? Think how hard it was for me. Seeing you disappear one morning, without even a word. Only two lines to say goodbye in the letter you left to Dad. I've always wondered whether you had left because of me. Whether I had done something devastating, whether I had been an enemy to you, or too friendly, whether with my requests I had become an unmanageable burden for you and your damn commitments. I've always felt guilty for your leaving Mom. And that silence, all that silence. Where were you when I watched the mothers of my classmates and those of the neighbourhood with children in their arms, and those at the park playing and smiling? Where were you when I needed a word to go on? When I wanted to learn to apply makeup or lose weight? When my breast was bursting, coming out from every side, and I didn't know how to hide it? When I needed a friend to talk to? When I failed at school? Where were you? There, I know, you were never there. Do you remember that song, mom? Battiato's song, "... I'll protect you from the fears of the hypochondria, from the disturbances you'll meet in your life from today, from the injustices and the deceits of your time, from the failures that you'll meet due to your nature. I'll relieve you from your pain and mood swings ..." It's called "La cura", Mom, "The Cure". This is how a parent should behave. Just like that.

Help, my head is starting to falter again. Something devours me from the inside and I can't stop it.

"I have another partner and a ten-months-old child, I'm sure you know. It's not that I chose them and forgot you. I wish you would understand, have it very clear. It is life, my life. I had to do so, abandon you to detach myself, disconnect the umbilical cord. Forget your father, the woman I was with him. A woman I don't like, who doesn't belong to me, a woman who is not me. I had to leave you too, you know, I deleted you only because you reminded me of him and my mistakes. All the mistakes I keep making. It's hard to go on, make the right choice, Silvia."

She's crying, I hear her sobbing, and I don't feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for myself, because I was alone, I was deleted, I am the one who was sacrificed by her so-hard choices. Dad and I.

"I'm afraid Silvia. Afraid that now you might die without knowing how much I love you, how much I wanted you, how much I thought about you. Every now and then – you know? – I looked at the phone and wanted to call you, but I kept saying, "If get back in her life for a few minutes and then say goodbye and disappear again won't this make things worse? Won't I hurt her even more? Won't she find it absurd, a mother that calls her from London and doesn't visit her?"

No, no, what are you saying? I'd have given my life to hear that phone call, to know that every now and then you thought about me. You thought about me. I looked at the phone, the first day, the first few weeks after you left, and I was sure that it would ring, that you would invite me in your new home, show me where you lived, your new friends, your new job. I was sure that you would call, that you would send me a plane ticket or at least a note to say a few words, from mother to daughter, from woman to woman. Then at some point I stopped waiting, but I didn't stop feeling guilty, didn't stop loving you, hating you, wanting to see you dead before me.

"I thought, now she goes to school. I wonder how big she has become. If she has a boyfriend, if someone gives her the right advice to grow. I thought that one day I would take the plane and come to get you at the exit of the school. And maybe you would avoid me and hold a grudge for a while, but then you would throw your arms around my neck, like you did when you were a little girl, and we would make peace. I have always been about to do it. And don't blame him, my partner. It was my only choice. Andrew, the man with whom I live, never said a word. He is jealous of my past, that's true. He wanted me to break all contacts, to be only his, but he would never forbid me to see you, to bring you with me if I had deemed it necessary... I confided in your love and the blood we share... I hoped you would understand. But I was wrong. You are here and you cannot hug me, forgive me. Tell me that you still love me, that I'm still your mom."

So in the end it's for this. You sacrificed me for another man. You didn't give a damn about my pain. You're just selfish, a dirty, vile, selfish woman. I thought, I assumed, that dad – for some absurd reason, a secret maybe – had forbidden you to see me and call me. I hoped it was his fault. I made up in my mind a nineteenth century story with you, the cheater driven away with the brand of sin, forced to wander the world, without permission to call me and meet me even for a few minutes. Sometimes I looked around when I left the school and I thought, "Mom must be hidden behind a lamppost or a tree to watch me, to see how I am growing up, whether I am as beautiful as her, whether I still dress well like when she chose for me the more expensive clothes". But no, you were in London, having Andrew fucking make you pregnant, and becoming a woman with no past and no daughter. With no ties. Another woman. You are pathetic! That sucks, God how it sucks.

"I don't know why you became like this. I don't know why you started shooting. You were the most altruist girl in the world. You were cheerful, lively, affectionate. Abundant, exuberant, optimistic and always happy. God, don't tell me it was my fault. I had to leave, do you understand that? With your father it was a living hell, we did nothing but fight, we didn't understand each other, we had no esteem for each other, we had no longer been in love for so long. When I met Andrew it seemed to me the only real chance of escaping. I could start living again. I felt like a woman again. I found love, comfort and hope. A new world, the chance to exist. I know, I could have taken you with me. But you had to start high school, you had your friends, your world. Could I, should I take you with me in London? It wouldn't have been easy. You'd have needed a year just to learn the language. Maybe you would have hated me, you would have hated Andrew, we would have ruined our lives again. You could become a loose cannon in my new home. And then I was immediately pregnant. I had to think about the baby..."

Damn, you could at least have mentioned this to me Mom, you could at least have asked me to choose between you and Dad, between Rome and London, between a house where pain and apathy lived, and one in which there was a strong love and a new life was coming. You could have given me this chance, damned woman, let me know that, even just for a moment, you really thought about me, as a result of your actions. I don't know if I would have said no. I just know that I would have had a hope.

"Try to live, Silvia. Get well, come back to me now that we found each other again. I swear I will never leave you again, I will pay the best lawyer around, I'll pull you out of this mess, I'll help you. You are still underage, you can get by more easily. Some years in prison, they will send you to reformatory, then some recovery course, a family home. Maybe we can prove that you were of unsound mind that day. Maybe I can make you escape somehow. I have to think. You know I never give up, I'll find a way to bring you away with me. In Italy if you pay you get everything. Justice is a thing for the poor. There are many roads to follow, that your father doesn't even remotely imagine. We will use political friendships. I'll pull you out. I'll do everything I can for you, love. Try to live, try to come out of it. My child."

She cries. She has thrown herself on me, her arms around my body. She is kneeling on the floor beside the bed. She cries wildly, like a flooding river, a tsunami with wobbling motions, shaking my body, shaking it as if it were homemade pasta. As if I were hers. A property she leaves and takes when she wants.

"Silvia, Silvia. A doctor, quick, a doctor. She is dying, help, somebody give her oxygen, do something, quick. Help me, Help me."

Hey, step aside, I would like to tell her, you choke me this way. You're scaring me. Who are you? A silly little woman. Dad was right. You're worth less than zero. You can only talk about money. You want to buy, buy, buy even me. You no longer emotion me, even the scent of that one-hundred-euro-per-bottle perfume bothers me, it makes me want to sneeze. Do you want to pay for my acquittal? Would you want me to live, to resurrect, only to appease your guilt? I won't give you this satisfaction, ugly witch. If I had my gun I'd shoot you too. You don't exist. You don't exist for me. Not anymore. Go away, go away or I will.

"Don't die Silvia, Mom's love, please. Forgive me. Don't leave me."

This time it's my turn, dear Mom, to leave without a word. So maybe you'll understand. You'll know what it means to be rejected, abandoned, branded as the daughter of no one. I go, old witch. I leave you and all of these assholes. It's my turn in the circle. All fall down. I get high at the computer, here it is back in my hands. I don't hear you anymore. In my mind there's only pictures of frogs and cowboys. I go, I leave. And please step aside. You're too tall to play with me.

### Freedom for all

"Nino don't be afraid of missing a penalty kick, it's not from these details that a player is recognized, you see a player from his courage, altruism, imagination."

("La leva calcistica della classe '68", Francesco De Gregori)

Months later, the wound still burned like the first day. Sara had become even taller, one inch, which made her feel close to heaven, and at the same time one step from hell. But she had stopped rebelling against her body that wanted to grow taller and taller, against her breath that still stopped in her throat. Now she rebelled against life as a whole. She kept feeling guilty. She had tried to explain that to inspector Pascucci when he called her once again, soon after the funeral.

"Maybe you know something more than the others... a particular, a detail, something that could help me with the investigation", he had told her, looking at her with a paternal expression, at the same time full of resentment.

He looked tired, his hair was dishevelled on his forehead beaded with sweat. Sara thought she should help him, for Eleonora and everyone else, but she didn't know how.

"Silvia told me one day", she muttered eventually in one breath, plucking up courage but avoiding to look into his eyes.

"What did she say exactly? She told you about the slaughter? She said she had the gun? Did she say any names? Try to remember exactly. Did she say a name? I need just one."

"No, no, she said nothing. The truth is that she wanted to tell me, she hinted it, but I didn't believe her, Mr. inspector. It seemed impossible, I thought she was joking... it's as if I were to tell you now, well, no, not you, I wouldn't tell it to you, you are an inspector... as if I told to someone that I want to kill a person who is hateful to me. Would you believe me?"

Renato Pascucci nodded. He was starting to understand. Not even Sara could help him. He would not be able to bring to justice the hidden perpetrators of that slaughter.

"What did she say exactly?"

"That she was going to kill Eleonora, that she would rid us from her presence. I thought she was joking, that it was a relief. I laughed. You know, I just laughed. If I had asked, if I'd listened... why didn't I?"

Sara was crying. She was always crying since when it had happened. And she could not sleep. If she closed her eyes she heard the shooting, she saw again Eleonora, Alessia, Luca and Alessandro on the floor, she felt again that absurd fear of death, that terror. But she had been graced. She was alive, free and accomplice.

"I feel guilty, inspector. All of us who were in that class are guilty, we always agreed to everything, we laughed with Silvia and Deborah, joked with them... we allowed Eleonora to become their victim, we left her in their hands. We made fun of her because she studied, because the teachers loved her, and she was so beautiful, the most beautiful. You see... we allowed it, and it's no good saying that we're too young. We knew that Eleonora was suffering, but we didn't care... we laughed behind her back."

The father-looking inspector had widened his eyes with an incredulous expression. Sara liked his way of participating to that event, of intensely living their history. She felt him closer than any other adult she had known until then. She stood listening to him, paying attention even to his breathing.

"The most beautiful? Girl, are you telling me the tale of Snow White and her stepmother? Killed because she was the most beautiful, do you really think it was for this?!"

"I think so, Dr. Pascucci. I think it was just for that. Their idea was exactly that. Silvia was about to tell me everything that day. She trusted me, and I loved her, she knew that. But it seemed like a crazy idea... I did what you are doing now with me. I didn't believe her, I didn't attach any importance to it. If I had been less blind, less dumb... I don't know, I could have told Eleonora, my parents, the principal. I might have saved them all. I didn't, and now, even today I can't do anything. I don't know how to help you with the investigations. I'm sorry."

She had stopped crying. She had looked at him serenely, and patiently repeated that she did not know the circle of friends of Silvia, she didn't know who had given the guns to the two girls, she didn't smoke joints – actually she didn't even smoke cigarettes – and didn't know any pusher.

"Maybe there's someone at school who knows where to find weed", she said hopefully.

"Surely there will be, I will question them, and anyway stop tormenting yourself. You have not shot, girl, don't worry, it's not your fault. You didn't even support them morally, if that's what you think. Silvia and Deborah are the sole responsible of their actions."

Sara knew that, she had not taken a gun. She hadn't pulled the trigger, she hadn't killed. She hadn't ever even remotely thought about a slaughter. She could not be guilty. She had left the police station dejected, her hand in the hand of her mother, who had been waiting outside the room, eyes shiny.

"I will get taller, and this will be the punishment God has decided for me, for having been the unwilling accomplice of a series of murders. I will become a giant." So she repeated every evening before the mirror, and she measured herself, complaining with her parents.

"I'll never find someone as tall as me", she whimpered.

"You too will find a nice toad, don't worry", her mother answered, laughing.

Sara did not answer and lied on the bed. Sometimes looking at the ceiling, other times read the paper. If Mrs. Boschi had known, she would have fallen from her chair in excitement. She had taken to buy newspapers right after the slaughter. She leafed them anxiously to see if there was any news, if anyone mentioned Pascucci's investigations, if the name of the damn pusher had come up. There was never a single line about the story that had changed her life. Only the dramatic end of Silvia had won back the headlines; "The mind of the girls slaughter, Silvia Giardini, seventeen years old, died yesterday morning at 10.25 in the intensive care ward of the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome. In that moment with her was her mother, Giovanna, just arrived from London where she lives with her new partner and her infant son. The woman, locked in her grief, declined to comment. Her father, the architect Mario Giardini, immediately rushed to see his daughter one last time. He asked the reporters who were waiting outside the entrance for a news blackout, inviting them to understand his grief. For an absurd twist of fate, the girl died at the same time when the slaughter began on that tragic November 21st..."

Sara closed the newspaper with an angry gesture. She had asked her parents several times the permission to visit Silvia at the hospital, but they had looked at her as if she were crazy.

"Don't even talk about it. You visiting that killer? Do you remember that you're alive by a miracle, you could have died that day, too!"

"She was a friend of mine. She was a friend of mine", she had said, crying.

She wanted to see her and even talk to her, she did not know what about, nor why, but she was sure she had to say goodbye to her one last time, look for an answer, look at her after all that horror.

Newspapers had devoted much space to the mother of Eleonora, disappeared from the Santo Spirito hospital the morning of the slaughter. According to what had emerged from the investigations, the woman had suddenly dressed and left the hospital with no one stopping her, and she had never come back. A couple of nurses had gone on trial for lack of supervision. Her husband, the father of Eleonora, had circulated leaflets complete with mug shots, participated in a couple of episodes of "Chi l'ha visto?" on TV, launched a series of appeals, but his desperate search had been unsuccessful.

"Poor fellow", Sara thought, and she fantasized about the good-looking woman she had seen throwing herself on the pavement, outside the school, the day, that day.

Maybe it had been her, Mrs. Cremaschi. Maybe she had heard the news from someone, or maybe had had a premonition. Sara imagined her wandering around Rome in search of her beautiful daughter, victim of a momentary madness. She wanted to tell that to inspector Pascucci, but she tried to keep a safe distance from the investigations, from the school, from any event that could remind her of the slaughter. Besides, who and what would have benefited from knowing that Mrs. Cremaschi had been there that day? No one and nothing, she thought.

Over the weeks she noticed with surprise that the slaughter had been forgotten, like the proposal of a fancy minister who wanted to put metal detectors at the entrance of every school. Even the political debate around the story of the Marco Polo high had been deleted by new events and by the oblivion that covers the victims, wraps them, transforms them into martyrs who don't even have the right to be sorry for themselves.

"Understand, forgive, forget" had been written on a memorial plaque in the square of the school. Someone regularly brought fresh flowers and put them elegantly on the ground, near the entrance of the institute. Students had gone back to school as if nothing had happened. They sat in the classrooms and even opened notebooks and books, talking, talking, dreaming, like all students of the world. Lavinia had closed the shop next door to the Marco Polo high and moved to live in the countryside, in the tourist farm of a friend, a stone's throw from Vico lake. There was no trace of the parents of the murdered children. They had darkened in their sorrows, no one had sought them anymore. Claudia's sister, Alessia, had stopped eating and had been admitted to a centre specializing in the treatment of anorexic girls. Inspector Pascucci's shoulders were increasingly curved. He felt the defeat of not having been able – not even with the help of eager informants – to put an end to the investigations. Everything was apparently in order, everything was still as before. A huge ring-a-ring-o'roses of pain and thoughts that didn't seem to end.

In mid June, the girls slaughter regained the front pages of newspapers. The principal and teachers board of the Marco Polo high, upon suggestion of the Ministry of Education, had decided to award the diploma to the memory to the killed students – Eleonora, Luca, Alessandro and Alessia – and promote the survivors of the fifth E, whatever it was their academic performance during the school year. Sara was invited like everyone else to participate to the official ceremony. They sent an elegant note to her house, with a request to confirm her presence by telephone. She had begged her parents not to go with her, for once. They had agreed, although mumbling vigorously and with some fear. After the day of the slaughter, her mother had become neurotic, following her step by step as if she were afraid to leave her alone. And now Sara was walking alone, thoughtful, toward the school, pulled by an imaginary rope. She had conquered a political report, softened by an average mark of seven, without having opened a book from the day of the slaughter. Without having gone back to the classroom. And now she was presented with the bill. She had to go and collect it at school, sitting in the theatre, see again Marco, Mrs. Boschi, Andrea, Maria, and all those who had lived with her on that bloody Monday. She would need to see again the cameras and reporters, listen to speeches, shake hands, exchange kisses on the cheeks, pretend to be healed, to have overcome the horror. Maybe she would also meet the parents of the dead students, Alessia's sister, with whom she had exchanged a few words at the funeral, the father of Eleonora, whom she had only seen on television. She wondered what had become of Mrs. Cremaschi? And who knew what Silvia had felt, dying in the hospital, alone?

Sara didn't know which side to choose, whether that of adults and their legislation, or that of teenagers – frightened, without a clear answer. No absolution, no condemnation, that was her motto.

The official ceremony was scheduled for ten o'clock in the morning and it was hot in Rome. A let's-go-to-the-sea kind of heat.

Sara was sweating, walking unhurriedly on the cobblestones that would lead her to the Marco Polo high. She was wearing a white linen dress, lightweight and very chastened. A red scarf over her hair, a bracelet of the same colour at her wrist. In some ways she seemed to her to be reliving the day of the funeral. She was treading the same path, with the same state of mind, with her breath becoming increasingly laboured and the knowledge that she had to control it before it got stuck in her throat, like that sense of death she had not yet get used to had got stuck in her heart. The psychologist who had assisted her during all those months, an elderly and meticulous lady wearing thick lenses, had been explicit, yet determined, when she had considered refusing to go to the delivery of fictitious reports and useless diplomas. She had seriously looked at her from behind her glasses, a look that Sarah had learned to recognize and fear, then she had said, distinctly pronouncing her words, "It will definitely hurt you to go to that school again. Perhaps you will suffer more than you think, seeing your classmates again and remembering that day. But I think it will also benefit you greatly. You cannot remove the grief forever. You have to deal with what happened. Only this way you can feel better."

Sara hadn't answered. From her five feet ten of height, now conquered and consolidated, she had remained silent, like a sad giraffe observing the world around her. She had nodded resignedly.

"If you really want, if you think it is necessary, I will go."

She felt anguish at the idea of going back into that building. In September, according to the agreement she had reached with her parents, she would go back to school, but not to the Marco Polo high. She was going to have other classmates, other teachers. The third year of high school meant starting over. She had asked for the new teachers to be informed in advance that she was a survivor of the fifth E, and that she would not welcome any question or comment about the past. That was the deal. She had to remain a survivor in the shadows. Immediately after the slaughter, she had even been invited to participate in some television programs. Significant sums of money had been offered to her parents in order to be allowed to interview her. Sara had always said no, she didn't want to hear about that.

She wanted to tiptoe out of that story.

She caught her breath before crossing the entrance of the Marco Polo high with her burden on her shoulders. The room was dripping with sweat and people, teenagers and adults with forcedly appropriate expressions. She immediately saw inspector Pascucci, easily noticeable for his white polo, discreetly worn over a pair of jeans. He was standing close to the front door, with an absent expression. Sara restrained the impulse to run to him, greet him with enthusiasm and ask him about the investigations. Certainly they had been closed long ago, with no results, she thought, and there was no point rubbing salt in the wound of that kind man's failure. Then she noticed Mrs. Boschi, not far away, slightly fatter than usual and with her hair and a little fairer than she remembered. She deliberately avoided her, averting her gaze. If the teacher had noticed her she would have had to go and talk to her, and she still didn't feel ready for that conversation. Finally she saw Mrs. Maresco, dominating the room and the scene, standing upright. The lady of the house. She was just perfect, dressed as if she were in a box at the opera. She was shaking hands and trading smiles. It was her triumph, Sara thought with a touch of sarcasm, while everyone was moving about without taking a seat, looking like disbanded extras in search of a director.

She stood a minute to look at the scene, and she already felt like she was suffocating. Air wasn't coming into her lungs. She put her hands to her throat and ran out, convinced that even if she hadn't attended the official ceremony, she would still have her undeserved promotion.

The square in which the Marco Polo high stood was populated as usual. A discreet coming and going of students, but also of casual passersby, tourists and onlookers. She resignedly sat down on a bench, watching the old school as it if were an old movie, while her breathing was gradually returning to normal. She was out again, safe for the second time.

"Hello Sara... you're here too."

Sara recognized the voice and turned in surprise to look at her classmate who had sit beside her. Discreetly, quietly. A ghost appeared out of nowhere.

"Marina! I haven't seen you for so long. How are you? I'm glad you're here with me. I feel like a zombie."

"Me too", the other girl said.

To Sara it seemed that she was thinner and more haggard, shrouded by a sadness that made her look strange, distant, dejected. She was no longer the cute and batty girl of the fifth E, she no longer was the flashy girl who went to all the raves in the area, with a bold look and a will to be noticed. Her hair had grown back and now caressed her face, just below the ears, discreetly. She was sweet, that's what Marina had become. A sweet and even helpless sixteen-year-old girl. She had always been aggressive and determined, ready to fight. Sara looked away in anguish. The slaughter had made early adults of them all. She was speechless.

They stood in silence for a few minutes, looking at the school, without looking at each other. They had never been close friends, they had never looked for each other in those months of oblivion that had followed the slaughter. They had never had anything in common.

"Do you still think about it?" Marina asked eventually, swinging her feet as if she had been sitting on the edge of a swimming pool. Apparently distracted.

Sara weighed her words. She might have suffered, but Marina must have been devastated in witnessing the murder of Alessandro, executed just like that, in front of everyone, in the middle of the classroom.

"I think about it constantly. Always. How could it be otherwise? We are two survivors, Marina", she said at last, resigned. "Everybody knows, this is why they are promoting us even though we didn't study at all. But I, you know, can't bring myself to go in there, talk to the teachers, get on stage and take a report that was paid with the lives of our friends."

"Me neither. I left my mother in there. She can take the report herself, since she minds so much. She will be glad that I didn't fail, you don't know how much she got on my nerves... do you realize? They will give the diploma to Alessandro's parents. I can't stay there. Can't watch this. I loved him, I can't believe it. I still can't believe it happened. I miss him so much."

Marina kept her eyes down and tormented her watchband with anger, tears slowly falling down her face. Her jeans were stuck to her from the heat, as well as her short white shirt. She looked like a little girl. Unrecognizable from the girl she had been just a few months before.

"I miss Alessandro. I miss him so much. He was my life."

Sara stood silent. She, too, missed everything; the old class, getting up early in the morning to go to school, her friends, Silvia and her carefree, rebellious attitude, the home works to be done as soon as possible, even Mrs. Boschi and her constant sermons. She missed – she thought with surprise – the life of a normal student, with deadlines and rules, commitments and holidays. Days had become so sadly empty, useless, identical, moaning. She wanted the old life back, the one she had before the slaughter.

"I miss him so much", Marina repeated. "Even his roller skates, his hugs, his kisses, his love... Alessandro was everything to me. I still can't believe it. It can't have happened. Not to us..."

She was crying harder now, sobbing, with her back folded in, her hands on her face.

"But it happened. It happened. We were in that classroom, that day. We'll stay there forever Marina. We'll bring all this in our hearts... I'm still in there, I dream that mess every night. I still hear the gunshots. I see the expression of Silvia, of Alessandro, you, Eleonora. Sometimes I wake up soaked in sweat and I think that I'm alive by a miracle", Sara eventually muttered, putting an arm around her.

Marina stood motionless, almost rigid. Frightened. She kept crying. She had lost faith in human contact.

Sara wanted to comfort her and could not find the words. She started humming a song that had been in her head since she had listened to it on the radio, just before leaving, "Nino don't be afraid of missing a penalty kick, is not from these details that a player is recognized..."

"Why did they do that, Sara? I mean Silvia and Deborah. Why did they do this mess? Why kill Alessandro that way? They were friends. What did they want to prove? We were so happy, we had everything. And we didn't even know."

Sara was still silent.

"Maybe they just wanted to dictate their rules, their law. Being the coolest, the strongest. More than boys, more than Mrs. Boschi, more than anyone."

The shock hit her almost like lightning. That had to be the answer to the question she had been asking herself since that day. The other girl remained motionless, as if she had not even heard her words. Motionless.

"Listen, Marina, what if we do something?", Sara continued abruptly.

"What do you want to do?" the other answered, breaking away from the embrace with an abrupt gesture. She looked scared.

"Nothing, I want to get as far away as possible. Let's go get an ice cream, take a walk. I can't stay here. After all, in September I must go back to school anyway. You too, don't you?" Sara suggested firmly. "We have never been close friends, but together maybe we can do it."

"I don't know... sometimes I would kill myself. I don't know if I'll stand going back to school. My mother has enrolled me in another school."

Marina had stood up and was looking at her. She looked like a frightened refugee, with sweat-soaked hair and the wild eyes of those who have met death and feel it all over them.

"Listen Marina, we will not forget today, we won't restart today. Maybe not even tomorrow. But we can do it. We have to."

Sara too had stood up from the bench. She suddenly felt resolute, as if having to protect the other girl gave her the strength that until then she hadn't been able to find.

"All right, a walk will be. Maybe even ice cream. It's a hell of a heat", Marina eventually whispered, resigned.

"Do you want to tell your parents that we're going? I came alone. I can't stand them anymore. My mother has become a leech. She's always afraid that something will happen to me."

"Not at all. They brought me here forcefully. I knew that I would not be able to go in there. When they get out, be sure, they will phone me. Come on, come on, I can't stay here any longer as well."

They walked together. Side by side. The tall one – trying to keep her breath in check – and the girl who had lost love. The former thinking about a pain that must be faced in order to grow, the latter about the pains that life brings you without asking for permission. They held hands to give strength to each other. They walked standing close, kissed by the sun. In silence. Inspector Pascucci saw them from afar, as he was leaving the school. He understood with no need for words and smiling, as the good loving father he was, he hoped he would never meet them again.

### The author

Carla Cucchiarelli, Roman, is a journalist of the regional newscast of the RAI. She has published "Why mothers suffer. True stories in the Mother-saving Universe," written with Vincenzo Mastronardi and Maria Grazia Passeri (Armando Editore 2009). In September 2012 she published her first novel, "I killed Bambi" (Zerounoundici Edizioni), a puzzling thriller about juvenile crime.

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