“You first!” I scream, then wait until he lowers his arm before dousing him yet again, splat in the face.
After that, things unravel quickly. Four young men overhear us yelling when they pass and assume that we are being terrorized by Wes and his friends. They leap into action, our knights in soft suede moccassini, as they try to intervene. We can’t understand what they’re saying, however, and our basic language skills don’t get us very far with them either. An exchange of Italian is being shouted so loud and so fast that it distracts everyone right as Mari throws another drink.
“God, stopdoingthat!” Wes yells.
The men do not take kindly to Wes yelling. Soon one of them has taken a pizza off a nearby table and smashed it into his face. Then, as if in slow motion, one of the men rips off one of the white tablecloths from the table, flicking his wrist like a magician. Except instead of the dishes falling to their places unscathed, they all go flying through the air, shattering and smashing to the floor. Shards of glass ricochet off the ground and the echo reverberates down the cobblestone street. One of the guys is waving the tablecloth in the air like a lasso before effortlessly looping it around Freddy. Another joins him, and they attempt to hog-tie Freddy with the tablecloth as he lies on his stomach, writhing wildly around and screaming.
The other two are occupied holding Wes’s and Graham’s arms behind their back, so their friends recruit a couple that is walking by to hold Freddie down while they secure the restraints. The woman pulls out pepper spray from her purse and sprays Freddy in the face, despite whatever threat he posed having clearly been neutralized.
“Is this real life?” Anya stands there, frozen, as we watch what can only be described as the strangest episode ofWWEwe’ve ever seen. “Should we do something?”
“I think… we should let them sort this out?” I take a step back but can’t look away. “What are they, professional MMA fighters?” I ask as I watch one of the men craft advanced knots in the tablecloth to make sure Freddy is secured.
A waiter has come outside to inspect all the ruckus, holding a beautifully decorated cassata cake. He screams for them to stop, to no avail. One of the men grabs the cake out of the waiter’s hands and slams it into Wes’s face. The waiter, horrified, runs back inside wailing, away from the carnage.
Wes stands there frozen, scooping marzipan out of his eyes. “WHAT IS HAPPENING!?” he yells up to the sky.
“Oh my God,” Mari says, a hand clasped over her mouth, as one guy body-slams Graham to the ground.
“Why don’t they try to run away?” Anya asks. With Wes’s athleticism, he could easily outrun these men. But I can only assume he and his friends are in some weird state of shock.
“You know… I don’t think Wes has ever been in a fight before,” I murmur.
“Yeah, that tracks,” Anya says.
Freddy is the only one who’s making an effort to escape—he is flailing about, trying to break free of his hog ties. He moves an inch forward at a time, thrashing around like a fish out of water while his eyes glow orange-red and tears stream down his face from the pepper spray.
I can’t help it; I start to laugh. It’s all so ridiculous—Wes picking bits of sponge cake from his hair, Graham and Freddy screaming, and I don’t know, Wes’s shimmer begins to dull before me. Mari and Anya join in, the three of us almost hysterical. That is, until the faint sound of sirens starts to get louder and louder and we realize it’s heading straight for us.
All the blood drains from my face.
The police car screeches to a halt. There’s a blur of people coming and going, running away, cursing. I’m still blinded by the flashing lights on top of the first police car when a second comes to barricade the end of the street. Wes and Graham sprint over to Freddy and rapidly attempt to untie the very sophisticated knots used to restrain him.
“Should we run?” Mari asks us, her eyes wide.
We don’t get the chance to decide, because the next thing I know, one of those intimidating policemen I saw at the airport, with a large machine gun slung across his chest, places me under arrest.
CHAPTER 37
My parents are going tokill me.
As I sit on the cold bench, tapping my right toe against the concrete floor, it’s the only thought running through my mind. There’s nothing magical about turning eighteen that erases the fear of facing your parents after an arrest. My immediate reaction is that I’ve brought actual shame onto my family.
Okay, in fairness, it’s less of a prison and more of a large holding cell. It could maybe even be classified as a drunk tank. There are no actual prisoners around and my hunch is that it’s almost exclusively used to toss in unruly tourists who can’t handle their liquor until they are able to sober up and rejoin society. But a jail cell is still a jail cell and the closest I had ever been to one before was during a second grade field trip to the local police station.
When the police rounded up the involved parties, shouting commands in Italian and waving their guns, the locals who had joined in quickly fled, while us Americans froze like deer in headlights. That means that it’s only Mari, Anya, and me, sitting across from Wes and hisfriends as we all look at anything but each other through the entire night.
Wes has pizza sauce in his hair and clumped in his eyebrows and to anyone else it probably looks like blood, unless you witnessed him getting a marinara-heavy pie straight to the face. He slumps over, hanging his head in between his legs. “I need to get thefuckout of here,” he says to no one and everyone.
Freddy, seemingly over the trauma of being hog-tied on the street by complete strangers, is standing by the prison bars, attempting to speak Italian to the prison guards. “Denaro?” he repeats over and over, sticking his entire arm through the bars while making the universal hand gesture for money, rubbing his fingers together.
The two officers manning the front desk bow their heads and talk in hushed voices. After a minute or so of debate, they seem to have come to some sort of agreement. The less angry one stands up and approaches, his key ring jostling from his belt loop. “Denaro, you say?”
“Yes. Denaro.” Freddy perks up. “We have denaro. Lots of denaro. How much to get out right now?”
“Right now?” The guard glances back to his partner, who offers him a subtle nod. “One thousand euro per person.”
“Done,” Freddy says, not even hesitating, motioning for Wes and Graham to get up. “Us three. Do you take Amex?”
