Diana: I have one.
I laugh alone at the desk. The sound surprises me. Not because it’s rare. I laugh. I’m not tragic. I know how to enjoy things, and I know how to be good company when I choose to be. Still, there’s a difference between the laugh you produce because a moment calls for it and the one that gets out before you can manage its shape.
This one gets out. I sit there for a second with my hands on the keyboard and the city breathing through the balcony doors.
Then I answer Diana.
Serena: Please never show me that mug.
Diana: File San Sebastián notes faster than you filed Rome.
Serena: I haven’t even left Rome.
Diana: I believe in preparation.
I close the laptop.
On my last full morning, I go back to the Campo de’ Fiori before sunrise has burned the softness off the stones. The same vendor is there. He sees me and starts bagging figs without discussion.
“Today, you leave,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
“Then today you buy more.”
“That’s very sound logic.”
“Yes,” he says.
I buy the figs.
I buy bread from a bakery where the woman behind the counter wraps it in paper and ties it with string even though I’m going to tear into it ten steps outside the door. I buy a wedge of pecorino from a shop that smells like salt, age, and waxed rind. I sit on the edge of a fountain and eat standing-quality food badly, with crumbs on my dress and sun warming the top of my head.
It is not elegant.
It is excellent.
A message from Sophie arrives while I’m licking fig juice from my thumb.
Sophie: Are you alive?
Serena: Yes.
Sophie: Are you eating your way through Rome like a beautiful little menace?
Serena: Also yes.
Sophie: Good. Call me later. Not optional.
Serena: You understand that adding “not optional” doesn’t change the optional nature of a thing.
Sophie: It does when I say it.
I look at the message and smile. Sophie always sounds like herself, even in text. Warm. Bossy. Slightly theatrical. Completely impossible to ignore. She has been my closest friend since freshman year at Columbia, when she found me in the laundry room at 2AM reading a book on restaurant history while guarding a dryer full of towels from a girl who kept trying to steal machines. Sophie walked in wearing silk pajamas under a trench coat, carrying a mug of tea and a legal pad.
She looked at me, looked at the book, looked at the dryer.
Then she said, “You seem like someone with standards. I need your help destroying a man in my seminar.”
