Fatima smiled and said, “I bet it smelled good in there.”
Elisa said, “It did. The teacher was so mad, though.”
Fatima took Elisa’s hand and squeezed. She considered the slices of pizza in the case, then turned to her friend and whispered. “I think today I want to get sausage.”
Elisa shrugged. “Sure, perchè no?”
Fatima ordered and then picked up two plastic containers of peach tea and added them to the square piece of pizza on the counter. Digging in her pockets she pulled out a five euro note, swept the change into her hand, and led Elisa back out to the park. Elisa’s eyes lingered on the change. Could she take money from Fatima now? Now that they were real friends?
The girls found a bench and sat down. They speared the tops of the tea with the thin straws, and then Fatima pulled back the waxed paper of the pizza and took a bite, before handing it to Elisa. As Elisa accepted the pizza with both hands, Fatima closed her eyes and chewed slowly.
“Wow,” she said.
“What is it?”
Fatima paused. “Sausage. Sausage doesn’t taste at all like I expected. It is so good. “
“Of course it is.” Elisa frowned. “Wait, this is your first time eating sausage?”
Fatima nodded.
“Oh! It’s pork, isn’t it? I never think about it.” Fatima had told Elisa last week that her family didn’t eat pigs, so she had never tasted cured pork. She’d breathed the confession after she had traded one of the girls her cornetto for a panino with prosciutto. They had laughed because after the first bite, Fatima had said that it tasted like salty soap that she wanted to eat forever. Elisa had never thought about it, but when she took the bite Fatima offered, she could see what she meant.
Fatima nodded again.
“I still don’t get why you can’t eat pork.”
Fatima accepted the pizza that Elisa handed back. “I don’t really understand either. It seems like a silly rule.” They chewed in companionable silence for a few minutes, watching the breeze swoop up sun-warmed leaves before tossing them up and over the fence and down the hill.
Elisa asked, “Will you tell your parents?”
Fatima coughed on her pizza. “No! They are already worried that I will forget how to be a good Moroccan girl. If they knew I ate pork . . .” Fatima paused, considering, before saying, “And have a crush.”
Elisa’s face whipped toward her friend. “You like a boy? Who?”
Fatima blushed. “I don’t want to say.”
Elisa was bewildered, “Why? Who can it be?” She thought about the boys in their class. “It’s Mario, isn’t it?”
Fatima’s open mouth confirmed Elisa’s hunch. Fatima gasped, “How did you guess?”
Elisa shrugged. “You look at him a lot, but you never say anything to him.”
Fatima ventured, “Do you think he likes me too?”
Elisa sat back and closed her eyes, scanning her memory. Opening her eyes she said, “Yes.”
Fatima beamed, “Really? Why?”
Elisa grinned at her friend and shrugged again. “He smiles a lot when he sees you.”
Fatima beamed and sat back, staring without seeing over the distant hills.
Elisa was glad her friend was happy, but she did not understand why Fatima would care about boys. Her thoughts darted to Stefano’s hand brushing her behind as she walked away. She shivered. Boys were awful. And a little scary.
Fatima drained the last of her tea and handed the pizza back to Elisa, “Mamma will kill me if I don’t eat my whole dinner. She says I’m so thin I’ll blow away. Can you finish it?”
“Sure. Okay,” Elisa took the last quarter of the pizza and concentrated on not wolfing it down. She finished, and licked her fingers before using the napkins to wipe her hands clean.
Fatima leapt up, “C’mon! Do you think we could play in those trees and pretend they are rosemary? I want to be a wood princess with a crown of leaves.”
“I’ll be a traveling mushroom seller! And I come with my mushrooms and you aren’t sure to trust me or not. Too bad there aren’t any porcini around, but look! I see some moss, we can use that!”
The playground was empty, as it often was when there was a nip in the air. Pork and boys and money and grades were left behind as the girls filled the park with their laughter. They chased each other around the pomegranate tree, then used the fruit to stain their lips. They stood on the swings, pretending to be flying goddesses. Elisa was showing Fatima how to do a cartwheel on the small patch of grass, rubbed almost to dirt by the attempts of small boys to play soccer, when their conversation was cut off by a yell.
“Elisa!”
They both looked up.
A woman hurried into the park, oily hanks of hair escaping the scarf she’d tossed over her head, a coat buttoned haphazardly over her loose flower print dress. Elisa’s face went white against the pomegranate juice smeared across her mouth. She backed up like a crab.
The woman grabbed Elisa by the arm and yanked her to standing.
“What do you think you are doing? I wake up and you are gone with this . . . this note! What do you think your father would say if he came home and found it?”
“I’m sorry, Mamma, I’m sorry! I didn’t think about him finding it, I thought you would find it.”
“You thought! You thought! If you thought for a moment it would be a miracle worthy of Santa Lucia herself. How dare you! How dare you leave! After everything we’ve done for you!”
The woman’s hand flung across space and time, connecting to Elisa’s face with a cracking sound. Elisa’s hand cupped her cheek and she sobbed, “I’m sorry, Mamma! I’m so sorry!
