Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

"And do you like me?" Alice went for it. Her voice came out rather shrilly and her face exploded with heat.

"I don't know," Mattia answered hastily, looking at the floor.

"Why?"

"I don't know," he insisted. "I haven't thought about it."

"You don't need to think about it."

"If I don't think, I can't understand anything."

"I like you," said Alice. "A bit. I think."

He nodded. He played at contracting and relaxing his retina, to make the geometric design of the carpet go in and out of focus.

"Do you want to kiss me?" Alice asked. She wasn't ashamed, but as she said it her empty stomach curled with terror that he might say no.

Mattia didn't move for a few seconds. Then he shook his head, slowly, still staring at the swirls in the carpet.

With a nervous impulse, Alice brought her hands to her hips and measured the circumference of her waist.

"It doesn't matter," she said quickly, in a different voice. "Please don't tell anyone," she added.

You're an idiot, she thought. Worse than a girl in kindergarten.

She stood up. Suddenly Viola's room seemed like a strange, hostile place. She felt herself becoming intoxicated by all the colors on the walls, the desk covered with makeup, the toe shoes hanging from the closet door, like a pair of severed feet, the big photo of Viola at the beach, lying on the sand looking beautiful, the cassettes stacked haphazardly beside the stereo, and the clothes piled up on the armchair.

"Let's go back," she said.

Mattia got up from the bed. He looked at her for a moment, apologetically, it seemed to her. She opened the door, letting the music flood the room. She walked partway down the hall alone. Then she thought of Viola's face. She turned around, took Mattia's stiff hand without asking his permission, and together they walked into the noisy living room.

The girls had trapped Denis in the corner, near the fridge, so as to have a little fun. They had arranged themselves in front of him, forming a barrier of excited eyes and flowing hair, through which he could no longer see Mattia in the other room.

"Truth or dare?" Viola asked him.

Denis shook his head timidly, to say that he didn't feel like playing this game. Viola rolled her eyes and then opened the fridge, forcing Denis to lean to the side to make room for the door. She pulled out a bottle of peach vodka and took a gulp, without bothering to find a glass. Then she offered him some, with a complicit smile.

He already felt dizzy and a little nauseated. The whiskey had left a bitter aftertaste suspended between his nose and his mouth, but there was something in Viola's behavior that prevented him from objecting. He took the bottle and took a sip. Then he passed it to Giada Savarino, who grabbed it greedily and started to pour it down her throat as if it were orangeade.

"So. Truth or dare?" repeated Viola. "Otherwise we'll choose."

"I don't like this game," Denis objected unconvincingly.

"Mmm, you and your friend really are a drag," she said. "Then I'll choose. Truth. Let's see."

She rested her index finger on her chin and with her eyes traced an imaginary circle on the ceiling, pretending to be deep in thought.

"I know!" she exclaimed. "You have to tell us which one of us you like best."

Denis shrugged, intimidated.

"Dunno," he said.

"What do you mean, dunno? You must like at least one of us, right?"

Denis thought he didn't like any of them, that he just wanted them to get out of his way and let him get back to Mattia. That he had only one more hour to be with him and watch him exist, even at night, when usually the only thing he could do was imagine him in his bedroom, sleeping under a sheet the color of which he didn't know.

If I choose one of them, they'll leave me alone, he thought.

"Her." He pointed to Giulia Mirandi, because she seemed the most harmless.

Giulia brought a hand to her mouth as if she'd just been elected prom queen. Viola turned up one corner of her mouth. The other two exploded into coarse laughter.

"Good," said Viola. "So now the dare."

"No, that's enough," protested Denis.

"You really are a bore. Here you are, surrounded by four girls, and you don't even want to play a bit. Certainly this doesn't happen to you every day."

"But now it's someone else's turn."

"And I say it's still your turn. You have to do the dare. What do you say, girls?"

The others nodded greedily. The bottle was once more in the hands of Giada, who at regular intervals threw back her head and took a swig, as if she wanted to finish it before the others noticed.

"See?" said Viola.

Denis snorted.

"What do I have to do?" he asked with resignation.

"Well, since I'm a generous hostess, I'm going to give you a nice dare," Viola said mysteriously. The other three hung on her words, eager to discover the new torture. "You have to kiss Giulia."

Giulia blushed. Denis felt a pang in his ribs.

"Are you crazy?" Giulia asked, shocked, perhaps pretending.

Viola gave a capricious shrug. Denis shook his head no, two, three times in a row.

"You were the one who said you liked her," she said.

"What if I don't do it?"

Suddenly dead serious, Viola looked him straight in the eyes.

"If you don't do it you'll have to choose truth again," she said. "You could tell us about your little friend, for example."

In her keen, bright stare Denis recognized all the things he had always thought were invisible. His neck stiffened.

His arms at his sides, he leaned his face toward Giulia Mirandi, narrowed his eyes, and kissed her. Then he tried to draw back, but Giulia held his head, her hand on the back of his neck. She forced her tongue through his pursed lips.

In his mouth Denis tasted saliva that wasn't his own and felt sick. In the middle of this, his first kiss, he opened his eyes just in time to see Mattia coming into the kitchen, hand in hand with the crippled girl.

The others were the first to notice what Alice and Mattia would come to understand only many years later. They walked into the room holding hands. They weren't smiling and were looking in opposite directions, but it was as if their bodies flowed smoothly into each other's, through their arms and fingers.

The marked contrast between Alice's light-colored hair, which framed the excessively pale skin of her face, and Mattia's dark hair, tousled forward to hide his black eyes, was erased by the slender arc that linked them. There was a shared space between their bodies, the confines of which were not well delineated, from which nothing seemed to be missing and in which the air seemed motionless, undisturbed.

Alice walked a step ahead of him and Mattia's slight drag balanced her cadence, erasing the imperfections of her faulty leg. He let himself be carried forward, his feet making not the slightest sound on the tiles. His scars were hidden and safe in her hand.

They stopped on the threshold of the kitchen, a little away from the cluster of girls and Denis. They tried to work out what was happening. They had a dreamy air about them, as if they had come from some distant place that only they knew.

Denis pushed Giulia violently away and their mouths separated with a smack. He looked at Mattia and sought in his expression the traces of the thing that terrified him. He thought that he and Alice had said something to each other, something he would never be able to know, and his brain filled with blood.

He ran out of the room, deliberately knocking into him, to destroy that equilibrium he loathed. For an instant Mattia met Denis's red and upset eyes. For some reason they reminded him of Michela's defenseless eyes that afternoon in the park. Over the years those two gazes would gradually merge in his memory into a single, indelible fear.