Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

Alice stood up again and found herself looking into four hostile faces.

"We were all ill yesterday," Viola began.

"Really?" Alice asked, with genuine concern. "What was wrong with you?"

"A terrible stomachache, all of us," Giada broke in aggressively.

Alice saw Giada vomiting on the floor again and felt like saying I'm not surprised with the amount you all drank.

"There was nothing wrong with me," she said.

"Of course," sneered Viola, looking at the others. "There was no doubt about that."

Giada and Federica laughed; Giulia lowered her eyes.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Alice asked, disoriented.

"You know very well what I mean," Viola retorted, suddenly changing her tone and fixing her with her marvelous, piercing eyes.

"No, I don't know," Alice defended herself.

Giada attacked. "You poisoned us."

"What are you saying? What do you mean 'poisoned'?"

Giulia butted in, timidly. "Come on, girls, that's not true."

"Yes, it is. She poisoned us," Giada repeated. "Who knows what disgusting things she put in that dessert."

She turned back toward Alice. "You wanted to make us all sick, didn't you? Well, it worked, well done."

Alice listened to the sequence of words, but it took her a few seconds to reconstruct their meaning. She looked at Giulia, who, with her big blue eyes, was saying sorry, there's nothing I can do. Then she sought shelter in Viola's eyes, but Viola returned an empty gaze.

Giada held a hand over her belly, as if she were still having convulsions.

"But I made it with Soledad. We bought all the ingredients at the supermarket."

No one replied. They looked in different directions, as if waiting for the murderer to leave.

"It wasn't Sol's dessert. I ate it too, and I didn't get sick," Alice lied.

"You're a liar," pounced Federica Mazzoldi, who hadn't said a word till then. "You didn't even taste it. Everyone knows that-"

She suddenly froze.

"Please, stop," Giulia begged. She looked as if she were about to burst into tears.

Alice put a hand over her flat stomach. She could feel her heart beating under her skin.

"Everyone knows what?" she asked them in a calm voice.

Viola Bai slowly shook her head. Alice stared at her former friend in silence, waiting for words that didn't come but that floated in the air like tongues of transparent smoke. She didn't even move when the bell rang. Ms. Tubaldo, the science teacher, had to call her twice before she finally went to sit in her place.

Denis hadn't come to school. On Saturday, on the way home, he and Mattia hadn't looked at each other once. Denis had responded to Mattia's father in monosyllables, and hadn't even said good-bye when he got out of the car.

Mattia rested a hand on the empty chair beside him. Now and again Denis's words in that dark attic ran through his head. Then they slipped away, too quickly for him to get to the bottom of their meaning.

He realized it didn't really matter to him to understand them. He merely wished Denis was there, to shield him from everything beyond his desk.

The day before, his parents had made him sit down on the sofa, in the living room. They had sat in the chairs opposite him. Then his father said so tell us about the party. Mattia had clenched his hands tightly, but then stretched them out on his knees so that his parents could see them. He had shrugged and replied in a quiet voice that there was nothing to tell. His mother had gotten nervously to her feet and disappeared into the kitchen. His father, on the other hand, had come over to him and clapped him twice on the shoulder, as if consoling him for something. Mattia remembered how, when he was little, on the hottest days of summer, his father would blow on his and Michela's faces in turn, to cool them down. He remembered what the sweat felt like as it evaporated from his skin, ever so lightly, and was filled with a searing nostalgia for a part of the world that had drowned in the river along with Michela.

He wondered if his classmates knew everything. Maybe even his teachers knew. He felt their furtive glances weaving together above his head like a fishing net.

He opened his history book at random and started learning by heart the whole sequence of dates that appeared from that page onward. The list of numbers, lined up without any logical meaning, formed an ever longer trail in his head. As he followed it, Mattia slowly moved away from the thought of Denis standing in the shadow and forgot the void that now sat in his place.

During break time Alice slipped into the infirmary on the second floor, a narrow white room furnished only with a hospital bed and a mirrored cabinet with the essentials for first aid. She had ended up there only once before, when she had fainted during PE because in the previous forty hours she had eaten only two whole-grain crackers and a low-calorie snack. That day the gym teacher, in his green Diadora tracksuit, his whistle, which he never used, around his neck, had said to her think carefully about what you're doing, think very carefully. Then he had gone out, leaving her alone under the fluorescent light, without anything to do or look at for the whole next hour.

Alice found the first-aid cabinet open. She took a wad of cotton wool the size of a plum and the bottle of rubbing alcohol. She closed the door and looked around for a heavy object. There was only the wastepaper basket, made of hard plastic, a dull color halfway between red and brown. She prayed that no one would hear the noise from outside and shattered the mirror of the little cupboard with the bottom of the basket.

Then, being careful not to cut herself, she picked up a big triangular splinter of glass. She caught the reflection of her own right eye and felt proud that she hadn't cried, not even a bit. She stuffed everything into the center pocket of the baggy sweatshirt she was wearing and went back to class.

She spent the rest of the morning in a state of torpor. She never even glanced at Viola and the others and didn't listen to a single word of the lesson on the theater of Aeschylus.

As she was leaving the class, behind all her classmates, Giulia Mirandi furtively took her hand.

"I'm sorry," she whispered into her ear. Then she kissed her on the cheek and ran after the others, who were already in the hallway.

Alice waited for Mattia in the atrium, at the bottom of the linoleum-covered staircase down which poured a chaotic stream of pupils headed for the exit. She rested a hand on the banister. The cold metal gave her a sense of tranquillity.

Mattia came down the stairs enveloped by that foot and a half of emptiness that no one other than Denis dared occupy. His black hair fell over his forehead in tousled curls. He watched carefully where he placed his feet, leaning slightly backward as he descended. Alice called out to him, but he didn't turn around. She called again, more loudly now, and he looked up, said an embarrassed hi, and made as if to head toward the glass doors.

Alice elbowed her way through the other students and joined him. She took him by the arm and he gave a start.

"You have to come with me," she said.

"Where?"

"You have to help me do something."

Mattia looked around nervously, in search of some kind of threat.

"My father's waiting for me outside," he said.

"Your father will wait. You have to help me. Now," said Alice.

Mattia snorted. Then he said okay but he couldn't have said why.

"Come."

Alice took him by the hand, as she had at Viola's party, but this time Mattia's fingers spontaneously closed around hers.

They left the crowd of students. Alice walked quickly, as if she were escaping from someone. They slipped into the deserted corridor on the second floor. The doors leading to the empty classrooms conveyed a sense of abandonment.