Page 10 of The Summer You Were Mine

Why are you naked?

Was that really the best line he could come up with after all this time?

he wondered. It was like being in this house had defaulted his brain back to age thirteen.

Ninnolo. Ellie called him “ninnolo.” Actually, she screamed it at him.

It was a leftover nickname from when he was still that tiny punk, fighting to be taken seriously.

Even after he grew almost fourteen inches in eighteen months, she was the only one who called him that—especially when she was mad.

What did he expect in this case? Not only did he walk in on her, he walked in on her topless, in a skirt.

She looked amazing, though—the color of the fabric set off the sunny gold in her skin and the pissed-off pink in her cheeks.

She probably wouldn’t want to hear that particular compliment, or really any compliment, from him.

His best option this trip was probably to keep his head down and his mouth closed.

He sat down on the bed and looked around the room.

It looked different, but the energy was the same, like all of his memories still breathed in the walls.

They laughed at him now as he sat trying to shake off his unexpected blunder with Ellie.

Then again, she always had a way of throwing him off his game.

He remembered the summer when the girl walking into the Delfino was absolutely not the girl that he’d said goodbye to the summer before.

He was fourteen, not old enough to have a scooter but old enough to need transportation to get around town on his own.

He’d been racing around the parking lot on his new bicycle with two other guys his age, showing off a little bit since his little brothers were practicing their own tricks on his old hand-me-down.

He’d popped a particularly impressive wheelie but wobbled a little bit too close to the entrance trying to stick the landing.

“Hey! Watch it!” he’d heard. In English.

He’d whipped his head around to see the person with Ellie’s voice, but it didn’t look at all like the Ellie he knew.

It wasn’t so much that she had grown per se, it was more like the ratio of girl to woman had shifted dramatically in favor of a filled-out bikini top and pink lip gloss.

Her legs were smooth all of a sudden and she even smelled different—sweet, like she’d been dipped into a cotton candy machine.

And what was that thing she was doing while she walked?

There was some kind of new hip swish and a concert of movements that looked like dancing in forward motion.

She smiled at him and his vision blurred.

How long had he stood there dumbstruck, the bicycle he was still straddling becoming a toy in his hands, before he could utter a greeting?

That whole summer, the molecules in the air shifted.

They were still friends, of course, but they weren’t exactly challenging each other to increasingly complicated dives off the rocks or seeing who could eat a whole Popsicle the fastest before their head froze.

Ellie, Greta, and the other girls were suddenly more likely to be flipping through fashion magazines or playing cards up on the terrace, their legs flung over the armrests of the plastic chairs or folded up under them.

They never took their sunglasses off, drank Chinotto through plastic red-and-white-striped straws, and waved their hands wanly complaining about the heat: “ Che caldoooo…” If the boys were lucky enough to get invited to sit, they would forget whatever squirt gun war they were waiting to have and pull seats over, squeezing around a single table and thrilled at the forced proximity.

Even the way she talked to him had been different.

He couldn’t tell if she was insulting him to his face or merely being helpful when he tripped on figures of speech in English or random references to the American pop culture he was still getting used to.

He also couldn’t tell if he felt embarrassment or pure delight when she corrected him.

“ Quale vuoi sentire? The Killers o Linkin Park ? ” he had asked, holding the two CDs in his hand when they were all crammed into the boys’ room one rainy afternoon with nothing to do.

“Same difference,” Ellie responded, not looking up from her magazine.

Heat rose to his face. Cris stood motionless and tried desperately to run through the possibilities of what on earth she had just said.

Her eyes flicked up to him, frozen and hovering over the stereo. “Like, either one is whatever.”

“You don’t like them,” he said, brow furrowing.

He glanced at the rest of the crew sprawled out on the floor.

Was she ripping on his music taste in front of everybody?

She’d already informed him with laser eyeballs earlier that summer that Maroon 5 was cringe beyond measure.

He felt nauseated but also like he’d stuck his finger in an electrical socket. “Leo has others I think.”

“No. I like them both.” She held his gaze, but with softer eyes. “So, they are the same to me, there is no difference.”

His blood pressure dropping, he plopped the Linkin Park CD into the player and sat back down on the floor.

“Cool.” She nodded in approval as the first few notes of the Minutes to Midnight album filled the room.

She would do that—break character and save him at the right moment.

Sometimes when everyone was talking at the same time, he would catch Ellie’s eye.

They would look at each other for a nanosecond, but he’d sworn they’d had an entire conversation.

Yes, it’s still me. Yes, you’re still you.

I’m still in here. Are you in there? Isn’t all of this weird?

They never talked about it of course, but there had been an understanding, hadn’t there?

No matter what was going on all around them, there was still this little thread connecting them so that at any moment, one of them could pick up one end and find their way back to the truth of the other.

He opened his duffel bag, but sat staring at it, suddenly exhausted. It was a three-minute walk to the beach from the house, but it may as well have been hours away. He had a lot of ground to cover before making it to the Delfino.

“Excuse me?” Ellie leaned into the door of the bedroom, her face still pink.

“Hey. Sorry. I didn’t know you were still here,” he said, realizing that his head was so foggy, an entire demolition team could have swarmed into the house with sledgehammers and he probably wouldn’t have noticed.

“I’m not. I mean, I wasn’t. I—my phone,” she stammered, pointing at the bed he was now sitting on. Cris looked around, finally scooping up his bag to reveal the phone hidden underneath.

“Thanks,” she said, taking it from his outstretched hand.

“Sorry you had to come back.”

“It’s fine. It’s not your fault.” She turned her head to the side, looking at him in the way that he knew meant she was scanning for incongruities. Trouble was, only she used to be able to find all of his. “You okay?”

“Just a little tired from the trip,” he lied.

“Got it,” she said, backing toward the door.

“Hey, I’m really sorry. For barging in,” he said as she stopped herself, hanging onto the doorframe.

“I already forgot about it,” she said, her neck a little too tight for him to fully believe her.

She uncurled her fingers and slid back into the hall.

Her feet beat a quick rhythm down the steps and across the foyer until he couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the seagulls through the bedroom window.

cosa ci fai lì?

It was only a matter of time until his mom texted to ask where he was.

She’d gone directly to the beach saying that a dip in the ocean was the best remedy for jet lag.

Cinzia had been keeping tabs on him a bit more since the Sports Illustrated article dropped.

She’d seen how people reacted to him in public and it was an obvious departure from the adoration he normally got hit with.

They used to ask him to sign a magazine or to take a selfie, all while congratulating him for his latest medal or smashed record.

Now they stayed away, across the airport terminal, whispering to one another.

They didn’t want pictures with him. They wanted pictures of him.

It was difficult to know which side of the argument was more scandalous: whether he trashed his entire legacy to take a banned supplement at the end of his athletic career or whether he was stupid enough to lie about it.

Making his way through the San Francisco airport had been an excruciating process.

Short of showing up to check in for the flight with a paper bag over his head, he’d done his absolute best to go incognito.

The hat, glasses, and facial hair rendered him more or less unrecognizable until his mother got up to get coffee.

She called “Cristiano” from the line across the terminal asking him if he wanted a double or triple espresso.

It was then that the phones started following him around like an army of tiny eyeballs designed to catch him in the scandalous act of buying trail mix at Hudson News.

He made Cinzia promise to not use his name and only speak to him in Italian to be safe.

She got it after that. They sat with their backs to the main hallway and he kept his eyes on his iPad until boarding.

What kind of a no-integrity-having asshole journalist tried to go after an already-retired athlete in the biggest sports magazine in the country?

Apparently, it was the kind of no-integrity-having asshole journalist that had tried and failed to qualify for the World Athletic Games himself—in speed skating—about twenty-five years ago.

This misanthrope had subsequently made it his life’s mission to troll the bottom of the barrel looking for stories designed to show the dirty side of sports.

He had been in trouble for his misplaced accusations before, so he began to write articles like the one he’d written about Cris that “just ask questions.” He’d gotten a tip from an anonymous delivery driver about a professional athlete receiving a package from a particular lab in New Zealand that was known to produce certain banned substances.

His MO was to present some flimsy facts, just enough to raise doubts about a previously spotless reputation, and watch as the gossip vultures swarmed in for the picking-apart ceremony.

Cris had spent the last week hiding from everyone but the agent he shared with his brothers, Teena Lynn, who told him to absolutely not address the heckler.

She said it would die down and fade into nothing as soon as people saw it was a garbage article.

Still, the calls kept coming even up to the day before he left for Italy.

“We’ll deal with it. Let me do the damage assessment, but don’t panic,” she’d said. “Go be with your family and don’t think about this now.”

But his family was why he was thinking about this.

He was here in Italy, where some of the most important reasons to tell the truth were probably about to tuck into lunch.

And now there was Ellie. What would she think?

What else would she think was a better question.

It was pretty clear that her thoughts about him were still ranging from “minor idiot” to “gargantuan asshole.” Cris rifled through the bag until he found his swim trunks.

No matter how messed up everything was, it wasn’t going to solve itself in here under the capiz shells. He had to get to the beach.