One Step to You (The Rome Novels #1)(55)

Chapter 22



The first A was too skinny, the second one had too long a stroke, plus the letter itself was too short, and anyway the line itself was too faint. Babi tried to imitate her mother’s signature again. She filled up several pages of her math notebook before she decided that the result was passable, at least.

“Dani, do you think this could pass for Mamma’s signature?”

Daniela looked at that last signature for a second. She pondered, lost in thought. “Here, the G is too skinny. You gave it a belly that looks little. Mamma always starts the surname with a really big G. Here, look.” She opened her notebook and showed her sister one of the authentic signatures. “See?” She pointed to the G of their last name the way their mother did it.

Babi stared at it for a second, checking it against the one she had done. “They look identical to me.” She turned and went back to her bedroom, pleased as punch.

Daniela got up. “Do what you think is best. But to me, that G is too small. And another thing, I don’t understand why you always ask me what I think if you’re just going to go ahead and do whatever you want to.” She shut the door.

Babi opened her notebook to the excused absences page. She filled one out. She wrote down the day, and then, where it said reason for absence, she wrote in: Ill health. Actually, it was true. The idea of not running away with Step made her feel sick. She smiled.

Then it was time to forge the signature. She turned serious again. She tried another one on a sheet of paper at hand, under dozens of previous attempts at Raffaella Gervasi. This last effort turned out even better. It was perfect. Her own mother would have had a hard time picking it out from a string of authentic ones. But at this rate, she could even fake a check to buy herself a Peugeot Metropolis scooter. She realized she’d overdone it. After all, she didn’t need money. She just needed a note justifying her absence.

She picked up the pen, fearfully staring at the dotted line immediately below the printed word: SIGNATURE. Then she leaned in and went for it. She started with the R and so on down the line, sliding as naturally as possible until she reached that last dot on the i. Then, still shaking from her extreme concentration, from the grueling effort of writing perfectly just like her mother, she looked at her signature. It had turned out even better. Incredible.





Chapter 23



Later, after Babi’s parents had gone out for the evening, Step came by to pick her up. The whole group was downstairs waiting for her. Schello, Lucone and Carla, Dario and Gloria, the Sicilian, Hook, Pollo and Pallina, and a couple of other guys in a VW Golf with two girls. They rode their motorcycles toward Prima Porta and then veered right toward Fiano.

By the time they got there, Babi was chilled to the bone. The restaurant was called Il Colonnello—The Colonel—and it was very far away. Babi couldn’t understand why they’d picked a place like that for dinner. There were two big dining rooms with a pizza oven open to view and rows of perfectly ordinary tables. Maybe the place was especially affordable, she supposed.

They sat down, and a young waiter showed up to take their orders. There were fifteen of them, and they were all constantly changing their minds—all except for her, who had decided from the outset to have a salad without too much oil.

The waiter was confused. Every so often, he’d try to go back over the list of pasta dishes so that he could proceed to the entrées, but by the time he made it to the side dishes, there was always someone who’d come up with a different selection.

“Listen, waiter, we’ll take a couple of pappardelle al cinghiale.”

“Make that three.” Then there was a fourth order of pappardelle, and then a fifth. After which two others decided to get polenta, or a carbonara. It was the most indecisive group Babi had ever watched order in a restaurant. As if that weren’t bad enough, Pollo tried to help out every time by repeating all the orders, which only mixed things up worse.

At last, they all laughed heartily. It had turned into a sort of game. The poor waiter walked away. The only thing he knew for sure is that he needed to bring them fourteen medium draft beers and one…What was it that pretty blonde with the blue eyes had asked for? He checked his pad, covered with scratch-outs, and headed into the kitchen, reminding himself to add a Diet Coke to the list.

The dinner went on in the throes of utter confusion. Every time a dish was brought to the table, whether it was prosciutto or mini mozzarellas or bruschetta, there was a general assault on the serving dish, with everyone lunging at it, and in an instant, it was gone.

A group of girls whose eyes were too heavily made up laughed in jolly amusement. Babi looked at Pallina, in search of a smidgen of understanding. But by now her friend seemed to have merged perfectly into the group.

Babi caught Step’s eye. He was smiling at her. She tried to respond, but she wasn’t all that sure of herself. She dropped her gaze. Her mixed salad without too much oil had arrived, and she ate along with everyone else.

Then, no one knew how it happened, but a chunk of bread flew through the air. Then it was a hail of bread chunks, a genuine all-out food fight with leftover meat, flying potatoes, and beer.

They threw anything that came within reach of each other. The girls were the first to abandon their seats. Babi and Pallina hurried quickly away from the table, closely followed by the other girls. The boys continued to throw scraps of food at each other, hard and vicious, indifferent to the other tables in the restaurant, even though they were hitting customers sitting nearby.