Nicola's POV

I hadn't slept well for at least three reasons: my bed was too soft, it had been at least twenty-four hours since I had told someone off, Gioele grumbled while he slept.

Or at least, I assumed he was sleeping. His head was buried under the blankets and the pillow, I couldn't see it. The shape of his body looked like a crumpled piece of paper.

Every time I updated the count of how many hours had passed since I had last told someone off, I felt like a pressure cooker about to explode. Then I would look at my incomprehensible roommate and feel like crème caramel slowly cooking.

That's not normal.

I pulled myself up, making the mattress springs creak. I knew it was morning, but the light filtering through the window had to pass through several layers of gray clouds to reach me, so it looked gloomy and dull. Lovely, just the kind of light for me.

I slowly pushed aside the blankets and placed my feet on the cold floor, hitting something that made a noise. Gioele didn't move.

I looked down and found an abandoned phone on the floor. I leaned over to pick it up, making the mattress groan again. I pressed the unlock button and a screensaver full of colorful stuff appeared, with a barely visible inscription above it: "Have no pity for the dead, have pity for the living. And above all, have pity for those who live without Shounen Jump."

But the most relevant thing was that there were thirty-nine missed calls from "mom" and twenty messages.

Hmm.

"Gio." I shook what I assumed was his shoulder.

He grumbled and curled up even more. And the crème caramel that my bones were currently made of began to drip along the floor tiles.

Let's try to keep it together.

"Gio... Did you call your mom when we arrived in Turin?"

The silence stretched for another three seconds or so. The blankets flew up in the air, screaming, as Gioele jumped out of bed and pounced on his abandoned bag on the floor.

"Here." I handed him the phone, and he looked frantically around before pointing my hand like a bird of prey.

"Mom!" He squealed as soon as he put the phone to his ear. "I'm aliiive!"

His brown hair came to life, standing on end with every shout from the other end of the receiver. He was still wearing his uniform pants and a crumpled white tank top that slanted over one shoulder. He was nodding very seriously at what I could only imagine were death threats from his mother, while at the same time propping up his cheek with his index finger as if it were bread dough ready to rise. It was adorable to excessive levels.

NO.

No.

I stopped staring at him. I had other things to think about. Like my internship, for example.

Like the fact that Gioele behaved as if he had absolutely no idea I was gay. OF COURSE. The only soul in the whole school who didn't know ended up coincidentally doing the internship with me. What? I'm supposed to believe that?

Everyone knew.

It had even been written in the newspapers. The news had been on the regional tv channel! And, okay, maybe only people over seventy watch the regional news, but even the juniors knew. And what was that story Gioele had told me on the train?

"Well, I asked your classmates what kind of person you were, and a girl told me you were normal. But, I don't think she meant it in a negative way."

It must have been Stefania. She thought she was so cute and clever. Well, there was nothing clever about being seventeen and still talking behind people's backs like an elementary school bully.

"Yes, mom... Nooooo! But... you can't..." 

I stopped pretending to make my bed and glanced at Gioele, who was a step away from me. He was all curled up on the mattress, holding onto the iron bar at the foot of the bed and rocking back and forth.

He went on to whisper, "No, it's embarrassing! But...! But...!" And finally, a low, resigned "O-okay."

He ended the call and I went back to being super busy tucking in the blankets on my bed.

"Uh, Nico?"

I turned around abruptly. "Yes?"

Gioele stopped rocking and looked me in the eyes. He had a strange way of looking into people's eyes. It was as if he wanted to look at something behind me, and I just happened to be in his line of sight.

"My mom would like to have your phone number, in case I don't answer mine." He shrugged his bony shoulders, giving him the physique of a contortionist gymnast. "Sorry... She's crazy."

"No problem." Quite the opposite. "My mom is a bit paranoid too, is it okay if I give her your number?" So I can also save it on my phone.

Gioele nodded.

The exchange took place with our heads bowed over that tiny abyss that separated us. His knee bounced against mine and his lips let out a double boing boing.

Maybe Gioele wasn't pretending not to know. Maybe he was legitimately clueless and these moments of touching were entirely innocent and not because he was gay too and trying to send me signals.

That was the first thing I thought when the teacher told me that a boy from another class would come with me to the internship. Since the incident with the suspension, and the newspapers and everything else, the only people who approached me in public were those who wanted to tease, and those who approached me in private were those who wanted to try some homosexual experience without too much risk. A fifth-year boy even offered me money.

I didn't accept.

I didn't accept any proposals of any kind. In truth, I had never intended to come out, certainly not so publicly and... um, violently.

The guys at my school didn't understand that being gay didn't mean you had done something gay. I was gay in theory. That is, in my head I was 100% homosexual. In practice I was... rather... behind.

Gioele was light-years ahead of me. Assuming he was gay. I didn't know. Of course, if he was straight, he was doing a terrible job of it, clinging to me by the pinky, talking very close to my face, and touching various parts of my body with various parts of his body.

Honestly, I was getting conflicting signals.

I didn't want Gioele to have really chosen to come with me to the internship because he hoped that by sleeping next to each other something would come out of it.

When he showed up on the platform, I immediately felt relieved. "You have huge ears! You look like Dopey from Snow White." Well, someone who's trying to get you into bed usually keeps those observations to themselves.

And they weren't that big. It was just the way they protruded that made them seem bigger.

I had left hoping to have a roommate I wouldn't want to strangle in his sleep, and even that would have been a kind of miracle. But at that point, on the platform, I even thought we could become friends. I wouldn't have minded getting one, after being stuck at zero for so long.

But now I was just confused. Sometimes it seemed to me that he was making advances, sometimes it seemed to me that he had forgotten about my existence.

I looked at the colored paper with my name hung above my bed. What the hell did that mean? The only experience I could connect it to was when Viola gave me a ticket with my name written in glitter and a heart all around it for Valentine's Day. That had clearly been a sign of courtship, but there was also the fact that we had been seven years old. I had no idea what a similar version of that message meant at seventeen.

I should have felt like I was about to explode, which was also the natural state of my being, and yet...

And yet there was the crème caramel.

I was melting. A slow, calm, sugary melting.

Gioele dropped the phone on the floor (that's how it ended up there the first time) and lay back in bed. He tilted his head upward and spotted his green plush toy wedged in the corner between the pillow and the wall. He lifted his thin arm and retrieved the stuffed reptile.

"Was your mom very angry?" I asked.

He held the plush toy up high, above his face, exchanging glances with the fabric muzzle. "Oh, yes. But she knows I forget things."

"And your dad? Shouldn't you call him too?"

"Oh, I don't have a dad."

Oh, shit. "I'm sorry," I replied hastily.

Gioele slowly lowered the plush toy and said "boop" when his nose hit the toy's muzzle. "No, not in the sense that he's dead. It's just that he's not there. He just doesn't exist."

The Pokémon flew back over his head, and he looked at me. "When my mom turned thirty, she decided she was tired of waiting for a decent partner. So she went to Spain and paid a few thousand euros to have me. I mean, through artificial insemination. She didn't buy me on the black market. A lot of people do it. I mean, artificial insemination, not the black market. In Spain there are specialized clinics with all the staff speaking Italian, just because so many people go there for this."

"Oh." I replied eloquently.

Gioele turned his attention back to the plush toy, lowering it again onto his face and giving it a chaste kiss on the muzzle. He turned to look at me just as my heart threatened to implode.

His dark eyes sparkled. "I was created in a laboratory. Now all I need is a tragic origin story and I'll have everything required to become a superhero."