Of course, she knew what loss was. She'd lost things-spelling bees, parts in plays, volleyball games, Becky from next door, who'd moved to Holland when they were ten. Two of Jessa's grandparents had died. But they had been old-sick. Her parents had spoken to her in soft whispers, their hands warm across hers at both funerals like giant Band-Aids. Everything in the natural order of things, the right kinds of loss, not this inky, evil thing asleep in her.

Before high school, perhaps she'd checked the box next to "Drama I" on the counselor's pink sheet, sought out the theater world simply because she'd lacked so much of her own drama. Maybe that's what had drawn her toward Carissa, who had to put her daily drama into categories the way some people separated their recycling. Carissa never seemed to feel more alive than when she was caught up in a crisis. Or two. Or three. Jessa had been swimming in Carissa's disposable angst since Carissa had plopped down beside her in Ms. Jenkin's third-grade cla.s.s-her pigtails bouncing, one red ribbon slipping-and told her they had to be friends, because both of their names ended in ssa, so it was destiny. And Carissa leaned on steady, box-checking Jessa for the right words said in the right order. It's what they did for each other. It was like that biology word-what was it? Symbiosis.

Until now.

Because this break, this ache, this pressure in her chest, it hurt-a sticky, ugly stomach-flu type of ache, like a tiny miserable elf had burrowed under her skin and had started pulling apart her nerve endings. No steady Jessa now. No, Jessa couldn't shake it, couldn't seem to stop from wobbling. It wasn't the kind of pain you just popped a couple of Advil for; it wasn't isolated to her ankle or her back-it existed everywhere, even in the b.a.l.l.s of her feet, in her cuticles.

Being here wasn't helping. She had thought maybe Italy would make it better, but it seemed like it was having the opposite effect. The dawn light spread across the Italian countryside like syrup; she could almost drown in it. There was too, too much of it, all that yellow light, all the newness adding to the death grip on her heart. She needed to do something to release it, to pry open the grip of that miserable elf, kick him to the side of the Italian road, so she could regain her footing. She hated how she felt, didn't want to be one of those annoying, angsty girls who were wrecked by the slight of a boy. Carissa knew that; it's why she sent the instructions. She wanted to help drag Jessa out of the muck, plop her back on steady ground.

Tyler shifted beside her, asleep against the faded bus seat, her iPod blaring into his ears, the rockabilly tap-rattle pulse of the Lee Rocker he had made her download because of the band's kick-a.s.s drummer. Like the way she heard the music, she was feeling things only as echo, her body trying to wall itself off from any more pain. She caught a shuffle out of the corner of her eye, watched Ms. Jackson slip down the bus aisle to the Sean and Natalie make-out accident scene, where they were definitely not coming up for air anytime soon. Ms. Jackson leaned over them, a human jaws of life, and waited until they pried themselves apart, neither of them looking as embarra.s.sed as they both should. Ms. Jackson returned to her seat but not before catching Jessa's eye and making a gag sign with her finger. Jessa nodded, mirrored it back to her.

Tyler stirred again, rubbed his eyes, sat up. "Where are we?"

"Somewhere between Rome and Florence."

"Dubious." He took a long drink of water from the bottle he fished out of his backpack and opened a bag of gummy bears.

"You think maybe you can OD on gummy bears?" Jessa grabbed a handful.

"Some people believe gummy to be a life-extending elixir."

"What people?"

"Me." Tyler chewed. He handed her back the iPod. "Thanks for the loaner."

Jessa tucked it into her backpack. The bus whispered down the highway, full of morning hush, the group quiet. They slept or stared out the window, texted people, listened to music. In the row next to her, Jade was writing postcards, a huge stack of them, her curls bouncing around her face as she wrote. Francesca chatted on her phone at the front of the bus, preparing their day. Jessa tried to push aside the loss that weighted her to the seat, tried to open her glossy blue guidebook to the Florence section, fasten herself to some concrete facts about their next destination.

In Florence, they would see Brunelleschi's dome, the Uffizi and The Birth of Venus, and the famed Piazza della Signoria. The pages in her lap, all those black-and-white words, told her that the square held statues humming with political contradictions, each with a different agenda. Contradiction, confusion-she'd feel right at home. Closing the book, she opened the envelope she'd been using as a bookmark.

Reason #4: Valentine's Day from h.e.l.l: I don't think I need to remind you, but I'll paint the picture anyway. February 14th. Bright, cold. You waited in the front of school with the soccer jersey we stayed up all hours of the night bidding for on eBay until you got it for him, waiting for his car to pull in by the tree where he always parks. Did I mention how cold it was???? Fast-forward one hour. No car. No Sean. No answer when you call. He is not at school. And when he does finally appear somewhere around four for rehearsal, here is the reality. He has nothing for you. Has forgotten it is Valentine's Day, and (here's the kicker) gets MAD at you for having "commercial expectations for his love" which is some dial-an-excuse-c.r.a.p for being a lousy boyfriend. Double kicker: You gave him his present anyway when the rest of us thought you should shove it up his pathetic a.s.s. But you said maybe he had a point. Maybe Valentine's Day has too many expectations attached to it.

He DOESN'T have a point. He's a lazy, lying jerk cheater who doesn't deserve you.

Jessa frowned at the instruction at the bottom, the un-Jessa-like thing that Carissa seemed to think she needed to do to move this two-thousand-pound weight off of her heart. She read it again. No way. She was not going to do that.

With the hum of travel all around her, she studied the arm of the Tim Burton boy from the other school through the slit in the bus seats in front of her. Folding the note back into the envelope, she looked out at Tuscany, the cl.u.s.ters of stone villages and sweeping vineyards, the castles dotting the landscape.

Carissa had lost her mind.

Tuscany must have its own sun. Jessa squinted into the b.u.t.tery light of Florence.

Firenze, she mouthed, the word like working taffy around her tongue. The light infused warmth all around, into the creamy stucco of the buildings, into the arch and roll of the hills across the Arno River. She sent a picture of it to Carissa, with a note that read: Florence. Miss you. Thank you for the envelopes. BTW: NOT doing #4. You're CRAZY! They will send me home! Did I mention how beautiful it is here? p.s. when I read #3 to Tyler, there were two old ladies walking by and a million tourists. That counts.

They followed the frog through the streets, heading to the Galleria dell'Accademia to see David, Michelangelo's, not Donatello's. Francesca told them that one of the interesting things about Michelangelo's David was that he chose to depict him in antic.i.p.ation of the battle, whereas Donatello choose victory, with Goliath's head at David's feet. "Antic.i.p.ation," she had said-the moment before the moment when all of history spilled out in front of him.

Walking around, Jessa felt like a dyslexic David, with all of history spilling out behind her instead of in front. The colors, the sweeping churches, the stained-gla.s.s widows, even the buzzing scooters and people calling to each other, kissing each other's faces, bursting from the small shops with loaves of fresh bread or cut flowers seemed formed from all their history. Everything was so old. Not like California, where old meant "last month."

"Where'd you get that scar?" Tim Burton boy from the other group had fallen in step beside her. He ran a hand through his mop of dyed black hair and studied her with close-set eyes like two smoldering coals. "I'm Dylan, by the way. Dylan Thomas."

"Like the poet?"

He looked impressed. "Yeah. Right. Wow, a girl with a brain in her head. You'll excuse me if I seem a bit shocked considering who I'm here with."

Jessa's eyes swept over the gaggle from the other school, like a pack of designer ducklings all trying to find the water's edge. "Not the sharpest knives in the drawer?"

He laughed, low and soft. "Not as sharp as spoons."

"Why'd you come?" Jessa watched him from the corner of her eye as they walked. "I mean, if you knew you'd hate traveling with them?"

He shrugged. "It was this or my cousin's house in Oregon. My cousin collects bug carca.s.ses and smells like a wet washcloth. At least Italy has gelato."

They walked a bit more. "So, not going to answer me about the scar?" Dylan Thomas asked. "Too personal?"

She held up her wrist. "I used to ice-skate when I was younger. It's from another skater's blade when we crashed."

"Do you still skate?"

Jessa shook her head, fingering the iPod cord curling out of her sweatshirt pocket.

He nodded toward it. "Any good tunes?"

"Oh, I'm sure I don't listen to music you like."

He laughed again and Jessa liked him more, that low, breathy laugh wrapped itself around her insides, swirling like mist. "a.s.sumptions. And what kind of music must I like?" He wrinkled his nose. "Whoa. What's that smell?"

Jessa inhaled a whiff of something stale, something organic and rotting. Jessa imagined piles of it in the darkest corners of Florence, the parts tourists didn't see, imagined tossing Sean and Natalie right into the middle of a big stinking pile of it, covering them with banana peels, coffee grounds, sticky gelato-melted cone wrappers.

"What's funny?" Dylan Thomas asked. Jessa realized she'd laughed out loud at her little fantasy garbage-pile world.

"I was just imagining throwing my ex-boyfriend into a pile of Florence's secret garbage heaps."

She wondered if maybe he would bolt, hurry ahead wondering about the crazy ex-boyfriend-throwing nut from the other group. Instead, he asked, "Can I help?"

They walked a few more minutes in silence, the hum of the city drawing them forward, their eyes on the blur of stones beneath their feet. Even the streets here were prettier, older, more interesting, than the flat concrete back at home.

"I was just listening to Mamma Mia! by the way. Stage, not the movie."

To her surprise, he busted out a few lines of "Honey, Honey," dancing a circle around her.

Tyler wandered up alongside them. "Am I missing the show?"

"This is Dylan Thomas from the other school," Jessa told him. "He sings and maybe dances."

Tyler swept some of his own not-dyed black hair from his face, stuck his hands in jean pockets. "Dylan Thomas?"

He took a little bow. "My parents made me a tribute before I could breathe real air."

Jessa watched the two boys appraise each other. Boys were so different from girls. She knew they weren't comparing hair or a.s.ses for that matter. They were just circling the outside of a ring, figuring out where each one should stand.

They opted for either side of her.

"So, the David, huh?" Tyler broke the silence. "In California, we'd probably have a statue of Will Ferrell." That was Tyler, offering out a peace treaty.

"And he'd be fine with the nudity," Dylan Thomas said, signing and sealing it.

Now Jessa had a posse. This trip was looking up.

"What is he wearing?" Cruella waved a hand again into the middle of whatever Francesca had been saying. "What's that around his neck? A scarf?"

The group shifted uncomfortably. Cruella's husband, the travel-shirted teacher from their group, buried his head in a Frommer's guide.

"It's a sling." Francesca tucked her curls behind her ear. The frog sagged in the curl of her arm where the stick was tucked.

"Is that a nod to the designers of Florence?" Cruella pushed her husband's hand away from where he had settled it on her arm.

"It's a nod to the Bible." That was Tyler. And he got a full-body glare from Ms. Jackson for it.

Francesca tried again. "He's David. From David and Goliath. Before the battle. He kills Goliath with a slingshot and a rock."

The woman gasped, her hand over her heart. "That's so violent. I'm not sure that's appropriate for a school tour? That kind of violence."

Jessa stared. This woman was like some sort of sociological experiment. Jessa wasn't really religious. She'd been raised in one of those vague northern California quasi-Zen-we-value-everyone-secular-humanist sort of households, but even she knew most of the Bible stories. Someone seriously couldn't be this dim, could they? Even one who clearly worshipped at the altar of Neiman Marcus?

The only other teacher from their group moved himself a bit away from Mr. and Mrs. Cruella until he was standing close to Jessa. He never seemed to say much, mostly just hung out in the background. He was Quiet Guy. Of course, Jessa would be quiet all the time too, if the only people she had to talk to were Cruella and her horse snackmustache husband.

Finally, Ms. Jackson's hand shot up. "You mentioned we will see the original work inside the gallery?"

Francesca looked like she might jump into the group and kiss Ms. Jackson right on the mouth. "Yes, yes. Inside we will see the original David in the Tribuna, which was built to especially house this piece of art. Come on, then."

Jessa hesitated, watching the annoyance wash over Cruella. What brought someone to Cruella's place, to that constant default to snarly irritation, a look that always suggested she was barely stomaching all of this, all of them?

Waiting in line outside the sweeping columned stone of the Uffizi Gallery, Jessa leaned down and plucked a piece of paper from the ground at her feet. It was a computer printout of a painting, a portrait, maybe Roman or Greek. A funny-looking little man draped in sheets, his head adorned with leaves, holding a gla.s.s of red wine. "Room 43" was scrawled across the top in green pen. Underneath the blurry black and white of the photo, someone had written: Bacchus. (c. 1595) Patron deity of theater. And wine.

Caravaggio. Dark and light. Considered enigmatic.

Humanist.

"Hey! Did someone drop this?" Jessa called up ahead to her group, waving the sheet of paper over her head.

Jade shook her head and went back to her conversation with Christina. Kevin frowned. "Maybe it's Tim's? He went for a gelato."

"Actually, it's mine."

Jessa turned and found Natalie, standing with her hands clasped by her side, looking nervously at the paper, or maybe she was really looking nervously at Jessa but couldn't meet her eyes.

"Oh." Jessa handed it over. Natalie wanted to see a Caravaggio painting? Jessa loved his work, all that dark and dangerous paint, always playing with light. But Natalie? Jessa would have pegged her as a Raphael's-little-angels sort of girl.

Natalie smoothed the paper, folded it once and slid it into her bag.

"Why that painting?" Jessa blurted. "I mean, that one in particular?"

Natalie shuffled her feet a little, cleared her throat. "Just something I want to see here. It's just..." She fiddled with the skin around her nails. "My dad used to have a print of this in his office. Something my mom gave him in college. As a joke. She used to call him Bacchus. They were both theater majors. And, well, sort of partiers, I guess?"

"His work was very controversial."

"Whose?"

Jessa pointed at the paper. "Caravaggio."

"Oh." Natalie shrugged. "I just sort of want to see it in person, that's all."

Sean came up along side her with three cones of what looked like pistachio gelato. "Oh." His eyes darted between the girls. One of the cones dripped a green drop of melty gelato onto his shoe. "Um, here." He handed a cone to Natalie.

"Anyway, thanks." Natalie nodded to Jessa, taking a dainty lick of her ice cream.

With the eyes of a cornered animal, Sean held up a cone. "I'd offer you a bite but you hate pistachio."

"I'm kind of gelatoed out."

Jessa watched them wander away and join Hillary in line, where Sean handed her the third cone. Jessa's eyes strayed again to Natalie, who was laughing at something Hillary had just said to L. E. Wood and taking small bites from her cone.

Natalie seemed like a girl entirely free of angst, as if she didn't have the time for the sort of silly nonsense when there was so much hair product to experiment with. Jessa bit her lip, a distressing thought creeping in, a candle flicker of fear. Maybe Sean just wanted to be with someone who liked pistachio ice cream as much as he did, who would want to share the Junior Mints at the movies, or who when asked didn't really have an opinion about most things.

Jessa's heart thumped against her chest as she roamed the ornate rooms of the Uffizi, her eyes trying to pull in everything at once. She tried to stay mostly by herself, determined not to let the other groups' stupid questions or the stupid p.e.n.i.s jokes of the boys from her own group ruin the gallery for her. The David had been a bit of a disaster earlier that day, but Jessa knew that putting that big of a bare b.u.t.t, even a marble one, in front of a bunch of teenage boys pretty much annihilated any chance of an artistic experience.

But here, this place-this was what she had dreamed of seeing, all these paintings in one spot. When she was a little girl, her family used to visit her grandmother in Arizona. Her grandmother always had a huge glossy Art of the Renaissance book on her coffee table. While her parents talked in the other room, Jessa would flip through the pages for hours, her fingers hovering above the paintings-Botticelli, Parmigianino, Raphael, Cosimo-each one a tiny window onto an untouchable world, their rich colors like candy in gla.s.s jars. The clock would tick on the wall of the quiet room and Jessa would imagine herself in each painting, floating to the earth on a giant seash.e.l.l or as one of Raphael's tiny crouching angels, full of secrets. In each painting, she would hold still for that invisible hand of the artist, imagine herself inside the world the artist created.

Now here she was standing in front of The Birth of Venus, her favorite painting as a child. A woman brought to earth held in her seash.e.l.l on the waves, fully formed, blown here by the zephyrs, her body long and odd.

"Ick. Why are they all so fat?"-redheaded Madison from the other group, Madison with her entrepreneurial camera and cracking-gla.s.s voice.

"What's beautiful changes throughout generations," Jessa heard herself saying, remembering her mother telling her that as she turned the pages of her grandmother's glossy book.

Madison shrugged, waved to her friend across the gallery. "Um, yeah. They're still fat."

Then Dylan Thomas was at her side. "Madison, I think they sell original thought in the gift shop."

"And imagination," Jessa added helpfully.

Madison rolled her eyes, already texting into her phone as if the press of each small key deleted them from her presence. She vanished into the sea of people all around.