LITMIR.BIZ

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trying to help.” Glancing behind me to see if the French tourists were paying any attention to the muttering teenagers in the back—which, fortunately, they weren’t—I took a deep breath. “Giovanni, I’m not sure how to ask this, but . . . you’re definitely dead, right?”

      He nodded, unconcerned; it was old news to him. “My school came here. I fell. My neck, it broke.”

      Maybe his clothes came across so 1970s because that was when he died. “Do you think you were pushed? Did someone murder you?”

      “What? No. Not possible.” Giovanni seemed utterly sure about this. “Rain was falling. The steps were wet all over. My feet went”—he made a hand motion that resembled the Nike swoosh.

      “He says he wasn’t murdered,” I whispered to Cairo, who shrugged. The only other sounds were the increasingly distant patter of the tour guide and the shuffling feet of French tourists walking away. I turned back to Giovanni. “Then why are you still here? I always thought . . . if spirits stuck around on earth, it was because they had some kind of unfinished business here.” But what did I know? It had been only stupid TV shows and horror movies to me until a few hours earlier.

      Yet Giovanni nodded. “One thing I never did on earth. One thing I always wanted to do.”

      Maybe he needed me to find his mother and tell her he loved her. Maybe I had to search for some long-lost friend. Or get revenge. Was I willing to get revenge for Giovanni for something that happened decades before I’d been born? Carefully, I said, “What’s that?”

      Bashfully, Giovanni said, “Never I kiss a beautiful girl. Never any girl, actually.”

      For a long moment, I thought I must have gone crazy after all. He couldn’t have said that, could he? “You’ve hung around on earth for thirty years or so because you didn’t want to go to heaven without kissing a girl?”

      “You have got to be kidding me,” Cairo whispered. I elbowed him sharply in the side; mockery wasn’t going to help us.

      Giovanni said, “I want this very badly. Please—maybe you would—maybe? You are most beautiful girl.”

      I didn’t especially want my first kiss to be from a dead guy. If this was a sign of how my love life would go from then on, my already low expectations were going to have to drop even lower.

      And yet . . . it was such a simple request. He wanted it so badly. He thought I was beautiful. He was so gorgeous; if I hadn’t realized he was dead, I would have kissed him for certain. And Giovanni would always be the first guy who had ever flirted with me.

      The tour group had moved significantly ahead of us now, but we could still hear them—still catch up if we had to, without getting lost down here. I told Cairo, “Can you give us a second?”

      “For what? So you can kiss him?” To my surprise, Cairo— who’d been so unflappable through all of this—looked disgusted. “You don’t know what that will do. He might, I don’t know . . . suck your soul out.”

      “I don’t think it works that way.” How it worked, I wasn’t sure, but I felt convinced that Giovanni wasn’t trying to hurt me. “Remember how you know that Michael’s always interested in Audrey’s feet? That’s how I know Giovanni isn’t trying to hurt me.”

      Cairo considered this. “You can read his mind?”

      Giovanni said, “Tell him I will not hurt your soul.”

      “It’s not mind reading. It’s just . . . if he were lying, I’d know. I feel sure of that.” And I did.

      The French-speaking guide had taken our group almost out of earshot. With a sigh, Cairo said, “Okay, I’m going ahead. Catch up when you can. And if anything weird happens . . . scream even louder than you did last time.”

      “All right.” We tangled pinky fingers for just a moment, a quick sign of solidarity we hadn’t shared since we were eight years old. Then Cairo walked off without a backward look. I knew it was his way of saying he trusted my judgment. The question was, did I trust my own?

      I turned back to Giovanni, who still stood there, hopeful and sweet. He was so beautiful—big, dark eyes, long eyelashes, dimpled chin—that only one question came to mind: “How is it that you never kissed a girl?”

      It turned out to be possible to blush after death. Giovanni flushed so that the catacomb around us seemed to turn a soft shade of pink. “Did not always look like this.”

      “What do you mean?” I shouldered my cloth bag and tried to stay focused. I hadn’t brought my shawl this time, and I shivered slightly in the underground chill. “Did you . . . change or something? After you died?”

      “After death, we look like we are meant to look. Not always in life.”

      I began to understand. This wish of his wasn’t only about kissing a girl; this was about making up for the life he lost—not after he died, but before. “Show me.”

      Giovanni didn’t want to, I could tell, but he obeyed. His beautiful face seemed to melt, the skin along the left side of his jaw crinkling and turning a vivid, meaty red. A burn scar, I realized. Giovanni’s fall on the catacomb steps wasn’t the first terrible accident he’d been in.

      It wasn’t so horrible, really—just a line along one side of his face—but I could imagine what most girls would’ve said about it. What Audrey would have said. If Giovanni had lived to be a little older, he might have met a girl mature enough to look past his scar and see the gentle, beautiful guy beneath. But he didn’t make it.

      “You see me now,” he said, ashamed.

      “I see you now.” I stepped closer to Giovanni and put one hand to his face. I couldn’t actually touch him—or so it seemed to me—but when my fingers appeared to brush his face, his lips parted slightly as though he could feel it. “I see all of you.”

      I lifted my face to his and closed my eyes. I felt his kiss not as a touch, but as a glow—warmth spreading through me, making me aware of my blood and my pulse, of everything that separated the living and the dead. For one moment, I knew more than ever before what it meant to be alive.

      The kiss’s end was like the snuffing of a candle—a little less light and heat in the world.

      When I opened my eyes, Giovanni was beaming at me, his face whole and perfect once more, and slightly transparent now. “Thank you,” he said.

      “Is that enough?” I still couldn’t believe that he wanted nothing more than one kiss.

      Giovanni shook his head as he faded even further. “Nothing is enough. Nothing makes up for it. But . . . is something. Something beautiful.”

      “You’re beautiful,” I said, and he must have known that I meant it, because the last of him I could see was his smile.

      I caught up to the French tour group, and Cairo and I managed to get a taxi to the hotel more than an hour before the others were due back from the Castel Sant’ Angelo. We ordered a couple of coffees from the café downstairs and drank them in his hotel room, which had a view of the street below—crowded with little cars and motor scooters, both more tourists and just Roman people trying to get on with their day.

      “We have to tell Mom and Dad about this, don’t we?” I said.

      Cairo sipped his cappuccino. “I think they already know.”

      “How could they know?”

      “Ever since this started happening to me—I know we tried to hide it from Mom and Dad, but I always suspected they knew. Almost like they were waiting to see what would happen, you know? To see what I’d make of it.”

      “How would they guess you were hearing people’s thoughts?”

      He gave me a look. “They got married three weeks after they met, Ravenna. I always wondered about that, and now I believe we see the reason. You don’t think they recognized something

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