With Malice by Eileen Cook Page B

schools. It was weird that they were already best friends; it made the rest of us feel sorta left out. I mean, we all made friends eventually. The two of them seemed happy together at the start. They buddied up right away to sit together on the flight and everything. I was crying because I had to say goodbye to my boyfriend, Trevor. He and I have gone out forever, like, since September. I caught the two of them looking at each other, and I could tell they thought it was stupid that I was crying, but maybe that’s because neither of them had a boyfriend, so they didn’t get it. Saying goodbye to someone you love sucks.
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    EXCERPT FROM POLICE STATEMENT GIVEN BY LIZ OCHOA, PROGRAM DIRECTOR FOR ADVENTURES ABROAD
    Transcript to be provided to Italian police
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    I’ve been doing this for eleven years, and I’ve never had anything remotely this awful happen. I hadn’t even imagined it in my worst nightmares, and trust me, I can have some real doozies. I’ve had a kid fall down a stairwell and break an arm. Every year I lose at least one of them for an hour or two. Food poisoning, homesickness, fights. One kid tried to steal one of those cheap Carnival masks from a store. You name it, I’ve pretty much seen it happen. But this . . . I just don’t even know what to say.
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    This year we had a group of twenty. We’ve done smaller groups, but we’ve found they don’t work as well. Twenty is large enough to have some interesting energy from different perspectives. More than twenty becomes a logistical problem. Keeping track of a group of teens is like herding cats. If they see something that catches their eye, they wander off before you know it. The program has two leaders on the trip, myself and Tim Wright. We travel with the group and provide supervision. We hire a university student in the home country to act as a guide. These are typically majors in the history or art departments. They get school credit, and we get a local expert of sorts.
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    For this trip we brought on Niccolo Landini. He’s a college student at Sapienza—Università di Roma, where he’s studying Italian history. I suspected when I saw him we might have trouble. Of course you shouldn’t discriminate against people because they’re good-looking, but teens are already basically a big bag of walking hormones, so having him around felt like chumming shark-infested water. The day he was introduced, you could see almost every girl in the program get that dreamy, someday-my-prince-will-come look. And you could tell he loved the attention, soaked it up like a sponge and just oozed back out the charm. I thought he and one of the girls might end up together. What can you do? At that age romance is practically a biological need and they’re all predisposed to expecting some kind of magical experience on their trip abroad. I blame all those teen romance novels.
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    I have to admit, I’d never have suspected Nico would be attracted to Jill. Don’t get me wrong, she’s quite pretty. Not in the way kids today seem to want to be, all skinny and hard-looking. Jill reminds me of a starlet from Hollywood’s golden era, a brainy young Sophia Loren or Elizabeth Taylor. I didn’t see her as his type. She was quiet and clearly very focused. One of those few people who doesn’t talk if she has nothing to say. My mother used to call them old souls. Jill felt older to me than her actual age in some ways, and in others, she seemed a little naïve. I had the sense she was going to be one of those people who really blossomed in college. You know, Jill actually emailed me as soon as she got her acceptance and asked for suggested readings for the trip. And she read them too.
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    At first I don’t think Jill knew what to do with Nico’s attention. My guess is that she wasn’t super experienced with boys. Her friend Simone egged her on, for sure. Simone would make a