A Semester Abroad by Ariella Papa

to my roommates. During the day when I spoke to them I said I just needed rest and asked Lisa, who was, in spite of herself, in my level, to get my homework.
    Jonas came to me during the night. He spoke words I couldn’t hear. All the things we said on the bus he said in a low whisper, just out of my reach. But he touched me. And his touch on my skin brought my fever up.
    It had been almost a year since I walked into the room where he blew pot smoke in my face. It was after he waited for me at the bus stop. He invited me to a party, Kaitlin and me like it was no big deal. She raised her eyebrows when I asked her but put on her lipstick and came anyway. She was good like that. She indulged me when she knew better. She never said I told you so.
    That night he danced a circle around me without picking up his feet. I knew that he had a girlfriend who lay sick in bed across the country in her hometown, but still her influence was strong. He kept his dancing circle wide enough that he was just out of reach, at least for a little while. He laughed when I passed the joint the second time and blew smoke in my face, smiling. I just inhaled his breath.
    And then, we were together all the time. At a party in the corner, just the two of us. Somehow we never ran out of things to say. His roommate had a girlfriend, which made it almost obvious that he could stay with me when Kaitlin was at her boyfriend’s. We were just friends, though. It was all cool. There was a girlfriend we were supposed to be thinking about, but she never came up. She was sick and not getting well. I didn’t worry. He said don’t worry. I believed him.
    In the bed in Siena, I could not focus on my thoughts. They were slipping away from me, but it wasn’t sleep. My resistance was weakening like his faraway girl. I knew her name but I always called her Mono Girl. I created a face for her because she had only been the back of the hair the one time I saw them walking together. I was behind them. She didn’t see me, but he did.
    My friends also called her Mono Girl. I’m sure her friends called me something worse. I’m sure she hated me. I never hated her. I envied her. Our only connection was Jonas.
    There is always someone else, isn’t there? Two of the worst words in the English language. I couldn’t think of how to say them in Italian in my sickness, and at that point I probably couldn’t have figured it out right if I was well. But there was always someone else in the mind of the person you want when they should be thinking of just you. There was always a reason for them to be guilty, preoccupied. There was always an excuse not to give you all of them. Mono Girl was someone else. And then maybe now, somehow, I became the “someone else” that he thought about. And she had to deal with my shadow the way I dealt with hers.
    Maybe not.
    “What does she look like?” I asked Kaitlin when Mono Girl returned, the next semester able-bodied and ready to pick up where I left off. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
    “Nothing like you,” Kaitlin said in a way that made me love her all the more.
    In my crazy fevered visions, I gave Mono Girl the face of Santa Caterina, whose fingers I didn’t get to see at her church in Siena. I was sweating, imagining Saint Catherine and Mono Girl and I were one falling into ecstasy as that parasitic boy crawled inside us. What good did the ecstasy do you if your fingers wound up preserved away from your body? With my fingers still attached, I wiped the sweat from behind my knees.
I cannot stop these images. I’m helpless.
In Italy, I didn’t know who would care.
    The weirdest things went through my mind. They were strange enough for me to know that I was delirious. I remembered that first night when he stayed over my dorm room, how we just pretended to fall into it, because it was easy, but down the hall a woman was sitting outside a door. Kaitlin and I called her the Stalker. She was obsessed with a kid on my floor. She