pisa

"You said you checked the radiator?"

"That I did."

"And the engine block?"

"Not my first time, love," Orla says. She squints under her safari hat, its drawstring flapping in the Tuscan wind. "The head gasket looks alright too, so we've not blown it."

Theo puts her hands on her hips and frowns very seriously.

We were half an hour out of Manarola when the bus started making a distressing kicked-can noise. Fabrizio came over the speakers to say it was nothing to worry about, never mind all the smoke, but in the spirit of curiosity did anyone happen to know anything about Volkswagen engines? And now Theo's standing with Orla on the side of an Italian motorway, staring into the bus's engine compartment as trucks whip past.

Fabrizio and I are watching from the steps of the bus, sweating through our shirts.

"Do you know, it is not far from here where Genoa defeated Pisa in the Battle of Meloria to begin the decline of the Republic of Pisa," Fabrizio tells me, sounding like he's succumbing to heatstroke. "Maybe Pisa does not want visitors from the northern coast. Maybe they send to us un piccolo fantasma."

"Un piccolo fantasma," I repeat. "A little ghost?"

"Sì, bene," Fabrizio says, stroking my cheek tenderly.

I'm fighting my own Battle of Meloria, which is my desire to help Theo versus the memory of her erotically throttling me in a garden shed last night. The least helpful thing I could be doing is thinking about it happening again. But she's holding a wrench and wearing worn-in jeans, and my maritime empire is crumbling.

"You smelled that, though, didn't you?" Theo asks Orla. "The smoke was sweet. That's definitely coolant." She rubs at her jaw thoughtfully, leaving a streak of engine grease behind. "Do you have a cylinder compression tester?"

Whatever that means, Orla does have one. Theo rigs it up, Orla climbs aboard to turn over the engine, and after a minute of clunking and scowling at some kind of meter, Theo shouts, "I was right! The head bolts are loose!"

Apparently this is an easy fix, because Orla is jolly as she pulls out her toolbox. I watch, feeling wobbly and iridescent as Theo digs through it with the offhanded confidence of a self-taught mechanic. How long has she known how to do this?

"Kit!" she calls out. "Can you give me a hand?"

"You're up, love," Orla says, slapping my hand to tag herself out. She sits beside Fabrizio and gives me an indiscrete wink, and I regret telling her how I feel about Theo when we were strolling those lavender fields in Sault.

Theo smiles as I approach, glistening with sweat and flushing vigorously under her freckles. I try not to remember her weight in my lap.

"Do you have a sketchbook on you?"

We need to tighten all twelve head bolts on the cylinder, she tells me, which I'm sure means something. This has to be done in a very specific sequence, one Theo has memorized from having the same problem with her own Volkswagen bus but can't explain without drawing a labeled diagram. We're going to take turns tightening the bolts and reading the sequence out loud, to make sure she doesn't skip any steps.

"Oh, and it's gonna get greasy," Theo says, eyeing my linen. "You might want to, you know."

To finish her sentence, she peels her shirt off and tucks it into the back pocket of her jeans, safe from stains. All the powerful inches of her swimmer's build are now concealed by only a skintight undershirt.

"Oh, sure," I say, going out of my mind.

I strip my shirt off and throw it to Orla, who waves it over her head like a scarf at a football match. Fabrizio applauds. I happen to know that Theo and I are both nice to look at topless, and I'm pleased to feel Theo's gaze settle on my shoulders.

"I do love these Tuscan views, don't you, Fabs?" Orla says to Fabrizio.

"Sì," Fabrizio says, eyeing us with drowsy delight.

With Fabrizio and Orla's encouragement—half sincere cheering and half suggestive wolf calls—we fix the engine. Theo explains the torque wrench to me and guides my hands on it, showing me the precise amount of muscle to apply. It's hard, and it's sweltering, and Theo's skin is so close to mine, and this new, resolute, commanding side of her is making me lightheaded, but it also feels natural, somehow. After last night, I was afraid she might pull away, but there's an ease here. She trusts me to help her. I trust her to let me.

When we're done and Orla cranks the engine, a cheer goes up inside the bus. Theo stomps her feet and slaps a victorious hand against my chest. If everything else was different, this is when I would kiss her.

Instead, I put my hand over hers and lift it away gently, squeezing once before I let go.

We roll on to Pisa.

French buttercream is a very particular color. Italian and Swiss buttercreams have that pure gloss of egg-white meringue, but French buttercream doesn't begin with egg whites. It begins with yolks, beaten until ribbon smooth, then whisked with hot sugar syrup to make pate à bombe before the butter goes in. When it's finished, it should look richer than its sisters, a shade of white-gold that means it was one degree more difficult.

I'd describe the Tower of Pisa's color in afternoon light as French buttercream. In pictures it seems to stand alone, but in real life, it's in a green square with a matching cathedral, baptistery, and camposanto. They make a neat set. Fabrizio says this is called the Piazza dei Miracoli—the Square of Miracles.

Before the group splits, Fabrizio lines us up so he can take the classic Leaning Tower photo for each of us. I hang back with Theo to watch. Lars poses as if he's holding the campanile in a gelato cone; both Calums pretend to fuck it.

"Don't you want one?" I ask Theo.

"Nah."

For someone so certain of her hotness, Theo has historically been camera shy. I see the way she's watching, though, and I realize that at all these sights we've visited, I've never once seen her take a photo of herself.

"You're not too cool to do tourist things, you know."

Theo lowers her sunglasses. "I could say the same to you."

"Oh, you think I can't be uncool? Because I can."

"Won't they revoke your French passport?"

"Let's find out."

I jump up onto one of the stone stanchions keeping visitors off the lawn and do all the most cliché, embarrassing tower-tourist poses—holding it up, kicking it over, back-to-back lean—until Theo stops taking pictures and starts begging me to stop, screaming with mortified laughter. It works, though. When I tell her she has to do one now, she laughs and sighs and says, "Fine."

I line up the shot: Theo with grease-smudged hands in front of an 850-year-old tower, both of them tall and gorgeous and beaming.

"Oh, wow," she says when I show her the photo. "I actually really like this one."

"Yeah?"

She touches the back of my hand as she passes the phone back. "Yeah."

Theo's been like this about photos since we were eleven, when she still went to premieres for her sisters' projects. It was the big one, the Willem Dafoe movie that both Sloane and Este were in, and Theo wore a blue suit with a flower-print tie. Flowers for Flowerday, she said.

It never occurred to me that it would matter to anyone. It didn't occur to Theo either, and certainly not to her parents, who never cared when Theo asked for haircuts and clothes meant for boys. That was just how Theo had always been. But for some reason it mattered to red-carpet reporters, who wrote breathless articles about how heartwarming and progressive it was for two famous people to let their daughter wear a suit to an event, and what an inspiring gender hero Theo was. They made it into a whole thing. Diversity win! Child wears clothes.

Tabloids didn't exist in Theo's household, but if one comes from a famous family, one might look oneself up on one's best friend's family computer eventually. We were thirteen. She stopped posing for pictures after that, and she didn't get a haircut for years.

I've always thought Theo could pull off anything she wanted. I liked her just as much in slip dresses and lip gloss as I did in T-shirts and cotton boxers, and I didn't care if she chose to leave one for the other. But sometimes, when she leaned in to the mirror to put on lipstick or tugged the front of her shirt away from her chest, I would see her eyes go somewhere else, like she wasn't quite inside the body she was dressing up.

In her photo with the tower, I see someone filling up their body all the way to the skin. It's in the loose set of her shoulders under her shirt, her broad stance, the jut of her chin, her short hair flying across her forehead in wild, boyish waves.

"I love your hair this length," I tell her as we walk toward the cathedral. "It's so good on you."

"I like it too," she says, readying her ticket for the guard. Her expression is soft, inquiring. "I feel like I finally look like myself, you know?"

We walk into the cathedral, between huge Corinthian columns topped with acanthus leaves and through Romanesque arches with alternating black and white stripes of marble. Above the central nave is a gilded ceiling, each ornate coffer decorated with flowers and faces of angels. We split at the cross point of the nave and the transept, where the dome is painted with the Virgin Mary gliding toward heaven in a whirlpool of golden clouds.

When I moved to Paris, Dad told me to guard my wonder. He said that the danger of living in a place of dreams is that it can become ordinary. His exact words were, Novelty is half of sublimity, the kind of thing that once made me believe he was a genius and now makes me picture Theo doing a jerk-off hand gesture. Still, somewhere during the long hours at work making the same gelée for three months straight, I lost my appetite for taking in the view on my way home. I stopped noticing all the beauty that once astonished me when I read about it in books.

I was full of wonder when I was studying art. The quality that made me choose Renaissance artists as my concentration so I could write obsessive pages about their attention to human emotion and bodies, the part of me so infatuated with the Baroque that Theo made me put a dollar in a jar every time I brought up Bernini—it left me not long after Theo, but much more quietly. I barely noticed until Bordeaux, when I stepped off the bus at the chateau and felt wonder return like an old friend. Every stop since, I've slowly unfolded, opening to it again.

Here at the apse of the cathedral, I remember how it felt to be eighteen and falling in love with a history of art course catalog. I look at the massive oil paintings and recite pigments of the Renaissance palette, azurite and vermilion, verdigris and gamboge. I remember when I learned their names, how I imagined being some sixteenth-century cheese maker seeing paint give off light for the first time. I don't know if it's Italy or Theo bringing it all back, but I'm so thankful to both.

I find Theo by a golden casket, reading something on her phone.

"I'm looking this guy up," Theo says, jerking her chin toward the coffin. "It's Saint Ranieri, patron saint of Pisa. I feel like we could be friends. It says, ‘He was a traveling musician who played all night and slept all day.'"

I smile, enjoying the way her mind works, and lean in to read the screen. "‘His life revolved around food, drink, and partying.' I've slept with this Italian boy before."

She scrolls down. "Oh, but then he joins a monastery and gives away all his possessions. But look, one of his miracles is multiplying bread. You'd love that."

"Depends on the bread. Let's do the camposanto next."

We walk on to the long cemetery spanning the piazza's entire north side. I follow Theo through the arches and thousands of meters of frescos, still thinking of my imaginary cheese maker and those impossible, luminous oil-mixed paints he would have never seen before. They probably looked to him the way Theo looks to me now.

Beside the camposanto is the round baptistery, its domed roof half terracotta tiles and half brown and gray sheets of lead. I read once that the exterior was finished nearly two centuries after it was begun, and it shows in the way the structure literally evolves upward in complexity, starting with simple Byzantine columns and ending in ornate, pointed Gothic arches up top. Inside, it's almost all empty white-gray marble except for the font at the center of the floor and the sculpted pulpit over it. The rest is open, encircled by two tiers of massive arches holding up a high, curved ceiling.

"Kit, look at this," Theo says, pointing to a sign about the mathematics of the baptistery's roof. "What do you think it means by ‘acoustically perfect'?"

Before I can guess, a badged guard steps away from her station and declares, "Silenzio."

Theo's eyes widen as the murmur of visitors drops off into silence. From beneath one of the tall arches, we watch the guard walk to the font, directly under the highest point of the ceiling. And then she begins to sing.

At first, she holds one long, clear tone, an open ah that unfurls to the yawning ceiling and expands to fill it. Then she sings a second, lower note, but the first note still hangs in the air, resonating among the marble walls as if she's still holding it. She sings a third, higher note. The echoes layer over one another, so loud and rich it's as if a choir of ghosts is in the loggia harmonizing with her. But it's only her own voice lasting on and on, over and over, harmonizing with itself.

An expression of delighted awe dawns on Theo's face, and in it I see layer after layer, old self after intermediate self after current self, the Theo I met as a child and the Theo I got to call mine and the Theo who fills her own body. They're all here, hanging in the air, harmonizing with one another. Maybe they're always here. Maybe she feels so familiar and so new to me now because I'd heard the beginning note but not the completed chord. I knew her before her arches had points, before the paint to finish her had been invented.

What a wonder, what a miracle: somehow, more of her.

We have tickets to the top of the tower, but we're too heat-drowsy to climb the stairs. Instead, we buy gelato from one of the shops fringing the piazza and admire the tower from the cathedral steps below.

Theo tips her head to see all the way to the top of the campanile, all the repeating Romanesque arches making a pattern of half-moons like rows of pastries from this angle. She spoons amarena gelato into her mouth and hums.

"I feel better than I expected to, about last night," she says casually.

My spoon stops in my cup of fior di latte. I wasn't expecting us to talk about it. My mouth slips sideways into what I hope is gentle interest and not obvious, profound relief.

"What were you expecting?"

"I don't know. I guess I thought I'd be angrier?" She exhales a laugh. "At myself, that I did it, or at you, for making me want to. But I feel . . . good. Relieved, even. I think I'm glad we did it."

"That's good. That's really good, because I . . ." I should hold back. I shouldn't ask for more. But I think I might die if that was the last time she touched me. "I would love to keep doing it."

A pause. Theo stabs her spoon into the lump of gelato.

"Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, fuck it, why not?" She looks off into the distance where gold hills meet a big blue sky, a dangerous, punch-drunk edge to her voice that makes my heart pound. "It's like . . . nothing in this life matters except what you want, and what feels good. Right? Taste everything, fuck how you like, nothing else matters. You know what I mean?"

"Of course," I say. "I'm French. We invented that."

"Exactly," Theo says. She angles her face toward me. "But there's one thing I should tell you if we're going to be hooking up."

I brace for a catch, a caveat. "I'm listening."

"So," Theo begins, "I don't know about you, but after we broke up, I sort of wasn't sure who I was anymore."

I think of my own first year after Theo, drowning myself in poetry and pastry, pouring all my love into person after person and still waking up full afterward, wondering if the problem had always been me.

I say, "Sure."

Theo nods. "So, I went back to the beginning of me. Like, square one. And I started going through everything and figuring out what went where. And one of the main things I found is that—" A pause, a pinch of contemplation between the brows. "I think gender has always been more complicated for me than I wanted to admit."

Oh. Oh.

"I don't necessarily see myself as any particular, static thing," Theo goes on, "but if I have to pick, nonbinary is the closest. I just know I'm a lot of stuff, but one thing I'm not is a woman. Does that make sense?"

Truthfully, it wouldn't matter if it made sense. I would accept anything about Theo even if it didn't agree with any laws of this world or the next. But more importantly, it does. It's not so much a revelation as an explanation of something I've never been able to put into words about Theo, like the day I learned what a superbloom was.

"That might make more sense than anything you've ever said to me," I say. Theo laughs like I might be joking, but I don't break eye contact. "Really. Of course that's you. That's been you forever."

Theo blinks. "You think so?"

"Theo, you're—do you know how big you are?"

"Yes, I'm five-ten."

"Don't ruin it, I'm being sincere," I tease, bumping my knuckles against Theo's shoulder. "You're . . . expansive. You take up space. You make the world bigger to fit you. So, no, I'm not surprised you can't fit inside one idea of gender."

"That's—that's really fucking kind of you to say," Theo says, voice soft but fierce, knees pulled up to chin level. "But—yeah, I don't always tell everyone I hook up with, but if it's going to be a regular thing, it feels important that you know. And also, I just wanted to tell you."

A regular thing.

"I'm happy to know," I say, meaning it. Then I voice the worry that's been at the back of my mind for a minute now. "Can I ask—have I been using the wrong pronouns?"

"Ugh." Theo sighs, forehead to knees. "Not exactly? I guess I'm still sort of soft launching. I've been they to all my friends for three years, but I haven't fully retired she yet, because sometimes I can't avoid it. It doesn't feel like something I want to explain to my parents, and I'd rather die than see some stupid headline about Sloane Flowerday's Sister, Nonbinary Queen! I don't want to have to correct every stranger who calls me a lady or mademoiselle or se?orita. And at work, it would just be—I mean, hopeless. So it's like, if I keep she on the table for now, those things don't feel so shitty. I can frame it in my head in a way that doesn't hurt. Like pitching a really wonderful, complex, grippy Nebbiolo to a table and watching them order the house red because it's familiar and they don't have to think about it. It's not technically wrong, but . . ."

"You wish they would have tried."

"I just think it'd give them a richer experience," Theo says, smirking a little. "But, anyway, the people who know me best say, ‘That's Theo, they're my friend.' And I'd like that to include you."

My hand drifts reflexively to my chest, over my heart.

"That's Theo. They're my friend," I try. "Yeah, it feels so much better that way. Meaty."

They begin to grimace, but they can't hide their laugh.

"Are you giving notes? On the mouthfeel of my pronouns?"

"Sure, yeah," I say, laughing too. "Very nice vintage. Strong finish. Notes of dressing up as Indiana Jones for Halloween in fifth grade."

"At least people knew what I was supposed to be. Everyone thought you were Abraham Lincoln in a dress."

"How could I know that nobody would recognize Gustav Klimt? I was eleven!"

"Where did your mom even find a child-sized druid gown?"

"She sewed it herself," I say, still laughing. "God, sometimes I worry she was too supportive."

"She would have loved our Sonny and Cher."

"Yeah," I agree, softening. "That was a good night."

A tour group streams out of the tower and passes us in a swish of sundress skirts and Bermuda shorts. We watch them in comfortable silence, listening to their guide recite the history of the campanile in Mandarin until they're absorbed into the rest of the tourists filing through the square.

"I kind of love that we were both in drag the first time we slept together," Theo says, returning to me. "Sex is better when the person you're with really understands you, and understands how to look at you."

I consider that.

"For what it's worth . . ." I search for the right way to phrase it. "You know how attraction to men feels different from attraction to women? It has a different flavor, or comes from a different place."

Theo nods; we've talked about this many times before. "Yeah."

"Being . . . attracted to you," I say, putting it mildly, "that has always come from another place completely. Or, maybe everywhere at the same time. But it's never been like one or the other."

"I like that," they say.

Sun flashes off the gold in Theo's eyes. The moment settles.

"So . . ." I say. "A regular thing?"

Theo grins. They reach out and briefly tangle our grease-smudged fingers, then jump to their feet. It's almost time to meet Fabrizio.

"Yeah," Theo says. "But I did the work last time."

"Oh, the work?"

"Your turn to make a move." They take two steps backward, still grinning, bouncing on their heels. "I'll be waiting."