life. Despite the factoid that if I had a euro for every time my father has done the weird and wonderful thing of this type I would be able to buy a pony (if it was very small), still I question if there is a dark and majestic reason that we have exited the scene, but Lo Zilla is staying mum. He answers only interrogations such as “I can go to the Internet café for IM with my small friends?” To which, ten times for nine, he says “NOT!” in a monster voice.
But apart from the fact that I must cohabitate with Lo Zilla and my half-mother Sherri!, and in the absence of my friends and my heart, Venice appeals to me a lot. We live in the Grissini Palace Hotel, which is in a palace on the Grand Canal and is crammed with beauty. The building is made in 1586 by an unstable person smarting from thwarted love, and so it surprises not that even today it is chock with unstable people such as: Lo Zilla and Sherri! who are a paragraph of joy in themselves but I will save you that; Colonel Larabee who scribes a book about his life and sometimes could be found talking to the armor suits that make the lobby so homelike; Camilla, the concierge who bursts with information about every guest and is my friend but normal? No. She has a fish named Orlando the Furious who inhabits a bowl on her desk with coins on the bottom because, says Camilla, he will require only metal alloys to live on. And try if you do to give him even the smallest crumb of bread for food because he look zest-less, then everyone runs crazy like you are attempting to murder him in his bed! If fishes had themselves beds, I mean to say.
This is where I live. It is incredible that I have not also gone unstable.
I got a B-plus on the essay because although my verb tenses were “reckless,” my vocabulary was “surprising and muscular.”I didn’t tell Professore Rossi that I learned most of it from my ChiPs -watching rather than from class. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
Despite the fact that the Grissini Palace was like Crazy Zoo, Proudly Displaying All Aspects of Crazy, Twenty-four Hours a Day, I loved it there. As soon as I arrived inside its walls I could tell that something was UP. I was trying to figure out what when I saw Camilla, standing behind her desk, waving me over.
Camilla had a dark brown bob and a round face with wide-spaced blue eyes and looked more like a little porcelain doll than a real person. She was twenty-five and from a distance her face was so sweet you wondered what she was doing working in a place like Crazy Zoo, but when you got up close you could see that there was a hint of the insane around those eyes. Usually she was energetically bouncing from minding one person’s business to minding another’s, but today she looked almost as zestless as her fish.
Even though my desire to escape the lobby—aka the Place Where Dadzillas Roamed Free—was extreme, she looked so sad that I detoured toward her. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Oh, Yasmine, it is awful here today. The Save Venice people start to arrive. For the big events this week? And they all want to know where the ice machine is. Why do you Americans love ice so much? Is it because you are hot-blooded?”
“I don’t know, it could—”
“ Sì , I bet that it is,” she rushed on, musing to herself. One nice thing about chatting with Camilla was that you didn’t have to prepare any material because her superpower was to be able to hold both sides of a conversation by herself, complete with interruptions. “I wonder if I should date an American boy. I did date a Canadian once. Are they different from Americans?”
“I imagine that—”
“This one, he wasn’t crazy for the ice. He did like—” She cut herself off there, looking at me as if she’d just noticed my presence. And as if what she were seeing was not exactly a gorgeous dessert tray. Pained is what her expression was.
“I do not mean to be rude, but I am not sure that this hairstyle is the most