Read Me and You for Free Online Page A

Bye.’ I hung up and took off the wig, trying to work out what the hell she wanted from me. And why did she want to know if Mum and Dad were at home? Why didn’t she just
call them? I shrugged my shoulders. It was none of my business. In any case, if it was a trap, I hadn’t been fooled.
    The only time I’d seen my half-sister Olivia was at Easter in 1998.
    I was twelve and she was twenty-one. The times before that didn’t count. We had spent a couple of summers together in Capri at Grandma Laura’s house, but I was too little to
remember.
    Olivia was the daughter of my father and some woman from Como who my mum hated. A dentist whom my father had married before I was born. Back then he lived in Milan with the dentist and he had
had Olivia. Then they’d divorced and Dad had married Mum.
    My father didn’t speak easily about his daughter. Every now and then he would go and visit her and he always came back in a bad mood. From what I could understand Olivia was crazy. She
pretended to be a photographer but she just got into trouble. She’d failed her high-school exams and run away from home a couple of times, and then in Paris she’d had an affair with
Faustini, my father’s accountant.
    I had worked all these things out in bits and pieces because my parents didn’t discuss Olivia in front of me. But sometimes, in the car, they would forget I was there and so I was able to
pick up snippets.
    Two days before Easter we had gone to visit my uncle who lives in Campagnano. During the ride there Dad had told Mum that he’d invited Olivia for lunch to convince her to go to Sicily.
There were priests there and they would keep her in a nice place with fruit trees, orchards and things to do.
    I had expected Olivia to be ugly and with an unpleasant face like Cinderella’s stepsisters. Instead she was incredibly beautiful, one of those girls that as soon as you look at them your
face burns red and everybody knows you think she is beautiful, and if she talks to you, you don’t know what to do with your hands, you don’t even know how to sit down. She had lots of
curly blonde hair that fell all the way down her back and grey eyes, and she was sprinkled with freckles, just like me. She was tall and had big, wide breasts. She could have been the queen of a
medieval kingdom.
    She had barely spoken during dinner. Afterwards she and Dad had locked themselves in the study. She left without saying goodbye to anyone.
    I stood there for a while thinking about that strange phone call, then I realised that I had a much more serious problem to solve. If I had another Sim card I could send a text
to my mother pretending to be Alessia’s mother. But it wouldn’t work. Mum wanted to talk to her.
    I put on a high-pitched voice: ‘Greetings, Signora, this is . . . Alessia’s mother . . . I wanted to let you know that your son is fine and having lots of fun. Goodbye.’
    I was terrible. She’d have recognised me on the spot.
    I picked up the phone and wrote:
    Mum we’re in a hut up high in the
mountains. There’s no reception.
I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you.
    And so I’d earned myself another day.
    I turned off the phone, cleared my mind of my mother, flopped down on the bed, put on my headphones and started playing Soul Reaver. I came up against a mutant so tough I couldn’t beat
him, which pissed me off, so I switched off the PlayStation and made myself a mayonnaise and mushroom sandwich.
    I loved it here. If they brought me food and water I could spend the rest of my life here. And I realised that if I ever ended up in solitary confinement in prison I would be as happy as a pig
in shit.
    The fly had finally found a place where it could be itself, and so it may as well take a nap.
    My eyes flew open suddenly.
    Someone was fiddling with the lock on the door.
    I had never even considered the possibility that someone might want to come into the cellar.
    I stared at the door, but I couldn’t move. It was as if I were