Angel Face Read Free Page B

Bundestag to kick-start her German studies, and she was planning to return to Perugia after she finished in Berlin. But she wanted to sew up her living arrangements in advance. She found the house on via della Pergola by pure chance:
    i need to find a place to live, so i search desperately through italian classifieds. i also buy a phone. then, when we walk down a steep road to my university, we run into a very skinny girl who looks a little older than me putting up a page with her number on the outer wall of the unversity. i chat it up with her, she speaks english really well, and we go immediately to her place, literally 2minutes walk from my university.
    Indeed, Filomena Romanelli, then twenty-eight, was hoping for someone just like Amanda to take one
of the back bedrooms in the apartment she and her friend Laura Mezzetti, then twenty-seven, were renting. The two Italian women worked as legal assistants at a nearby law firm. Both Filomena and Laura liked to smoke pot, and Filomena had a serious boyfriend. Laura, on the other hand, once confided to Amanda that she had bedded the washing machine repairman in desperation. “ Forza Laura—you go girl!” Amanda wrote of the story on her MySpace pages. But not long after, Laura found a boyfriend with whom she spent most nights. The Italian women sublet rooms at the villa to make ends meet. Renting to foreign students was also a good way to practice their English, and the young tenants would never stay for long. It was a strange house, once an outbuilding in an old farm-stead, that seemed to hang off the side of the hill just below the city’s fortress wall. It felt remote, but it was actually just tucked out of sight. The busy street called via Sant’Antonio was parallel with the rooftop, yet the villa was impossible to see unless you knew it was there.
    The house was L-shaped, with a covered portico at the front that opened into a tiny foyer where the girls hung keys, parked umbrellas, and kept a bulletin board with messages to each other. The foyer opened
into the apartment’s one common area—a live-in kitchen that had been cheaply renovated and filled with IKEA furniture, tattered sofas and a green Formica table. Laura and Filomena had hung fabric on the walls and put down colorful rugs to brighten up the dismal space. Their bedrooms were off this living area at the front of the house, and they shared the larger bathroom next to the kitchen. The sublet rooms were down a short corridor to the back of the house. The hallway gave onto a small terrace and ended at a bare-bones bathroom with a flimsy Plexiglas shower stall. Meredith, arriving first, took the corner room, and Amanda was left with the smaller one next door. Both these rooms were tiny, with just enough space for a single bed, a small closet, and a writing desk. Downstairs, four young Italian men shared an apartment with a similar layout but far less light.
    Amanda loved the place.
    it’s a cute house that is right in the middle of this random garden int he middle of perugia. around us are apartment buildings, but we enter through a gate and there it is. im in love. i meet her roommate. . . . the house has a kitchen, 2 bathrooms, and four bathrooms [sic] not to mention a washing maschine, and internet
access. not to mention, she owns two guitars and wants to play with me. not to mention the view is amazing. not to mention i have a terrace that looks over the perugian city/countryside. not to mention she wants me to teach erh yoga. not to mention they both smoke like chimneys. and, she offers me one of the open rooms after we hang out for a bit. we exchange numbers. i put down a down payment. im feeling sky high. these girls are awesome. really sweet, really down to earth, funny as hell. neither are students, they actually both work int he same law office, and they are desperate for roommates because the two they had decided they wanted to disappear all of a sudden. they are relieved to meet me believe it or