Me and You Read Free Page A

Francesco. Lorenzo thinks that we’re the special people and he considers everyone else to be inferior.’
    ‘He’s a snob? Is that what the professor is trying to tell us?’
    ‘He said that he has an inflated sense of self-importance.’
    My father burst into laughter. ‘Thank goodness. Just think if he had a low sense of self-importance. That’s enough, take him away from that worthless idiot before he fills up our
son’s brain with nonsense for good. Lorenzo is a normal child.’
    ‘Lorenzo is a normal child,’ I repeated to myself.
    Little by little I worked out how I should act at school. I had to keep to myself, but not too much, otherwise I stuck out.
    I was like a sardine in a school of sardines. I camouflaged myself like a stick insect on dry branches. And I learned to control my anger. I imagined that I had a tank in my stomach, and when it
filled up I emptied it out through my feet and the anger ended up in the ground and penetrated into the world’s guts and was burned up by the eternal flames.
    Now nobody bothered me.
    For middle school I was sent to St Joseph’s, an English school filled with the children of diplomats, of foreign artists who had fallen in love with Italy, of managers from the US and of
wealthy Italians who could afford the fees. Everyone was out of place there. They all spoke different languages and looked like they were just passing through. The girls kept to themselves and the
guys played football on the big field opposite the school. I fitted in well.
    But my parents weren’t satisfied. I had to have friends.
    Football was a stupid game, everyone running around after a ball, but that’s what everyone else liked. If I learned to play, I was home free. I would have some friends.
    I found the courage and put myself in goal, where nobody ever wanted to play. I realised that defending it from enemy attacks wasn’t all that bad. There was this one guy, Angelo Stangoni,
who was unstoppable whenever he got the ball. He would shoot like a lightning bolt to the goal and kick really hard. One day a defender knocked him down with a kick. Penalty. I lined myself up in
the middle of the goal. He took a run up.
    I am not a man, I said to myself, I am a nyuzzo, a hideous but incredibly agile animal produced in an Umbrian laboratory that has just one purpose in life: to defend the earth from a mortal
meteorite.
    Stangoni kicked hard, straight down the line, and I flew like only a nyuzzo can, stretching out my arms. And the ball was there in my hands. I saved it.
    I remember how all my team-mates hugged me and it was nice because they thought I was one of them.
    They put me on the team. Suddenly I had schoolmates who called me at home. My mother would answer and she was happy to be able to say: ‘Lorenzo, it’s for you.’
    I used to say I was going over to my friend’s house but really I went and hid out at Grandma Laura’s. She lived on the top floor of an apartment building near ours, with Pericle, an
old Basset Hound, and Olga, her Russian carer. We spent our afternoons playing canasta. She would drink Bloody Marys and I would have tomato juice with pepper and salt. We had made a pact: she
wouldn’t tell about my not going out with my friends and I wouldn’t tell about her drinking Bloody Marys.
    But middle school was soon over and my father called me into his study, sat me down in an armchair and said, ‘Lorenzo, I think it’s time you went to a public high school.
You’ve had enough of these private schools for spoiled kids. So, what would you prefer, mathematics or history?’
    I glanced quickly at all his heavy volumes on the ancient Egyptians and on the Babylonians, neatly lined up on his bookshelf. ‘History.’
    He gave me a satisfied pat on the shoulder. ‘Excellent, old boy, we like the same things. You’ll enjoy the Classics high school, you’ll see.’
    When I walked up to the entrance of the high school on my first day I almost fainted.
    It was hell on