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"He puts down roots. I can hear them in my head. The spikes are sinking in here” he said, tapping a finger on the forehead. "And they hurt. They hurt a lot."
"I can prescribe you something for your headache and… not now, Greta!" said annoyed Salieri as he turned to the
attendant who came to the door without knocking. Greta apologized. She took a folder and disappeared into her office.
The session went on for 48 minutes. Adriano's condition had clearly deteriorated in the last month. Roberto Salieri noted in his notebook the suspension of the Marxotal. It was time for a change of treatment. There weren’t significant changes, his patient would have been at risk of being re-installed in a psychiatric clinic.
Adriano, accompanied by Greta, walked out the door without saying goodbye. Salieri lit a cigarette. He pressed the button on his mobile phone to listen to some parts of the conversation.
‘The parasite clung to the inside of my head with its spider's paws, Doctor. A spider that will never weave random webs. He's weaving one with thick, neat weaves. A spider's web that will trap her, too.'
The psychiatrist scratched the back of his head. He couldn't remember that passage.
Above all, his voice didn't sound like Adriano's.
4
A heavy steam hood had set down on the gym locker room. The girls groomed their naked, slender bodies after volleyball time. Lorraine, her nipples numbed by the hot water running down her chest cavity, made a single braid of her thick hair and squeezed it tightly.
Daisy washed off the foam, which slid down her long, tapered legs, revealing her maliciously shaved tongue.
"Wow! The shaving on the precious little hole you gave me wouldn't have expected" Lorena laughed. "I bet you did it for Guido."
"But no. I'm rehearsing the dance for the show. The sweat sticks to the bloody pants and causes me a lot of irritation” Daisy excused herself.
"Cute as an excuse. I'll write it down."
"It's the truth. Guido has nothing to do with it at the moment" Daisy said as she came out of the shower.
"By the way, how did he react when you asked him out? Did he drop dead on the floor?"
Daisy looked at her with a veil of reproach.
"Do I ever ask you about your full-back muscles?"
"No. But you should. Then I'd tell you about his biggest muscle…"
"Lorena, come on. Is he really good between the legs?" Daisy giggled in a fluffy cream-colored bathrobe, which she closed with two laps around her waist.
"Seriously. Have you slept with him yet?"
"No, I haven't. Just kidding. You know we've only just met" Lorena specified, wrapping herself in a large towel that she knotted over her lower back. The girl reached the wardrobe with her breasts swaying, proud of their prosperity. Half the schoolgirls were still underneath the showers wrapped in
clouds of steam, and the girls' bodies were flexuous, shiny with soap and water.
The more vain ones lingered to flaunt the splendour of their physicists. Daisy herself took off her bathrobe with a thread of exhibitionism, bowing forward to take her panties out of her purse, showing off her perfect round back.
While the girls who considered themselves less attractive washed quickly.
Only Filippa Villa walked around naked without any problem. Filippa was a tall, sturdy, completely clumsy girl, with a prominent belly, a wild skein of untrained combed black hair, dark, mobile and restless eyes. Filippa was a young civil rights activist, and Daisy sympathized with liberation struggles of all kinds.
The first barricades against the systems established by others had been erected in early childhood. The first to challenge were the dogmas of her parents.
As a child, they told her many fairy tales about princesses, and this often included the presence of a charming prince. The same one to marry once they grew up. It was the recurring nightmare of little Daisy, and of all the lesbians in the world. And Filippa was openly lesbian.
One day, hiding in the clouds of steam, she tried to kiss Daisy in the shower. Daisy, out of curiosity, accepted the kiss. She didn't find anything particularly scandalous about it, except that a moment later she found herself wearing Filippa's body, who seemed to have gone out of her mind with desire. She brutally put his hand between her thighs to touch her.
Daisy pushed her away. Filippa, panting, her hair clinging to her face, sketched out an excuse, and from that moment on stopped bothering her.
Daisy was helping Lorena to fasten her bra when Filippa said something, and then one of the girls started screaming.
The high school girl, a small, chubby blonde girl, was running naked with a cloud of foam stuck to her, shouting at all her mates to get dressed. Other girls started screaming, and they all ran out of the showers. One of them slipped on the wet floor and fell to the floor.
"Barbara, what's going on?" Daisy asked the girl, a shy, skinny teenager, bordering on hyanoresis.
Barbara replied that she had run away because she was frightened of the screams. Daisy realised that most of her friends didn't know what was really going on, but they all screamed anyway, influenced by the reactions of the more exaggerated.
Filippa Villa, who remained calm and lucid, looked out beyond the row of clothes hangers.
"Look up there!" she exclaimed, angrily pointing her finger at one of the air intakes.
"Do you see? There's something…"
"Pulitzer expression, Guido. Big stuff on the hands?"
"Come on, am I that predictable?" Guido replied as he passed Manuel along the east wing corridor of the high school.
"They all saw him. Not just you. It's a freak show. I took a few pictures if you need them."
"Who hasn't? Sorry, but I really have to run."
Guido had to write the piece fast. In front of the school, someone had crashed a pickup into a rusty-coloured Austin and rolled it over on its side. The driver of the car was stuck between the plates. He had been deliberately thrown off the road, and from what little was known, it was a passionate affair. There was a betrayed husband involved, full of anger, threats, insults, and tears of despair.
It was the kind of news that in Cronache Cittadine could have ten thousand views in a day, and for Guido it meant a bonus of thirty euros if he managed not to get the piece
burned. He ran to the literature classroom to get the computer from the cabinet.
Guido had been delegated by the headmaster to stay beyond the canonical time of the lessons. Cronache Cittadine was in fact the most trusted voice on high school performance.
The school headmaster had donated three thousand Euros to the newspaper, just to keep the cultural page alive. No sponsor was in fact interested in culture, but since the school bore an illustrious name, that of Giacomo Leopardi, it was almost a moral duty. And the funding was a breath of fresh air for the online newspaper.
Guido had to warn his mother that he was going to be late. He put his hand in his pocket to get his mobile phone, but all he could hear was the hard bottoms of the fabric. He tried to find it in his locker, even though he was sure he hadn't left it there. He opened the door, moved books and notebooks, went through the drawers. Nothing. It was the second phone he'd lost in a year. That's quite gratifying. The money he earned from it would have been used as a down payment on a new cell phone.
Dark in the face, closed the cabinet and went back to the computer.
He was ready to write about the incident when a link opened without him touching anything.
He started streaming what appeared to be a pornographic chat. On the screen appeared the soft shapes of a girl soaping her tongue, her small, white hand exploring her thighs, her face cut out of the frame.
Like all teenagers, Guido was particularly attracted to pornographic sites. But he was worried about the chat because it started automatically, as if it were the work of a hacker ready to infect his computer.
He was about to close the link, but that soapy girl had something familiar to him. He focused his gaze on that image: the foam covered the young woman's face, and she
reclined her head back to rinse her face and hair in the shower.
ʺNo. It can't be.ʺ
His heart began beating fast in the centre of her chest.
ʺNo, it can be her.ʺ
The girl was exactly her.
It was Daisy Magnoli.
She watched her classmate wipe the sponge on her slender, perfect hips. She noticed that her pubic hair had been shaved, and that she had mischievously tattooed a butterfly on the left side of her tongue.
He saw the hidden slit, the one that disturbed his nights, glabrous and shiny with water. The bald version of Coulbert's world was right there in front of him.
Guido, excited and confused, had an erection. The situation was absurd, almost unreal. He tried to regain control by trying to stay calm. He wondered who might be the author of that film.
He adjusted his glasses on his nose and clicked the ESC button to reduce the screen. Graphics appeared around the video. He realized it wasn't a pirate link.
"Oh, shit!" he exclaimed, discolouring his face.
The video was broadcast live from a smartphone.
He recognized the number at the bottom of the screen.
It was his cell phone number.
In the locker room, the girls crowded to the far side of the air.
Filippa noticed a small, compact object behind the slits in the aluminium grille.
She would never have noticed it if the vapour condensation on the object hadn't started dripping onto the bench where she had put her things. Filippa never deviated from her habits. That's why he always put his suit, shorts, and volleyball shirt in the same place, folded the same way,
under one of the four air vents in the locker room. She was taking tampons out of her bag when the drip dampened the back of her hand.
She looked up and saw the phone behind the grille, the camera's pitiless eye on the showers.
Daisy grabbed the stool and placed it under the air intake, climbed on it and grabbed the edges of the grille, which came off effortlessly.
Someone had removed the four screws that secured it to the wall. She grabbed the cell phone, version 5 of the Galactic P6. She owned that same model. Her familiarity with the phone's functions helped Daisy to turn the camera off. "Who's the asshole who had fun filming us?" exclaimed Lorena, quickly tucking her blouse in.
"Surely a big bastard or a big son of a bitch” said Filippa who, along with the other girls, had gone behind Daisy's back to get a better look at the phone. The girls were all furious, and they were all consumed with that animosity that comes every time something happens that makes them feel ashamed and embarrassed through no fault of their own.
"Imagine if that bastard had retrieved the cell phone and put it on the net" Lorraine said, imagining disturbing scenarios like ending up in some porn chat room, or in high school kids' cell phones.
"Us walking around naked in the showers… can you believe it? "Tits and asses in the wind for everyone to see. Can you imagine that shit?"
Daisy sat on the bench, grimacing her phone with a grimace of contempt, as if just having it in her hands disgusts her. She looked at the footage with disgust and said, "This is no joke, I'm sure. It looks more like the work of some perverted maniac" she added, "I've got bad news: we were being filmed live.
The panic began to creep up on the girls, even though some of them, underneath it all, got excited at the idea of being
secretly watched. But the more demure ones, and they were the majority, were terrified that the video might go viral. None of them would have the courage to stick their noses out of the house. Daisy reassured them, "If you look closely, you haven't been filmed, so you don't have to worry.
Daisy discoloured her face when she saw who the only girl on film was naked. She hesitated and picked up her cell phone to show her companions the images that were scrolling across the screen.
"See? You're not in any frame. Only… only I'm being filmed. So the fuckin' shit's only on me."
The girls kept quiet. The news lifted them up and they stopped despairing. Their reputation was safe. Some of them kept pretending to care because, anyway, they thought it was right to show sympathy for Daisy. The girl went through the phone menu to find out who it belonged to, assuming it was impossible to trace it back to the owner. No one could be so clueless as to use their phone to perform such an action. Violating privacy was illegal, and in the worst cases, you could even go to jail. Daisy ran her thumb across the screen and read the alphabetically sorted apps: Apps, Calendar, Cinetrailer, Facebook, Games, Weather, Messages…
"Messages. There you go! Now let's see this bastard's texts."
The girls raised the bar.
"Can you tell whose it is?" exclaimed Lorena.
"Wait a second. Here we go. Yeah. I got it." Daisy said, noting that under ʺmessagesʺ there were dozens of texts. She read the most recent ones feverishly.
Hello beast! I'll expect you tonight at nine. I'll bring the beer, you bring the girls! Oh, sorry. I always forget you're a queer. That means I'll settle for beer. Don't be late!
Good morning, Mr. Director. I hope the article it's fine. Otherwise, I'll replace it with a piece of news.
Manuel, I have a review tomorrow. Could I borrow your French dictionary?
Daisy read more messages. With each line, she felt the tears in her eyes rise.
"Well? Did you find something?"
Daisy couldn't respond quickly enough.
"I don't think… I don't…" she slurred, each syllable a painful lament.
"Daisy, are you all right?" worried Lorraine, seeing her pale, her lips trembling, foreshadowing a broken cry.
"The phone, I can't… I can't figure out who’s it is” she lied. "If you agree, I will hand it over to the principal” she proposed, the phrase broken by an inner hiccup.
The girls nodded with a distracted expression of who no longer thought it was their problem.
Daisy finished dressing. She greeted Lorena, who had an appointment with the boy, and headed for the locker room bathroom.
She looked in the mirror to brush her wet locks.
As she watched carefully, she became irritated with herself at the restlessness and suffering on her face.
Guido couldn't have been that important, especially now that he had turned out to be some kind of maniac. She didn't want to cry. That idiot did not deserve his tears. All he had to feel was a healthy pissing off with the bastard. Nothing more.
