Roman Holiday

Chapter Two

Hermione couldn’t believe how well her summer was turning out.

What had first promised to be an ordinary family vacation had been abruptly derailed when Mum broke her ankle gardening. No sightseeing for her this year, she’d announced gloomily, and Hermione had steeled herself, disappointed, for Quiet Holidays at Home.

But then Giulia had called, inviting her to visit, glamorous Cousin Giulia with her flat in the Piazza del Spagna and her zippy little red moped with the racing stripe and her scholarship to the Film Design Institute. Please, please, PLEASE, Hermione had begged, and listed, in writing, the first million or so reasons why Rome was at the top of her Must-See List.

Her trump card, the angle that finally convinced her parents to let her go, was the summer research project she was doing for Muggle Studies, on the Italian sorcerer Palestrina. Think of the libraries, she’d rhapsodized. The cathedrals. The living, breathing history!

In the end, they said yes. Of course. Mostly because they trusted her to be sensible.

Well, screw being sensible.

Hermione leaned to the law-abiding side as a general rule, but she wasn’t STUPID. Six weeks in Rome with her beautiful, freewheeling college-student cousin? If they thought she was really going to sit in the library all day, they were truly, pathetically thick.

She wasn’t going to enlighten them.

**

Cousin Giulia wasn’t a witch, but she was up to enchantments of her own, Hermione found out. The first day she was in Rome, Giulia dragged her to the salon where her friend Micaela worked as an intern. “I don’t know what you can do with it, really,” Hermione said apologetically, fingering her hair, but Micaela waved aside her protests and went to work with the scissors. Forty minutes later, Hermione had traded in her shoulder-length jungle of waves for a cleverly cut cap of curls that made the Italian ladies in the shop twitter about pre-Raphaelite nymphs and the cherubim on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Whatever, Giulia had said. Screw the art history, bambina. You’re hot, hot, hot, like Audrey Hepburn, like Lolita, like Leslie Caron in a ‘50s movie. Cross your legs, unwrap a lollipop, and watch them fall to their knees.

Hermione could live with that.

She moved on in the wake of her cousin’s flashing eyes and brilliant laugh and dizzying perfume. Makeup. Clothes. Shoes. Hermione got the feeling that she wasn’t quite a real person to Giulia, as much as a breathing, three-dimensional paper doll. But she didn’t mind.

Rome was AMAZING.

They stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, giggling over nail polish and Italian television. Sneaked into the movies to see big-budget Hollywood flicks, badly dubbed into Italian. Danced for hours to American pop music in smoky, strobe-lit clubs.

Giulia knew fascinating people: costume designers who clucked over Hermione’s slim sixteen-year-old body and loaded her arms down with beaded tops and faux-suede miniskirts, messy-haired sound engineers, pop singers with soulful liquid-chocolate eyes, fierce-looking paint-stained abstract artists and jazz guitarists in black turtlenecks who gulped espresso and grappa and sprawled at the sidewalk tables of Rome’s cafés, arguing about Ginsberg and Cousteau and Rimbaud and smoking clove cigarettes.

It was another world, and Hermione was loving it.

Playing dress-up in Giulia’s clothes and pretty leather shoes was FUN. Flirting with the beautiful dark Roman boys who thronged every street corner was FUN. Soon enough, she’d be back at Hogwarts, buried beneath shapeless black robes and that oppressive, wearying Good Girl persona. For now, let her have her borrowed go-go boots and her push-up bra and her spritzer of Giorgio.

If Ron Weasley could see her now, he’d choke on his pumpkin juice.

**

Her second week in Rome, Giulia’s fashion-model boyfriend Carlo returned from his photo shoot in Milan and invited Giulia to the Riviera. Obviously she intended to go. She wasn’t even particularly apologetic about it as she handed Hermione the keys to the flat.

Take the moped, she’d said brightly. Wear anything you want from my closet. Raid the fridge. Here - if you need groceries or souvenirs or something - here’s some money.

And she’d held out a fat stack of crisp bills in high denominations. Hermione assumed it was Carlo’s money; Giulia usually kept her cash crumpled at the bottom of her bag.

She did what she was supposed to - smiled, and took the money, and dutifully agreed: yes, she’d be fine. Yes, of course she’d stay on in Rome and look after the plants. No, Giulia shouldn’t worry about her.

Carlo made her Sneakoscope go off in about six different ways. But she couldn’t tell her pretty, flighty cousin that.

So. Sixteen years old and alone in Rome. For more than a month. With enough money to buy half of the city and still have cab fare home - money intended to buy her silence.

Well, Hermione was down with that. She was a lot of things, good-girl things that made Harry and Ron sneer, but she wasn’t about to call her parents for a plane ticket back to England. Not in a million years.

This was the adventure of a lifetime.

Plus, she had homework to do.