Here’s the thing: the students didn’t come to Italy with any sort of plan or intention, but rather with a goal: drink good wine, eat good food, and get good sleep. Burdened with the kind of hangover that comes from lacking sufficient sleep and sufficient hydration, nothing sounds more enticing than merely sticking to the established goals. In this situation, eating good food gets called into play. Being the girl she is, Alex decides they’ll go get pizza from the hole-in-the-wall local pizzeria and pastaria at the end of their block once Mack pulls himself out of bed. 

Mack awoke with a fog of confusion clouding his vision, making him unable to see all that was clearly in front of him. “Jesus, guys, what the fuck happened last night? Like, actually, where the fuck are my clothes?” 

The other three laugh at Mack, baffled by his intoxication levels from the night before. 

“Well– what happened is that you and Heming nearly let Eli and I sleep outside last night,” Alex said in a way that implies poking fun, but really, she was bummed he’d forgotten about her. 

Mack blinks, head full of nothing, and says, “I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t remember anything after I left the club.” He continues, “Alex, we left together, right?” 

The remaining three look around at one another, unsure how to break it to him that it was not Alex he laid in bed with. “Jesus, Mack, you really were blackout,” Heming said. “I took you home last night.” Heming watched the gears turn in Mack’s head, wondering if he was going to be outed like a fraud. 

But nothing comes of it. “Yeah, okay.” 

Dragging himself out of bed, Mack showers and wears a crochet polo shirt that Alex picked out for him when they were in Lyon, France, on an excusion for school. He wears it thrice a week since the purchase. Before he knows it, he’s dragged out of the comfort of their Airbnb, covered in bugbites from mosquitoes trapped underneath all their sheets, and whisked to the corner of the block where the four students order pizza from who they call The Pizza Man. 

Each of them get their respective pizza’s to-go, wandering to the rocky coast line of Spiaggia di Vernazolla, they sit on boulders inflitrating the beach. Portofino buildings of gelato colored paint and forest-green shutters surround them from the North, West, and East. To the south, the endless landscape of where the sky meets the sea, trailing all the way to Ibiza. Pastel pinks, tangerine orange lay the background for what they don’t know is the last time they’ll all be together as friends. Mack sits next to the left of Alex, and Eli is to her right. She remembers what Eli told her about Heming the night before and feels the impossible weight of holding such information. She’s never been good at keeping secrets. 

The friends laugh, fiend off pigeons, and wonder what happens after they die. Mack and Alex discuss whether God is real, and how long they hope to live. 

“I can’t wait to be dead,” Mack says. An unmaskable smile tugs at her cheeks as she tells him she’s felt that way for years. 

Nodding her head, refusing to break eye contact, she continues, “I just feel like there’s going to be something so freeing about death– like, none of this matters. Nothing we do matters. Or at least it really won’t matter in however many years.” Alex thinks like this all the time– wondering what the point is in the grand scheme of things. At one point, she thought Love (with a capital L) could be the true meaning behind why people suffer on earth for decades and decades only to die in the end. But now, seeing how no matter she loves someone, that doesn’t mean they’re “meant to be,” she’s lost hope in the notion that love saves. Jones would tell her she thinks too much, she worries too much, and she reads into things too much, but Mack, he saw her– right through to her bones. 

The moment continues, feeding her worst thoughts. 

Feeling revived from the Pizza Man, Mack, Alex, Heming, and Eli wake up from an afternoon nap just in time to head to the Beach Club at 11:30 that night, an underground bar just on the coast of the Ligurian Sea. Alex decided it was to be her night. It was her turn to blackout, her turn to fuck up, her turn to pass beyond the point of no return. Mania riffled behind blue eyes, and exactly what she wanted came true. 

Jones and Alex were in a stalemate: a few texts exchanged throughout the day, a few apologies, others a form of passive-aggression neither refuse to acknowledge as such. Lines of worry tattoo themselves upon her face, even if it’s just for the night. Potentially, forever. Forever, she’ll worry about what this trip has done to her and Jones. But one more night remains. 

To skip the typical mundanities of vodka-induced intoxication (ignoring Jones, paying too much attention to Mack, giggling with Eli, forgetting what she heard about Heming), the evening ends with Alex and Mack in a bed, her head on his chest, and his morals sunken to the bottom of the sea, left behind on a jagged-stone pathway that Alex tripped over seven times on their walk home resulting in Mack’s hand in hers to “steady” her, as he said. 

It was on this pathway that Alex and Mack couldn’t help but lean into each other, into whatever chemistry bubbled between them. Light kisses planted on the top of his hand. A gentle grip around her waist. They understood one another, and they understood to never repeat to anyone the way they’d behaved together that last night in Italy. Under a love spell, a delusion that tomorrow would never come in the way they knew it would, the future rushing towards them with all its ugliness, reality, and consequences. When Alex awoke the following day, still drunk and dizzy, she knew she couldn’t pretend any longer. She wasn’t going to leave Jones for Mack, but Mack showed her there’s more. But most of all, if she genuinely respected her relationship with Jones, she wouldn’t have acted like that under Mack’s gaze. The moment she met Mack, her relationship with Jones was over. It just took her three weeks to realize it.