Luca and Alberto exchanged a glance. Neither said anything, but they came to the agreement that they'd probably be okay as long as there were two of them and only one Signor Granchio. They climbed in and sat down in the passenger's seat, and Luca pulled the door shut. Without a word, Signor Granchio started the truck again, and turned around to get back onto the highway.
It was only a few minutes after that, with the Palazzo del Corallo far behind them, that the man spoke. "Your dad said I'm taking you to your Uncle Leonardo's house?"
"Yeah," said Alberto.
Luca thought for a moment. "Like... all the way there?" he asked cautiously. Alberto looked at him, and knew they were both thinking the same thing. Uncle Leonardo and his family surely lived out in the Gulf, underwater. If Signor Granchio were supposed to take them all the way there, then he, too, must be a sea monster, but nobody had actually said. Giancarlo also had human friends, some of whom didn't know about sea monsters, and the boys weren't sure what they were and were not allowed to say here. Signor Granchio's dark tan and land-based job suggested he was human, but didn't prove it.
"I know where it is," said Granchio. "I'll drop you off."
Driving down the raised highway was quieter in an enclosed vehicle than it had been in the sidecar of Giancarlo's motorcycle, though it was also hotter and didn't smell very nice. The lack of conversation on the way to Portici had been uncomfortable, but could be blamed on the noise. Now it was much worse. With his father, Alberto hadn't wanted to talk. With Signor Granchio, neither he nor Luca knew what to talk about.
After a few more minutes, Luca seemed to decide to try again. "Sir?" he asked. "How do you and Signor Trombetta know each other?"
"We're sort of cousins," Granchio replied. "His mother married my stepmother's brother."
The boys worked that out. Signor Granchio's stepmother would have been Girolamo Scorfano's sister... so he and Giancarlo weren't actually related, but that sounded as if Signor Granchio were also a sea monster. Or was he? Signorina Scorfano wasn't his actual mother, and they now knew that humans and sea monsters marrying each other was something that had happened at least twice. He could really be either. Alberto tried to recall if there'd been Granchios at the picnic yesterday, but there'd been so many names that after a while he'd almost stopped hearing them.
"We used to hang out when we were kids," Signor Granchio added. "Then he decided he wanted to see the world and off he went. Didn't hear from him again for years."
That didn't help, either, and Signor Granchio himself didn't seem to want to say more. At the next stoplight he lit a cigarette and put it in his mouth, and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as if in time to music the boys couldn't hear. They exchanged another look, and decided to say nothing more. Luca, who hated the smell of smoke, tried to hold his breath as much as he could.
The highway took them back to the south end of Napoli, but rather than head north to catch the ferry back to Procida, Granchio drove to the shipyards south of the harbour, where workers were building and repairing several large metal ships. He parked his truck and greeted a couple of people, then led the boys to a place where there were several huge watertight compartments, each of which could be drained in order to work on a ship below the waterline. The last of these was empty, and the gates were open to the harbour beyond. On the right, there was a ship in the next compartment, and on the left was a high stone wall, so nobody could see into it from either direction, and there was a clear path out to the sea.
"Leo and Giorgio live out that way." Granchio pointed towards the horizon. "You can't miss the place. They live in somebody's pleasure yacht that went down about twenty years ago. It's upright on the bottom with the mast still standing, and there's a bit white gorgonia growing on it."
Gorgoniawas a lacy, fan-shaped coral, easy to recognize. The boys nodded.
"Stay near the bottom so nobody runs into you," Granchio added, and waited. He clearly expected them to jump right in. Even if he wasn't a sea monster himself, Signor Granchio must know how they worked.
"Thank you for the ride, Sir," said Luca.
"Don't you thank me. Giancarlo better thank me," Granchio grumbled.
"Thanks anyway," said Alberto, and climbed into the water. Luca followed, but they didn't swim off right away. Instead, they sank into the shadows where Granchio wouldn't be able to see them, and watched him a moment. He checked the time on his watch, then took the cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it in the water before turning and walking away.
"Do you know who he is?" asked Luca.
Alberto shook his head. "Never heard of him before today." Not that this was surprising. The more Alberto learned about his family, the more he realized Giancarlo had either lied about or omitted just about everything important.
"I think he's probably a human..." said Luca cautiously.
"Yeah, probably," Alberto decided. "He wouldn't work around boats if he wasn't. Too easy to get wet."
"Yeah."
They lingered a moment longer, but there was really no reason to stay. The two boys set out across the harbour towards the gulf.
Sea monsters had an unerring sense of direction. Giulia had once speculated that this was because they could sense the earth's magnetic field, as some birds could – this had surprised Alberto, who had never stopped to wonder about the ability and never realized humans didn't have it. Luca had thought it made sense that they didn't, because humans didn't have to find their way around the open ocean. On land there were things like roads and buildings to tell people where they were, while sea monsters far from shore might have only water in every direction.
Whatever the reason for it, that directional sense allowed Alberto and Luca to keep straight on in the direction Signor Granchio had indicated, until they arrived at the sunken boat he'd described. It was in the middle of a garden of coral, with a copse of towering kelp behind it to provide shade. The algae swayed gently in the current, and ribbons of sunlight from the surface danced over the structure. Alberto could see Luca relax at the familiar pastoral atmosphere, and felt himself uncoiling a bit, too. It had been a very stressful morning, but this place felt safe.
The man Lucrezia had pointed out the previous day as Uncle Leonardo was kneeling among the corals, removing parasites from a large, chrysanthemum-like snakelocks anemone. As Alberto had already noticed, he looked a lot like Giancarlo, being similarly tall and thin and mainly royal blue in colour, with golden-yellow fins around his head. He looked up as they approached, and waved.
"Buon pomeriggio!" he greeted them, rising from the bottom. "Alberto... and his friend from Liguria. Yes?"
"That's us," said Alberto. A couple of days ago he might have made a much more enthusiastic introduction of both of them, but today he was feeling cautious. What did Uncle Leonardo and his family think of how Alberto had behaved at the picnic?
"Sorry we missed you yesterday," Uncle Leonardo said, "but we had to leave early. Didn't catch your name," he added, to Luca.
"Luca Paguro," said Luca.
"Alberto Marcovaldo," Alberto added, still not wanting any mistake about that.
"Leonardo Scorfano. Uncle Leo, if you like," said Leonardo. "Where's your father?" He looked back the way they'd come, evidently expecting Giancarlo to be there.
"He, uh, met a friend and wanted to talk to him," said Alberto.
"He had Signor Granchio bring us back," Luca agreed.
Leonardo looked shocked. "Granchio? He's here? I mean..." he looked around again. "He got in the water?"
The boys shook their heads. "He drove us to the shipyard, and then he gave us directions," Alberto explained.
That seemed to be even worse. "He just left you there? With all those propellers?"
"We're not babies!" Alberto protested. "We know to avoid propellers!"
"Some of those big ships have a very powerful pull," Uncle Leonardo huffed. "Granchio should know that. That's how he lost his tail!"
That answered several questions: Signor Granchio was a sea monster, but if he had no tail he probably couldn't swim very well, so that might be why he preferred to stay on land. It did, however, leave one particularly horrifying open problem. "Don't they grow back?" Alberto asked.
"Only if you lose it below about here." Luca grabbed the tip of his own tail and felt his way along to a spot between the two fins. "Old Man Cormorano had that happen. The bones don't grow back, either, it's rubbery stuff called cartilagina instead. I read a book about lizards on land who do the same thing, only they can actually make it fall off on purpose when they need to distract a predator!"
That was slightly more information than Alberto had needed about the idea. He'd always had the idea that losing a tail was nothing more than a temporary, albeit painful, inconvenience. Now he was going to think about that every time something brushed against his backside. "Right, well," he said. "Anyway, we didn't get cut up by propellers and we still have our tails, so nothing to worry about! We're here to meet everybody we missed yesterday." He had to admit, he was still very curious about Flavia and what had happened with her parents.
Uncle Leonardo gave an exasperated sigh, but he was smiling. "You sound exactly like your father," he said. "Giorgio's gone into town to run some errands, but you can meet Flavia if you're up for it." He turned towards the ship. "Flavia! Your cousin Alberto and his friend are here!"
There was no immediate response.
Uncle Leonardo waited a few moments, then said, "she can be very shy. I'll be right back."
Rather than enter the sunken boat, Leonardo swam around behind it into the copse of kelp. The boys heard him call Flavia's name again, bur any further conversation was too soft for them to make out.
"Mom would be so jealous of that anemone," Luca observed while he was gone. "Hers are half that size."
It must have taken a minute or two of convincing, but Uncle Leonardo eventually re-emerged from behind the sunken boat, with an arm around his daughter. She was a bit younger than Luca and Alberto, twelve or thirteen years old and bright banana yellow in colour with anxious red eyes and fins in a dozen other shades of yellow and gold. Accompanying her were the three hand-sized turquoise fish they'd seen at the picnic. Up close, these proved to be fat, pebbly-skinned creatures with wide-set eyes and rather dopey, pigeon-like expressions.
"Hi," said Luca, raising a hand. "Nice to meet you."
"Sorry we missed you yesterday," Alberto added.
Uncle Leonardo patted Flavia's shoulder. "They don't bite, Angelfish," he said gently. "I promise."
Alberto actually had bitten Luca once, while they were having a fight – but only once, and that was exactly the sort of thing he'd already decided the Scorfanos didn't need to know about. But what to say next? Alberto was not the most tactful person, but he did know that I hear your parents left you in a giant sponge was not a good opener.
"I like your pet fish," Luca offered. "What kind are they?"
That seemed to be the right thing to say, because Flavia came a little closer and held out a hand. One of the fish rested itself on her palm, and Flavia petted it. "They're spiny lumpsuckers," she said. "This one is called Squalo, and the other two are Zanna and Fiero. The names were Papa Giorgio's idea," she added.
Alberto snickered, appreciating the joke, while Luca took a closer look. "I've never seen any before," he said. He tried to lift the one named Squalo off Flavia's hand, only to find the creature somehow stuck fast. "Are they common here?"
"No." Flavia peeled the fish off her hand and put it on Luca's arm, where it also stuck using a suction cup made of the fins on the bottom of its body. "One of Nonna Sofia's friends brought them back for me, all the way from Spagna. He has a bee farm there."
That tickled Alberto's memory. "You mean Signor Aranque?"
"Yes!" Flavia said, startled. "You've met him?"
"Last year," Alberto said. "My father and I stopped by his place."
"Did you see his bees?" Flavia asked, her voice less timid now as she took interest.
"Yeah! He got me to wear some of his bee armour and told me all about them, so I'm basically an expert," Alberto replied, trying desperately to remember what he'd learned about bees... he'd asked about them mostly to annoy Giancarlo, and hadn't listened as much as he probably should have. "They're about this big, and yellow, and their backs are fuzzy but their butts are shiny, and there's never just one, there are thousands and thousands and there's a queen who's in charge."
Flavia nodded. "He told me that the queen is the mother of all the other bees, and they make honey for her! Did you get to taste the honey? What did it taste like?"
Luca had been trying to get Squalo off his arm, but meanwhile the one named Fiero came and stuck to his other elbow. "It's very sweet," he said, moving to try to unstick Fiero, "and very sticky, but it doesn't stick your mouth shut like toffee does."
"You met him, too?" asked Flavia.
"No, I learned about bees at school," Luca told her. The third fish, Zanna, came and stuck itself to his cheek.
Flavia had been in the process of reaching to get her pets back, but now she stopped short. "You're the one who goes to school? With the humans?" she asked in a hushed voice.
"Yeah, in Genova. I stay with our friend Giulia – she's Alberto's cousin on the human side." Luca finally got his fingers under one of the suction cups and peeled Zanna off his cheek to give back to Flavia.
She accepted the creature with wide, awed eyes. "What's it like? Living up there all the time?"
"Well, Genova is a big city," Luca said, wiggling the fish called Fiero until it came off his arm. "So there's always a lot going on. There's cars and dogs and humans everywhere, so you have to watch where you're going..."
"Have you ever ridden in a car?" she interrupted. "I never have. What's that like?"
"Of course we have! Signor Granchio drove us to the harbour in a car just today," Alberto said. "It's bumpy and loud, and it gets really hot inside."
"The day we all went to the zoo at school we rode in a little bus," Luca added, "and one kid got sick."
"The zoo! That's where all the land animals are!" Flavia collected her third fish and let them all stick themselves to her arms and shoulders as she leaned in to hear more. "Did you see them all? What kinds were they? What's your favourite one?"
"The elephants, definitely," Luca replied at once. "They're the biggest land animal, although they're not nearly as big as whales. They've got legs like trees, and floppy ears that look a lot like fins, and a long nose that they can pick things up with."
She was nodding until he described the trunk – then she gave him a suspicious look. "Are you making that up?"
"No way," Luca assured her. "My second favourite was the flamingos. Those are birds with pink feathers and long skinny legs, but they're not naturally pink the way I'm green or Alberto is purple," he added. "They get the colour from the krill they eat, and if they don't get the right food they turn white."
"I saw some of those in Francia," Alberto recalled. "They were all hanging out in this briney lake, and I chased them away. They look really silly when they fly."
"You've been to Francia and Spagna?" asked Flavia. It was hard to say whether she was jealous or terrified.
"Yeah! Uncle Massimo and I saw a museum there, and then we went to Barcellona and saw a big church with towers like gelato cones upside-down." Flavia seemed even more excited to hear about human things than Luca had been when they first met, and Alberto was happy to talk about it. "They're still building it, and it's gonna take like another hundred years to finish. And in Portlligat there's this crazy artist who lives in just the weirdest house. He's got a telephone booth in his garden and a huge stuffed bear with jewellery holding a lamp. He asked to paint my picture because he'd never met a sea monster before."
It would, in fact, be another ten years before Alberto realized the artist in Portlligat was somebody famous.
"What's your favourite thing on the surface?" Luca asked.
Flavia had been enthralled, her shyness having completely evaporated. Now her face fell and her pupils contracted, as if she'd just been slapped, and she gathered her fish closer to her chest.
"Lucrezia said she's not allowed, remember?" Alberto said.
"Oh, right! Sorry," said Luca.
"It's okay," said Flavia grudgingly, and it occurred to Alberto to wonder why she wasn't allowed. Nobody else here seemed to think twice about going to the surface. Nonna Sofia had her house up on the island, Lucrezia casually went to the cinema with her friends, and people like Giancarlo, Carlotta, and Signor Granchio even had jobs. Andrea had followed them up the steps to Nonna Sofia's house like he did that all the time, and his mother hadn't seemed to even notice. Why was Flavia different?
"My parents didn't used to want me going to the surface either," said Luca, "but they changed their minds. It's not as dangerous as a lot of people think."
"Maybe we could convince your Dads," Alberto agreed, and recalled that Uncle Leonardo had said Giorgio had gone to the surface for something. Why did he go while Flavia wasn't allowed?
"No, I don't think so," said Flavia, and changed the subject. "Hey, do you want to play nascondino?" she suggested. "I know all the best hiding places."
"Sure," said Luca. "Who wants to be It?"
Alberto, however, groaned. "That's a game for little kids," he protested.
"Oh," said Flavia, wilting.
"It's still fun," Luca said. "I want to play."
"We don't have to," Flavia said quickly. "I mean, we can do something else. I... I know where there's a submarine!"
Alberto had been about to reply to Luca, but that word caught the attention of both boys. Alberto had heard of sottomarini. They were a type of boat humans used to sail under the water, although how that worked when the machines were full of air and air floated, he wasn't quite sure. He'd never seen one for himself, but humans and sea monsters both talked about them in the sort of voice they used for something very dangerous. Submarines were connected somehow with the big fight the humans had when Massimo was young, and talking about it still made a lot of them sad and scared.
Flavia smiled at their interest, both pleased and relieved. "Come on, I'll show you."
While the young people talked, Uncle Leonardo had settled down again to work on his anemones, satisfied that everyone was making friends. Now Flavia called out to him. "Papa Leo! We're gonna go play nascondino!"
"Okay, Angelfish," said Uncle Leonardo. "You know the rules."
"Yes, Papa!" Flavia stuck her three fish to the hull of the sunken boat, then gestured for the boys to follow her. "It's this way."
Now it was Luca's turn to hang back. The mention of rules, combined with Flavia's lie to her father, seemed to have made him nervous. Alberto, however, was that much more intrigued by the idea that the submarine was somewhere forbidden. "Come on," he said, grabbing Luca's wrist. "Andiamo."
Flavia led them down a slope and across a broad field sown with seagrass, much like the ones in the waters around Portorosso. Stones and corals served as field boundaries, and livestock like groupers and goatfish were grazing in the pastures. There were a few people around, though not so many as there would be during harvest time, and some of them waved and called out greetings as the kids passed.
"Hey, look!" said Flavia, and ducked down to brush against the grasses as she passed over. This startled several coffee-coloured stingrays that had been hiding there, and they darted away on silky, undulating wings while Flavia giggled.
"Cool!" Luca exclaimed. "Did you see that, Alberto?"
"Yeah," Alberto replied with a shrug. He'd seen stingrays before – they were cool, but not special. "Where's this submarine?"
"In the ravine, up ahead," said Flavia. She looked around to make sure nobody was watching, then darted over a final row of stones and corals and into the darkness beyond. The boys followed, and found themselves looking down at a deep, narrow crack in the seafloor. There was something similar not far from Portorosso – the sea monster community's blacksmith had his forge there, where the superheated water welling up from a volcano made it possible to soften and shape metal and glass. The water here, however, was cold, and beyond the lip of the ravine it was very, very dark.
"Down there?" Luca asked tremulously.
"Silenzio, Bruno," Alberto tugged him along.
Flavia paused to pull a couple of jellyfish out of a crack, and poked them to activate their bioluminescence. With that faint pink glow to guide them, she led the way down. Alberto followed, and Luca brought up the rear, repeating "silenzio Bruno" under his breath.
For a moment Alberto thought they might have to go all the way to the bottom, but soon the soft light of the jellyfish fell across a dark shape wedged between the walls of the ravine, spanning the entire thirty-metre width of it. It sagged a bit in the middle, as even under the water, gravity was slowly pulling on its structure. The main body of the submarine was a metal cylinder about three metres in diameter, bent and cracked and dripping with rust and barnacles. The propeller at the back was broken off, along with part of the body of the vehicle, and the whole thing had tipped on its side so that the conning tower was sticking out towards them, with corals and sponges hanging from the periscope. At the bow end, six yawning openings represented where mines had once been stored.
It was one of the spookiest, and therefore also the best things Alberto had ever seen. "Whoa," he whispered.
"Pretty neat, huh?" Flavia said proudly.
Alberto went up to one of the openings and peered in. There were no mines in there now, but a pair of shining eyes were looking back at him. As his own eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized these belonged to an eel who had chosen the hole as a lair.
"Is this safe down here?" Luca asked, his voice shaking a little.
"It's fine," Alberto told him. "There's three of us." That was the rule his father had given him about exploring shipwrecks: don't go inside unless there's somebody outside to help if you're stuck. "We just have to go in one at a time."
"There's a skeleton in the back," Flavia said.
"What?" Alberto asked. "Really?"
"Like... one of us, or a human skeleton?" Luca wanted to know.
"A human," Flavia replied. "I think he was stuck inside when it sank. He's here." She went to the broken back section of the submarine, and pointed to the opening where the metal had been torn away. Luca reached it first and looked where she pointed, and even though he knew what he would see, he still yelped. Alberto caught up, and there it was, tangled in broken metal pipes: the bleached skeleton of a human.
"Wow," whispered Alberto. He knew humans had skeletons, just like fish and sea monsters did. Signorina Repetto even had a plastic replica of one in her Farmacia. But this was a real one, that had once been inside an actual person. He wanted to touch it. He reached out.
"Alberto, don't," said Luca.
"He's dead. He won't bite," said Alberto. He tried to be careful threading his hand through the twisted pipes, but didn't quite manage it – his elbow bumped one, and this had an unintended consequence. The pipe broke free from the wall and fell onto the skeleton, which immediately disintegrated into individual bones that fell into the bottom of the hull. More pipes came down with it, filling the water with dirt and rust particles. Alberto hollered in surprise, and Flavia and Luca grabbed him from behind and pulled him away from the mess. They all backed up against the wall of the ravine, panting, as unseen things deep inside the submarine creaked and clanged.
"Maybe... maybe don't touch anything else," said Luca.
"Maybe not," Alberto agreed.
"I used to hide here while playing with my cousins," Flavia said. "In one of the tubes up front. Papa Leo and Papa Giorgio say that's too dangerous." She swallowed. "You're not gonna tell, are you?"
"Of course not," said Alberto. "We're not snitches."
Flavia nodded, and then started to giggle. It was more out of relief than because anything was funny, but it was infectious, and the boys started laughing along with her.
"Where else did you like to hide?" Luca asked, trying to steer the afternoon back to safer pursuits.
"I'll show you some of my favourites," said Flavia. "But you gotta promise not to tell. Some of them are secrets."
They returned to sunny, populated seafloor, and she gave them a tour of her favourite spots. She showed them all sorts of hiding-holes among the rocks and corals, and even one behind a tumble of stone blocks which might have been some of the underwater ruins from Luca's book. And while Uncle Leonardo had warned them Flavia was shy, once she got talking she was full of things to say, mostly about the fish and crabs and other creatures that inhabited the gulf. Many of these were the same as or similar to the creatures Luca and Alberto were familiar with from the Ligurian sea, but some were quite different.
"Oh! There's a scorpionfish!" She waved the boys to come see the creature, which was poking through a colony of clams looking for prey. It was a striped animal a bit bigger than her pet lumpsuckers, with very fancy, spotted fins supported by long spines. "Don't touch it. They're poisonous!"
"I saw a picture of one of those in a magazine," Luca said. "They're not from here."
"That's right, they come from very far away," Flavia nodded. "Humans like to keep them in tanks, but sometimes they get out and they seem to like it here. Papa Leo and Papa Giorgio say we should kill them if we find them, because they eat everything, but I think they're pretty."
Not far away, she spread some seagrass to reveal a little knobbly brown seahorse, clinging to a step by its tail. "Look at his belly," she said. "He's got eggs in his pouch."
"How did you even see him?" asked Alberto. The seahorse was the same colour as the surrounding algae – he would never have spotted it himself.
"You just have to practice looking for them, and they start popping out," Flavia said. "Did you know seahorses don't have stomachs?"
"No," Alberto said, surprised. He didn't know very much about seahorses, actually – they were too small and bony to eat, and didn't catch enough krill to be good pest control, so most sea monsters didn't bother with them other than sometimes as pets. He and Luca had both been shocked by how large and strong the land kind of horses turned out to be, although apparently those still weren't good for eating and the humans couldn't explain why. "How do they eat, then?"
"The normal way," said Flavia. "It just doesn't sit in their stomachs and make them feel full like our food does."
"That's so weird," Luca said, always delighted to have learned something.
"Do you ever help feed Carlotta's angel sharks?" asked Alberto. That seemed like something Flavia would definitely have liked.
But the question only seemed to confuse her. "Who is Carlotta?"
"Signora Gennari," said Luca, but that didn't seem to help.
"She's got white patches on her face and hands," Alberto said.
"Oh! Yes, I've met her," said Flavia. "She's the one who's married to a human. She barely comes into the water at all."
Maybe Flavia wasn't allowed to talk to her, Albert thought... but why wouldn't she be? It didn't seem to bother Uncle Leonardo that Alberto was half human, so why would he be upset that Carlotta had married one? Was it Uncle Giorgio who had the problem?
That didn't seem to be the case either, though. When they arrived back at the house, Uncle Giorgio was there, and he was still dressed in human clothes as he chatted in the garden with Leonardo and Nonna Sofia. He was shorter than Uncle Leonardo and mostly green in colour, though not as dark as Luca's father, and he was the first to notice the kids returning.
"Here they are!" he called out, and waved.
"Hi, Nonna!" Flavia sped up to be the first to reach Sofia for a hug.
"Hello, Darling," said Nonna Sofia, kissing her on both cheeks. "What mischief have you three been up to?"
"She showed us how to find seahorses," said Luca. "And told us about her lumpsuckers."
"How lovely," said Sofia. She moved over a bit to make room on the stone she was sitting on, and Flavia sat down beside her and leaned on her, smiling. "I'm glad you three are getting along. When I found out Giancarlo hadn't brought you back himself... well, I knew it must've have been a rough morning."
"It was about as bad as I expected," said Alberto, and did not volunteer any more information. Giancarlo had been surprised and unhappy to see Godin, but Nonna Sofia wouldn't know that... she might think he was just misbehaving again, and throw him out.
The boys therefore sat by themselves while the adults talked and Flavia stayed near her grandmother and played with the three lumpsucker fish. She seemed outgoing and happy now, asking Giorgio what he'd done in the town that day, and telling Nonna Sofia that Alberto had said he'd been to Francia and Spagna. It seemed bizarre that she'd been so reluctant to even meet them when they'd arrived a couple of hours earlier.
"I wonder why nobody likes Flavia," Luca mused. "She seems so nice."
Alberto tended to agree. Flavia was probably the best person they'd met here so far. She wasn't annoying like Andrea or snooty like Lucrezia, and she didn't seem like somebody they needed to impress the way the adults were. She just wanted to show them weird fish and cool bones. If Giulia were here, Alberto was confident that she and Flavia would have been best friends immediately.
"Lucrezia said she wasn't allowed out of the water," Alberto remembered. It had sounded like the other kids didn't want to be friends with Flavia because she couldn't do the things they thought were fun. "But people don't need a reason to be jerks. I mean, there's Ercole."
"Yeah," said Luca with a frown. "I was thinking maybe it's because she's adopted? But why does anybody care about that? Basilio Storione is adopted and nobody makes a big deal about it." He thought for a moment. "I have an idea."
"You do?" Alberto started to smile. Luca's ideas were usually good.
"Yeah," said Luca. "I'll tell you about it when Flavia's dads aren't here."