Chapter Text
“You really embarrassed us today.”
Fugo stares out the window as his father lectures from the driver’s seat. Who cares, who cares, who cares, he thinks to himself, timing his mantra with the dip and swoop of the telephone wires that border the road.
“We had to make a lot of calls to get you into that competition in the first place,” not that Fugo wanted to go to the Young Pianist’s Showcase; it was the grand idea of his piano teacher, a man who constantly praises Fugo’s ‘excellent potential.’ “And you didn’t even place. Those other kids put a lot more work into it than you did.”
It isn’t fair. He practices half an hour each day, measured by the distracting tempo of his mother’s kitchen timer, and he hates every moment. The pieces come easily to him at first - he is unnaturally good at playing a song he’s reading for the first time - but when it comes to smoothing out the difficult bits, he gets frustrated, sometimes to the point of screaming. And then his parents scream at him for screaming, and he storms off and sits in his room until he’s calmed down enough for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, however much of his sentence remains.
He’s never wanted to be good at piano. He just wants to play.
His father drones on, the same subject as always, how everyone expects so much of Fugo and how he’s not living up to those expectations, how he’s got to stop being lazy and do a decent day’s work for once. Who cares. Fugo thinks he did pretty well in the competition anyway, he just messed up in that one part of the sonata where his fingers are too short to reach the full chord. That piece was written for adults, not eight year olds, he doesn’t see how he can master it and the only advice his teacher gives him is “keep practicing.” Who (dip) cares (swoop) who (dip) cares (swoop).
“And you stick your tongue out while you’re playing,” his mother adds, when the lecture lulls.
“Who cares?” Fugo spits, though it comes out as more of a question than the explosive phrase he’s intended.
He used to play with these kids, Alessandro and Roberto and Carlo. They marched around the playground together, rode bikes and played catch, until Fugo was anointed as The Smart One and pulled out of class for Accelerated Learning. Math with the Gifted Group two years ahead Reading with the eleven and twelve year olds. But his body hasn’t accelerated past his chronological age, and he attends gym class with his bygone companions, who nevertheless seem to think that he’s mutated beyond recognition.
“Eh… Pietro,” Team Captain Roberto says, after surveying the few remaining unchosen. Fugo knows they’ve seen him play football - he’s actually fairly good at it - but now that he’s The Smart One, all they can see is a cartoon nerd, a clumsy mad scientist. He’s there on the bench with Maurizio, who is a daydreamer, and Gaspare, who simply hates football; the former plays poorly even when he’s paying attention, and the latter refuses to participate at all.
Alessandro squints at the three of them. Come on, thinks Fugo, you know I can play. Pick me. Please. He’d showed Alessandro the trick to juggling the ball back when they were both six, which might as well have been a thousand years ago.
“Gaspare,” Alessandro finally decides.
There aren’t enough books. He finishes one and starts another, and bounces back to the two he already has going and forward to one he’s read at least twenty times. No one else in school has read anything he has, not even the smartest student in the eleven/twelve year old Gifted Readers class. Some day, he’d like to find someone to talk to about everything he’s absorbed.
“Please translate the sentence on the board…” the teacher scans the class, and chooses randomly, “... Fugo.”
Fugo answers with confidence; he’s seen loads of Hollywood movies with subtitles and has mouthed along with the English as best he can. ‹‹The boy runned-››
“‹‹Ran››, Fugo,” the teacher corrects, over the laughter of his classmates. “The word is ‹‹ran››.”
‹‹Assholes››, he thinks in English. Pasquale’s been saying ‹‹Good knife›› instead of ‹‹Good night›› for a month now, and they never laugh at him. It’s so funny for The Smart One to mess up for once, isn’t it? His skin feels hot against his skull, his hands curl into fists before he’s able to choke the anger down.
“And why are you so angry all the time?” his mother shouts. This began as an argument over him not doing his homework again and has mutated into a recitation of Fugo’s faults, as all arguments eventually do.
There’s plenty of things that reliably piss him off: when he has to repeat himself, when he has to sit through the same lesson day after day, when he answers a question and his classmates stare at him blankly. When he’s stuck inside practicing instead of playing street football with the neighborhood kids. When he makes a stupid mistake and he should know better, he’s the Smart One, and that’s all he has and he can never, ever fall behind. But what surprises him every time is the intensity of the anger. It hits his body all at once and leaves him shaking, it pushes its way out as a scream or a kick or a book thrown across the room.
He’s angry now, so angry that the words in his mind are too hot to grasp and all he can do is whine I don’t know, I don’t know as he pounds his fist against his mattress. This isn’t an acceptable answer, he’s screwed up again, he knows, but there’s nothing he can do when he’s gone this far into rage.
His exasperated mother sighs. “Why don’t you join a football team and get some of this energy out,” as if that’s even possible, as if anyone would believe he could play, as if his time playing music and going to accelerated classes and lurking around the library hadn’t drained the apparent humanity out of him. It’d end up just like gym, him alone on the field and the bench, an obstacle to everyone else’s good time.
At least that’s how he’ll rationalize it when he calms down. In this moment, all he can do is punch the mattress again and yell, “BECAUSE EVERYBODY’S STUPID.”
Wrong answer again. “Well you’re certainly not going to make any friends if you go around thinking you’re so much better than them,” and that’s not it, that’s not what he means, but now they’re back on the subject of Why Pannacotta Has No Friends, and the loneliness and guilt are just tinder to the flames of fury.
Carlo has been bumping into him on purpose. It could almost have been an accident the first time, but since then it’s escalated. Shoulder checks and elbows to the ribcage, topped off with a sarcastic singsong “Sor-ry!”
“Stop it,” Fugo shouts the fourth or fifth time, and the teacher on hallway duty says, “Fugo, it’s just an accident.”
But it isn’t. It’s mean and it’s frustrating, and what bothers Fugo most is that he has absolutely no idea why Carlo’s picking on him. Not being able to find the answer is new territory for him, and he doesn’t like being lost there.
And then one day, Carlo gets tired of pretending to be clumsy and instead walks very closely behind Fugo, crooning “Professoooorrr….. Hey, Professooorrrrrr…”
“WHAT,” Fugo finally says, stopping so quickly that Carlo stumbles into him.
“Professor!” says Carlo, jumping back with a lopsided grin, “Say something smart!”
He’s at a loss. “...Hypotenuse.” What the hell? “Protractor?”
Carlo laughs mockingly and the anger rises. “Fuck you,” Fugo says before reason has a chance to intervene.
“Oooooohhhh, Panni said a swear-”
It’s over. Fugo shoves him, and Carlo shoves back, and then the anger strikes in the form of a fist and Fugo’s in his first actual fight, kicking and biting and screaming and continuing to scream, even as the principal pulls him away and the faces of his shocked classmates recede from view.
“Pannacotta, I’m Dr. Lombardo,” says the man in the armchair. Fugo fidgets in his seat and glances around the room: a dollhouse, a box of tissues, a framed diploma. “We’re not going to examine you today, I’m a special kind of doctor who just talks.”
“You’re a therapist,” says Fugo, annoyed with the condescension. “Don’t try to analyze my dreams, I don’t believe in that.”
Dr. Lombardo chuckles. “You’re a smart one, aren’t you? Let’s talk about that.”