I am excited to be a part of this book blog tour! I hope you will stop by the other blogs.
Cover Art:
And the lovely Anna Premoli:
Excerpt:
Chapter 1
Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful.
Four years and nine months later
Sometimes I’m almost afraid that I’m going to get lost in the maze of buildings that makes up the campus of the Bocconi university, despite the fact that my time here is almost up. I’m in the last year of my master’s degree – the fifth year I’ve spent in these corridors, together with students coming from all over the world. They say that the place didn’t use to be like this – once upon a time there was only one building and that was pretty much it.
Finally I find the right corridor and set off at a gallop in the direction of the lecture hall, where Giada is waiting for me. Her punctuality is almost legendary and, as always, she has managed to grab a tactical central position. She gives me a big smile and shows me the empty seat next to her, moving aside her large bag to let me sit down.
“You almost arrived late on the first day. That’s not like you,” she tells me off good-naturedly.
I take a deep breath before answering. “The key word there is ‘almost’. I almost got here late, but Alessandra is definitely going to get here late,” I say with a smile.
Giada brushes a thick lock of Titian-red hair from her face and laughs. “It’s nice that there are still some certainties, don’t you think?”
My friend is a very special girl: if there were a prize for changing the colour of your hair the greatest number of times over the duration of a degree course, Giadawould win it hands down. I long ago stopped trying to keep count of the number of colours she’s tried out and the looks she’s experimented with, completely indifferent to the reactions of everyone. And to make matters worse, she also has a split personality: at university she tries to blend into the crowd by wearing very dowdy clothes while in the evening she turns into a mysterious creature with piercings in her tongue and navel, dressed exclusively in black and covered in studs like the perfect punk. I still have to work out which of the two Giadas I know is the real one.
At that very moment, the lecturer enters the classroom and behind him I see the silhouette of our friend Alessandra. What a shame! A few seconds earlier and she’d have been on time. But at least she’s beaten her previous record.
We watch as she embarrassedly babbles some excuse to the teacher and then makes her way between the other students to get to us.
“Did you have to sit right in the middle of the row?” she asks grumpily after forcing a lot of people to stand up to let her pass. Giada gives her a stern look. “This is the best place best to take notes. Look, you can see the board perfectly from here.”
“Oh forget it…” says Alessandra resignedly, finally managing to take her seat before asking quietly, “Anyway, what kind of course is this?”
Giada looks at her in disbelief. “You mean you just signed up for courses at random?”
Strange that someone who’s so fickle about hair colour should be so deadly serious when it comes to her college career. She’s a peculiar mix of determination and carelessness and the fact that it’s impossible to tell which will prevail only adds to her charm. To male eyes as well as to female ones.
“Of course I didn’t!” responds Alessandra resentfully. “I just lost the lesson prospectus. And if it hadn’t been for Lavinia, I wouldn’t have even known where to go,” she confesses.
Giada shakes her head. “You should have just left her wandering around campus, Vinny.”
“This is the last year of the master’s” I reply with a smile. “I wanted her to at least have a chance…”
“Never mind a chance, Alessandra’s going to need a miracle,” mutters Giada as she watches the planning and budgeting lecturer switch on his laptop, connect it to an overhead projector and set off at full speed.
The last year.
I take a deep breath and try to banish the terror that washes over me every time I think about it. When I get out of here, I will have devoted five years of my life to getting a degree in Economics and Business Legislation, but in a way I’ll still be right back where I was when I started. A part of me still doesn’t know what I want to do when I grow up. Unlike Giada, who’s aiming to become a specialised foreign tax consultancy chartered accountant, and Alessandra, who dreams of getting one of those fantastic company jobs, maybe with a multinational, where you can hide among all the other employees. My friends might know the road they want to take and why they want to take it but I’m trying with all my strength not to think about the future and hoping like mad that no forks in the road appear in front of me, because I really wouldn’t know which way to choose.
I mean, economics is not actually that bad. The university is full of interesting people and there are plenty of opportunities out there. The problem isn’t the courses or the people. The problem is me, the girl who’s never quite sure what she wants and who can never quite summon up the nerve to admit it to others. At this point, pretending has become natural.
