Translated from Italian by Jennifer Panek.

Under other circumstances, I would never have gone. If it’d been a different situation—some normal, ordinary situation—I’d have ignored it, but not this. I even put on the elegant shirt I wear for important meetings at work, and it makes me feel like an overall decent person. Not the best, of course, but not one of the worst, either. Not like the ones who’ve decided not to show up.

There are only three people there when I get to the restaurant, at a table reserved for twenty. It’s a rustic-looking place, with wooden plank tables and a red-brick bar displaying the logos of craft beers nobody’s ever heard of. Valentina greets us one by one, hugging us as if it were her birthday and this were her house. The reunion was her idea. She’d put us into a group on whatsapp and managed the discussion: when we should meet, where we should go. We’d ultimately settled on the beginning of September. We’ve got our summer tans, just like we used to all those other times we’ve seen each other at the end of vacation, on the first day of school. Except that the last of those times was twenty years ago.  

Toni emerges from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a floury, dough-smeared apron. He was only with us for the first three years of secondary school, after which he was sent off to a different school because someone found him doing coke in the boys’ washroom. But that was just a phase. As he hands out the menus, Valentina asks if he could bring some appetizers while we’re waiting for everyone to arrive. She married a pharmaceutical salesman a few years ago and now she’s pregnant with their second child. Sit down, Toni tells her, I’ll take care of it, but she keeps getting up to greet the people who are trickling in. I watch the two of them as they orbit each other, and I wonder if they still think about those clumsy first kisses they’d been so eager to try out, or if they can hold each other’s gaze without finding themselves back in first year, in the protective cloud of Dior Poison she’d sprayed all over her sweater that night to prevent her father from detecting the odour of teenaged boy.

Valentina gets up again as Maddalena appears in the doorway. The fuss they make over each other seems excessive—I have zero recollection of these two together in school—but then I remember some photos they were tagged in, standing next to each other at a university graduation party. They both went to law school, but only Maddalena became a lawyer. She walks to her seat with her shoulders thrown back, like a bird puffing its chest feathers out to make others take notice. It’s clear that she’s turned herself into the person she’s always wanted to be. The expensive clothes she used to see the rich girls wearing to school, the Pomellato jewelry, the Ralph Lauren purses bought on their mother’s accounts in Via Mazzini: Maddalena would watch them with anger and admiration. Now she’s slipping off the Burberry duster she had on when she arrived, despite the broiling heat. She holds it in a way that ensures everyone can see the label before she drapes it over the back of her chair.

Then Alex walks in.

After all these years, he’s still got that bohemian starving artist look to him. He’s thin and pale, not a single grey hair: at one time I used to make fun of him by joking that he looked like a vampire, and maybe I wasn’t all that wrong. I’m surprised to find myself scrutinizing him from a distance, being careful not to make eye contact. I’m not ready yet. He hadn’t responded to the whatsapp group, and I’d eventually figured he wouldn’t show up. As soon as he gets to the table, the men are in a circle around him; they’re slapping each other on the back, everything’s getting louder, and then the appetizers arrive and we’re taking our seats.

We make small talk about what we’re doing these days, where we’ve ended up, as if we hadn’t already spent enough time checking what’s listed under “workplace” on each other’s social media profiles in the weeks leading up to the reunion. We’re good at pretending surprise, though not too much surprise, because to not be up on things like weddings and babies might betray our actual lack of interest. The group’s attention soon settles on Francesco, who spent thirteen years getting his degree in medicine only to throw it all away and start working as a life coach instead. During dinner, when Valentina learns that Alex, too, has moved to Dublin to work with a start-up, she asks if we’ve ever run into each other in Ireland.

“All I ever do is work,” I reply, “and besides, I’ve been out of touch with him for even longer than you have.”

Technically, this is not a lie.

In June, Valentina had contacted us all to tell us that Arcangelo had died. She’d created the whatsapp group, which she’d named “The Kids from 3 D,” she’d added us one by one, and then she’d told us. It came completely out of the blue.

“How did you find out? Who told you?”

“My sister went to school with his younger brother. He told us.”

She’d asked us to be as discreet as possible, seeing how few funeral notices had been posted for him in town.

“And the funeral?”

“In Vienna. He moved there with his mother.”

His father still lived at their old address, so we sent him flowers, with a card from the entire class. We remembered how he’d always be reading Il Sole 24 Ore when he’d come to pick up his son on Saturdays at noon. A nice man. It was only afterwards that we learned Arcangelo had stopped speaking to him years earlier.

“We should have a mass said for him,” Maddalena had written.  

“He was an atheist,” Toni had replied.

In the end, Valentina had decided for a class reunion.

Before now, none of us had felt the need to meet up again. Little subgroups had sprung up over the years since our secondary school leaving exam, a few individual friendships, but the class had never got back together as a whole. We were a group of people growing up with completely different personalities and desires. We had nothing in common except ambition, and ambition had made us mean.

Around 2009, when everyone started setting up their Facebook profiles and sending friend requests to their old classmates, I’d wondered what kind of perverse thinking had led some of us to do such a thing. What was the point of reconstructing something so toxic? Whoever had been the first to start looking up the others surely wasn’t doing it out of any desire to get back in touch, but rather to prove to themselves that they were better off, that they were someone who’d made it. Getting back in touch means you’re re-establishing a relationship, but a genuine relationship was something we’d never had. If we’d never sought each other out in all those years, the reasons were resoundingly obvious. At a certain point, though, the rules of the game had changed. We were suddenly able to go back to watching without interacting, the way we used to do in class, except that now we’d acquired the power to choose what we wanted to show.

Growing up, I’d often encountered people with full-on nostalgia for their time at school, but I’d never subscribed to the stuff about those being the best years of your life. It’s a time when our friendships are weak alliances that come and go with our trigonometry proofs, our Greek and Latin translations, our study groups for oral exams in art history. And this was precisely how Arcangelo and I got to know each other.

I found out about his death when I was on a ferry to Athens, and my first thought had been that we’d studied the Parthenon together. Before that, I’d never really tried talking to him. Everyone in class used to make fun of him; nobody hung out with him because he was the weird guy. He used to wear his hair long, like some nineteenth-century German composer, and his shirt buttoned all the way up, with tailored trousers and a jacket even in the summer. He spent the breaks off in a corner reading Gore Vidal. It was as if he were fighting his frustration at still being a teenager by taking on the ways of a grown man, but sometimes he’d go so far over the top that he’d come off as a senior citizen.

Every morning, a few members of the class would draw caricatures of him on the blackboard: Arcangelo on horseback; Arcangelo in a carriage; Arcangelo in a hot-air balloon. He would smile and seem to enjoy it, but I have no idea if he actually did. I never asked him.

We became friends studying the monuments of the age of Pericles, Doric and Ionic and Corinthian columns, the battles of the centaurs, the chariot of the sun, the chariot of the moon.

“When you don’t know what to say,” he once told me, “start with a definition and buy yourself time.” This worked for a good long time until it didn’t work any more. For years, I had nothing to say to him. I just disappeared. And thus our friendship became a thing that was impossible to find a definition for.

After Toni takes our orders back to the kitchen, we keep going, filling each other in on our lives. Someone’s gone and walked the entire Camino; someone else has become a Buddhist. Someone’s managed to fall madly in love; someone else is already on their second marriage. In the infinite kaleidoscope of what’s become of us, as we lay our fates down one by one like winning cards in the middle of the table, it becomes increasingly clear that not one of us had stayed in touch with Arcangelo while he was alive, nor knows where he was or what he was doing on the day that death came for him. Nonetheless, at a certain point everybody seems to have a fond word to say about him, some indelible memory to share. As I wait my turn, I watch Alex out of the corner of my eye to make sure he’s not paying attention. I’m relieved to see no one finds it strange that he isn’t; it means they don’t know about us.

When it’s my turn, I tell them about my first year of university when Arcangelo used to come and pick me up at my front door in his father’s car and drive me to the Department of Literature in Naples. One morning when I’d had an oral exam, he’d adjusted my coat collar for me, undoing the top button so as to give my look a certain breeziness. He’d put it just like that: “a certain breeziness.”

Alex hears my anecdote too, but he can’t say anything. He can’t tell the others what an absolute bitch I was, how I broke Arcangelo’s heart, because if he did, he’d have to tell them all the rest of it, too. For instance, that it had been the three of us for only a single semester.

Every day, Arcangelo used to come over from the economics department to the cloister in Via Mezzocannone to hang out with us when our classes were over, until we pushed him away. We found his stories entertaining at first, but then they became so obviously fabricated that we couldn’t deal with it any more. Once, to get us to pay attention to him, he’d told us he’d come straight from the airport and made up a story about finding a pair of five hundred euro notes on the ground near Piazza Borsa, which he’d spent on a night in London at the Ritz.

“He’s peacocking,” Alex had said. “It’s obvious he’s into you, and he’s puffing himself up.”

Such a thing had never occurred to me before, and from then on, I did everything I could to avoid him. How could he possibly imagine I might feel something for him? Why would he make such a fool of himself for nothing? I started lying to him, inventing excuses that were even more ridiculous than his hypothetical adventures, and then I’d tell Alex about it on the phone that evening. I took a certain pleasure in being able to make him laugh, and so I kept the comedy going, to make Alex think of me as a brilliant wit.

At the Easter break of that first year of university, Alex gave me a ticket to see Pete Doherty with him in Paris. The concert never happened—Doherty got too high on heroin—but when we came back, Alex and I were holding hands. Arcangelo noticed it on our first lunch break after classes started up again: he’d shown up at the Department of Literature and Philosophy without warning, wanting to give us a surprise. That was the last time we saw him.

“He was a good guy,” someone says. “The best of us.”

“A misunderstood genius.”

“Wise beyond his years.”

When the round of stories is over, I get up from the table and go outside. There I find Francesco, who despite his reputation as a life coach has never quit smoking. He gives me a light and says we should have that mass said anyway. We should do it for us.

I can only agree. “That’s the one honest thing I’ve heard anyone say since I got here.”

“I liked your story about the jacket, though,” he remarks as we’re about to go back in.

“What was yours?” I ask. He must have been telling it while I was worrying about all the things I was leaving out of mine.

“My what?”

“The story you shared.”

He tells me that in his first year of university he’d been in London with his girlfriend and they’d run into Arcangelo at the Green Park tube station. He was wearing an elegant overcoat and leather gloves and carrying a small suitcase. He’d told them he was on his way to spend a night at the Ritz. He’d found a pair of five hundred euro notes on the street in Naples and had decided to treat himself.

“That’s a great story,” I say.

“A ridiculous story.”

We leave before it’s even midnight. One by one, we settle our bills, we peck each other on both cheeks, we tell Toni what a great time we had and how we’ll be back soon, and then we gradually make our way out to our cars. The city fills up slowly in early September, and we’re the only people here on this empty downtown street in the waning days of summer. From one sidewalk to the other, we promise we’ll get together again, we’ll organize a dinner after the mass, maybe a fundraising concert, something with classical music, an auction, a lecture. Maddalena knows someone who knows someone; they’ve already said it would be no problem. Valentina says it would be great to get in touch with Arcangelo’s mother in Vienna, maybe meet up there for the first anniversary. We all agree; we try to outdo each other for who will do what. When we finally go our ways, the sound of our car doors slamming echoes off the old buildings. Before I turn on the ignition, I let myself sink into my seat and watch the group as it dissolves and disappears, as the screen goes black and the credits roll. Later, in the darkness of our rooms, it'll be hard to tell whether the nights have grown more silent with the passing years, or whether it’s us, searching everywhere for definitions we’re no longer able to find.