Page 42 of Marcello

But remember: I was dealing with the devil.

“You promise?” I asked.

He sounded bored. “I promise.”

“You swear?”

Fausto chuckled. “I swear to you on the life of my brother. How’s that?”

He didn’t sound exactly serious, but I guess it had to do.

“…okay,” I agreed.

“Good. Tick-tock, Marcello. Tick-tock.”

Then he hung up.

15

Getting through my shift at the pizzeria was not fun –

But I didn’t care about Federica giving me the evil eye for eight hours.

I had something much bigger preoccupying my thoughts:

Buying drugs from a gangster.

I worried about it all day as I washed dishes.

When work was over, Federica came over and asked sourly, “You ready to go home?”

“Huh?” I said absentmindedly, then remembered what had happened that morning. “Oh – yeah. Sure.”

We walked in silence back to her apartment.

She was probably still stewing about our fight.

Me?

I was obsessing over the drugs.

My father was a judge. Other than smoking pot a few times with Fede, the most illegal thing I’d ever done in my life was steal a bottle of wine from my parents when I was 15 and get drunk with my friends – and my father whipped my ass for it.

So I was legit freaking out about the drug buy.

It was weird. When I was in the middle of real-life situations, ice water flowed through my veins. It was like time slowed down, and none of the danger seemed entirely real.

But when I worried about the exact same shit before it happened, it was so much worse in my mind.

For me, fearing the thing was ten thousand times worse than the thing itself.

I read a quote attributed to Mark Twain in one of my English classes: I have known a great many troubles in my life, a few of which actually happened.

That was me.

I knew that worrying about something was worse than actually doing it…

And yet I was still freaking out, so I practiced in my mind.