Whitney is sitting at the base of the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in Piazza Navona in Rome. The water in the fountain is the blue of baby blankets, seductive and very Roman somehow, but the spray that tickles the back of her neck smells like how blood tastes. She is watching people trickle in and out of Sant’Agnese in Agone, calculating how many people are in the church at a given time. She won’t go in unless she is confident that she is the only person inside that palatial space of worship. 

The belligerent sun is broiling her skin, the only thing about her that doesn’t pass as Italian. The weeks before she came to Rome, her mother and father comforted themselves about their daughter’s impending four months in Europe by repeating that Whitney actually looked Italian. No mafia behemoth, sex trafficker, or aristocratically handsome Italian man would whisk Whitney away because her long, wavy, coffee-colored hair and matching eyes branded her as one of them. 

“The majority of the world has brown hair and brown eyes,” Whitney had said. “It will be obvious I’m just another foreign student when I ask for directions or when I’m at the supermarket and can’t remember which coins equal what amount. I can protect myself.”

“No, it’s more than your coloring,” her mother said. “It’s your face. You look baroque.”

Whitney is sitting unbothered on the fountain as her skin burns, and her faux-Italian eyes clock the last person coming out of Sant’Agnese in Agone. She springs up. 

She is finally going to meet St. Agnes. 

St. Agnes, the reason she ever studied Latin in high school, ever declared a Classics major, ever came to study abroad in Rome, ever got to throw coins in a bowl at the cafe in exchange for espresso. Whitney first read about St. Agnes in a box set of biographies on the Saints written for children; her mother told seven-year-old Whitney that she had to choose a patron saint for her Confirmation. Whitney curled herself up on a windowsill and scanned the books for the prettiest saints. St. Dymphna was Irish, lusted after by her father, and wearing a green headscarf. St. Lucia had four eyeballs, two in her head and two rolling on a golden dish. St. Maria Goretti looked like she was choking on all of the lilies around her head. But only St. Agnes, with her hair the same ashy blonde as Whitney’s mother’s, was holding a placid lamb and gazing upwards, which allowed Whitney to stare at her for as long as she wanted. St. Agnes was a virgin-martyr from Rome, protecting rape victims, virgins, and young girls since 291 C.E. St. Agnes looked upwards at Jesus, head demurely bowed into a pillow of lilies, and her eyes said, Even though I am a rich and popular noble girl in Rome, the eternal city, I do not want any part of it. Gelato? Vespas? Cacio e pepe? No grazie. I want what I cannot see. For the love of God, please nobody look at me. 

That Sunday at CCD, the teacher passed around a basket filled with saint cards. She told the children to close their eyes and pick a card and emphasized that the children did not choose a saint out of the basket, that saint chose the child. 

St. Drogo, patron saint of coffee and of those who find others repulsive, chose Whitney. Regardless, at her combination First Communion and Confirmation, Whitney kneeled before the bishop as her mother placed a lily-scented hand on her shoulder, and she declared to the entire congregation that her name was Agnes. Her devotion to St. Agnes prompted Whitney to read every book about ancient Rome in the library. In high school, she signed up for Latin instead of Spanish, so that she could learn St. Agnes’s language. She translated Ovid’s myths about the Roman pantheon frolicking around dewy mountains and wondered why St. Agnes preferred Jesus over the eerily human gods and goddesses until a gelatinous, tarlike mound formed in her stomach, and she zoned out of her teacher’s lecture on the subjunctive and rattled off a few Hail Marys to make it go away.

As Whitney meanders around the interior of Sant’Agnese in Agone, she is fatigued by many things. First, after a month and a half in Rome, old grandiose buildings bore her. The painstaking artwork of long-dead men are just squares and lines to her now. Second, she is standing on the spot where St. Agnes was martyred. A Roman man stripped St. Agnes naked, and her hair grew to cover her unmentionables. The blister on Whitney’s big toe is pulsating so insistently that it is blocking the power of the place from entering her, and now the knowledge that her faith is weak is numbing her fingers. Third, the sudden remembrance that a paper on Horace is due tomorrow, not two days from now, dries her mouth and makes her tongue shrivel. 

She walks the perimeter of the church looking for the skull of St. Agnes. It is the church’s resident relic. Her childhood church had a scrap of cloth that once touched St. Anthony of Padua’s tongue. 

She turns around and sees a statue of St. Agnes underneath an organ. There she is, cradling a lamb as always. There’s my girl, Whitney thinks. She walks towards the statue, leans closer to read the Latin inscription underneath it, and is startled by a skull. 

“Tiny,” Whitney whispers. But of course the skull is tiny. St. Agnes was a preteen when she was martyred. 

Whitney congratulates herself for not being spooked for more than a couple seconds. Instead, she is reverent of the jaundiced bone bowl in which St. Agnes’s brain was nestled. St. Agnes’s brain was goo and electricity just like Whitney’s, but there was something else zipping around in there that made her perfect. Whitney leans closer to see if can smell the ineffable substance. 

“Cool, isn’t it?” a male voice speaks at her, from behind her, in English.

Whitney wrinkles her nose and turns around to see the short, skinny boy who is drumming his fingers against his hip. He is wearing the type of Aeropostale tee shirt that was ubiquitous in Whitney’s junior high. She nods and tucks a lock of hair behind her ears. “Very cool. She’s my favorite saint.”

“Are you from here?” The boy’s accent is not Italian, but he speaks English confidently.

“No.” 

“Can I ask you a question?”

“What?”

“Are you in town for the pretty girl contest?”

Whitney looks away from the boy and back at Agnes, into the holes of her eye sockets, and pretends that they are rolling their eyes in annoyance together. Whitney and Agnes: best friends forever. Agnes may be seven years younger than Whitney, but they share a holy kinship that transcends the earthly constraints of age. 

“No,” Whitney says, “I am not.”

“Can I guess where you’re from?” The boy sidles up next to her, smelling like the metallic water of the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi. 

“Go ahead.”

“Las Vegas.”

“No, sorry, I’m Canadian.” Whitney shrugs and walks away, listening to the boy’s steps behind her, following her. The church is frigid. Whenever Whitney swallows, there is a sharp clicking in her ears. The squares and lines of the old grandiose church are showing her the way out, all of them pointing to the door, into the stony field of Piazza Navona.

With her hand on the door, Whitney turns around out of habit to see if she needs to hold the door open for anyone, but when the boy does a fake little run to catch up with her, she slams the door against him and runs out into the entropy of the Roman public. 

She dives into a side street and buys an espresso at a cafe. A stray kitten massages itself against her calf as she tosses euro at the barista, who is leathery and grumpy and doesn’t look at her. She licks the espresso off the rim of the cup. When the kitten bats at her shoelace, she marvels at how she can feel the power of such tiny muscles. 

The kitten watches Whitney leave the cafe. She looks back and sees the kitten limp after a couple who have their hands in the back pockets of each other’s low-rise jeans. On her way back to the dorm, Whitney passes another church across the strada. An old man, hunched over a cane, is screaming in Italian at a younger man in a security uniform, who is blocking the door of the church. The old man is throwing his hands around, unaware that Italians are taunted for those exact erratic gestures. Whitney crosses the street to hear what he is so upset about. 

“La chiesa è chiusa?!” The old man rages.

The security guard explains that the church is closed for a tourist group. 

The old man continues screaming and gesticulating, asking how, how, how? How could the church be closed to those who want to say a prayer? Today is the anniversary of his sister’s drowning. He wants to say a prayer. Why are tourists more important than prayer? 

Whitney can hear the tears in the old man’s voice. How they are fighting their way out, and how he chokes on them, like how St. Maria Goretti choked on all the lilies that represented her perpetual virginity. Perpetual only because she died when she was eleven-years-old. 

Climbing the hill back to her dorm, past the sherbert-painted mansions and scores of palm fronds, Whitney decides not to tell her friends in the dorm about the ridiculous pick-up line she had endured while standing in front of the tiny head of St. Agnes. Are you in town for the prettiest girl contest? Her friends would laugh, revealing their straight teeth, masticating linguine, oysters, bread, and San Pellegrino, and Whitney would say, He actually said that! No joke! 

She decides to skip the dorm-sponsored dinner. She would buy a kebab and finish her paper on Horace instead. That’s the reason she came to Rome in the first place. To plunder Latin poetry for modern meaning in the eternal city. Whitney wants to paw every unturned stone and swallow every drop of acid rain that tries to sully Rome. She wants to part her legs over the seat of a Vespa and stick her hand in the back pocket of an Italian boy’s jeans, but only if he kisses her and claims her tongue fizzes like Coca-Cola. 

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