“You’re in my class,” she said. She had blue eyes and blond hair, half a dozen friendship bracelets on each forearm, and the deepest voice I had ever heard out of a female. It was incongruous with her soft appearance, like a ballerina chewing tobacco. I chose a sandwich from the display and the man at the register rang me up. The girl grabbed a tray and asked, “Can I sit with you?”

We sat at a table outside with our sandwiches. Just as I was taking my first bite, she pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes. “Want one?”

She was Dutch. Just finished high school, here for her gap year. Her older sister, who was twenty-three like me, did hers in Barcelona. She hoped she’d made the right decision by choosing Italy over Spain. She had one friend so far, a Salvadoran named Agos, also here for her gap year. They lived in a house with a bunch of American sorority girls. “They’re loud as hell,” she said, smooshing her cigarette onto the sidewalk and finally picking up her sandwich. “And it’s fucking annoying.”

“I live in a pretty cool building,” I told her. “You should come hang out sometime.”

“Can I come tonight?”

She showed up at seven, while my housemates were pregaming in the courtyard, the Keralan chef serving plates of penne with fresh marinara sauce. When she got up to use the bathroom, he asked, “Who’s this blond bombshell you’ve brought to us? She’s gorgeous!” The rest of the guys nodded along and chimed in with added praise.

All I saw was the blond hair, and after Kate I’d stopped noticing blondes. “I didn’t ‘bring her’ to you,” I responded. “She’s not some sort of sacrificial offering.”

They nicknamed her the Sacrifice.

After that night the Sacrifice followed me everywhere. At first I found it irritating, a lost puppy trailing me wherever I went. She even showed me how to pedal my bike with her seated on the back. “It’s how we do it in Holland,” she said.

And so I pedaled through cobblestoned streets with the Sacrifice sitting behind me. We rode along the Arno River, over the Ponte Vecchio, all the way to Piazza de Michelangelo, way above the city, where a statue of the artist towers over Florence. In time I got used to the extra weight. And when it was absent, I found myself missing it.

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