In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

He drained his cup and disappeared. Penny went to her room,
grabbed her laptop in its neoprene sleeve and put on her jacket.
Walking back from her room, she forgot not to look at the
photos. No doubt about it, the boys were not horsing around. This
kind of photo should not be on somebody's wall, this old guy was a real
pervert, and how could they do that, anyway? She wondered if
Alessandro knew these things were up and that she had seen them.
Somehow she doubted that he knew, he didn't seem that sleazy, and he
had a girlfriend.
She waited at the door. He was having an intense argument
with Dick, who countered every jab with high nasal snorts until he
turned on his heels and disappeared into the back.
Stalking down the sidewalk, Alessandro just about had steam
coming out his ears. Fog, rising from the river enveloped the stone
buildings into the fuzzy monochrome of an old black and white movie
set. They passed by a small courtyard belonging to the art school,
enclosed behind a series of heavily barred arches and lined with some
statues spared in '68. Here and there discarded drawing tables warped
with happy abandon. In the center, atop a pile of dirt along with some
old truck tires, a bright blue coil of plastic hose struck the only note of
color in the grainy fog soaked browns of the courtyard. Chunks of
broken modern sculpture peaking from the dirt convinced Penny this
wasn't another art project.
They turned around the corner and walked up the rue
Bonaparte. Long haired students, their throats wrapped in yards of
scarves and carrying black portfolios were scuttling down the street and
filing through the gate to the palatial and from this angle, well
preserved école. The scraggly students each scanned Alessandro with
cold raw envy as they turned in, but he was inside his bubble and took
no notice of them.
The Metro, packed with sleepy workers, smelled like perfume,
toothpaste and coffee breath, snaked its way through town, above and
below ground like some fun park ride, with panoramas of the city
stretching bleakly beyond the floor to ceiling windows. They were
disgorged at République along with all the dot comers and fell in step
with the mass trudging up the narrow sidewalk towards Le Temple
d'Or.
The little café was as packed as the night before, but there was
less smoke, and a lot less shouting. The crowd was different, too, less
trendy, a lower social stratum was in here this morning, mostly
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