Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir by Amanda Knox Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t hear from me she’d realize something was wrong and would get help.
    One night when the bar was slow, Patrick decided to close early. I texted Meredith, who said she’d meet me at the fountain by the Duomo, three minutes away.
    As I made my way through the mass of drunk students in Piazza IV Novembre, I saw two of our downstairs neighbors, Giacomo and Marco. Giacomo handed me a beer, and I pushed my way through the crowd to find Meredith. When we had rejoined the guys, they introduced us to a friend who, I’d later learn, had moved to Italy as a kid, from Ivory Coast. His name was Rudy. They sometimes played pickup basketball with him.
    The five of us stood around for a few minutes before walking home together. The guys invited us to their apartment, but Meredith and I first stopped at ours to drop off our purses.
    “Ready to go downstairs?” I asked her.
    “You go. I’ll be down in a second,” she said.
    When I opened the door to the downstairs apartment, Giacomo, Marco, Stefano, and Rudy were sitting around the table laughing. “What’s funny?” I asked.
    “Nothing,” they said sheepishly.
    I didn’t think another thing about it until months and months later, when it came out in court that just before I’d opened the door, Rudy had asked the guys if I was available.
    A short time later, Meredith came in and sat down next to me at the table. The guys passed us the joint they were smoking. We each inhaled, handed it back, and sat there for a few minutes while they joked around in Italian. Tired and a little stoned, I couldn’t keep up with their conversation. After a little while I told Meredith, “I’m going up to bed.”
    One day in mid-October, about three weeks after I arrived, Meredith and I were walking down Via Pinturicchio to try out a new grocery store that was supposed to be cheaper than the Coop we usually went to downtown. I didn’t know it then, but it was just a few doors down from Perugia’s courthouse.
    “Have you met any guys you like yet?” I asked Meredith.
    “Giacomo,” she said, shyly but decisively. She had talked about our downstairs neighbor before. “I think he’s cute and nice.”
    Not many nights later, the guys invited all of us in the house on an excursion to Red Zone, a popular club just outside of town. I was excited. It wasn’t usually my scene, but I’d decided to try something different and had already been to two downtown dance clubs, Domus and Blue Velvet. To my surprise, I’d had a decent time.
    Laura and Filomena stayed home, but Meredith invited her friend Amy to come. The guys brought a friend from Rome named Bobby, whom I’d met once before. I had a cold sore then and was so self-conscious about it I just wanted to hide. Bobby said, charmingly, in English, “Why does it bother you? Many people get cold sores.”
    Red Zone took up an entire warehouse. It was the largest, most over-the-top dance club I’d ever been to. The line to get in snaked around the building, and people were crammed in as if the place had been vacuum-sealed. It was hard to find any air. Bright lights flashed red, green, and blue, and the heavy bass seemed to travel through the cement floor and into my bones. Somehow we snagged a table, and Stefano ordered a round of sweet, electric blue drinks. I don’t know what was in them, but I got drunk almost immediately. We were listening to the music and laughing, getting up to dance every now and then. It must have been 102 degrees, and I was sweating, dripping. Bobby tried to talk to me, yelling over the music.
    When I went to the bathroom, he followed me and waited outside the door. As I stumbled out, I grabbed onto him and kissed him on the mouth.
    “Do you like me?” Bobby asked.
    I nodded.
    Then he kissed me back.
    Just then, Marco passed by and started whooping and congratulating Bobby on our hookup. I have no idea how long we stayed at the club. When it was time to go, Stefano went for the car, and Bobby and I stood on the