Gracie Faltrain Gets it Right (Finally) (19 page)

‘Annabelle, wait.' I feel like an idiot, standing in the street with popcorn all over me and the guys from school watching.

‘Martin, you need to talk to Gracie and sort things out with her.' Her voice is gentle but it cuts just the same. ‘I want to be with you
here
. We can take a trip but we can't stay on the road forever. You need to think about that before you talk to me again.'

And then she leaves. Typical. I'm so crap with girls they break up with me before I've even kissed them. I expect Flemming to laugh, and say I deserved it. ‘Come on mate,' he says. ‘You're not the only one who had a bad night.'

Corelli drives Flemming, Francavilla and me to the oval where we had our first soccer game. We sit there, staring out at the field. ‘Does anyone understand women?' Flemming asks.

‘Not really,' Corelli says. ‘Jane's a mystery. I don't even
know if she likes me enough to stick around at the end of the year.'

‘She probably won't stay for you. She's a feminist. Do you remember in Year 5 she punched me for saying I liked her in short skirts?' Francavilla asks.

‘Alyce is a feminist,' Flemming says. ‘Did any of you know she was still seeing Mason?'

‘Yeah. We didn't know she was seeing you,' Corelli says.

‘I'm not smart enough for her, I guess.'

‘Faltrain's one of those hard-core feminists, I reckon. What do you call them?' I ask.

‘Ninjas,' Flemming answers. ‘Did you see her leap the Candy Bar in a single bound? If you ever get married don't invite her to the wedding.' His voice lets me know that we're mates again.

‘I failed Year 12,' I say. ‘Stuffed up every exam. I'm doing it over next year.' I didn't even know I'd decided to do that until now. It feels right, though.

‘I made a peach tart last night. We can have it with vanilla pod and cinnamon ice-cream. Who wants food?' Corelli asks.

‘Well, all right,' I say. ‘Let's go.'

*

‘What else you got in here?' Flemming asks, looking in the fridge. ‘I feel like meat.'

We eat lasagna and bread and dips and cheese. Corelli's mum walks in wearing her slippers and dressing gown and curlers and sits next to me. Francavilla makes room for Mr Corelli. We talk for ages about Italy and soccer and the ocean and women.

‘Women this, men that. You boys forget,' Mrs Corelli says, and taps her heart. ‘We're all people here.'

As she says it her slippers brush my feet under the table. She smells like powder. I watch her hands, passing food. I watch her eyes when she smiles at her son. I remember when I stayed over here as a kid I ached because my mum was gone and Corelli still had his.

I haven't been thinking about Mum much since I got home because it always hurt too much to look back. But tonight it doesn't, at least not as much as it did. I told Faltrain once that sometimes the only way to keep going is to leave the people you love. I can't stay one jump ahead of Mum's memory forever, though. That's a lot of running and a lot of road trips. And I don't want to leave again if Annabelle's not coming with me. At least, I don't want to go away again for good. I've been looking back for so long that it never occurred to me that I could look forward. I'll find Mum in both directions. My home's not that place she locked the door on anymore. I reckon my home's wherever I decide to make it.

‘I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Martin,' Jane says when we get home from the cinema. ‘Alyce thought we should but I didn't want to be the one to give you the news.'

‘I didn't want to lie,' Alyce says. ‘If you can believe that.'

‘When did you start going out with Flemming again?' I ask.

‘I've liked him all year. I've been making up excuses for us to spend time together. Did you see the look on Brett's face? I feel so awful.'

I don't know what to say to Alyce and then I remember what Jane told me last year. ‘You fix what you can and you live with the rest.' I guess that's what I was doing tonight, living with the parts of last year that couldn't be fixed. ‘Martin never forgave me. If he had, he wouldn't have lied about dating Annabelle.'

‘Maybe you're looking at things the wrong way,' Jane says. ‘Maybe he fell for Annabelle the way you fell for Dan, and he
didn't tell you because he knew how much it would hurt.'

‘I don't care why they lied. They did it for months. Kally took my help. She listened to me talk about Martin and the whole time she was listening to Annabelle fall in love with him. I'm out of the bet. I don't want to see any of them anymore.'

‘I lied on my United Nations application, too,' Alyce blurts out. ‘I said I'd worked at the neighbourhood house for years so I could get into the program.'

‘Okay,' Jane says. ‘If my parents ring me tonight and tell me I'm adopted, I won't be surprised.'

‘The best thing about this year is you two,' I say.

‘Right back at you both,' Jane answers.

I wait for Alyce to chime in and make the trilogy complete. ‘Alyce?'

She pushes up her glasses. ‘Gracie, what if I asked you to choose between Jane and me. Who would you pick?'

‘That's a dumb question. I like you both.'

‘No, really. Pick one of us.'

‘I can't, Alyce, and I have to tell you, you're ruining a great friendship moment here.'

‘So if you can't choose between Jane and me, how could Kally ever choose between you and Annabelle?'

‘She's good,' Jane says. ‘She's better than me at pulling you into line.'

Alyce is right. I know I've lied to people before and I don't exactly have strong legs to stand on in my argument. I know choices aren't clear-cut. ‘It doesn't make me feel any better that Kally and Dan kept secrets,' I say. It doesn't make it hurt any less.

Alyce and Jane fall asleep and I think for ages about everything that happened tonight. I know what I should do, but I'm not ready to do it yet.

I get up after a while. ‘I think we had more sleep in the year you were born than now,' Mum says, sitting on the couch with Dad. They don't ask me what happened and I don't tell. I will, but for now, I want to spend some time between them. I want to feel their warmth on either side of me, while I fall asleep.

I get up for a drink of water in the middle of the night. I walk past the lounge and see the three Faltrains, asleep next to each other on the couch, the light of a late-night nature documentary flickering over them from the TV.

My GPS starts working again, just like that. I like Corelli a lot. But I need to go home next year. I need to spend some time with my family. I want to study journalism with Mum there to argue about media monopolies. I want to go to Orientation Days with my brothers' step-by-step guides to fun in my back pocket. I want Dad to cook me breakfasts.

And when I'm ready to leave them I will. And maybe I can come back and Corelli will be here and he won't have found home with another girl. But that's the tricky thing. Home shifts. You can't pin it down on a map. So I know that when I leave I'll have to say goodbye to him. And so my decision, even though it's the right one, really kind of hurts.

I dreamt about Annabelle and Martin last night. To shake off the image of them holding hands I had to run around the block twenty times after I woke up.

‘Feeling any better?' Mum asks, when I walk back in.

‘Not really.'

‘Are you ready to talk about it now?'

‘Martin likes Annabelle. They've been dating since he got back. Kally and Dan knew.' She opens her mouth and then closes it. She puts in some toast, waits until it's done and butters it before she says anything.

‘There's nothing I can say that will make that hurt less.' She puts the toast between us and takes a piece. ‘You have to give it time.'

‘That's what I'm doing. I can't face any of them, not Kally or Dan or Martin or Annabelle.'

‘You might feel differently in a little while.'

‘A hundred years could go by and I won't be okay about Martin liking Annabelle.'

‘In a hundred years you'll be dead, Gracie,' she says. ‘I just wanted to give you a little perspective.'

The only perspective I want is the shrinking type, where the humiliation of last night gets smaller and smaller as I walk away.

It's early afternoon when Kally knocks on my door.

‘Can we talk?'

‘I don't have a whole lot to say.' I know what Alyce told me last night makes sense. Thanks to Mum's cheery thought, I know I'll be dead in a hundred years. But I'm so hurt every time I think about Martin lying to me. ‘You've known for months. He was there on the steps that night and you flatout lied to me.'

‘I wanted to tell you but Annie asked me to wait.'

‘Annie asked,' I say. ‘I should have known I couldn't be friends with someone who was loyal to her. Was she laughing at me as she kissed Martin? She's stolen every boy I've ever dated.'

‘Which is only two at the last count,' Kally says. ‘And you're dating Dan, an ex-boyfriend of hers.'

‘That's different.'

‘Why, because you don't like him as much? He's really hurt, by the way. You might want to call him.'

This is getting all twisted around, now. It sounds like I've done something wrong. ‘I do care about Dan, a lot. But I didn't turn him against Annabelle.' I try to shift things up the right way again so I can see them clearly.

‘You can't actually think it happened like that. I know it's hard for you to believe, but Martin and Annabelle really like each other. They're going away on a road trip at the end of the year.'

When Kally arrived five minutes ago I was only a little mad and mostly hurt, the words dripping out of me like a slow leak of petrol from a car. But she just dropped a match.

I actually feel my heart burning. A road trip? He was going away again and he wasn't even going to tell me? Okay, I'm mad. I would have liked a little heads up on the fact that my ex-boyfriend was running off into the sunset with Annabelle Orion. ‘I hope you have a lot of hats because I'm not helping you with your stupid bet anymore.'

She looks like I do in Maths, when I'm waiting for a new idea to settle in. ‘Annabelle was right. Gracie Faltrain is the only person who matters in your world. She hates you because of the things you did in Year 6. I know you know that because I heard it in your voice the night we got lost. You sounded sorry, though. I told Annabelle that she was wrong about you. But I was the one who was wrong.'

‘I was a kid in Year 6.'

‘Yeah, well, you're not a kid anymore,' she says, and flips me the bird as she walks away.

That fire's left a mess inside me that I can't sweep away. I did know about Annabelle's dad. And I did do awful things to her in Year 6. The class made an Easter piñata, a huge papier-mâché egg full of lollies and chocolate that hung from the ceiling for a month, waiting for us to break it. The day before the holidays we took turns beating it with sticks until it cracked. Everything tumbled out. The teacher picked
up the biggest thing from the floor: a golden egg filled with Smarties. ‘We'll save this for Annabelle,' she said.

I thought it was so unfair. And every day of the week that Annabelle came back I did something bad to her. Quiet things. Like putting glue in her desk or making a tiny rip in a picture that she'd drawn.

Jane stopped me in the end. ‘Enough's enough, Faltrain. I'll buy you a Smartie egg if you care so much about it.' I did all those things to her after she lost her dad. I did all those things to her and I convinced myself she deserved them.

‘Does that mean I have to give her Martin?' I ask Mum, crying because everything is upside down.

‘Gracie, love,' she says. ‘I know this hurts, but Martin doesn't belong to you. He belongs to himself. Even when he was with you, he belonged to himself.'

‘That's awful,' I say, hiccupping. ‘That means that you can never really know if people are going to stay with you.'

She thinks for a long time. ‘No, you don't. But if you treat people with love, most of the time they do stay. Or if they go for a while, they come back.'

‘And if they don't? Martin's mum wouldn't have come back if I hadn't looked for her. Annabelle's dad definitely isn't coming back.'

‘That's life,' she says. ‘And so you live with it.' I hiccup again. ‘You take the hiccups with the downs.' She giggles at her own joke. I start to giggle. Like Jane says, sometimes the best laughs are the ones you have when your life's going down the toilet.

Mum smooths my hair. ‘Martin's had a hard life, Gracie.
I don't know whether you've ever really thought about how it would feel if I abandoned you. I know you think you've thought about it, but really let it sink in.'

I close my eyes and think of Martin that day, really think, for the first time. I cry, then. Not the hiccupping tears that were falling from me a little while ago. Now I cry the real thing.

I walk over to Corelli's house this afternoon.

‘Is Faltrain okay?' he asks.

‘Sort of. She's hurt.'

‘When she's playing in the World Cup she'll look back on last night and laugh.'

‘She won't ever laugh about Martin loving Annabelle.'

‘She will if we tickle her,' he says. And then I laugh. We both laugh so long it hurts.

I haven't met anyone like Corelli. I get up in the morning and I look forward to seeing him. ‘I like the way you yodel on the high notes in a Britney song,' I say. ‘I like how you put pineapple on my pizza when you think it's a crime. I like the way you help Faltrain in Food Tech when you know her cooking is a crime.'

He smiles. ‘You're going back to England at the end of the year, aren't you?'

If I tell him the truth I won't get my kiss but I have to
be honest. ‘I'd love to stay with you, but I want to study journalism in England. I want to live with my parents for a while.'

‘I get it. Most of the reason I like you is that you're the sort of person who goes her own way. So, do you think you'll ever come this way again?'

‘
Aspetta
,' I say, with the accent his dad taught me.

‘
Aspetti
,' he corrects me. ‘I can't believe “be patient” is the only thing you can say in Italian. It's not exactly your best quality.'

‘I can say “
amico
”, too.'

‘You're butchering a beautiful language. But yeah, I can be your friend.'

From the look on his face I can tell I'm not going to have the chance to use the other Italian word I know:
bacio
.

‘I'm going to miss you, Corelli.'

He smiles. ‘I'm going to really miss you too.'