Saving Francesca (4 page)

When my dad drops me off, they scream hysterically.

“Look at your hair,”
they say. I’m confused, because my hair looks exactly the same as it has for the last five years. Shoulder-length, brown, straight.

I see familiar faces from Stella’s inside the house, and they wave from a distance.

“So, who are you hanging out with?” Natalia asks as we sit on the front veranda, while guys hang around, perving. These guys are different from those at Sebastian’s. They are actually more interested in us than each other.

“Siobhan Sullivan and Justine Kalinsky?” Michaela teases, and they all groan.

I force a smile and laugh. “The Perpetua girls are really cool,” I say, not exactly lying.

“Who are the other girls?” a Pius hanger-on asks.

“Siobhan Sullivan is the biggest slut in the whole wide world,” Teresa, the Queen of Hyperbole, tells them. “Francis used to hang out with her in Year Seven.”

They call me Francis, by the way. “Just to keep you simple,” they’d tell me.

“I swear to God, this girl never shut up before we met her. Even the teachers would say, ‘Francis, enough of these questions.’ ”

“Once in Year Seven on an excursion to Manly, we were on the ferry coming back and next minute she’s on the bow of the boat screaming out, ‘I’m the Queen of the World,’ ” Simone says.

“And remember, we thought, what a psycho?” Natalia says, as usual ending all her sentences up in the air. “And you got suspended, Francis? And the school wanted you tested for ADHD and your mum went berserk?”

Faintly.

“And then Siobhan Sullivan went away for a couple of weeks and we thought, let’s make friends with her, because I think this girl needs saving.”

When Siobhan Sullivan’s grandfather died in Year Seven, she went up north to stay with her nan. They were the loneliest days of my life. Not one person would let me hang out with them. “It’s because you’re a show-off,” my future friends explained to me gently. “If you stop showing off, we’ll be your friends.”

“And we made her ours,” Michaela says, hugging me to her affectionately.

That’s what my friends do. They’re press agents. They give me publicity, and for three months at Sebastian’s I haven’t had any, so it’s a bit of a relief to be on the news again.

“And the other girl?”

“Justine Kalinsky,
poor thing
. She came new in Year Eight. Do you remember in Year Eight?” Natalia asks the others.

“Oh my God, Year Eight. Yeah,” Michaela says.

“This one time in Year Eight we had to write on butcher’s paper how we’d like people to see us. Remember ours? We were like, ‘We don’t want people to see us as leaders or heroes or anything out of the ordinary. We just want them to see us as on their level.’ ”

“But Justine Kalinsky gets up there, on her own,
poor thing
. And she says, ‘I’d like people to see me as their Rock.’ ”

“And we killed ourselves laughing.”

“Poor thing.”

“What did she mean?” the Pius girl asks.

“Who knows.”

I don’t dare mention Tara Finke. Sluts and losers are tolerable to my friends. But a person with a social conscience is from Pluto. Once in Year Nine, Mia forced me to go to the Palm Sunday peace march and I had to walk alongside Tara Finke. Our photo got into the school news, and I didn’t hear the end of it for ages.

A group of girls walk up the garden path and my friends scream and join them, leaving me with the Pius hanger-on, who confides that if it weren’t for my friends, she’d be lost.

“They saved me from having to hang out with the losers,” she tells me with pride.

“That’s what they do,” I explain politely.

We smile at each other with nothing left to say.

It’s a good night.

When I see Justine Kalinsky at school, I feel guilty, as if I’ve spent the whole weekend bitching about her.

“Tara’s talking to them about a basketball game.” Justine Kalinsky is giggling with excitement.

I sit at my desk, listening to Eva Rodriguez and the rest of the Perpetua girls being persuaded by Tara Finke.

“It’s the best idea ever,” Justine Kalinsky says, beaming.

“Can you arrange it?” Eva Rodriguez asks.

It takes a moment to realize that they’re talking to me.

“Me?”

“Justine reckons you’ve already set up communication with one of the House leaders.”

Justine Kalinsky’s face is lit up in anticipation.

“Which one?” one of the other Perpetua girls asks.

“Trombal,” Tara Finke says.

The girls are impressed.

“I don’t think he actually likes dealing with her,” Tara Finke says. “But if we send someone new, he’ll interpret it as a lack of leadership on our part. Let’s be consistent.”

“Plus we can’t send someone with a strong personality because the guys will get defensive. She’s perfect,” Siobhan Sullivan says. She’s enthusiastic about something for once, probably because it means getting into Lycra in front of a bunch of boys.

“It’s not competitive. Just call it a friendly senior basketball game. It’ll give us some kind of profile.”

“They’ll slaughter us,” one of the other girls argues.

“I play rep,” Eva Rodriguez tells us. “Plus our school won the Eastern Region last year and five of us from that team are here.”

“Ours got to the finals in the Inner-Western,” Justine Kalinsky pipes up. “Not that I was on the team, but Francesca was.”

“I think it’s a great idea,” Tara Finke says. “This is our foot in the door, and we should grab the opportunity and show them that we have the ability to take control of our lives at this school.”

They all look at me.

How can my weak personality resist such a challenge?

William Trombal and the other leaders have a little office just outside Administration.

I stand out front for a moment or two and hear music coming from inside. I knock on the door and walk in. He’s in there with another two House leaders, and they all look up for a moment.

“Yours?” one of the House leaders asks him, smirking at me. I look away for a moment, concentrating on the poster of two league stars with bloodstained faces hugging each other.

“I’ll see you later,” I hear Trombal tell the other guys as they walk past me out the door.

When we’re alone, he sits back in his chair and turns down the music.

“I’m not going to get into a discussion about a tampon machine,” he tells me bluntly.

I don’t respond, and he looks at me and holds up one hand as if to say,
What?

So much for Ms. Quinn’s “he’s actually quite shy.”

“The girls would like to arrange a game with the guys.”

“We don’t play netball.”

“Basketball.”

He gives a laugh, but he’s not laughing with me.

“I don’t want to sound patronizing, but we won the CBSA finals last term.”

“Just a goodwill game,” I explain.

“We wouldn’t want to hurt you,” he says. “The guys can be aggressive.”

“Tell them it’s friendly.”

He thinks for a moment, looking me straight in the eye.

Don’t look away,
I tell myself. But then I regret not looking away, because I feel my face going red and I don’t know why.

“Who’s your captain?” he asks.

“Eva Rodriguez.”

“Good-looking girl who looks like Jennifer Lopez?”

I’m poker-face cool and it’s killing me, but I don’t say anything. He fishes something out of his pocket and I notice that it’s our list of requests, and I can’t help being surprised that he has it on him. He opens it up and reads down the list, and for a moment I see the paper flap, as if the hand holding it can’t control itself, and then I realize that William Trombal is nervous.

I’m
making him nervous.

“Request number four,” he says, reading from the list. “An opportunity to play competitive sports.”

I nod, as if I know exactly what request number four is.

“Why not?” he says with a shrug.

I hold out my hand to shake on it. Luca and I do that all the time, and for a moment I feel so childish, but I’m too embarrassed to retrieve the hand.

“No complaining if anyone breaks a nail?” he asks, looking at my outstretched hand, but he doesn’t extend his.

“You can complain all you like. You can cry as well,” I tell him.

I get a hint of a smile and then he shakes my hand.

“I’ll see what the guys say.”

“Thank you.”

“What did you say your name was? Francis . . .”

“My name’s Francesca.”

Detention drags on. Thomas Mackee sits next to me, scribbling on what looks like a music sheet. He’s a guitarist. Sometimes, as he’s walking to music class, he serenades Ms. Quinn, who, despite his being an idiot, actually has a bit of a giggle. He nudges me, almost sending me sprawling.

“Do you know how to convert notes into tablature?” he asks me in his duh-brain voice.

I pretend he’s not there.

“Are you retarded?” he asks.

I ignore him.

“Do you know anything?”

This coming from the Big Kahuna of Knowledge.

“Do you?” he presses.

“I know you’re a dickhead, and for the time being, that’s all I need to know,” I say flatly.

“Ooh, you’re turning me on.”

That’s as clever as our conversations get. Sometimes Jimmy Hailler joins in when he’s not torturing the younger kids. Thomas Mackee and Jimmy Hailler grasp each other’s hands, one of those brothers-in-arms-we-fought-in-Nam-together grips, but outside this room I don’t think they relate.

“What’s the punishment today?” Jimmy Hailler asks.

“Ten different lines. Must have some form of the word ‘learn’ in it,” Thomas Mackee tells him. He adopts the voice of a deep and meaningful television psychologist, matching his words to hand actions. “He wants us to take control of our misbehavior so we can self-discipline ourselves.”

Jimmy Hailler looks over my shoulder and reads what I’ve written.

“I must not underestimate the wisdom of my learned teachers
.

Butcher’s paper is not just for wrapping sausages, but for learning
.”

“That was mine,” Thomas Mackee says. He’s very proud.

Jimmy Hailler looks at me and I nod in confirmation.

“Wow.”

“Learn Baby Learn, Disco Inferno
.”

“Hers,” Thomas Mackee says. “Have no idea what it means.”

“I came, I mucked around, thus I did not learn.”

When we’re allowed to go, I leave as quickly as possible. Through Hyde Park, I walk ahead of them, hoping that they don’t speak to me. On the bus, Thomas Mackee and I sit at opposite ends. I’m grateful that he doesn’t see solidarity in our detention. I figure he lives somewhere around Stanmore, because he gets off the stop before mine.

At Stella’s, we all came from the same area, and I liked the closeness of it all. Here, I don’t feel a sense of community. The city is too big and the school is like an island at the edge of it. An island full of kids from all over Sydney, rather than from one suburb. Nothing binds it together; no one culture, no one social group. You could be on the same bus or train line with someone and still live miles apart. My bus line travels along Parramatta Road from the inner city, past the University of Technology, where Mia works, past the University of Sydney, and then into the beginning of the inner west. Most of the time I don’t travel with Luca because he has choir practice or soccer or I have a three-unit class after school. At Stella’s, our bus was a School Special and the trip home was the best part of the day. Here, it’s almost the worst.

I get off at my usual stop on Parramatta Road and walk down Johnston Street. Sometimes Annandale feels like a small country town, ten minutes from downtown. There’s still a working-class quality to it, but, sprinkled with academics, musicians, and professionals, it tends not to have a “type,” which suits Mia, who goes on about “types” all the time.

Once in a while, my parents toss up whether or not to move. My dad thinks that not providing us with space will stunt our emotional growth and that it’s cruel to have a dog and children when you’ve got a tiny backyard. But we’re not interested in that type of space, and neither is our dog. He loves having his puppaccinos at Cafe Bones over in Leichhardt every Saturday morning or sitting outside Bar Italia while we have gelato and coffee. Luca named him because Mia’s into that. I got to name Luca, so he got to name the dog, and I thank God he’s younger than I am, because the dog’s name is Pinocchio. I named Luca after a character in a Suzanne Vega song. I didn’t realize until I was older that the person in the song gets abused. I just loved the certainty the character had about who he was.

Luca’s one of those blessed kids. Incredibly cute, smart, and has the voice of an angel, which is why he’s in a composite class of Year Five and Six for choir kids at St. Sebastian’s. William Trombal used to be a choirboy as well, but these days his role is merely to take the choirboys over for morning practice. According to Luca, he lets them play cricket in the middle aisle of the cathedral with a hacky sack. Apparently, the hacky sack once hit Christ on the cross, and William Trombal said that if Christ’s hands weren’t nailed on to that cross, he would have caught the ball himself.

Luca says that when he grows up, he wants to be just like William Trombal. Fantastic. My little brother’s ambition is to be a stick-in-the-mud moron with no personality.

I have absolutely no idea what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve changed my mind one hundred times. Just once I’d like to get it all together, see beyond the next five minutes, but I’ve never been able to. Not even when I was a kid. Mia’s mother, Nonna Celia, is to blame for that, because she’s a prophet of doom. Every time I’d ask her if we could go someplace the next day or next week, her reply would be, “We might not live that long.” If I’d say, “See you tomorrow,” her answer would be, “If that’s what God wants.” Leaving so much to fate has kept me an insomniac for most of my life, and this thing with Mia has reinforced the fear.

I get to the house, trying my hardest to avoid the people across the road. As usual, I wonder why they even have a house. They spend all their free time sitting on the front veranda watching the world go by. They eat outside with their meals on their lap trays, hang over the fence on either side for chats, while their children, grandchildren, and any other kids they seem to be looking after play happily on the little stretch of grass in front of their house. I don’t know how many live there because they always seem to have people over, but it’s like four generations in one tiny pre-fab house, like something out of a 1940s
Harp in the South
story. Although they’re doing nothing wrong, everything about them annoys me. So when they wave, I never wave back.