Saving Francesca (9 page)

On the bus, Justine Kalinsky and I sit in the back row making small talk about one of the teachers. When the bus stops at Broadway, about ten Pius girls get on. Two of them are Michaela and Natalia, my Stella friends. As usual, they’re animated, enjoying their lives with those around them. Why do I feel as if something’s missing in my life without them and they don’t feel the same about me? That doesn’t make them bad, does it? My mother’s voice goes through my head. She’s the hoarder of memories. “Remember the time they stayed for the weekend and didn’t even say thank you or goodbye? Remember the time they wouldn’t come to the phone when you were crying and apologizing about something you had no reason to be sorry for? Remember the times they’d come to school and decide they weren’t going to speak to you that day?” No, Mum. Because I chose not to remember the moments that pigeonhole me as one of the top five losers of all time, but hey, thanks for the memories.

Natalia and Michaela spot me instantly. “Oh my God,” they scream, running down the aisle, knocking people in the face with their bags. Thomas Mackee looks up from the music magazine he’s reading, unimpressed by the squealing. I don’t think it’s the excitement of seeing me as much as the theatrical aspect of their personalities that compels them to do it. But they always made me laugh at St. Stella’s. They gave me some identity.

We hug, and a few of the other ex–Stella girls wave from the front of the bus. Others ignore me. Girls like Tina, our archenemy, who’d throw a party and invite everyone in my group but me. The girls would always tell me not to take things personally, but I never believed there was any other way of taking it. Thankfully, they’d be loyal and not go to whatever I wasn’t invited to, except when they couldn’t get out of it.

“So how’s life with the Sebastian boys?”

They tend to ask the same question each time I see them. Thomas Mackee hears the question and turns around, eyebrows raised as if to say, “Go on, what are we like?”

“Pretty pathetic. Well, the Year Elevens, anyway,” I say, giving him a look back. “You?”

“Waverley guys are okay.”

“Are you going to that party?” one of the Pius girls behind us asks them.

They have an animated discussion about who is going to be there and who isn’t and what they’re not going to wear. Then they remember that I’m there.

“Who do you hang out with?” Natalia asks, looking over my shoulder. She’s always done that. Wherever you are, whoever you are, she’ll always look over your shoulder to see if there’s someone more exciting to speak to. It used to make me feel paranoid.

I don’t answer. They haven’t noticed Justine Kalinsky. They never noticed her at Stella’s either, except to make fun of her.

“I rang the other night,” I tell Michaela, changing the topic.

“Really. Did you leave a message?”

“Kind of.”

“Is everything okay?”

I feel awkward with Justine sitting next to me. She takes out a music book and studies it intently.

“My mum’s sick,” I say in a hushed tone, turning my body to face them so Justine Kalinsky doesn’t hear.

“Oh my God, Francis. Is she okay?”

I look at them and I don’t know what to say. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud, and I find I can’t really describe what Mia has. People want symptoms. They want physical evidence. This thing my mum has is like the X-Files. It can’t be explained to the non-believer, and I’m just not ready to describe it at all right now. Not to someone who’s looking over my shoulder.

Thankfully, the dreaded Tina is walking down the aisle. I’m about to snicker something to the girls, but she arrives first.

“We’re getting off at the Forum for coffee,” she says before walking away, and I realize she’s speaking to Michaela and Natalia.

“Cool,” Natalia says.

This time it’s my turn to look over their shoulders. “You hang out with Tina? We hate Tina.”

“We hang out with everyone,” Natalia says defensively.

“She’s a bitch.”

“Once you get to know her, she isn’t.”

What is it with that argument? Why is it that you have to jump through hoops of fire to find out that someone’s decent? The fact that someone is a bitch on the surface says heaps about them.

“She treated us like dirt.”

“No she didn’t. She only treated you that way. You take things too personally, Francis. You always have.”

Justine’s stop approaches and she presses the button. She bumps past me, but I’m still looking at them.

“Come for a coffee with us,” they plead. “We haven’t spoken for ages.”

They look as if they mean it.

“Another time,” I tell them, and I get off the bus with Justine. I just don’t want to be on the bus for another second. Justine doesn’t ask why I’m following her home. Justine Kalinsky never questions anything. She doesn’t even look smug. She just walks, her bag bumping against her hip, her ginger hair coming out of its clasp.

“Are you okay?” she asks after a while.

“Just having one of those days.”

“No. I mean are you okay in general? You don’t seem to be. You haven’t all term.”

It’s the most we’ve ever spoken. I don’t want to be her bosom buddy and I don’t want to tell her about my mum.

“It’s just Sebastian’s getting to me,” I half-lie. “At least the Pius girls seem to be having a better time than us.”

“I’m having a great time.”

I glance at her.

“No, it’s true,” she says, “compared to Stella’s. I hated Stella’s.”

“Then what about all the protest Tara Finke goes on about? Why do you go along with her if you love the place?”

“Because she has every right to. It’s unfair what we have to put up with there. But that doesn’t make me hate the school. It’s better than complaining about nothing or discussing the tragic return of the off-the-shoulder T-shirt,” she says, referring to Natalia and Michaela’s conversation and revealing a bit of a bitchy streak. Which I kind of like.

After a while, I ask, “What was wrong with Stella’s? We had nothing to complain about.”

She shrugs. “Yes we did. People just convinced you that we didn’t.”

“‘You,’ singular or plural?”

She looks at me. “You think people chose not to hang out with me, don’t you? But it was my choice. I chose not to hang out with them. The only people I wanted to hang out with, I’m getting to hang out with now.”

I realize she’s including me in these “people.”

“Me?”

“I think it’s because you were a bit of a dickhead like the rest of us in music, but we kind of never knew it until we went to music camp in Year Nine for elective. I’d never seen you without your friends, and you were so different. So
loud
. And I thought, who is she? You were such a show-off, for three days, and everyone shit-stirred you and you let them, which was so much fun. And you sang ‘On My Own’ from
Les Mis
and you weren’t even self-conscious and it blew everyone away. I reckon that’s why Ms. Tagar picked it for the musical in Year Ten. Except you didn’t go for it.”

“I’m not into musicals.”

“Really? Funny that you knew all the words to all the songs.”

She turns into a tree-lined street of massive Federation houses and already I feel calmer.

Suddenly, Justine Kalinsky gasps and pulls me behind a tree.

“Oh my God. The tuba guy.”

“The what?” I ask, trying to look through the branches.

“Don’t look. He’ll think we’re looking,” she whispers.

We both look ridiculous.

“Let’s try to act natural.”

“Hiding behind a tree?”

She puts a finger to her lips and we stay hidden until I feel a giggle build up inside of me. A guy wearing a Sydney Boys High uniform walks by holding a tuba.

Justine’s face goes the most ferocious shade of red, and the moment he’s five steps away she grabs my hand and we run in the opposite direction.

We don’t stop running until we reach the top of the street, leaning on someone’s front fence, taking massive breaths.

“Who’s the tuba guy?”

“I don’t know his name.”

“How long have you not known him?”

She looks at me miserably. “You’re going to think I’m a loser.”

“Justine, my friends from Stella’s are hanging out with a girl who once wrote ‘Francis Spinelli’s mum is a lesbian slut’ on a wall at Petersham station. I think you’ll just have to wait for that Loser of the Month tiara a little while longer while I wear it, with pride, around my neighborhood.”

“Tina was always jealous of you.”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“Three years. I’m in the same combined school band with him.”

“Have you ever spoken to him?”

“He looks at me at the bus stop. Sometimes I’m on the bus and it drives past his stop and we have eye contact.”

I think about it for a moment. “I had a bus-stop relationship for four years at Stella’s.”

“What’s his name?” she asks.

“The Boy from the Bus Stop. I never actually spoke to him, but we had a visual relationship, if you know what I mean.”

“I think ‘Tuba Guy’ is a bit more original than that.”

“I once liked a guy whose name was Roller Boy because I saw him on Rollerblades, but never found out his name. Then there was Altar Boy, whose name I discovered was Dudley, but I prefer to remember him as the former.”

She stops in front of her house and we’re awkward for a moment.

“Do you want to come in?”

I shake my head. “I still have to take another two buses home.”

“Don’t you live in Annandale?”

“I’m staying with my grandparents in Concord. My mum’s kind of sick.”

She nods, understanding.

I’m about to walk away when I think of something.

“Was I cruel? At Stella’s.”

She shakes her head. “You just seemed kind of . . . I don’t know . . . You always belonged to a big group, but it was like you didn’t want to be with them and I couldn’t understand why you stayed.”

“I liked . . . like them,” I explain. “They’re my friends.”

“I didn’t say it was them you didn’t like.”

I feel as if I’m talking to my biographer and the mood is too dramatic.

“I think you’re wrong, though,” I tell her.

“About?”

“The return of the off-the-shoulder T-shirt. Be afraid of that.
Be
very afraid
.”

She giggles. I grin. I go home to my grandparents feeling okay.

chapter 11

ONCE A MONTH,
my nonna has the Rosary at her place. About twenty people, male, female, mostly over sixty, mostly Italian-speaking, invade the house, their voices rising above each other as if they’re arguing rather than just greeting. I’ve promised my nonna that I’ll make the coffee while they’re saying the Rosary, placing it in the giant thermos to keep it hot. The guests hand me various selections of cakes and slices for the after-Rosary gossip fest, and I arrange them onto trays while my nonna sits everyone down in the living room. Just before they’re ready to begin, the doorbell rings. A moment later I watch my nonna freeze as a woman stands in front of her, haughtily holding out a plate of biscuits.

S biscuits.

Nonna’s famous S biscuits.

And I know instantly it’s William Trombal’s grandmother.

I take the plate off her politely and walk into the kitchen and begin to make the coffee. It takes forever to make enough for twenty, and I just want to get into my pajamas and curl up in bed. While I wait for the coffee to come up, I stand at the door and watch them praying, concentrating especially on Nonna and William Trombal’s grandmother. Through the Joyful Mysteries they’re putting on a front of piety, but by the Sorrowful Mysteries things have deteriorated. I can actually see my nonno looking at my nonna warningly and doing that twisting lip thing with his fingers, and I see the superiority on William Trombal’s grandmother’s face. The same air of superiority that I’ve seen on his.

And at that exact moment, I realize that the S biscuits must go. They cannot be paraded around by that smug woman while people congratulate her on how smooth the chocolate on top tastes and how perfect they are for dipping into your coffee.

So during the Glorious Mysteries, I put them in the bin, wrap up the garbage bag, and take it outside. I know the Virgin Mary will understand. The Jews are a lot like the Italians, so I’m sure there were jealousy issues between her and the other women of Nazareth.

Then I change into my pajamas and go to bed, trying to get into my English novel.

Half an hour later the doorbell rings. The Rosary group is making such a racket in the living room that no one hears and it rings again.

I go to answer it and find myself face to face with William Trombal. I’m not sure who’s more embarrassed, but I figure it’s me because of the Harry Potter pj’s I’m wearing, courtesy of Luca last Christmas. William looks confused.

“Do you live here?”

“No.”

I’m not interested in elaborating, so we leave it at that.

“I’m picking up my grandmother.”

“They’re still having coffee.”

We stand there nodding at each other.

“Can you tell her I’ll be waiting in the car?”

“I think you should tell her yourself.”