Saving Francesca

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

chapter 15

chapter 16

chapter 17

chapter 18

chapter 19

chapter 20

chapter 21

chapter 22

chapter 23

chapter 24

chapter 25

chapter 26

chapter 27

chapter 28

chapter 29

chapter 30

chapter 31

chapter 32

chapter 33

chapter 34

chapter 35

About the Author

Copyright Page

For Luca

and

the St. Mary’s Cathedral College boys

… and for the girls there, too …

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Mum, Dad, Marisa, Daniela—thanks for the whole Grand Central Station experience.

To my mum, Christine Alesich, Barbara Barclay, Marcus Burnett, Anthony Douglas, Philippa Gibson, Laura Harris, Damian Hatton, Janet Hill, Sophia Hill, Genevieve and Olivia Hill (for typing out your mum’s notes), Brenda Hokin, A

Thanks also to Beth Yahp, Teresa Crea, and Agnes Nieuwenhuizen for giving me the opportunity to create fragments of Francesca over the past ten years in your anthologies and performance piece.

chapter 1

THIS MORNING, MY mother didn’t get out of bed.

It meant I didn’t have to go through one of her daily pep talks, which usually begin with a song that she puts on at 6:45 every morning. It’s mostly seventies and eighties retro crap, anything from “I Will Survive” to some woman called Kate Bush singing, “Don’t give up.” When I question her choices, she says they’re random, but I know that they are subliminal techniques designed to motivate me into being just like her.

But this morning there is no song. There is no advice on how to make friends with the bold and the interesting. No twelve-point plan on the best way to make a name for myself in a hostile environment. No motivational messages stuck on my mirror urging me to do something that scares me every day.

There’s just silence.

And for the first time all year, I go to school and my only agenda is to get to 3:15.

School is St. Sebastian’s in the city. It’s a predominantly all-boys school that has opened its doors to girls in Year Eleven for the first time ever. My old school, St. Stella’s, only goes to Year Ten and most of my friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn’t allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn’t bring me up to have limitations placed upon me. If you know my mother, you’ll sense there’s an irony there, based on the fact that she is the Queen of the Limitation Placers in my life. My brother, Luca, is in Year Five at Sebastian’s, so my mother figured it would be convenient for all of us in the long run, and my dad goes along with it because no one in my family has ever pretended that my mother doesn’t make all the decisions.

There are thirty of us girls at Sebastian’s and I want so much not to do the teenage angst thing, but I have to tell you that I hate the life that, according to my mother, I’m not actually having.

It’s like this. Girls just don’t belong at St. Sebastian’s. We belong in schools that were built especially for us, or in co-ed schools. St. Sebastian’s pretends it’s co-ed by giving us our own toilet. The rest of the place is all male and I know what you’re thinking if you’re a girl. What a dream come true, right? Seven hundred and fifty boys and thirty girls? But the reality is that it’s either like living in a fish-bowl or like you don’t exist. Then, on top of that, you have to make a whole new group of friends after being in a comfortable little niche for four years. At Stella’s, you turned up at school, knew exactly what your group’s role and profile was, and the day was a blend of all you found comfortable. My mother calls that complacency but whatever it’s called, I miss it like hell.

Here, at Sebastian’s, after a term of being together, the girls haven’t really moved on in the sorority department. I don’t exactly have friends as much as ex–Stella girls I hang around with who I had barely exchanged a word with over the last four years. Justine Kalinsky, for example, came to Stella’s in Year Eight and never actually seemed to make any friends there. She plays the piano accordion. There’s also Siobhan Sullivan, who uses us as a disembarkation point for when one of the guys calls her over. In Year Seven, for a term, Siobhan and I were the most hysterical of friends because we were the only ones who wanted to gallop around the playground like horses while the rest of the Stella girls sat around in semicircles being young ladies. Most of our free time was spent making up dance moves to Kylie songs in our bedrooms and performing them in the playground until someone pointed out that we were showing off. My group found me just after that, thank God, and I never really spoke to Siobhan Sullivan again. My friends always told me they wanted to rescue me from Siobhan, and I relished being saved because it meant that people stopped tapping me on the shoulder to point out what I was doing wrong.

Tara Finke hangs out with us as well. She was the resident Stella psycho, full of feminist, communist, anythingist rhetoric, and if there is one thing I’ve noticed around here, it’s that Sebastian boys don’t like speeches. Especially not from us girls. They’d actually be very happy if we never opened our mouths at all. Tara’s already been called a lesbian because that’s how the Sebastian boys deal with any girl who has an opinion, and because there are only four ex–Stella girls, I assume the rest of us get called the same thing. I could get all politically correct here and say that there’s nothing wrong with being called a lesbian, but it all comes down to being labeled something that you’re not. Tara Finke thinks she’s going to be able to set up a women’s movement at the school, but girls run for miles when they see her coming.

The girls from St. Perpetua’s, another Year Seven to Ten school, make up the bulk of the female students. They don’t want to get involved with Tara and her movement because their mothers have taught them to go with the flow, which I personally think is the best advice anyone can get. My mother is a different story. She’s a communications lecturer at the University of Technology–Sydney, and her students think she’s the coolest thing around. But they don’t have to put up with her outbursts or her inability to let anything go. If it’s not an argument with the guy at the bank who pushed in front of us, it’ll be questioning the rude tone of some service-industry person over the phone. She’s complained to perso