Saving Francesca

Every day I come home from St. Sebastian’s and my mother asks me if I’ve addressed the issue of the toilets, or the situation with subject selection or girls’ sports. Or if I’ve made new friends, or if there’s a guy there that I’m interested in. And every afternoon I mumble a “no” and she looks at me with great disappointment and says, “Frankie, what happened to the little girl who sang ‘Dancing Queen’ at the Year Six graduation night?” I’m not quite sure what wearing a white pants suit and boots, belting out an Abba hit, has to do with liberating the girls of St. Sebastian’s, but somehow my mother makes the co

So I come home ready to mumble my “no” again. Ready for the look, the lecture, the unexpected analogies and the disappointment.

But she’s still in bed.

Luca and I wait for my dad at the front door because my mother never stays in bed, even if she has a temperature over 104 degrees. But today the Mia we all know disappears and she becomes someone with nothing to say.

Someone a bit like me.

chapter 2

I WAKE UP to silence. No songs about surviving. No songs about boots meant for walking. And then, after a moment, I hear her being sick in the bathroom. For a moment I’m relieved because there is a symptom. I wonder if she could be pregnant, but it’s too strange a thought. She’s only been at the university for over a year, and she worked hard for so long to get the position. Mia would have been careful about jeopardizing that.

Later, when I get out of bed, my dad is in the kitchen and he looks at me and tries to force a smile. My dad’s a builder and I love that about him. His name is Robert and my mum calls him Bob the Builder. They’ve known each other since they were my age, so they’re kind of like best friends. He’s a bit immature, and I know that some of my mum’s friends think she should have outgrown him years ago. Some of his friends joke around that he should never have let her go and get her masters, as if the control was all his. It’s what I love about Bob the Builder. He doesn’t give a damn what his friends or family say. He doesn’t give a damn that his wife has a dozen more degrees than he ever will. He works for himself, refusing to expand because he reckons it will change everything. I think my dad just likes what he does and who he is. Sometimes my mum and her friends ask each other what they’d do if they had another life. My dad’s answer is always the same. He’d marry a girl called Mia and they’d have two kids.

Whatever this thing is with my mum, I don’t think it’s cancer or anything, and it certainly isn’t pregnancy, because my dad would probably be ecstatic about that. Today he just looks tired and confused.

“Is she okay?” I ask.

“She’s just a bit down. Go get Luca out of bed.”

I’m not quite sure what “just a bit down” means. I’m “just a lot down” and I’m getting out of bed.

“Did you have a fight or something?”

They are eternal arguers. She is the Queen of Hypotheticals and he’s the master of not thinking beyond the next moment. She believes that if she doesn’t challenge what they stand for, they’ll end up like other couples they know.

“Take away your job and take away your kids and who are you, Robert?” she asked once, over di

“Your husband,” he said, in what she calls his droll voice.

“Then take away me and who are you?”

“Take away you, the kids, and my job? Is this a trick question? I’m dead, right?” He asked, “What are you if we take away all those things, Mia? Can you be you without all of us?”

Luca was looking from one to the other.

“Must you talk about this in front of the children?” I asked.

“You think too much and you analyze too much,” he’d tell her. “Everything’s fine. The kids are happy. We’re happy. Everything’s fine.”

Mia would do that a lot last year. Analyze stuff to bits, contemplate the meaning of life. My no

A woman with a big bust had my breasts cupped in her hands at the time, so I wasn’t much in the mood for a philosophical discussion and I didn’t respond. I do that a lot. Even if she asks me a great question. It shits me that she can keep me interested. Most of the time she’s right about me and what I’m all about, but once, just once, I’d like to come up with a Francesca theory before her.

“Eggs?”

My father holds two eggs in his hands and I’m back to reality. I don’t eat eggs. Nor does Luca. But I don’t have the heart to tell him that.

Later, Luca and I go into their bedroom to say goodbye. She looks tiny, huddled under the blankets. Sometimes I forget how small she is because she is so vocal. She’s kind of like a dynamo who does one thousand things at once, successfully. This new Mia, I don’t know. She looks sick and helpless and, worse still, vulnerable. As we walk out, she stirs but she doesn’t even look at us.

I go to school with a sick feeling in my stomach, and I dare not look at my brother’s face because I know that I’ll see on his what he can see on mine.

Tara Finke corners me as soon as I step into homeroom.

“Today’s the day,” she says, waving over one of the ex–Perpetua girls, who chooses to ignore her.

She tries to grab Siobhan Sullivan as she’s walking in. “Are you with us or not?”

Siobhan Sullivan doesn’t even bother stopping. There’s some loser on the other side of the room that she has to impress.

“I wouldn’t rely on Francesca either,” Siobhan says over her shoulder, with a trace of spite in her voice.

I’ve noticed since the begi

I sit at my desk and watch Tara organizing the ex–Perpetua girls.

“We’re having House meetings this afternoon. It’s time to tell them what we think of this place.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Eva Rodriguez asks. The ex–Perpetua girls tend to follow Eva around like she’s their security blanket. She’s so effortlessly cool and protective of her lot, and most of the time I wish I were one of them.

“The invasion of our personal space,” Tara Finke answers, invading Eva Rodriguez’s personal space. “No girls’ sports offered, and when we do PE we have to share three toilets to get changed or do it out in the open. Or the fact that you can’t use the words ‘oral task’ or ‘penalized’ or the number 69 without a guy in your class snickering loudly and grunting. Ring a bell, girls?”

The bell rings, thank God.

“Or that some of the girls get wolf-whistled,” she says, following them to their seats, “and others get called dogs. Or that we actually came to this place because of its drama department and this year they decide to put on Stalag 17, which has not one female role, or that some teachers insist on addressing the class as—”

“Gentlemen, get to your seats, please,” Mr. Brolin orders.

Eva Rodriguez looks at Tara Finke and then at me. “Let’s just learn to live with it.”

I nod. Things could be worse.

Thomas Mackee enters the class and burps into my ear.

Thomas Mackee is a perfect example of most of the boys in my homeroom. They have nicknames like Booger and Jabber and they wear those names with pride. Sometimes they attempt a bit of irony—for example, calling a guy who’s absolutely clueless “Einstein.” But other times it’s obvious—the guy with the lowest intelligence level I’ve ever come across is called “Duh-Brain.” Most of the nicer guys have girlfriends, and we know this because they make it clear the moment we’re introduced, as if to say, “Don’t think about it.” Those particular guys have absolutely no idea what to do with girls who aren’t girlfriends, so at the moment they’re at a bit of a dead loss in the friendship department. The smarter ones feel slightly threatened, thanks to all the media coverage about girls dominating in the classroom, and they make sure that we don’t take their seats at the front.