Saving Francesca

And slowly the mornings begin to change. Nothing too friendly or exciting, but by the time I get to school, the sick feeling that I wake up with every morning disappears. Not for long, but enough to get me through the day.

chapter 19

WE GET INVITED to another party. It’s a Year Eleven guy, but most of the Year Twelves are invited as well, and I wonder if Will Trombal will be there.

My dad drops us off at the same time that Thomas Mackee drives his friends in. He does an exaggerated double take when he sees us and, as usual, his friends kill themselves laughing as if it’s the most hysterical thing they’ve ever seen.

Jimmy Hailler is swinging his legs from the front porch, smoking a joint. He beckons me over and pats the space next to him.

“It’s nerdsville inside,” he informs me.

Someone puts on an Abba CD, and I hear a combination of cheers and boos.

Jimmy offers me his joint. “You might need this to get through ‘Dancing Queen.’ ”

I decline with a laugh. “Dance with me.”

“Only losers dance to this type of music.”

I dance with Tara and Justine, squashed on the tiny living room dance floor with the jaded and the cool and the clever and the straightie-one-eighties, as Jimmy Hailler would call us. But Abba has the ability to unite the masses and it goes from there. At the part where Agnetha and Frida sing “Dig in the Dancing Queen,” Justine does a digging motion and actually starts a trend, which is frightening. At one stage I’m doing Saturday Night Fever dance steps with Shaheen. It’s like I’m high on Jimmy Hailler’s joint without having smoked it. As usual, there’s heaps of drinking, and combined with junk food, my stomach feels like it’s going to revolt. But it’s fun, and Mia being sick belongs to another world.

I finish dancing and I see Will Trombal looking at me. He’s indulged in the hair gel, and in surf-shop streetwear he looks impressive. But it’s the look in his eyes that I can’t help responding to, and I think to myself, forget the girlfriend. Just go for it. And I want to. But his girlfriend is there, a smiler, not a gri

Later on, I get some air. Jimmy is playing knuckle thumping with some guy, and they’re both killing themselves laughing because they keep on missing.

I sense someone beside me and I know it’s Will Trombal. We look at each other and don’t say a word for a moment or two.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Do I not look okay?”

“You look great.”

We do the nodding thing, but I don’t look away. I think our fingers even brush up against each other. Something light and static.

“Is that your girlfriend with you?”

He nods. “Veronica.”

Thomas Mackee sticks his head between us and makes kissing sounds, just as Justine comes outside and pulls me away.

“It’s Siobhan,” she says, somewhat distressed.

I follow her into the house and I see Tara standing in front of a door, her arms folded, a don’t-mess-with-me look on her face.

I go into the room and come face-to-face with this guy called Tim Lang. Siobhan’s bad taste in guys never ceases to amaze me. For a moment, I don’t let him pass. I just stare at him, and then he pushes past me.

“Lesbians,” he says snidely to Tara.

“Oh, very original,” Tara says.

Siobhan is sitting on a bed, half-naked, crying hysterically, mascara ru

I bend down to button up her shirt, a bit embarrassed because it’s not as if I’ve ever seen her half-naked.

She slaps my hand away.

I pull her into the adjoining bathroom and stick her face into the sink, and she fights me hard. There are mascara streaks all down her face. Outside, I hear “Endless Love” and I think of Will Trombal dancing with his girlfriend.

I dunk her face in the water again.

“If your father sees you like this, he’ll kill you.”

“What do you care? What do you care about anything?”

She makes a retching sound that I’ve become very familiar with, and I pull her toward the toilet, where she vomits. I find it hard not to vomit myself, but she’s crying and I hold her forehead the way Mia used to hold mine and I feel so lonely and I want my mother. Suddenly, I’m crying too.

I wipe her face and I finish buttoning up her shirt. She’s looking at me, a little stu

“You used to be my best friend,” she whispers. “Do you remember?”

“I don’t know who I was,” I whisper back.

We walk out of the room calmly. Some of the guys are snickering, but thankfully everyone is belting out “Summer Nights,” outdoing each other as best they can.

Tara is speaking to Ryan Burke and some of the social justice guys.

“We’re going,” I tell her.

I grab Thomas Mackee as we walk out.

“We need your car.”

For a moment he looks torn between his friends and us. Then Tara says, “Thomas, are you with us?”

And for once, he doesn’t say a word.

At midnight, we take turns ru

“It was a crap party anyway,” Thomas says. “Do you want to know my theory?” he rabbits on. “Retro is going to be the downfall of the twenty-first century.”

“What happened in there?” Justine asks me quietly. I think she’s talking about me, rather than Siobhan. I haven’t said a word since the party.

“He called her something she’s not,” I say quietly. It’s the first thing I’ve said since the party. Tara comes back with Siobhan just as I say it and we stand huddled against each other and I feel Siobhan’s hand come across my back. It feels warm.

And in the dark silence it makes me feel strong.

“My mother’s had a nervous breakdown. She’s suffering from depression and she won’t get out of the house. And every day it’s killing us more.”

I can’t believe I’ve said it out loud. The truth doesn’t set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defense-less and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable. But free? I don’t feel free. I feel like shit.

No one says anything. Because there’s nothing really to say.

But then I feel Justine Kalinsky take my hand, and I feel Siobhan’s shock and Tara Finke’s empathy.

“Don’t tell Will Trombal,” Thomas Mackee says. “He’ll probably try and comfort you, and tonight when he was speaking to you, he got a hard-on.”

The others are disgusted, their voices all mingling into one.

“You’re such a dickhead!”

“Why can’t you act human?”

“You are so insensitive.”

“You’ve made her cry, you asshole. She’s shaking.”

But I’m shaking because I’m laughing so much. I’m laughing so much that I have tears streaming down my face and then I’m sobbing until it’s like I’m going to choke and I’m feeling so many things that I don’t think my mind can handle it. I can hardly breathe and it must sound so frightening that Thomas Mackee grabs me and holds me and everyone’s saying, “It’s okay, Francesca, it’s okay, Francesca,” and they’re crying too.

We stay like that for a while. No one tries to analyze it or offer solutions. No one interrupts. Sometimes, momentarily, I’m embarrassed by the whole disclosure, but I realize that I trust these people and I don’t know how or when that happened.

Later on, we walk back to Thomas Mackee’s car and I ask him why he doesn’t drink.

“Because I want to be the first male in the Mackee family to reach forty and still have his liver,” he says bluntly.

In the dark I can’t tell whether he’s serious or not.

I lean against a streetlight and throw up, just near his shoe. He looks down at the ground and then at me.