Saving Francesca

“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. Qui

“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 i

I get off at my usual stop on Parramatta Road and walk down Johnston Street. Sometimes A

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 Suza

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, No

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 a

I’ve heard Mia talk to them about me. “She’s going through that adolescent alien stage,” she told them once. “Where she has to pretend she’s something she’s not.”

As opposed to being who she thinks I am, or should be. Maybe another Tara Finke. That’d make me popular.

Today I want them to wave, just to reassure me that everything is normal. But their happiness makes me angry. So I just go inside, praying that Mia is marking assignments, or cooking di

But God’s not listening.

It’s been six days.

The door’s still closed.

chapter 5

THE BASKETBALL GAME draws a lunchtime crowd in the gym. Not just the basket ballers, but most of the girls and half of the guys. The boys’ team is made up of Year Eleven and Twelve boys, and I notice that William Trombal is one of them, but thankfully not Thomas Mackee, who is too busy eating a meat pie illegally in the back row. Once in a while he gives a war cry and meat pie goes everywhere.