“Will,” I interrupt. “Do I need to hear the ‘sex would be nice’ stuff? I had a bit of a mini-breakdown yesterday and you’re not cheering me up.”
“Yes you do, because breaking up with her was so easy and breaking up with you would be like, I don’t even want to think about it.”
“We haven’t even started going out together and you’re thinking of breaking up.”
“But that’s it. When I think of you, I think of future stuff. I think of this is it and I’m not supposed to think this is it at my age. I don’t look at you and think nice. I look at you and think, oh my God, I want to hold her and never let her go. I think, sex—right here, right now—”
“Frankie!”
My dad is behind us and Will swings around in shock, instantly getting onto his feet and staring up at my father, who is glaring.
“We’ll be leaving in five minutes,” he says, eyeing Will.
“Papa, this is Will.”
My father nods, taking in every detail, and then he goes inside.
Will sits down, stunned.
“He heard the sex bit.”
“If you said the word ‘sex’ to me and I was standing a thousand miles away from him, he’d hear it.”
I laugh, because I can’t help it. I can’t believe I’m talking about having sex, and I know this sounds slack, but I just love it when Will’s all confused and rambling.
“Am I making sense?” he asks.
“Weirdly enough, yes.”
“Last year on Reflection Day we had to write down what our foundations were and whether we thought they were strong enough to get us through unfamiliar territory, and I thought, shit no. Go overseas and have my whole world back here change? No way. I didn’t even know who I was here, so what made me think that I’d know who I was over there?
“But we had to do the list again this year, so I went for it. I didn’t put down Sebastian’s, because school’s not going to be there next year, nor is being a prefect or choirboy or rugby loser or anything else. And that freaked me out, because I wondered, what am I if I’m not all those things? But I stuck to three truths. The first is that my family loves me. It’s unconditional, and I know this because of the way they’ve dealt with things in my older brothers’ lives that they don’t believe in but support. Secondly is that I’m good at building things, and thirdly is how I feel about you, but more than anything how I feel about me because of you.
“Sometimes you look at me and it’s like all the bullshit gets stripped off and I’m left with what’s underneath and I kind of like what I see. Someone who actually fails. Someone who has absolutely no self-control. Someone who says real dickhead things like ‘this is complicated.’ I like that part of me, you know. I like the fact that I know I can’t control you or how I feel about you and that doesn’t freak me out.”
“I love it when you’re demented like this.”
He’s unstoppable. “But sometimes I get terrified and think that everything may change and I won’t know where to fit in when I get back, after I’ve spent a whole lifetime fitting in. Or what if that dickhead Mackee and that psycho Hailler grow a brain and you start finding yourself attracted to them, if you aren’t already?”
“If you stay behind, the whole change thing might happen anyway,” I tell him. “The not-fitting-in stuff. Certainly not the part about me being attracted to Thomas and Jimmy.”
He kisses me softly and just stares. I get a bit embarrassed because it’s so intense.
“What are you looking at?” I ask.
“Why, I’m looking at you, miss.”
Oh my God. He’s quoting a romantic scene out of The Last of the Mohicans.
“I thought you only watched it for the massacres,” I say, grinning.
“I watched it again. Although you can’t go past that last scene when he guts that guy.”
“Oh, I think I can.”
We laugh for a moment.
“Thank God for e-mail, right?” he says. “It’s not that far when you think about it.”
I shake my head.
“Write me letters, Will. Write me long letters.”
I feel sad. No matter what he’s said, I still feel sad and I want to cry because I’m losing him at a time that I’ve actually found him.
“If I asked you to stay, would you?” I ask later as we’re standing by his car.
“Maybe I would, but I don’t think you’d ask me. But I swear to God that I’ll be on the first plane back if you ever need saving from anything. . . .”
I shake my head again.
“You go and shake your foundations, Will. I think it’s about time I saved myself.”
chapter 34
IT’S ALMOST THE end of term three and the Year Twelves are on their way out. I can’t believe that my senior year is about to begin, but I’m looking forward to it, despite Will going and even with my mum the way she is. I stand talking to Will and without thinking, we’re holding hands. Mr. Brolin approaches us and puts us on detention for breaking the “hands-off” policy, and while he’s writing in our diaries, we’re killing ourselves laughing, which makes him angrier.
Later, I’m standing in the middle of the courtyard, just watching everyone.
I love this school. I love how uncomplicated it is and the fact that we come from almost two hundred suburbs, so we have to work hard at finding something to hold us together. There’s not a common culture or social group. There’s a whole lot of individuality, where it doesn’t matter that we’re not all going to be heart surgeons and it doesn’t matter whether you sing in a choir, or play a piano accordion, or lose dismally at rugby league, or are victorious in basketball. I remember a poem we’re studying. I think it’s Bruce Dawe. About constants in a world of variables. That’s what this place is, I guess. And it might be mundane, but I think I need the constant rather than the variable at the moment.
“A good day or a shocker?” Mr. Ortley joins me.
“A good one. There’ve been a few in a row now.”
“The music department is going to do a musical next year,” he tells me, rolling his eyes like I would.
Justine is running toward me, and I can tell by the look on her face that she’s found out about the musical, too.
I sigh, shaking my head. “I have to give Justine a lesson in holding back,” I tell him. “She’s just way too enthusiastic.”
She grabs my arms in excitement.
“We’re doing Les Mis.”
I scream hysterically, clutching her as we jump up and down.
Siobhan and Tara walk toward us. “You guys are so uncool. I don’t know why we hang out with you,” Siobhan says.
Justine and I do a medley of songs for them, and then we listen to Tara explain the conspiracy theory behind her being elected one of next year’s leaders.
“They want to control me,” she tells us.
Siobhan looks at me over Tara’s head and I can’t help laughing.
“How will Thomas feel about that?” I ask.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I shrug. “That night for my birthday, I thought I saw something happening between you two.”
Siobhan looks at Tara, stunned.
“No way,” Siobhan says, mouth gaping open.
“Can I remind everyone that a day after that event Francesca schized out, so let’s presume she was imagining things.”
“But your face is red at the moment,” Justine says.
“I’m not having this discussion. Thomas Mackee is the last bastion of arrested development and hormonal retardation.”
“Sometimes he can be really deep,” Justine says.
Thomas bulldozes past and grabs Tara under his arm and drags her away, almost hanging upside down.
“Tom!” she snaps.
She disentangles herself and walks back to us, trying to fix up her uniform.
“Shut up,” she says at the faces we’re making.
And then I stop.
I stop laughing an
d I stop walking. My heart is in my mouth and somehow I’m crying and I just can’t hold back.
“Francesca?” They hover around me. “What is it?” they ask, clutching at my arm. People grab me. Justine is distressed. Will’s there and Thomas is there and Eva Rodriguez and Jimmy.
I pull myself together and take a deep breath.
“My mum’s here,” I whisper to them, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “My mum’s here to pick me up.”
A guy walks by us and I can tell he’s overheard me. “I don’t understand girls,” he tells his friends. “They have to get emotional about everything.”
I’m crying and laughing at the same time, and the next minute Luca is flying past me.
“Come on, Francesca. What are you waiting for?” he shouts, almost jumping the fence.
She looks pale, but she manages to smile and tries hard to make conversation. Luca and I fill in the spaces but sometimes I think there are just too many to fill, and I can see the way she looks at her surroundings as we drive through the suburbs. Like she’s been gone for a long time and doesn’t know how to get back. When we get home, the people across the road wave, and I wave back.
And that night we lie on my parents’ bed and my dad’s snoring and I’m telling my mum about the Tara conspiracy and at the same time Luca is telling her about the trip they’re taking to Canberra next term and I tell him that I started my story first and to wait and he says that he has to go to bed earlier so he should finish his first and my dad wakes up for a moment and bellows, “Go to bed,” and then there’s silence and the snoring begins again and we start speaking again and my mother says, “What is this, Grand Central Station?”
chapter 35
THIS MORNING, MY mother got out of bed.
She’s not up to a pep talk, but the day began with a song at 6:45. Today it was Natalie Merchant’s “Kind and Generous.” When I questioned her choice, she said it was random, but I know that it was a subliminal way of telling us how she felt.
One thousand questions went through my mind. Just say I got home this afternoon and nothing’d changed? Just say this was one good day out of a thousand bad ones? Just say Luca and my dad and I weren’t enough to keep those black days away?
I brushed my teeth and on the mirror in front of me there was one of those motivational messages.
Do something that scares you every day.
I looked at it for a long time.
And for the first time all year I went to school with hope in my heart.
about the author
MELINA MARCHETTA’S first novel, Looking for Alibrandi, swept the pool of Australian literary awards for young adult fiction in 1993, winning the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award (Older Readers), the Multicultural Book of the Year Award, the Kids Own Australian Literature Award, and the Variety Club Young People’s category of the 3M Talking Book of the Year Award. It was also highly commended in the New South Wales Family Therapy Award and in 1996 was short-listed for the prestigious German Prize for Youth Literature. More recently, it won the 2000 Fairlight Talking Book Award for the most outstanding young people’s audiobook in the past ten years.
Looking for Alibrandi was released as a major Australian film in 2000, and the screenplay, written by Melina, won an AFI Award as well as the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award and the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award.
Melina lives in Sydney, where she is a teacher. Saving Francesca is her second novel.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Melina Marchetta
KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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First Knopf trade paperback edition May 2006
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eISBN: 978-0-307-43371-8
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Melina Marchetta, Saving Francesca
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