Nonna and Angelina’s mother make me try on fourteen dresses. Angelina sits on the other side of the room, shaking her head, mouthing obscenities. The dresses are hideous, and Angelina’s wedding is in danger of being hijacked by two very angry women who are only united by their obsession with bright-colored taffeta.
I’m a rag doll, pulled at from each side. The moronic shop assistant tells me I look beautiful, and in the distance, I can see that Angelina has had enough. When they make me try on something that’s lilac, with boning in the bodice and something called a sweet-heart neckline, she lifts herself from the chair and makes her way toward us.
“Get dressed, Frankie. I’m making the dresses.”
“You can’t sew,” her mother says.
“I’ll teach myself.”
I put on my jeans and throw the dress at the shop assistant. Angelina takes my hand and we make a run for it.
Later on, we’re sitting in a café. She’s just smoked her fifth cigarette in an hour.
“Those things are going to kill you.”
“My mother will beat them to it, so I may as well enjoy another one.”
I try to smile, but I can’t.
“Luca reckons that everyone’s saying that my mum’s had a nervous breakdown as opposed to a ‘bit of a breakdown.’ ”
She looks at me, and I can see there are tears in her eyes. Mia’s always been her idol. The number of times Angelina ran away from home when she was a teenager and came and stayed with us are countless.
“They’re just words,” she says. “People use them to try to explain things they don’t understand.”
“What would you call it?”
I’m about to hear the truth, because Angelina doesn’t lie, and after I hear this truth I won’t be able to lie either, and that frightens me to death.
“It’s depression, Frankie.”
“I don’t understand. Sad people with sad lives are depressed. Mia’s not one of them.”
Angelina takes hold of my hand.
“I think everything’s just shut down on her. Maybe for one reason or maybe for a thousand. It’s kind of like a grief, and it’s not a puzzle that you’re supposed to work out on your own, Frankie. But I’ll tell you this. Mia is not going to get better being looked after by her mother. You have to find a way of getting back home. For you and Robert and Luca and Mia to get back together—and then you start from there.”
“But I don’t know how,” I whisper, trying not to cry. “I just want to go home and I don’t know how.”
“Then find a way,” she says firmly. “I love Nonna and I love the aunties, but don’t let them own this. Don’t let Mia wake up from this nightmare and find you guys in pieces. It’ll kill her more than anything else.”
I see Nonna Anna and Angelina’s mum coming toward us. I picture a world of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and no Buffy.
I need to find a way home.
chapter 12
I’VE BEEN AT my nonna’s for two weeks and nothing has changed at home. Actually, I think it’s worse, but the first casualty of all this is truth.
My dad rings me one morning and tells me to contact Mia’s university and ask for the rest of the term off.
“I thought you said she was out of bed,” I say almost accusingly, as if my dad’s lying.
“She is, but she’s not ready to go back. Just ring them and we’ll talk about it later.”
“Why can’t you ring them?”
“Because I’d like you to.”
“Papa, they’ve got degrees, not machetes.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He sounds harassed. With me. Am I the one who’s locked herself in the house? Since when do I have to fix things around here?
“We can’t keep on telling people that Mummy has the flu.”
“Then tell them the truth, Frankie.”
The truth? I haven’t said the truth out loud yet, and I don’t know how to go about doing this. I’m in Year Eleven. I’m sixteen years old. I don’t want to call up my mother’s boss and tell her she’s not coming in for the rest of the term. I don’t want to use any of the terminology out loud. I’ll say it one thousand times to myself, but I can’t say it out loud, because if I do, it means it’s real. Nervous breakdown. Depression. Nervous breakdown. Depression. Such overused words until it actually happens. How many times has Mia said, “I’m having a nervous breakdown, kids”? How many times have I said I’m depressed? Too many times to count. Nothing close to the reality of it at all.
The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, “We’re pregnant.” I want to go around the neighborhood saying, “We’re depressed.” If my mum can’t get out of bed in the morning, all of us feel the same. Her silence has become ours, and it’s eating us alive.
I want to stay in bed for the day and not go to school, but I can’t bear the idea of Luca being there alone. So I turn up for second-period English. My teacher, Brother Louis, has set us some study questions based on Henry IV, and we work on our own. I hold my pen in my hand, but I don’t do the work. I haven’t slept all week and I can’t even see straight.
Brother Louis stands by my desk and looks over my shoulder. He’s in his sixties and knows every text we’re studying inside out. I’ve never met anyone who knows so much about literature. I’m not used to Brothers. At Stella’s we didn’t even have nuns. But he’s the kindest man I’ve ever met, and he’s the only person I do homework for because I couldn’t bear it if he was disappointed in me.
“Would you like to go to sick bay?” he asks quietly.
I shake my head.
“Then go to Ms. Quinn’s office,” he suggests gently.
I collect my books and walk out, and I’m so tired that I feel weepy.
Ms. Quinn is on the phone and beckons me in. I don’t know what I’m going to say to her. Brother sent me down because I looked sad?
“Do you want to go to the counselor?” she asks gently. It’s as if she knows what’s going on and I don’t know how, because I couldn’t imagine my father ringing up the school and revealing anything. Then I realize it’s because of Luca.
“Is my brother okay?”
“I haven’t seen your brother. Do you want me to?”
“No.”
“Will said you were a bit down.”
Oh God. Will Trombal thinks I’m a charity case.
“Can I just lie down?”
“I think the counselor—”
“Please, Ms. Quinn. I’m just tired and I want to lie down and not have to talk.”
And that’s how I spend my day. Sleeping in Ms. Quinn’s office. I think, wouldn’t it be great if I could open my eyes and it’s six months down the track and everything’s back to normal?
But when I open my eyes, it’s one day down the track, and for the time being, that seems to be enough.
During a House meeting the next day, when Will Trombal stands in front of us talking, I’m all ears. Whether it has to do with the night at my nonna’s or whatever he told Ms. Quinn, I just can’t be indifferent anymore. I so don’t want to be attracted to him, and the fact that I am surprises me. Sometimes when I get home, I convince myself that I’m just romanticizing anyone who’s actually spoken to me, but then I see him the next day and my heart starts beating fast and I can’t really kid myself. It’s not as if he’s good-looking, because he’s not. Sometimes he’s so plain that he looks bland. But it’s his voice and his mannerisms that fill him with some kind of color. I listen to his voice and its resonance hooks me in. The worry lines on his forehead, his expression when he twists his face into a smile, and the way his whole face lights up when he laughs those short bursts of laughter. When he looks at me, he must see an annoyed look on my face because I get the same annoyed look back. That’s how I feel. Annoyed that I like him.
When he finishes speaking, Ms. Quinn gets up and gives us a rundown on admini
strative stuff, and I look over at him and he’s looking back. Tara Finke, as usual, is nudging me and muttering comments under her breath. But I don’t react. I just keep staring and so does he, until the bell rings and we all file out.
chapter 13
A GUY IN Year Twelve has a party and invites all the girls in Year Eleven. No one in our group of four mentions it until the very last minute.
“I don’t think I’ll go,” I murmur to Siobhan when she asks.
“Why not? It’s two guys to every girl.”
Wow! Two Sebastian guys. Dream come true!
“It’d be good to make an effort,” Justine says.
“Maybe,” I say with a shrug.
“How would you get there?” Siobhan asks me.
I shrug again. “Probably my father. You?”
“Obviously not my father. He’d probably insist on coming in and giving everyone a Breathalyzer.”
Siobhan’s father’s a cop. He runs the station over at Marrickville and puts the fear of God into those who work under him, especially his family. He liked me in Year Seven. “Make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid,” he’d tell me. I never liked that about him. Just that certainty he had that Siobhan was always going to do something wrong.
Siobhan gets wasted at parties. It was always the thing you heard about her in Year Ten. She’s the type that constantly imagines herself in love with some loser and then she ends up getting shit-faced and crying in the toilet.
When I think about it, my mother was never threatened by Siobhan Sullivan’s reputation.
“People with lost personalities will suffer a great deal more than those with lost virginities,” she told me one afternoon after Siobhan was suspended from St. Stella’s for cutting school in Year Ten and going to the beach with a couple of the St. Paul’s guys.
“So you’re telling me to go out there and be a slut?”
She looked up from her marking. “Firstly, I’m not telling you to go out there and lose your virginity. I trust that you’re not going to do it just because you’re hanging out with the Siobhan Sullivans of the world. And secondly, losing your virginity doesn’t make you a slut. I slept with your father when I was your age. . . .”
“Mia,” my father roared from the other room.
“What? So we’re going to lie to her now?” she shouted back.
He walked in. “What if your mother finds out? Or my mother?”
“Robert, it was twenty years ago. I don’t think there’s much they can do.”
He looked at me, pointing a finger. “No sex for you.” He used the Soup Nazi’s accent from Seinfeld.
“Stop treating this like a joke,” Mia said, irritated.
“You think Frankie having sex is a joke to me?”
“I don’t want her to have sex, Rob. I want her to stop hanging around people like Michaela and Natalia, who suck the life out of who she is.”
The people I’m stuck with in my life now aren’t sucking the life out of me, they just suck. That’s what I’d like to say to her.
“I’m not going,” Tara says, referring to the party. “I’ve got better things to do.”
“You wish,” Siobhan mutters.
“I think we should make an attempt,” Justine Kalinsky says. “I’ve got a piano accordion recital, but it’ll be over by eight.”
“Don’t say that too loud,” Siobhan tells her.
“Making fun of the piano accordion thing is a bit passé now, Siobhan,” Tara Finke tells her.
“So are you, Tara.”
Oh, what a united group we are!
“I’ll pick you up, but after that you’re on your own,” I tell Siobhan. “I’m not spending the night looking for you.”
By the time we arrive, everyone is paralytic. Even Will Trombal.
The guy throwing the party is handing out vodka Jell-O shots, and after a couple the sensation is strange.
On the dance floor, Eva Rodriguez is surrounded by a bunch of guys. Her parents are from the Philippines, with the usual Spanish-and-Filipino mix of caramelized skin and almond-shaped eyes. Most of the guys think she’s gorgeous, but the Filipino guys adore her. I watch them move. Their bodies are like liquid as they dance. When they walk, dance, play basketball, they all seem to glide to a tempo that the rest of us can’t hear or respond to.
Will Trombal sees me from the other side of the room and he grins and he makes a beeline for me and my mind is buzzing with the best opening.
Hi.
Hey.
How’s it going?
Great party.
Love your shirt.
Great music.
Crap music.
And he’s coming closer and closer and the way he’s looking at me makes me think that I’m going to have the most romantic night in the history of my life. I open my mouth to say something and he sticks his tongue down my throat.
We’re in a corner, pashing, and I don’t even know what’s got me to this point. A look in the corridor? A flirt outside my nonna’s house? All I know is that no one exists around us. I don’t know whether we’re kissing for five minutes or five hours and my mouth feels bruised, but I can’t let go. Because it feels so good to be held by someone other than Luca. Will’s arms tremble as they hold me and his heart beats hard against me and I know that whatever I’m feeling is mutual. For a moment I taste the alcohol on his breath, and it brings me back to reality.
“Do that sober and I’ll be impressed,” I say before walking away.
Justine Kalinsky is a wallflower all night. I can tell she’s itching to dance, but she just stands there and there’s a worried, pinched look on her face.
“Siobhan’s gone into the bedroom with that Year Twelve guy who’s in charge of the microphones, you know, at assembly,” she tells me. “They’re really drunk.”
“Siobhan’s a big girl.”
“With bad taste in guys.”
“Not our problem.”
Over the weekend, I think of Will one thousand times a day. I think, what if he doesn’t speak to me on Monday? What if he doesn’t ask me out? What if my heart beats at this rate for the rest of my life until he does? Why isn’t he ringing? He knows I’m at my nonna’s place. His nonna would have the phone number.
Oh, ring, ring, why doesn’t he give me a call?
And then it hits me. I’m going to ask him out. Except I’ve never asked a guy out before. Should I wait for him to ring me? He’s made it obvious that he’s interested, even if he was drunk, so why wouldn’t he ring? You don’t kiss me the way he kissed me and not mean business. Do guys shake like that with every kiss? I change my mind one hundred times in a minute. Michaela would wait. Natalia would say, “Let him ring you.” But I feel as if I’ve spent my life waiting. For phone calls from my Stella friends. For Mia to be okay. For someone else to decide that it’s right for Luca and me to go home.
I’m going to ask Will Trombal out! And for the first time in a month, I can see beyond the next five minutes and what I see doesn’t seem so bad.
There’s a lot of awkwardness on Monday. Not a lot of eye contact between the sexes. There’s a bit of snickering as Siobhan walks by, and Tara looks from the snickerers to Siobhan.
“I’m not going to ask,” Tara says.
I’m sitting on my desk, working out my strategy, when Justine Kalinsky approaches us. She has the most distressed look on her face.
“You’re going to be devastated,” she says.
“About?”
“I don’t know if I can tell you.”
“Then why bring it up?” Tara Finke asks.
“It’s not as if I wanted to overhear it.”
“She pashed Will Trombal. And the whole world’s talking about it, right?” Siobhan mocks.
“Not even remotely devastating,” I say.
“It’s much worse than that.”
“Can you stop being so dramatic? I don’t do devastation,” I tell her.
“Will Trombal has a girlfriend.”
Oh
my God, I am so devastated.
“I think she’s devastated.”
I try to shake my head. “I’m not. . . .”
“Yes you are.”
I don’t want to look at them. I don’t want to see the I-told-you-so on Tara Finke’s face or the you-sucker on Siobhan Sullivan’s or the pity on Justine Kalinsky’s.
I feel as if my throat is made out of cardboard, and all of a sudden kissing Will Trombal is the most embarrassing thing in the world. I feel like Adam and Eve when God points out to them that they’re naked.
I feel tears well in my eyes and I can’t even stop them from happening. I can’t stop anything from happening in my life. I just want to get through the day, the week, the year, without ever having to see Will Trombal again.
During period five, I’m in class, not listening, looking out the window into the quadrangle, and I see Luca, his head down, walking toward the toilets. I ask to be excused and I wait for him outside and then we find a place, any place, for some kind of time together. Time that’s been taken away from us by everyone. We find a corner in the library and we hold on to each other tight and he begins to cry. I feel the sobs racking his body before I hear them. I can cope with my misery, but not Luca’s. His pain makes me ache, and I’m crying so much that my whole body is hurting.
“Don’t be sad, Luca. Please don’t be sad.”
And I don’t know why I’m saying something so foolishly simple. Don’t be sad.
Worse still, I realize we’re not alone. Thomas Mackee is standing there, staring as if he’s come across some alien life forms. He nods in acknowledgment and I nod back. And then he’s gone with the secrets of my family’s misery locked in his brain, and I wonder when he’ll use them as part of his arsenal, part of his repertoire of mockery.
“You know what I think?” Tara Finke says on the bus home. She’s the first to say anything to me after I’ve done a literal rendition of the sound of silence all day.
Don’t say it, I want to scream at her. Don’t say anything. Mind your own business, you loser. Don’t intellectualize my misery . Tara Finke knows nothing but words that mean nothing when your insides are in pieces.