“If you don’t want me to hang out with potheads, you should have sent me to Pius.”
I feel as if I’m doing Jimmy Hailler a disservice because he’s probably not a pothead, but it’s a way to rile my dad up. I’m not sure why I want to do that, but I just do.
He doesn’t say anything else. Later, I hear him in Luca’s bedroom, doing his quality-time thing. But I know he’s dying to get into that room to be with Mia while we have to watch it all from a distance. And I hate that distance. Because from a distance, Luca and I see it blurred. And blurred, it looks worse than anyone can ever imagine.
chapter 18
THE MORNING BUS trips to school are a combination of Thomas Mackee’s music, Tara Finke’s protest, and Justine’s mooning over Tuba Guy.
Sometimes Thomas Mackee will stick an earphone into my ear and ask me to listen to a song. When I get over the revulsion of putting something in my ear that’s been in his, I sit back and let the music take over, and for a half hour there’s something comforting about someone’s heart beating at the same rhythm as mine.
Other times, I sit back and listen to Tara organize the troops. If it’s not a food drive outside school, where most of the homeless hang out at night, it’s volunteering for a social justice day run by the Education Office or organizing a protest outside a local MP’s office, who she feels is doing nothing about the detainment of refugees.
A stubborn part of me doesn’t want to get involved. Mia spent the last four years asking why I couldn’t be “like that Tara Finke girl.” “Because I want to have friends,” I’d tell her.
“Some of those people won’t even know what the issue’s about,” I say to Tara Finke. “They protest for the sake of protest.”
“That’s a cop-out and you know it,” Tara says.
“Are you denying it?” I ask.
“No. But it’s like the argument ‘don’t donate to third-world countries because the money mightn’t get to them.’ People only say that because it makes them feel better about the fact that they do nothing.”
Thomas Mackee is sitting next to us listening to his Discman. Tara takes one of the earphones out of his ear.
“You’re coming with us,” she says firmly.
“I don’t think so,” he says, knowing exactly what she’s referring to, as if he’s listened to our conversation.
“Don’t pretend for one moment that we haven’t caught on that you’ve got a social conscience,” she accuses.
“Not listening,” he singsongs.
“Yes, you are listening.”
He turns off the Discman, takes out the other earphone, and stares at her coldly. “No, I’m not listening.” He points to himself. “My world.” And then he points to her. “Your world. Different worlds.”
“Where’s your world now, Mackee?” she asks. “Where are they after school when you’re hanging out with us?”
“I don’t hang out with you. I take the bus home with you. Get the difference. I’m not into protesting. I don’t want to save the world. I don’t care about anything, and I don’t care that I don’t care.”
Tara stares at him and then nods. “I’m sorry,” she says honestly.
Thomas Mackee looks surprised for a moment, and then he nods back, as if he accepts the apology.
“It’s a habit of mine to force people into things,” she adds meekly.
“T’sokay.”
Oh God, Thomas Mackee, don’t fall for this.
“You could get into trouble at school, and where would that get you?” she continues. “I mean, you’re thinking of joining a punk band one day, right? And what if they ever found out that you protested about something? It’d ruin your reputation. As a punk artist you need a squeaky-clean image, not a rebellious one.”
He stops nodding when he works out where she’s going with this.
He has that stupid look on his face. His “Huh?” look.
“What are you looking at?” he asks Luca gruffly.
Luca giggles. He has that Year-Five-need-to-get-attention-of-senior-boys thing happening. Sometimes, Thomas Mackee carries Luca to school, holding him upside down by just one leg, and I picture my brother’s head splattered all over Market Street, but I don’t stop him. If Luca is killing himself laughing, I don’t have the heart to stop anything.
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 grinner.
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 running down her face.
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 st
reaks 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 stunned. My eyes feel swollen and my face grimy, and I must look worse than her at the moment.
“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 running around Hyde Park sobering Siobhan up. It’s freezing cold, and those of us who aren’t running are huddled on the grass together, looking at the stars.
“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.
“The guacamole was a mistake,” he says matter-of-factly.
For the second time that night he makes me laugh. “Don’t make me have to like you,” I tell him.
chapter 20
IT’S THE END of the term, and instead of feeling excited, I’m depressed. The thought of two weeks in the house with my mum in the state she’s in is unbearable. Worse still, I’m frightened that any type of progress I’ve made with people at school will be lost over school break. The foundations of our friendships are too weak, and I’m not sure if they will hold.
I ring up my Stella friends, one by one. I haven’t heard from them since the time on the bus with Tina, so I figure it’s about time I made an attempt.
I get invited to a Pius party, but all I want, really, is to see them on their own. The way it used to be.
A part of me itches to ring up Justine Kalinsky and the girls, but I don’t. I’m scared they’ll say “Who?” when I tell them it’s me, and I know they’ll probably have a hundred other things to do. But I have nothing. Just Luca, and even he’s too busy for me.
On the weekend, I have a dress fitting with Angelina and the bridesmaids. One’s her best friend from college, and the other is her cousin Vera from her mother’s side, who my aunt insisted on.
For someone who’s never sewn in her life, Angelina has done a brilliant job. She’s got enough taste to be able to pull off something extraordinary, but the dresses are low-cut and I can’t help looking down at my cleavage at least every five seconds.
“You look great,” Angelina reassures me. “Just don’t think about it.”
“It’s in my face, Angelina. I don’t have a choice.”
“You should be proud of it. You could be like Vera, who has nothing.”
Vera is obsessed with dieting and the gym and has lost any body fat she ever possessed.
“Thanks, Angelina,” Vera says dryly, adjusting her push-up bra.
Later on, Angelina and the bridesmaids take me up to Haberfield for coffee and ricotta cannoli.
“How’s Mia?” she asks.
I shrug.
“Don’t let her get comfortable with this, Francesca,” Vera says, as if the whole world knows about it. “Robert’s a good-looking guy and he’ll get sick of—”
“Vera, shut up,” Angelina tells her.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“She means she’s an idiot and she doesn’t know Uncle Robert.”
“Men don’t hang around depressed women forever. They get sick of it. They need to have sex,” Vera continues.
Angelina stands up and takes me by the arm.
“I’m going outside for a ciggy.”
My head is spinning.
“She’s an ignoramus, like everyone on my mother’s side of the family,” she tells me outside.
“Are people saying that my father is going to leave my mother?”
“They’re jealous, so they’re going to go around putting the malocchio on it,” she says, referring to the evil eye.
“Just say my mum stays like this forever? Like Zia Annunziata in Sicily, who hasn’t said a word for forty-five years.”
“Says who? Nonna? Would you speak to Nonna if she nicked off with your fiancé?”
“Nonno was engaged to Annunziata?”
“Uh-huh. And the flirty younger sister, Nonna, stows away on the boat with him coming out here. He was supposed to bring Zia over when he arrived, but then he had to marry Nonna.”
“Wow.”
“Plus she nicked off with Zia’s S biscuit recipe.”
“Oh my God!”
Angelina nods.
“That town in Sicily was like Melrose Place and Nonn
a was Heather Locklear.”
She puts out the cigarette. “Don’t listen to Vera. She’s got as much intelligence as those dumbbells she holds on her power walks.”
“I just want it to go back to the way it was.”
“It’ll never go back to the way it was, Frankie. But you have to make sure it goes forward.”
She drops me off and I go straight to my mum’s room. My dad’s in there with her, holding her. She’s asleep and he’s kissing her cheek.
“She doesn’t want to have sex!” I yell. “She’s sick.”
He looks at me in shock.
“Frankie, what’s got into you?”
I storm into my room and slam the door, furious at him for allowing people to make up rumors. I ring up Michaela from Stella’s and I ask her if she’d like to do something. I try to remember what made our relationship work in the past. Was it because she had a sense of humor and treated me well? And if it was because of that, why did I feel so grateful that people treated me well?
But Michaela can’t do anything tonight. She’s having a sleepover at Natalia’s. I want to invite myself over, but I keep on thinking she’ll invite me instead.
But she doesn’t.
So I ring Justine Kalinsky and I say, “It’s Francesca Spinelli,” and she says, “Francesca, you’ve got to stop using last names. How are you doing?” and I say, “I feel like shit,” and I don’t know how it happens, but by eight o’clock that night I’m lying next to her on the couch with Siobhan and Tara and we’re eating junk food and watching a Keanu movie.
And I want to stay on that couch for the rest of my life.
chapter 21
WE START TERM three with a House meeting, and I get to look at Will Trombal for a whole twenty minutes while he speaks. He is a man of minimal words, Will is. His stares are long, his pauses never-ending, and he always thinks before he speaks. He has a quiet confidence devoid of the ego, and earnestness and sincerity I find confronting to witness. When the meeting is over, as I’m jostling out of the foyer, I feel someone grab my arm from behind and he’s there, facing me, an irritated look on his face.
“What?” he says.
We’re pushed and shoved, but I don’t mind the contact.