Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta Read Free Book Online Page A

reckon, Francesca?” Javier asks me. “Do Lebs rule?”
    I look at Shaheen, who’s grinning. I can’t help grinning back. “My school captain last year was a Leb. So I guess she ruled.”
    Shaheen shakes my hand.
    Suddenly I’m a girl with attitude.
    Attitude is everything with these guys. I have no chance of being their goddess because Eva Rodriguez is. She’s upbeat and positive. But somehow I’m allowed to be part of them, based purely on the fact that my grandparents and theirs belong to a minority. I’m back in complacency land and I’m loving it.
    They give me advice. Keep away from the SAS, they tell me. They’re the guys who sit on the quadrangle stairs who have an obsession with the military. On non-uniform days they come to school wearing camouflage.
    The bell rings and Shaheen walks me up to class and we sit together and he gives me a rundown on his hero, Tupac.
    “He’s not really dead,” he tells me.
    I have no idea who he’s talking about, but I find the whole conspiracy theory surrounding a supposedly dead rapper more intriguing than biology.
    And somehow, yet again, I’ve managed to get through another day.
    My dad arrives home and goes straight to their room to see how she is. At the moment, my dad can only be Mia’s husband, not Francesca and Luca’s father.
    Luca looks at me. “Do you think Mummy speaks to Papa at night?”
    I don’t know what to say to him.
    “Because it’s okay if she can’t speak to us, but Papa would be so sad if she didn’t speak to him.”
    “It’s not as if she doesn’t want to speak to us,” I explain.
    “It’s just that Papa likes speaking to Mummy,” he says, almost in tears. “He always wants to speak to her. Sometimes more than he wants to speak to us, so if she doesn’t speak to him . . .”
    Being Mia’s husband has always been my dad’s priority, even at the best of times, so now I feel as if we’re orphans.
    “Do you want to do your homework on my bed?” I ask.
    He nods. I know he’ll fall asleep there and I let him.
    Later, I lie down next to him while he sleeps with Pinocchio snug up against him. Squashed up on the end of the bed, I try to think back to the day before my mum didn’t get out of bed. What was the last thing she said to us? What clues did she leave that we didn’t respond to? We own all this, and while we’re owning this ugly sickness that turns off the lights in a person’s head, those around us who think they know us best observe and comment.
    I start wondering how the rest of the world sees us, and this is what I’m sure of.
    They look at us as if we’re guilty. My dad, Luca, and I have become the villains. I know what they’re thinking. How could someone as lively and passionate as Mia feel this way? It’s her family, they whisper in my head. They’ve sucked the life out of her. All three of them. They see my father for who he is out there in the real world and not the person he is in our home. They see him as the guy who rode around on my Malvern Star bike once and broke his arm, or the husband at Mia’s university dinner parties who doesn’t say much. They don’t know the real him. Mia might be responsible for daily discipline, but if she wants to scare us, it’s my dad who’s in charge. That he doesn’t believe in small talk and won’t say much is because he’s bored by people who talk crap. He can make Mia laugh when she’s in the most stressed of moods. He can fix anything that’s broken in our house and can pull apart a car engine and put it back together again and make it work. That’s what people don’t see, and the fact that he doesn’t care what they think calms me down at the worst of times.
    Then I picture the way they see me. Have you seen the eldest? I can hear them ask. She’s a dead loss. Has no idea what she wants to do with her life. She’s so insipid, she’s almost invisible. Her closest friend’s mother didn’t even know who she was.
    What about the son? He still sleeps