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 and 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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Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools,

visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

First Knopf trade paperback edition May 2006

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-43371-8

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