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  “Who told you that?”

  “Signora Formosa saw you. She said you and your friends almost ran her over. She told Zia Patrizia’s next-door neighbor and it got back to Nonna.”

  The telephone company would go broke if it weren’t for the Italians.

  “She’s exaggerating. We’d just come from the beach and Sera was driving us home.”

  “How many times have I told you that I don’t want you riding around in Sera’s car?”

  “The same number of times that Nonna has told you to tell me that.”

  “Don’t answer back, and clear the table,” she snapped. “Now. This very minute. This very second.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mean in an hour?”

  “Josephine, you are not too old to be slapped.”

  It mostly ends up that way in the afternoons. My grandmother’s meddling could put Mother Teresa in a bad mood. As much as Mama says that she doesn’t care what Nonna says, she takes every word to heart.

  I don’t exactly help out much, but sometimes I do decide to start anew and do the right thing with her. Though just when I want to sit down and have my time with Mama, she’ll be too tired or she’ll want to go to bed or, worse still, she’ll want to spring-clean the house. Sometimes I wonder if my mother loves housework more than me.

  “Don’t open that cupboard,” I said, too late. Tea bags, onions and potatoes came tumbling out.

  So we’ve got a tiny kitchenette. Is it my fault?

  We were pretty quiet as we ate that night. I could hear the guys downstairs playing some crazy music and the cicadas outside. I desperately wanted to open a window because it was sweltering inside, but there’s always the threat of a cockroach or some horrific insect flying in, and until we buy screens we can’t really have the windows open at night.

  I didn’t feel like eating. It was too hot for baked potatoes.

  While we were sitting there I felt Mama looking at me again.

  “What are you looking at, Ma?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What else did Nonna have to say?”

  “She . . . she had guests.”

  I eyed her for a while before I picked up a bread-roll and toyed with it.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  I shrugged, rolling my eyes. “Reasonable. Father Stephen came in for religion class. The attention span was unbelievable. If he was a teacher he could do heaps for HSC results. Pity he’s a priest.”

  “He’d probably make a horrible husband.”

  “Well, he decided to ask questions. Picked on me, of course, because he sees me at church. He wanted to know what we think of when we come back from communion and kneel down. Like do we pray or what. I told him that I check out any good-looking guys in church.”

  “You did not?” she asked, horrified, looking up at me.

  “Did so. He laughed. Sister told me I was a pagan.”

  “Oh, Jose. Couldn’t you just have lied and told him you pray for your poor mother, or something?”

  “Lie to a priest. Sure, Mum.”

  She grabbed the bread-roll from me and I watched her butter it, noticing her hands trembling.

  “Something’s worrying you. I can tell.”

  “I’m getting old.” She shrugged dramatically.

  “You only say that to cover some horrible truth,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “And truly.”

  She leaned forward and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.

  “How would you like to go away for Easter? Just the two of us. Cairns or someplace.”

  I don’t know why I got scared then. Something had to be wrong for her to suggest that. I had begged for a holiday for years. There had always been some excuse.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere at all for Easter,” I shouted at her.

  “Why are you shouting?”

  “Because.”

  “Great defense. I can see you in a courtroom one day, Jose,” she laughed. “I thought you’d want to go on holidays. Remember how you used to go on about trips when you were young?”

  “I’ve got homework to do,” I said, picking up my books.

  As I lay in bed that night, I tried to keep the worries about Mama at the back of my mind. I knew something was bothering her. She seemed upset and preoccupied. We’re pretty good that way. We tune into each other very well. Maybe because it’s always just been the two of us.

  Just lying there gave me an uneasy feeling. Nighttime scares me. I hate the complete silence of it, especially when I can’t sleep. I feel as if everyone could be dead and I would never find out until morning. When I was young I would stand by my mother’s door to make sure she was breathing. Sometimes now I pretend to get a glass of water and do the same.

  The worst thought struck me as I lay awake.

  I leapt out of bed and ran to her room, yanking open the door.

  “It’s cancer, isn’t it?”

  “What?” she asked, sitting up in bed.

  “Don’t hide it from me, Mama. I’ll be strong for you.”

  I burst out crying then. I didn’t know what I would do without her.

  “Come here, you silly girl. I have not got cancer and I’m not dying,” she said.

  I threw myself on her bed and lay beside her.

  “Where do you get these silly ideas from?” she asked, kissing my brow.

  “Holidays at Easter.”

  “Whatever happened to those great speeches after watching Lost in Space? If Will Robinson’s father could take him to space, I could take you on a short holiday.”

  “I was young and foolish then. Anyway, his dumb father never did find Alpha Centauri and they’re still floating around because they can’t find Earth.”

  “Well, I do not have cancer.”

  “You’ve been staring all evening and your attitude has been weird. It’s something terrible, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged and looked away and then glanced up at me again with a sigh.

  “Your grandmother went to the Fiorentino wedding.”

  “Yeah, I heard the bride wore a pink dress and now everyone is going on about how she wasn’t a virgin.”

  She laughed and then sobered up quickly.

  “The groom’s cousin is Michael Andretti. He and his sister’s family were at your grandmother’s.”

  I was shocked. Dumbfounded. My mother had told me about him once and once only. I’d never heard his name mentioned since. Just “your father” or “he.”

  But for her to actually see him and worse, for him to actually exist, was mind-boggling. Sometimes I think he is a myth. My mother told absolutely nobody except me. As far as the world is concerned, Michael Andretti was just the guy next door.

  But for him to be a myth means that I’m a figment of the imagination.

  I touched Mama’s hand.

  “How did it feel? To see him, I mean. Did you hate him? Love him? Anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No . . . that’s a lie.” She sighed, lying on her back and looking at the ceiling. “I did hate him sometimes. When he was in Adelaide I could forget he existed. But now . . . can you believe it, Josie? He’s going to live in Sydney for a year. To work in some law chamber here. MacMichael and Sons, I think. Your socialite grandmother will make sure we see plenty of him. She’ll be his surrogate mother.”

  “But we can handle it, Ma,” I said, shaking her. “There’s no big deal.”

  “Josephine, you can’t handle it. You think you can, but I know you.”

  “That’s bull,” I exploded angrily. “I don’t care about him. I wouldn’t care if he was sitting in this room with us now. I’d look straight through him.”

  “He asked me how life was. When we were alone he even told me he had no regrets.”

  “What did you say?”

  She turned to me and smiled. My worry lifted then. My mother may look like a delicate soft, woman, but the strength in her eyes is such a comfort t
o me when I’m scared. She would never ever fall to pieces on me.

  “I said I had no regrets either.”

  “Did he ask if you were married?”

  “He asked if I had a family. I said yes.” She laughed bitterly. “His sister said that Michael is great with her kids. He loves kids, she said. He’d love to have some of his very own. I wanted to spit in his face.”

  “Spitting? Very impressive. My serene, lovable mother has become aggressive.”

  “I don’t know what I’m scared of, Josie. Maybe I forgot he existed after all this time.”

  “We don’t need him.”

  “What we don’t need and what we get are two very different stories.”

  “Well, I’ve got a wonderful idea. How about we never go over to Nonna’s place again so we can’t ever bump into him?”

  “You’ll have to meet him sooner or later, Miss, and you’ll go to your grandmother’s as per normal.”

  “Maaaa,” I groaned. “She drives me crazy. She’s starting to tell me all those boring Sicily stories. If she tells me one more time she was beautiful, I’ll puke.”

  “I want you to try and get on with her more.”

  “Why? You don’t. It’s not fair to expect me to.”

  “Our circumstances are different, Josephine. I’ve never got on with her. When I was young she used to keep me at such a distance that I used to wonder what I could possibly have done wrong. My father was much worse and it was only after he died that she took a step toward me. By then I kept my distance. With you, it’s different. She’s always wanted to be close to you.”

  Mama looked at me and shrugged.

  “I envied you that.”

  “Five, Jozzie,” I mimicked. “Five men came to ask for my hand in marriage when I was your age.”

  Mama laughed and I lay back content. I like to make her laugh. It’s weird that I’ve spent my whole life trying to impress her and out of everyone I know she’s the only person who loves me the way I am.

  “What does he look like?” I asked later, trying to act uninterested.

  She thought for a moment and then looked over at me, amusement lurking in her eyes. “He looks like a male Josephine Alibrandi.”

  Because it was the easiest thing to do, we both began to laugh.

  Two

  SPENDING HALF YOUR morning trying to pull Sera away from a mirror is one of life’s mundane tasks.

  Thankfully I don’t have to go through it every morning, but two days after Mama told me she’d met Michael Andretti, we had the annual “Have a Say Day” in Martin Place. Sera volunteered to drive. She and Anna are the only ones of us who have a license.

  For two days I just couldn’t help thinking about my father. I felt sick at the idea of meeting him, though at the same time I desperately wanted to. But I couldn’t tell my friends about it yet. I just wanted to keep it to myself until I figured out how I felt.

  There are four of us who hang out together and we make the most unlikely group. Most of the other students in the school are in clone groups. They all look similar. Either blond yuppies or European trendies. Either intellectuals or the “beautiful people.”

  Our group represents all types, yet we hadn’t fitted into any of them in Year Seven.

  Anna Selicic is your typical Slavic-looking girl. Long blond hair and blue eyes and that healthy red-cheek look. She’s the most nervous person I have ever known. She puts her hand up in class and whispers the answer with dread. It’s as if she thinks that if she whispers the wrong answer a blade will come hurtling across the room and decapitate her. She stands like a stunned mullet if guys approach us and still hasn’t been kissed, despite her good looks.

  At fifteen, she was the last of us to get her period. I remember the three of us standing outside the toilet cubicle instructing her on how to put in a tampon. She went through two packets of Tampax before she was successful.

  We tend to mother her a lot, and if we’re ever in a risky situation, like being squashed at a concert or terrorized by the students of Cook High, she’s the first person we try to protect.

  Then there’s Seraphina. It’s pretty difficult describing her. She has to be the most brazen person I’ve ever met. She can look a person straight in the eye and lie her heart out. She can bitch about a person for three hours straight and then turn around and crawl to them. Winning them over with what they see as sincerity. The three of us tend to look on in disgusted fascination. She has black roots and blond hair teased from here to eternity. She’s skinny yet voluptuous and tends to dress in whatever the latest rock or pop star is wearing. Since she was fourteen she has never been without a boyfriend for more than a week and she’s the only one of us who’s slept with a guy. Her father, like most Italian fathers, thinks she’s the Virgin Mary and like most Italian fathers is dead-set wrong.

  I have a funny relationship with Sera. As the only two of Italian ancestry in the group we have a thin bond, and I find that when I’m in her home I crawl more to her parents than to anyone in the world. I’m charming and kiss them on both cheeks, knowing deep down as they kiss me back that they’d think nothing of tearing my family or myself to shreds. I’m not sure why I put up with it. Maybe for acceptance, because I think that if you’re an outcast with your own kind you’ll never be accepted by anyone.

  Sometimes I really don’t like her. But other times she makes me laugh more than anyone I know. Those times are mostly in church or class or places where you have to control yourself but can’t. I envy her, I think. People really bitch about her at St. Martha’s. She’s a yuppie’s nightmare. Her father’s a fruit grocer. She’s the stereotype of a wog yet she doesn’t give a damn. She just gives the finger.

  And last, but never least, is Lee Taylor, whose main objective in life is to hang out with surfers down at the southern beaches and who thinks it’s cool to come to school with a hangover.

  God knows why, because her father is an alcoholic. That’s why she’s with us and not them. Because she went to primary school with them and her father came to pick her up from a birthday party once, blind drunk. Nobody was allowed to go to her place after that.

  Lee and I have a weird relationship. We pretend we have nothing in common, yet we can talk for hours on any subject. We pretend we come from two different parts of society, yet both of us are middle-class scholarship students. We pretend that our families have nothing in common because people in her family use words like “wogs” and mine happen to be “wogs.” Yet I respect her more than any of my friends, although I couldn’t tell her that because we both pretend we don’t know the meaning of the word.

  One day we’ll pass each other in the street, pretending our lives have gone in different directions, but I can guarantee that our adult lives will be as identical as our school lives have been.

  Guys go for her a lot. My cousin Robert, though he won’t admit it, has had a crush on her for six years. She’s one of those people you think is quite plain until you’re sitting in front of her and realize just how attractive she is. Straight brown hair streaked gold by the sun, freckles on her nose and hazel eyes that never look directly at you when she speaks. Yet you can’t call her a coward. I think she has so much emotion she doesn’t want to show, she makes sure nobody sees it.

  We grew up in the midst of the snobs of St. Martha’s and discovered that somehow brains didn’t count that much. Money, prestige and what your father did for a living counted. If your hair wasn’t in a bob or if your mother didn’t drive a Volvo, you were a nobody.

  That’s where the problem lies between me and our school captain, Ivy Lloyd, who we call Poison Ivy. I was awarded the insulting task of being her deputy. We hate each other’s guts, probably because we’ve been competitive all our lives. She’s one of those girls with perfect white skin and not one split end in her strawberry-blond hair. She’s a bore, though. She’s obsessed with schoolwork, and whenever we get assignments back she looks over to me to try to find out how well I did. Sometimes when she’s looking an
d I know that I’ve probably received the highest mark, I shake my head in a sorrowful way as if I’m devastated. Then as we’re walking out of the classroom and she has an ecstatic grin on her face, I’ll show Sera my mark and she’ll scream it out hysterically.

  Yes, I know. I’m immature and vain about my brains, but you can’t imagine how wonderful it is to beat Poison Ivy. It doesn’t happen very often. I remember the first day of school in Year Seven. She walked up to me in a really snotty way and said, “I hear you’re the recipient of the English scholarship.” I remember thinking that she wanted to be my friend. I was so thrilled, imagining the slumber parties and holidays we’d be spending together. But I was only given ten seconds to dream, because she looked me up and down and then walked away. The look kind of said it all.

  So I sat with Sera, who no one else would go near. Lee joined us so it wouldn’t seem as if she didn’t have friends and the three of us later rescued Anna from vomiting to death, due to nerves, in the toilet. We actually didn’t have our first conversation for a week. We just needed each other’s presence.

  I suppose we’ve done well for a group that the elite of St. Martha’s believed shouldn’t be at the school, but I only wish we could have been the best or the worst in the class. Not just somewhere in between.

  Purgatory. I hate it so much that when I die, and if God sends me there, I’ll beg him to send me to hell instead.

  “You guys ready?” Sera asked, breezing past us.

  “I read in a book that your hair can fall out if you put too much hair spray in it, Sera,” Lee laughed as we walked out of the house with her.

  “A book?”

  “Yeah, you know, those things they lend you in libraries,” Anna said seriously.

  “Very funny, smart-ass. If you’d like to know, I’m reading a very good mystery at the moment.”

  “Let me guess? The Mystery of the Missing Disco Lights ?” I asked, grabbing her arm.

  “Not all people are intellectuals like you, Josie,” she said, shaking me off.

  “I know. Isn’t life tragic?”

  Anna, Lee and I stood at her car and she avoided looking at us.