Читать онлайн «Saving Francesca»
Автор Мелина Марчетта
Table of Contents
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
chapter 28
chapter 29
chapter 30
chapter 31
chapter 32
chapter 33
chapter 34
chapter 35
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Mum, Dad, Marisa, Daniela—thanks for the whole Grand Central Station experience.
To my mum, Christine Alesich, Barbara Barclay, Marcus Burnett, Anthony Douglas, Philippa Gibson, Laura Harris, Damian Hatton, Janet Hill, Sophia Hill, Genevieve and Olivia Hill (for typing out your mum’s notes), Brenda Hokin, Annette Hughes, Brother Eric Hyde, David McGuigan, Michelle Patane, Mark Roppolo, Aaron Taranto (and Wade, although you weren’t supposed to read it), Francus Vierboom, Julie Watts, Kate Woods, Maxim Younger, and Toby Younger. Thanks for your advice about the manuscript or for writing ten pages of notes for me or feeding my ego or inspiring me with your own writing or pointing out the difference between a pipeline and a grind pole.
Thanks also to Beth Yahp, Teresa Crea, and Agnes Nieuwenhuizen for giving me the opportunity to create fragments of Francesca over the past ten years in your anthologies and performance piece.
chapter 1
THIS MORNING, MY mother didn’t get out of bed.
It meant I didn’t have to go through one of her daily pep talks, which usually begin with a song that she puts on at 6:45 every morning. It’s mostly seventies and eighties retro crap, anything from “I Will Survive” to some woman called Kate Bush singing, “Don’t give up. ” When I question her choices, she says they’re random, but I know that they are subliminal techniques designed to motivate me into being just like her.
But this morning there is no song. There is no advice on how to make friends with the bold and the interesting. No twelve-point plan on the best way to make a name for myself in a hostile environment.
No motivational messages stuck on my mirror urging me to do something that scares me every day.There’s just silence.
And for the first time all year, I go to school and my only agenda is to get to 3:15.
School is St. Sebastian’s in the city. It’s a predominantly all-boys school that has opened its doors to girls in Year Eleven for the first time ever. My old school, St. Stella’s, only goes to Year Ten and most of my friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn’t allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn’t bring me up to have limitations placed upon me
