And walk straight into William Trombal.

We’re almost exactly the same height, so eye contact is inevitable. I find a scar between his eyes to concentrate on. He has a strange face. It’s all sharpness and angles and incredibly fair skin. But then he’s got this thatch of black hair that’s such a contrast. It’s like two cultures had a massive fight over his face and neither won.

“The girls are just having a few issues that they thought maybe you could iron out,” Ms. Quinn explains.

“About?”

His voice is deep and gravelly. I once heard one of the girls say that he had the voice of a sex god, but because I’ve never really heard what a sex god sounds like, I can’t verify that.

The list in my hand suddenly feels like a hot wedge against my palm. I don’t want to hand it over. Apart from the comment about him, Tara Finke has this tampon machine obsession and she insisted on putting it at the top of the list. He holds out his hand, and I’m hating Tara Finke’s guts for putting me through this.

He runs his eyes over the list, and I know the exact moment that he’s reached the final line. His face flushes red and then he looks at me.

“What’s your name?”

“Francis … Francesca … Spinelli.”

Your grandmother stole my grandmother’s S biscuit recipe, as you well know.

“I was going to be called Francesca,” Ms. Quinn tells us. She nods, looking at us both. “But my mother went for Anna Carina.”

I don’t know how to react to this piece of trivia, so I smile politely.

“Were your parents Trotsky fans?” William Trombal asks, not at all perturbed by her rambling.

I wait for her to correct him but she doesn’t. He might think he’s the king of Latin translation, but he knows nothing about Russian literary history.

“Do you want some advice, Francis Francesca?” he asks me.

It’s kind of one of those rhetorical things, because I can already tell he’s going to give it to me.

He sighs and sits on the corner of the desk in an attempt to be as accessible as possible.

“Try to keep low-key. If you make a fuss, the guys aren’t going to like it. There’s going to be a shitload of stuff around here—sorry, Ms. Quinn—that you’re not going to like, and being vocal about it will give you a rep you don’t want.”

I nod as if it’s the best advice I’ve ever received. “I’ll pass that on to the—”

Before I can finish, he turns away and sits down, his back to me, as if I was never there. I stare at the back of his head. There’s something about it that makes me want to commit a violent act with a blunt instrument.

“It’s Tolstoy, by the way,” I say as I open the door.

He turns around. “What?”

Shut up, I tell myself. Shut up.

“The writer of Anna Karenina. Not Trotsky. Trotsky was a revolutionary who was stabbed with a pickax in Mexico in 1940. But I can understand how the T thing could confuse you.”

He looks at me, his eyes narrowing. William Trombal doesn’t like to be put in his place. Bad move.

I look at Ms. Quinn. She’s smiling.

“Thank you, Ms. Quinn,” I say politely, and walk out.

My father makes us an omelette for dinner. The three of us sit eating in silence. There has never, ever been silence at our dinner table, and tonight it’s like torture.

“Should I take some in to Mummy?” Luca asks.

At home, at our most vulnerable, she’s Mummy. When we’re talking to other people she’s Mum, but in my head she’s just Mia because I’ve been angry at her so many times that I’ve wanted to distance myself from her. Everything Mia does has to be so out there and noticeable. She’s the loudest of the daughters-in-law, was the most opinionated mother at St. Stella’s, and more than once I saw my Stella friends roll their eyes at something she’d suggest we should do. We just wanted to have fun. Mia wanted us to change the world.

There’s always a story to be told to show how weak I am and how great she is. “Remember the time you almost drowned?” she’d ask me. I don’t want to remember. Because it’s probably a reminder of how I needed saving.

“Mummy’s eaten,” my dad says.

“When?” I ask.

“Before you got home.”

“That would have been lunch.”

“Frankie, eat your food and be quiet!”

Luca and I exchange glances and look at my dad. Somehow he’s becoming someone we don’t know, as well.

I try to swallow the omelette, but it gets stuck in my throat. I want to go and throw it up, like my mum has for the past two mornings. I want to puke my guts out and I want her to come up behind me and hold back my hair and I want to take in her scent and I want to cry like I always do when I’m sick and my mum is there.

But I manage to swallow it, and the knowledge that it’s sitting there in my stomach, like some kind of poison, makes me feel weak.

The place is beginning to look like a pigsty. My dad isn’t the tidiest cook, and there are plates and frying pans all over the place. We clean up, but it doesn’t look the same as when my mum gets us to do it.

Later, as I make my way to my room, I see Luca at her door. She calls him in and I can tell he feels uneasy about it. Their bedroom has always been our sanctuary. Sometimes at night we’ll end up on their bed just talking. My dad will be snoring and Mia will say, “Turn around, Bobby, you’re snoring,” and he’ll turn around and for a moment it’ll be silent. Then he’ll erupt into a massive snore and Luca and I will kill ourselves laughing and my dad will wake up and bark, “Get to bed!” and not even a second later he’ll be snoring and we’ll kill ourselves laughing again and Mia will say, “What is this? Grand Central Station?”

But their room isn’t Grand Central Station anymore. It’s a room my mum won’t leave and I don’t understand why and nobody will explain it to me, and later I find myself standing outside their door listening for anything.

And I hear nothing because it’s like the volume button has been turned down on our lives and nobody has anything to say anymore.

chapter 3

IN RELIGION CLASS, we’re put into pairs and given butcher’s paper. It’s a Catholic school thing, butcher’s paper. Even butchers themselves have moved on to other alternatives. But ever since I can remember, it’s played an important role in any decision-making process at school. Sometimes I wonder if the Pope gets out the butcher’s paper over at the Vatican to explain the hierarchy of the church; or to draw a scaffold, listing potential leaders; or to illustrate how to get on with your fellow cardinals during a peer assessment session.

Today we’re asked to come up with our ideal community, and I get stuck with Thomas Mackee, who scribbles something down on a piece of paper and hands it over to me. His ideal community has “no fat chicks, no rules, no one over twenty-five.”

I look at the list and then at him and screw it up in a ball. Back at Stella’s, my group were the queens of the butcher’s paper presentation, and here I am stuck with a sexist, anarchist ageist. Fifteen minutes later we haven’t written a thing, and Mr. Brolin reaches our desk and stares. He has a big us-and-them attitude about students, and I’m surprised he hasn’t drawn a circle around his desk to keep us out of his area.

“You can’t think of anything?” he asks.

“I gave her a list and she wasn’t interested,” Thomas Mackee says in a singsong voice.

“You can both stay after school and do it.”

“Like I really want to do it with her,” Thomas Mackee snickers when Mr. Brolin walks away.

The guys around us join in the snickering.

My ideal community?

Anywhere but here.

At 3:30, the butcher’s paper is still in front of me. Mr. Brolin sits at the front calling his detention roll. There are a few kids from the junior school and a guy from my physics class. His name is Jimmy Hailler and he’s in trouble for calling Brother Louis, our English teacher, Bro. He said, “Hey, Bro, how’s it hanging?” Bro actually didn’t mind it, but Mr. Brolin overheard and went ballistic.