“You can complain all you like. You can cry as well,” I tell him.

I get a hint of a smile and then he shakes my hand.

“I’ll see what the guys say.”

“Thank you.”

“What did you say your name was? Francis …”

“My name’s Francesca.”

Detention drags on. Thomas Mackee sits next to me, scribbling on what looks like a music sheet. He’s a guitarist. Sometimes, as he’s walking to music class, he serenades Ms. Quinn, who, despite his being an idiot, actually has a bit of a giggle. He nudges me, almost sending me sprawling.

“Do you know how to convert notes into tablature?” he asks me in his duh-brain voice.

I pretend he’s not there.

“Are you retarded?” he asks.

I ignore him.

“Do you know anything?”

This coming from the Big Kahuna of Knowledge.

“Do you?” he presses.

“I know you’re a dickhead, and for the time being, that’s all I need to know,” I say flatly.

“Ooh, you’re turning me on.”

That’s as clever as our conversations get. Sometimes Jimmy Hailler joins in when he’s not torturing the younger kids. Thomas Mackee and Jimmy Hailler grasp each other’s hands, one of those brothers-in-arms-we-fought-in-Nam-together grips, but outside this room I don’t think they relate.

“What’s the punishment today?” Jimmy Hailler asks.

“Ten different lines. Must have some form of the word ‘learn’ in it,” Thomas Mackee tells him. He adopts the voice of a deep and meaningful television psychologist, matching his words to hand actions. “He wants us to take control of our misbehavior so we can self-discipline ourselves.”

Jimmy Hailler looks over my shoulder and reads what I’ve written.

“I must not underestimate the wisdom of my learned teachers .

Butcher’s paper is not just for wrapping sausages, but for learning .”

“That was mine,” Thomas Mackee says. He’s very proud.

Jimmy Hailler looks at me and I nod in confirmation.

“Wow.”

“Learn Baby Learn, Disco Inferno.”

“Hers,” Thomas Mackee says. “Have no idea what it means.”

“I came, I mucked around, thus I did not learn.”

When we’re allowed to go, I leave as quickly as possible. Through Hyde Park, I walk ahead of them, hoping that they don’t speak to me. On the bus, Thomas Mackee and I sit at opposite ends. I’m grateful that he doesn’t see solidarity in our detention. I figure he lives somewhere around Stanmore, because he gets off the stop before mine.

At Stella’s, we all came from the same area, and I liked the closeness of it all. Here, I don’t feel a sense of community. The city is too big and the school is like an island at the edge of it. An island full of kids from all over Sydney, rather than from one suburb. Nothing binds it together; no one culture, no one social group. You could be on the same bus or train line with someone and still live miles apart. My bus line travels along Parramatta Road from the inner city, past the University of Technology, where Mia works, past the University of Sydney, and then into the beginning of the inner west. Most of the time I don’t travel with Luca because he has choir practice or soccer or I have a three-unit class after school. At Stella’s, our bus was a School Special and the trip home was the best part of the day. Here, it’s almost the worst.

I get off at my usual stop on Parramatta Road and walk down Johnston Street. Sometimes Annandale feels like a small country town, ten minutes from downtown. There’s still a working-class quality to it, but, sprinkled with academics, musicians, and professionals, it tends not to have a “type,” which suits Mia, who goes on about “types” all the time.

Once in a while, my parents toss up whether or not to move. My dad thinks that not providing us with space will stunt our emotional growth and that it’s cruel to have a dog and children when you’ve got a tiny backyard. But we’re not interested in that type of space, and neither is our dog. He loves having his puppaccinos at Cafe Bones over in Leichhardt every Saturday morning or sitting outside Bar Italia while we have gelato and coffee. Luca named him because Mia’s into that. I got to name Luca, so he got to name the dog, and I thank God he’s younger than I am, because the dog’s name is Pinocchio. I named Luca after a character in a Suzanne Vega song. I didn’t realize until I was older that the person in the song gets abused. I just loved the certainty the character had about who he was.

Luca’s one of those blessed kids. Incredibly cute, smart, and has the voice of an angel, which is why he’s in a composite class of Year Five and Six for choir kids at St. Sebastian’s. William Trombal used to be a choirboy as well, but these days his role is merely to take the choirboys over for morning practice. According to Luca, he lets them play cricket in the middle aisle of the cathedral with a hacky sack. Apparently, the hacky sack once hit Christ on the cross, and William Trombal said that if Christ’s hands weren’t nailed on to that cross, he would have caught the ball himself.

Luca says that when he grows up, he wants to be just like William Trombal. Fantastic. My little brother’s ambition is to be a stick-in-the-mud moron with no personality.

I have absolutely no idea what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve changed my mind one hundred times. Just once I’d like to get it all together, see beyond the next five minutes, but I’ve never been able to. Not even when I was a kid. Mia’s mother, Nonna Celia, is to blame for that, because she’s a prophet of doom. Every time I’d ask her if we could go someplace the next day or next week, her reply would be, “We might not live that long.” If I’d say, “See you tomorrow,” her answer would be, “If that’s what God wants.” Leaving so much to fate has kept me an insomniac for most of my life, and this thing with Mia has reinforced the fear.

I get to the house, trying my hardest to avoid the people across the road. As usual, I wonder why they even have a house. They spend all their free time sitting on the front veranda watching the world go by. They eat outside with their meals on their lap trays, hang over the fence on either side for chats, while their children, grandchildren, and any other kids they seem to be looking after play happily on the little stretch of grass in front of their house. I don’t know how many live there because they always seem to have people over, but it’s like four generations in one tiny pre-fab house, like something out of a 1940s Harp in the South story. Although they’re doing nothing wrong, everything about them annoys me. So when they wave, I never wave back.

I’ve heard Mia talk to them about me. “She’s going through that adolescent alien stage,” she told them once. “Where she has to pretend she’s something she’s not.”

As opposed to being who she thinks I am, or should be. Maybe another Tara Finke. That’d make me popular.

Today I want them to wave, just to reassure me that everything is normal. But their happiness makes me angry. So I just go inside, praying that Mia is marking assignments, or cooking dinner, or on the phone counseling her friend Freya, the “bastard magnet,” or gossiping with Zia Teresa, or arguing with my dad, or kissing my dad, or reading, or laughing with my cousin Angelina, or sneaking a look at The Bold and the Beautiful.

But God’s not listening.

It’s been six days.

The door’s still closed.

chapter 5

THE BASKETBALL GAME draws a lunchtime crowd in the gym. Not just the basket ballers, but most of the girls and half of the guys. The boys’ team is made up of Year Eleven and Twelve boys, and I notice that William Trombal is one of them, but thankfully not Thomas Mackee, who is too busy eating a meat pie illegally in the back row. Once in a while he gives a war cry and meat pie goes everywhere.