Looking for Alibrandi

by Melina Marchetta

  The four of us went for pizza at Harley’s, where I was bombarded by unwanted sympathy that made me feel even worse.

  “If it helps, Angelo and I aren’t really going strong anymore,” Sera said.

  “I think your situations are a bit different,” Lee said, looking over at me.

  “He hasn’t rung?” Anna asked sadly.

  “Don’t talk about it,” I whispered, because I could hardly talk.

  It had been a week since my big confrontation with Jacob and I had almost lost my voice from all the crying.

  “It’ll work out one day. Maybe when you’re older,” Anna reassured me gently, handing me a tissue.

  “This from the girl who still leaves a stocking at the end of her bed on Christmas Eve,” Lee said. “There’s a good chance that things won’t work out, so don’t spend the rest of your days thinking he’ll come back.”

  I shook my head and sat up, blowing my nose.

  “Forget it,” I sniffed. “So what’s going on with you, Anna?”

  “Oh, Josie, Anton is Jacob’s best friend and all. I don’t want to upset you.”

  “What are you going to do? Wipe out Jacob and everyone he knows from existence?” I asked.

  Anna shrugged, giving a small smile.

  “Well, I’m going to Anton’s formal and I’m taking him to ours.”

  “Has your mother met him?”

  “Adores him.”

  “My mother adored Jacob,” I cried into the tissue.

  “Oh, Josie.”

  I wiped my tears again and tried to control myself.

  “I’m sorry. I promise I won’t cry again.”

  “What’s happened so far, Anna?” Sera asked.

  “Yeah, tell us all the nitty-gritty details,” Lee said sarcastically, looking at Sera with a scowl.

  “Just a few kisses,” Anna said, going red.

  “Did he slip you the tongue?” Sera asked.

  We all groaned just as the pizza came and the waiter looked offended.

  “He’s not as tough as he’d like people to think. He’s gentle, really. He said I had nice skin and I don’t even need all that junk women put on their faces.”

  “That’s what they all say, and then when you try looking natural, they’ll puke at the sight of you,” Sera said, patting Anna on the hand.

  We all looked pensive for a while as the pizza cooled.

  “Well, I’ve got news,” Lee broke the silence. “I slept with Matt last night.”

  “What?”

  “Where?”

  “Was he good?”

  We all spoke in unison.

  “I slept with Matt,” she said with a shrug. “It was no big deal.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “In his friend’s flat.”

  “Did . . . did it hurt?” Anna asked.

  “Not really. Weird, actually. I thought pleasure was what sin is all about. I don’t see the pleasure in sex, so I can’t see the sin in it.”

  “You mean you didn’t like it?” I asked.

  “It was nothing like the books,” Lee said, thinking. “No rising above the clouds or things like that.” She shrugged. “No big deal.”

  “I don’t think pleasure is supposed to be a sin,” I said. “I think guilt is a sin.”

  “Why should she feel guilty?” Sera snapped. “Maybe if you’d slept with Jacob you’d still be with him now.”

  I remembered what Jacob had said and ignored her.

  Lee gave a humorless laugh, picking up a piece of pizza.

  “What do you think?” I asked her. “Would sex have changed things with Jacob and me?”

  She shrugged.

  “Men are different. They satisfy themselves easier than we do. One poke and they’re happy.”

  “So you think, Sera, that I should have let Jacob use my body for his own pleasure?” I asked her.

  “How about your pleasure? What makes you think you wouldn’t enjoy it?” Sera asked scornfully.

  “Lee didn’t enjoy it.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Lee spoke up. “I just said it wasn’t as great as people make out, and to answer your question, Josie, you would’ve felt guilty now if you’d slept with Jacob. You were too unsure, for one thing. You think that guilt is a sin, and when you think you’re sinning, you don’t enjoy things as much.”

  I nodded. “If I slept with Jacob, maybe I would still have him. But I probably would also need a therapist.”

  We all had a bit of a laugh and Sera hit the table a few times.

  “Listen, first times are never great. The guy has to be fantastic for it to be good. But it gets better,” she explained to us between mouthfuls.

  “I always think, what happens if I get married and I’m not good in bed,” Anna blurted out.

  “That’s why I don’t believe you should be a virgin when you get married,” Sera said. “You should experiment. Men do.”

  “Yes, but only if you’re in love with them,” I said.

  Sera nudged Lee as if they were now part of a secret society.

  “That one believes in Santa Claus and this one believes in the tooth fairy.”

  We finished our pizza and paid the bill and decided to walk to Anna’s house instead of taking a bus.

  “You did right,” Lee said quietly to me as we walked alone while the others walked ahead.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not sleeping with him. You’re different from me. Different from Sera. You’re the type who’d suit being a virgin until she’s in love, or even until she’s married. You could probably make it look trendy. Anna will probably be a virgin six months after her wedding night from fear of not being good in bed.”

  We laughed and I looked at Anna.

  “I don’t know. Not if she keeps on with Anton.”

  “I’ll give them two weeks and it’ll be over,” Lee sighed.

  “So you think that even if I did sleep with him I wouldn’t have been able to hold on to him?”

  “Jose, your loss of virginity will be written in a diary and you’ll probably go to confession on its anniversary every year for the rest of your life. Losing mine was just a page in my life. No big deal.”

  “You keep on saying that. You’ve convinced me it was a big deal,” I said, looking at her. She looked pensive.

  “It is a loss of innocence, you know,” she said, thinking about it. “Just like everyone says it is. I think it’s the only thing you have left that belongs to you and that belongs to that cocoon of childhood.”

  “Are you going to see Matt again?” I asked.

  Lee shrugged.

  “You know what I wish?”

  “What?”

  “I wish I was a little girl again,” she whispered quietly.

  “So do I,” I whispered back.

  We put our arms around each other’s shoulders and followed the others home.

  Thirty-Two

  MY EMANCIPATION DIDN’T happen like I expected it to.

  I thought maybe I’d wake up one morning and see the light. Feel liberated from everything. Or maybe one particular incident would see me through it. But it happened while I was hysterically crying—again.

  It was after receiving a birthday card from Jacob that I threw in the bin. I just sat there thinking back on the year and I realized that I was emancipated long ago. It wasn’t at one particular point either, it was at several. The hang-ups I once had were superseded, but not with other hang-ups as much as with a few sorrows.

  I remembered feeling socially out of it at St. Martha’s, yet when the fiasco of the walkathon happened, I realized I wasn’t. I thought my birth circumstances were a cross I’d bear for the rest of my life, but what had happened between Nonna and Marcus Sandford made me realize that it had never been my cross. I had only made it mine.

  And the different cultures thing?

  Well, I’m not sure whether everyone in this country will ever understand multiculturalism and that saddens me, because it’s as much part of Aust
ralian life as rugby and meat pies. But the important thing is that I know where my place in life is. It’s not where the Seras or the Carlys of the world have slotted me.

  If someone comes up and asks me what nationality I am, I’ll look at them and say that I’m an Australian with Italian blood flowing rapidly through my veins. I’ll say that with pride, because it’s pride that I feel.

  A lot has changed at home. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’ve changed. Michael has moved into his home at Balmain and I stay with him a lot. The funny thing about it is that Mama will sometimes come over for dinner and the both of them amaze me. They just seem so tuned in to each other.

  They talk for hours without embarrassment or awkwardness and I wonder what is stopping them from getting closer. Maybe they’re both terrified of how strong their feelings really are.

  I fight with Michael a lot. Expecially now that I see him so much. He can sometimes be such a male chauvinist and he doesn’t think twice about criticism. Though he expects of me not what he wants, but what he feels that I want. If I cheat myself, he says, it makes him furious. We clash because there is a generation gap.

  He watches current affairs programs and considers them entertainment and he goes absolutely berserk when he catches me watching American sitcoms. He detests them.

  But I love Michael Andretti more and more every day. I love him double to what I did maybe a month ago, yet I see his faults now too.

  And Jacob?

  Well, I don’t think it is my Italian background and his Australian one that is keeping us apart. I think, at the moment, we’re too different. We haven’t figured out what we really want from ourselves, let alone from each other.

  I think that during the year Jacob got a bit more ambitious than he used to be and I became a bit less. Sometimes I’m not even sure that I want to be a barrister. But I’m not going to make that a problem or a hang-up. When my results come out, I’ll make my decision then. But I’m optimistic. I do believe in my heart that one day I will be with Jacob Coote again. So I took the card out of the garbage and put it on my mantelpiece.

  It’s my birthday today. I’m not seventeen anymore. The seventeen Janis Ian sang about where one learns the truth. But what she failed to mention is that you keep on learning truths after seventeen, and I want to keep on learning truths till the day I die.

  Just like I’ll know who I am till the day I die. I’ll believe in God and I won’t let any church rules take that away from me. I’ll believe in my world. A world where an Irishman told us to feed the poor and we fed the poor.

  Where musicians asked us not to “Sing Sun City” and we supported them against the segregation between blacks and whites.

  A world where Sting asked if the Russians loved their children too and we knew the answer was yes.

  I know there is a lot that is bad with the world, but too many people are ready to give up on it. But I’m not. Because I honestly believe in the goodness of the individual person and especially the youth.

  So I’m sitting here listening to U2, to the words written by, perhaps, a modern-day poet. And tonight I’ll be with friends and family, which is what life is all about. I will sit between two women. The two most influential women in my life, whose relationship was almost destroyed by one man who has been dead for fifteen years.

  I will sit between them and be a link and I’ll fight with all my might to see that nothing tears my family unit apart. I’m not saying my life will be easier now because I finally feel free. I’m not saying that people will stop whispering about me behind my back. Because I think that if I lived life like a saint and walked with two feet in one shoe; if I wore the clothes of St. Francis of Assisi and suffered like a martyr; if I lived by the rules and never committed a sin, people would still talk. Because human nature is like that. They’ll always, like me, find someone to talk about.

  I’ve figured out that it doesn’t matter whether I’m Josephine Andretti who was never an Alibrandi, who should have been a Sandford and who may never be a Coote. It matters who I feel like I am—and I feel like Michael and Christina’s daughter and Katia’s granddaughter; Sera, Anna and Lee’s friend; and Robert’s cousin.

  You know, a wonderful thing happened to me when I reflected back on my year.

  “One day” came.

  Because finally I understood.

  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 © 1992 by Melina Marchetta

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s

  Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Australia by

  Penguin Books Australia in 1992.

  KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges Anastasia Kipriotis for the use of her poem

  “Can you see what I see” on p. 285.

  www.randomhouse.com/teens

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

  at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marchetta, Melina.

  Looking for Alibrandi / by Melina Marchetta.

  p. cm.

  SUMMARY: During her senior year in a Catholic school in Sydney, Australia, seventeen-year-old

  Josie meets and must contend with the father she has never known.

  [1. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Catholic schools—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction.

  4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Sydney (N.S.W.)—Fiction. 6. Australia—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M32855Lo 2006

  [Fic]—dc22

  2005057873

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN : 978-0-307-43353-4

  v3.0