Read Online Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta - Free Book Online Page A

mother will murder me.”
    “Your mother need never know. I’ll drop you off around the corner.”
    “She’ll find out, all right. Who do you think will identify me at the morgue?”
    “Get on the bike,” he said, pushing the helmet down on my head.
    “Turn around while I get on. It’s bad enough that the whole of George Street is going to get a glimpse of my undies.”
    “You’re denying me that honor?” he asked, wounded, as he turned around.
    I pulled up my dress and climbed onto the bike self-consciously.
    “Ready?”
    “Let me check my bag for ID. I don’t want to be named something as plain as Jane Doe in the hospital.”
    “You are one morbid chick,” he groaned, stepping on the bike to start it.
    I screamed. A long piercing scream in his ear from George Street to Broadway. Give or take about five traffic lights, that’s five minutes of screaming.
    As we sat at the lights on Broadway, waiting to turn into Glebe Point Road, I felt strange being so exposed. I mean, we were unprotected from all those weird people who walk around after midnight. Anyone could have just come up to us and knocked us out. I noticed the middle-aged couple in the car next to us staring. I tried to stretch my dress to my knees but was unsuccessful. Maybe they were saying things like “Thank God that’s not our daughter sitting on that bike.”
    A carload of guys pulled up behind us and honked their horns. I think I heard one call out, “Show us your legs,” among other things. My face burned with embarrassment. I just felt as if the whole world was watching me and I couldn’t hide behind a car window. I just knew in my heart that someone in a car around me knew my grandmother and this would get back to her via the Italian phone system.
    On St. John’s Road I came face to face with the gravel on the road as we took a tight corner, and it was only thirty seconds away from my street that I began to enjoy it. I tapped his shoulder and yelled for him to stop, trying to grab my glasses from around my mouth. My eyes smarted from the wind and my skin felt tight, not to mention my throat hurting from all the screaming.
    “It’s this street,” I croaked.
    “I’m sorry, I’m deaf. I can hardly hear you. A hysterical girl screamed in my ear and busted my eardrum,” he said, slowing down and touching his ears.
    I pulled up my dress again quickly, trying to get off before he turned around, but when I stood up after adjusting it around my knees, I knew he had seen every movement.
    “I’ll walk you.”
    I shrugged and handed him the helmet.
    He was quiet as we walked down the street. Almost in his own world, and I wondered what boys like Jacob Coote thought about.
    “How did your mother die?” I asked him quietly.
    “Cancer, about five years ago,” he said.
    “I’d die if my mother died.”
    He shook his head and looked at me almost gently.
    “You don’t die. You just . . . get really angry and then after you’re angry you hurt a lot and then the best thing is that one day you remember something she said or did and you laugh instead of crying.” He smiled at the thought.
    I shook my head. “I’d run, you know. It’s like when you’re really busy doing something and you don’t have time to think about things. Well, I’d run and run and run so I couldn’t think.”
    “And when you’d finished running you’d be thousands of miles away from people who love you and your problem would still be there except you’d have nobody to help you,” he said with a shrug.
    I tried not to think about my mother dying.
    “I’m really sorry, you know. For mentioning your mother the way I did,” I said as humbly as I could.
    “No big deal.”
    I stopped in front of the house and he looked at it, shaking his head.
    “We’re the same, you know. You’re middle class and I’m middle class, except you’re a middle-class snob who goes to an upper-class school.”
    “I am not a snob. My mother is a single parent and we don’t