Read Online Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta - Free Book Online

feeling challenged. He’s still standing at the lights.
    I reach him, my arms folded, and I know I’m going to be right and I am as smug as he is. “Apocalypse Now.”
    No reaction.
    “I’m right, aren’t I? I can tell.”
    He doesn’t give an inch, so I walk away for the second time.
    “So what’s your favorite?” he yells out. “The Sound of Music?”
    He catches up to me.
    “I’m not as easy to work out as you are,” I tell him as we walk past Market Street.
    “It is. I can tell. You love The Sound of Music .”
    “No I don’t.”
    “You’ve watched it fifteen times. You’ve jumped around a gazebo pretending you’re sixteen going on seventeen. You’ve sung ‘My Favorite Things’ when you’re sad, and every time Captain von Trapp’s voice catches during ‘Edelweiss,’ you bawl your eyes out.”
    I stop and look at him, ready to deny it, but then I feel my mouth twitching. “Seems like I’ve watched it one or two times less than you have,” I say.
    “Think about it,” he tells me as we sit in Starbucks, soaking marsh-mallows into our hot chocolates. “ Empire magazine will interview you one day and you’re going to admit that it’s your favorite movie. At least I’ll come across dark and mysterious.”
    “Do you know how many guys would pick Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now as their favorite films? You’ll come across as a cliché.”
    “I like The Princess Bride as well.”
    “If you spread that around, you just might get lucky with the girls.”
    “What makes you think that I’m not lucky with them now?”
    I make a scoffing sound. “Dream on.”
    “Bitch.”
    “Just honest.”
    After a moment he nods as if agreeing.
    “So what do you girls talk about?”
    “Nothing exciting. You guys most of the time.”
    “What’s the Eva Rodriguez chick like?”
    “She’s pretty cool,” I say. “What is it about her that makes everyone interested? There are better-looking girls.”
    He shrugs. “Good-looking, knows her sports, uncomplicated. Doesn’t have to prove a point a thousand times a day. Like you said, cool. Maybe even Siobhan Sullivan and Anna Nguyen too.” He looks at me almost reprimandingly. “The guys think you need a personality.”
    “That’s actually funny, coming from the Personality Kings of the Western World.”
    “You do a pretty good act,” he says.
    “What?”
    “The Miss Mute thing.”
    “I just haven’t got anything to say.”
    “Yeah you do. You kind of mutter it under your breath when you think people can’t hear.”
    “Really.”
    “Do you want to hang out? At your place or something?”
    Hanging out with Jimmy Hailler will mean that I have to say hello to him every day. I’m not ready to say hello to him every day. Too much commitment. It’s bad enough that I’m sharing chocolate brownies with him. I shake my head.
    “Not today.”
    “Whenever.”
    He’s the foulest-mouthed boy I’ve ever come across and constantly uses the c-word. I tell him it offends me and he calls me a prude. I shrug. So be it. I’m a prude. But he says he’ll hold back when he’s around me. He talks about smoking dope, probably a lot more than he actually smokes it, and just when you think you’ve come up with some theory about him, he’ll make you change your mind. He’s obsessed with fantasy fiction and is incredibly biting about those who get fantasy and sci-fi mixed up. The constant Machiavellian grin on his face is a cover-up for some kind of yearning, which doesn’t excuse him for being rude and obnoxious and cruel, but he’s honest, and I think that deep down he’s as lonely as I am.
    On the trip home on the bus, I’m vomiting out words, unable to hold them back no matter how hard I try—talking film and music and books and gossip and DVD commentaries and clothing and teachers and students and pets and brothers and loves and hates and lyrics and God and the universe and our dads.
    But not mothers.
    “That’s off-limits,” he tells me, and I