“Why don’t you write me love letters?”

“I’m a seventeen-year-old boy,” Danny said with a laugh.

Fiona frowned. “But what if I wrote you one?”

“Then I would read it,” he replied, kissing her on the tip of her nose.

“And would you reply?”

“Of course, I would.”

“Okay,” she said and nuzzled her face into the crook of his neck.

*

Dear Danny, I’m so happy you asked me to be your girlfriend.

Fiona bit the end of her pencil and screwed up her mouth. She turned around onto her back and thumped her fists on the mattress in frustration. It sounded so childish. What did she want to say to him, really? That she loved him? She wasn’t sure she did yet. She pulled at a lock of her hair that cascaded around her shoulders and smiled. He always told her he loved her hair and twirled his fingers through the thick dark curls when he kissed her.

“Danny Devoy.” She let the name linger on her lips, and her mouth involuntarily turned up in a smile, a flush of warmth invading her belly. She turned back to the matter at hand. What to write. It had been less than two months since they’d been together, and before that, Fiona barely knew he existed even though he had been at the same high school with her for two years and was part of the in-crowd.

She certainly was not part of that crowd, with their pretty clothes, stylish hair, and pictures of A-ha on their folders and bags. Most of her clothes came from the local Target, and she tried to make do with what she had—her cute face, her thin body, and the way she walked, an air of nonchalance, pretending not to care what people thought of her.

Having arrived from Italy four years before and heading straight into the craziness of high school, Fiona Macrone was utterly unaware of how evil high schoolers were. They teased, and they tortured, things she wasn’t accustomed to. At first, it was her olive skin, and when they heard her accent, that was fodder for the bullies. At least she had an Anglo-sounding name, passed down to her from a distant Irish cousin, or else that would have added to the insults, her surname already converted to macaroni the moment she set foot into the classroom on her first day of school in Melbourne.

For a twelve-year-old going into this jungle by day and coming home to a different sort of jungle at night that was her family life, Fiona had to adjust who she was and who she was supposed to be—a bit like a chameleon. When she thought about it later, this might have been where it all began, the start of what she was destined to become.

This foreign land in which she and her elder brother Alfredo, or Alfie as she called him, were thrust was a blow from the fairly innocuous childhood where school was pleasant, kids were fun, and they lived in a place they actually liked living. A place where neighbours peeled potatoes as they watched the neighbourhood children play with marbles and chase each other in the street, where schools were a little nest of activity, students trying to outdo each other by putting their hands up first, where that same competitiveness was forgotten once they were in the yard at playtime.

Maybe it was the timing. Perhaps if Fiona had gone to high school in Italy, things might have been the same—nasty kids exist everywhere, she guessed. A child on the cusp of adolescence, thrown into a world of competitive beasts, doesn’t stand a chance, and Fiona watched in silence the way the popular girls tossed their hair this way and that, the way they laughed with their chins raised and their mouths puckered. She resented them for their style and their automatic place in a society that looked down on newcomers, and Fiona felt the heat in her rise, knowing that she could match them at anything, yet she had to change who she was to be a part of that society. But she leaned quickly, practising her Aussie lilt, watching, learning how to fit in, how to mask who she was, how to become one of them, much to the point that she didn’t know who she was, not for a very long time.

Alfie didn’t fare well, turning into a recluse six months after they arrived, preferring the company of comics and novels. Fiona watched with fascination as it turned him into an enigma, a wildly interesting boy with flowing black hair and dark brown eyes, who sat by himself engrossed in his books while other kids at school, including girls in her year level, two years younger than him, flirted, whispered and gossiped about him. He stopped caring about fitting in, and for them, he was a mystery they wanted to solve, so for a while, a very short while, Fiona became their source of information, and for those few months, she enjoyed what popularity was. She liked it—a lot. But soon, the mystery faded, and no one cared, and she was on her own again.

“God, you’re ugly,” the freckle-faced Tori said one day in class, looking at Fiona with disgust. She sat with her more poised friend, Carrie, who turned to Fiona with a smirk and went back to drawing love hearts on the picture of George Michael plastered on the front of her diary.

Fiona was taken aback, shocked, humiliated, and thankful the olive colour of her skin disguised all of the above. She turned to the board on which the teacher was furiously writing. She wanted to say many things back. Like, oh, have you looked in a mirror lately, or you’re the ugliest one, nothing intelligent, so she kept her mouth shut.

“I know you can hear me,” Tori hissed, and a nudge from Carrie stopped her from pushing further.