‘Lavora troppo!’ Nonna throws her hands in the air, one of them holding a crisp white tea towel with a lemon embroidered on one corner. ‘Sei giovane. Sei bello. Prendi la vita troppo sul serio.’
Whenever she feels particularly passionate about something, Nonna abandons English and starts shouting in Italian instead. I can only pick out the odd word here and there – work, beautiful, serious (I think?) – but her disapproval is crystal clear to the three of us sitting around the wooden table in her cramped kitchen.
‘Sofia,’ Mum warns her, ‘the doctor said to keep Marco calm.’
Nonna huffs, turning back to the orange laminate bench under the kitchen window. Her house is only a few blocks from the hospital, so we came straight here when the doctor discharged me, rather than driving all the way home. The second we arrived, she started crumbing chicken schnitzels.
‘He works too hard,’ she says, hunched over plates of chicken fillets, flour, beaten egg, and breadcrumbs.
The ‘he’ she’s referring to is, of course, me. And I don’t work too hard. I work exactly as hard as I need to.
My eyes land on the newspaper sitting on the floral tablecloth amongst plates of biscuits and fruit and a mountainous pile of zucchini slice. The paper is from the eighteenth of December – just over two months ago – but Nonna refuses to move it, most likely to streamline her bragging process when her church friends pay her a visit. The headline on the front page reads: St Peter’s High Achiever Tops the State.
Something hard hits me in the shin, and I swear. I whip around to glare at Leo, who’s plonked himself at the head of the table in Dad’s absence. He grins back at me, braces gleaming in the noon light streaming through the lacy kitchen curtains. ‘Just trying to distract you from your feelings,’ he says.
‘You’re such a little s**t,’ I reply, reaching out to mess up his curly ginger hair. He bats my arm away and I slap him – softly – on the cheek with my other hand.
‘Leo,’ Mum snaps. ‘Not now.’
‘Marco started it!’
I scoff, folding my arms over my chest. I love my younger brother, I really do, but the constant presence of a twelve-year-old boy can test your patience sometimes. Especially when –
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