151
" As soon as Santangelo and Raffy’s heads go under, Griggs leans over and kisses me. It’s a hungry kind of kiss, like he’s been dying to do it for ages and he can’t get enough but after a while I open my eyes and just stare at him.
“You’re supposed to close your eyes,” he says, a little unnerved.
“I’m not supposed to do anything,” I say, moving away from him and looking into the river, waiting for Raffy and Santangelo to come back up.
“Is there a problem here?”
“There’s nothing here.”
“Really? Because that wasn’t the message you were giving me last Saturday night.”
“And between last Saturday and today there have been at least six days, so let’s just say that I’m going by the message that you’ve been giving me since then.”
“We’ve been surrounded by the Santangelo circus and that little pest who is either attached to you surgically or me and then, when they’re not around, Casanova Cassidy is hanging off every word you say or Raffy is giving me one of those ‘girl zone only’ looks,” he says. “So if I haven’t been giving you the attention—”
“So you’re admitting it. That you can just switch this on and off?”
“Yeah, whatever you say. I’m over it.”
“Good, because I was never into it! "
― Melina Marchetta , On the Jellicoe Road
157
" No, I was waiting for the train. The three forty-seven to Yass. Comes every afternoon and, according to the station master, it’s never late and I knew that. And then you came along and you spoke to me and nobody had looked me in the eye for years. My mum wouldn’t. She told me later that she couldn’t, because she was scared to see that I might hate her. She feels like she didn’t protect me from him. But I remember you that day and you looked at peace with yourself and it made me reconsider everything I had planned to do. Because I thought to myself, you can’t do this to her, not after the Hermit thing.”
“Do what to me? I don’t think that leaving me on that platform would have changed my life, Griggs,” I lie.
“You being on that platform changed mine.”
This isn’t romance. This isn’t a declaration of love or affirmation of friendship. This is something more.
“I wasn’t there that day to get on the three forty-seven to Yass,” he says. “I was there to throw myself in front of it. "
― Melina Marchetta , On the Jellicoe Road