pencil: Alice Pasquini

story: Melissa P

The protagonist of this delicate story is Anna, a fifteen-year-old girl in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Rome.
Her mother never leaves the house after her husband abandoned her.
Anna has some friends in the neighborhood, but she can't get intimate with anyone.
Things change drastically when her mother's sister and her daughter Claire, her age, arrive from Paris to visit.
Anna hasn't seen them for seven years and the last time they didn't part peacefully.
But now she feels she has a lot in common with her cousin.
Claire has recently entered the heroin tunnel and is a lesbian.
When Claire kisses Anna, the girl discovers her true nature and they become intimate.
They decide to run away from home together, to reach their grandmother's house in the countryside, who has been dead for seven years now.
The house is in ruins, but they decide to stay anyway.
Claire, however, has a withdrawal crisis and returns to Rome in search of a fix.
Anna only notices it the next day and runs to look for her.
She tracks down Claire in a park, stoned, so she decides to track down the drug dealers.
She succeeds, but does not foresee their reaction.
Anna is segregated by drug dealers and forced to take drugs.
Claire returns to save her, but they only manage to escape thanks to the help of her grandmother's ghost.
Together again, they decide to leave and be on their own.
The refined drawings of the artist, who has made a name for herself with splendid murals, make an otherwise crude story enjoyable.
The topic is not a surprise for the writer, author of the best-seller "100 Brush Strokes".