Lucy and Linh (5 page)

Dear Linh,

On my first day, when I entered our homeroom, I had no idea where to sit, so I headed for the first empty seat I saw, next to a girl with very long hair braided into a plait and a pound-cake face flecked with freckles.

“You're the new girl, aren't you?” she asked.

“Yes—how did you know?”

“All your clothes are new.”

I looked down, embarrassed. Not a thread of my new uniform had been in the wash. My shirt had crease lines from being folded in the packet. Around the room, the other girls' clothes had a lived-in, everyday look. Later I would see how they chucked their jackets on the backseats of buses, tied their sweaters around their waists, not caring if the sleeves stretched, and hiked up the hems of their summer skirts. No one wore the blue hair ribbons—I was the only one dumb enough to have taken that part of the uniform code seriously.

The girl next to me was named Katie. “Don't worry,” she told me, “you look great.”

I didn't detect any sarcasm. She was being genuinely kind, and at that moment I learned two things about Katie. By telling me that she noticed my clothes were new, she showed that she was honest, but she could also tell the occasional white lie if the circumstances called for it.

After homeroom, we marched to the performing arts center for assembly. Years Seven and Eight sat level with the stage, while Years Nine and Ten sat in the raised seating areas. Looking down, I could see a moving blanket of blue and maroon. I had never seen anything so ordered before in real life, so…well, uniform. Even though we had a uniform at Christ Our Savior, we got away with wearing whatever socks we wanted as long as they were white, and whatever shirt we wanted as long as it was blue. Remember how some girls came in with all kinds of casual shirts, while others pulled their socks so high that they looked like tights, Linh?

Here, every girl in the auditorium had her hair tied back if it was below shoulder length. Here, every girl wore a blazer. Here, every girl sat still, no matter how long she had to wait. If she couldn't sit still, she was probably told to sit on her hands, as I saw many of the Year Sevens doing. I had been to assemblies before, but this was the model of an assembly. Suddenly I understood what it was to
assemble,
just as a few moments before I had truly understood
uniform.

I heard the sound of bagpipes, and everyone began to stand. Then I saw a girl playing
actual
bagpipes march through the stained-glass double doors of the auditorium.

Following her were two girls carrying long white flags emblazoned with the Laurinda motto—one in Latin (
Concordia Prorsum
) and the other in English (Forward in Harmony). The girls had more badges and pins on their lapels than a World War II veteran. Following them were four girls carrying red, blue, yellow and green flags. These, I presumed, were the prefects.

Finally the staff of the college marched by, all decked out in black academic gowns. Some had sashes of green or orange, while others had tassels and other scholarly insignia. I recognized Mrs. Grey by her red hood.

When they all had taken their seats onstage, Mrs. Grey stood up and looked around the auditorium. A few students were still quietly talking to each other. Mrs. Grey raised her right hand in the air, as if in parody of a bored student waiting to answer a question.

Then something strange happened. Students in the middle row—Year Eights—also raised their right arms in the air. Then the Year Nines followed. Meanwhile, the teachers at each end of the aisles raised their right arms. The befuddled Year Sevens, with whom I could identify, slowly began to copy the motion. Soon everyone on the ground floor of the auditorium had raised an arm and was quiet. That's when I noticed that all the girls on the top level also had their right arms raised. The entire school did! I quickly shot mine up. The room was now dead silent—you could hear every suppressed cough.

Over the next few weeks I grew used to this technique, which the staff and teachers used to quiet the girls. I saw how effective it was: it required barely any effort on their part, and you could see almost immediately who had caught on and who hadn't, and how we silently policed each other.

When all was quiet, the hands went down. The principal, Mrs. Ellison, walked to the podium. A petite and pretty woman in a pale pink silk shirt and a navy double-breasted suit with small gold buttons, she resembled a geriatric Princess Diana. She even had a string of pearls around her neck. I almost laughed—she was nothing like good old Sister Clarke with her frizzy hair and brown A-line skirts!

“It is good to see you all back, young ladies. I hope you had a refreshing break over the summer in readiness for a new school year.” She then told us what the young ladies of Laurinda could expect from the year ahead. First, the stained-glass windows of the main wing were being restored to their former glory with glass flown in from England. This term we would have seven more guest speakers than last year, including chocolatier queen Angela Piper. The girls cheered; apparently, Penelope had come from a rival girls' school so it was a coup to have her. Also, the girls were probably thinking, free samples, woo-hoo. Then, after the applause and cheering, Mrs. Ellison reminded us once more to take the academic year seriously.

A musical interlude followed. A girl named Trisha sat at the side of the stage in front of a grand piano. I hadn't even noticed the piano until then, so big was the auditorium. She started to play.

She was possessed. Her hands seemed to drag her body left and right, up and down the keys of the piano, at one point almost toppling her out of her seat. It was as if her fingers were playing some mad game of chase with her torso, except that every time they landed on a key, they made magical sounds that made me think of ice cubes in clear cups, floors of buildings collapsing with tiles tinkling unbroken, the first chink of daylight through castle windows in faraway countries, flying fish, volcanoes erupting with fireworks, the Lamb in his white beanie, my mother's Singer in full swing.

When she finished, Trisha stood up and took a small bow. It was the most incredible thing I had ever seen a fifteen-year-old do. She was a genius, Linh. At Christ Our Savior she would have been on the cover of the school magazine—they'd have made her play the organ in church every week and given her a nickname like “Magic Digits.”

But even more incredible than Trisha's talent was the applause: I was the only one clapping like a grinning monkey-and-cymbal toy. Embarrassed, realizing that everyone else was offering only a polite palm patting, I toned it down.

When assembly ended, none of the girls mentioned Trisha's playing as we moved off to our first classes. It was only after I'd been to a couple of assemblies that I realized every musical offering would be just as intense as the first, and every reaction would be just as tepid.

Ms. Vanderwerp taught my first class of the week, history. Wearing a long aquamarine dress that ended in wavy lines halfway down her calves, she looked like a Pac-Man ghost. She had enormous convex glasses, so thick that her eyes seemed to swim around in each lens.

Ms. Vanderwerp explained that we would be studying twentieth-century history, from the causes of World War I to the Vietnam War. She had a trembly voice, but she wasn't even that old. When she wrote on the whiteboard, her hand was shaky too. On her desk sat a cylinder of wipes. Sometimes she would emit a nervous laugh, but most of the time her mouth drooped as if she'd had a stroke.

I was seated next to a girl named Amber Leslie. Ms. Vanderwerp had arranged us in alphabetical last-name order around the room. “Easier for me to remember you in the first few weeks,” she told us.

When she called out my name, she got my first name, middle name and surname mixed up. She apologized when her watery-bowl eyes found me in the room.

“Just call me Lucy,” I said.

She smiled. “Thank you, Lucy,” she said, as if I had just invented some kind of life-changing supermop to free her from many hours of housekeeping.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Amber Leslie smile. I turned toward her, and the first thing I noticed was that she had very unusual lips. Her top lip was puffier than her bottom lip and jutted forward a little—not because buckteeth were giving it a nudge, for Amber had small, perfect white teeth, but almost as if her chin was shyly pushing her bottom lip behind her top one. She had the endearing jaw of a baby, gazelle-brown eyes and bangs that were trimmed so that two-thirds of her forehead lay bare.

I'm not doing a very good job of description, Linh, because those features and haircut sound as if they belong to a drooling asylum inmate, but on Amber Leslie they were mesmerizing. Because each one of her features was individually so striking, it took me a moment to realize that her face as a whole was stammeringly beautiful, a rare combination of beauty, innocence and experience that would surely provoke asthmatic lust in boys and mute envy in girls. She also smelled like the Body Shop's Fuzzy Peach perfume oil.

Distracted by Amber, I didn't notice that Ms. Vanderwerp was handing out term outlines, until one of the girls piped up: “Ms. V, hey, Ms. V, this term outline is for the Year Eights.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, taking a closer look, “I'm afraid it is. Oh, dear. My apologies, girls.” At least she didn't call us “young ladies.” “I must have left the others by the photocopier. Won't be long!”

After she left the room, some of the students looked at each other. It was a look that made me realize Ms. Vanderwerp was prone to such mistakes. At Christ Our Savior, whenever teachers left the class, girls would start calling out to each other across the room: “Hey, Melissa, lift up your bangs and give us a look! Aww, come on, they're not that bad. They'll grow back!” Or: “Quick, Tully, give us the answer!” But quietness at Laurinda didn't necessarily mean good behavior, I saw, or even indifference. Many things were going on in that quiet—a raised eyebrow, a rolling eyeball, a deliberate sniff. The room was soon reeking with the odorless stench of collective contempt.

When Ms. Vanderwerp returned, she passed around the correct handouts. She had been gone for less than three minutes, but I could feel something had shifted. “Thank you,” I said automatically when she came around to my desk, but Amber Leslie didn't.

There was another girl I noticed on that first day, Linh, and that was because she was so rude. “Typical,” she muttered when Ms. Vanderwerp called the roll and made us all change seats. “Typical,” she groaned when Ms. Vanderwerp told us that we would be studying twentieth-century history. When I heard her sigh her third “Typical” as Ms. Vanderwerp left the room, I realized that here was a sagacious reincarnate who could predict the turn of events with pinpoint accuracy, which was probably why life bored her so much.

Her name was Chelsea White. Unlike Amber's Angelina Jolie appeal, she was more the Jennifer Aniston kind of pretty, the kind that only other girls made a fuss about. She had curly doll hair and pink cheeks, as if someone had slapped her twice. She looked like one of those imitation Franklin Mint porcelain dolls, with the features painted a couple of millimeters above the grooves—the ones that would turn on you when you went to sleep at night.

When Ms. Vanderwerp handed her the correct document and requested the Year Eight outline back, Chelsea showed Ms. Vanderwerp that she had torn it into four pieces.

How had she managed that, I wondered, when I hadn't heard the sound of paper ripping?

“Chelsea White!” scolded Ms. Vanderwerp. “Now, tell me, why on earth did you do that?”

“You gave us the wrong class outline, Ms. V,” Chelsea replied innocently. “I didn't think you needed this anymore.”

“Well, I did need it!” protested Ms. Vanderwerp. Next to me, Amber Leslie was calmly peeling her cuticles. Ms. Vanderwerp had been the careless one, and Chelsea was making her pay.

That was when I learned a very important early lesson: here at Laurinda, mistakes meant annihilation.