Lucy and Linh (6 page)

At recess, I was called to Mrs. Grey's office. I had not spoken to her since our “interview” almost a month before. Her office was as bare as when I had first seen it, and when I sat down, I had the curious feeling that I should have asked her for permission.

“So, Miss Lam. How are you finding your first day?”

“Fine,” I replied.

“You know, you are our inaugural Equal Access student,” she said. “That means you are the first one we have ever had.”

“Yes, Mrs. Grey,” I answered.

“You are aware that Laurinda is making a big investment in you? In committing to fund your education for the next three years, we are gambling on an unknown quantity.”

“Yes, Mrs. Grey.” And then, “Thank you, Mrs. Grey.”

“What does your father do?” she asked me point-blank.

I was appalled by the directness of her question—and by how much adults thought they could get away with when they were dealing with minors and there was no one else in the room.

“Dad works.”

“Where?”

“At Victory.”

“What's that?”

“A carpet factory.”

“What about your mother? Home duties?”

I nodded. I didn't want to tell her about the sewing.

“Do you speak English at home?”

“No,” I answered.

She gave me that smile again. “Now, Miss Lam, tell me what books you studied last year.”

“The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”

She looked at me blankly.

“By Stephen Chbosky.”

Her brow furrowed. She'd clearly not heard of it and was not interested. “What else?”

“Romeo and Juliet.”

“What else?”

“
Stand by Me.
But that wasn't a book.” I wasn't sure why I added this. “It was a film.”

“Ah, yes, based on a Stephen King novel,” remarked Mrs. Grey, in the same way a person might say,
ah, yes, that ingrown toenail, part of my foot.
“You are aware that at Laurinda we don't study movies?”

“Yes.”

“And we don't study any books considered young adult literature. For instance, your Stephen Chbosky.”

So she
had
heard of him.

“
Romeo and Juliet
is a play we study in our first year of high school. We consider it a good introduction to Shakespeare at the elementary level.” She paused. “Now, I don't blame you for your school's choice of reading, but here at Laurinda we are a serious academic college, as evidenced by our English curriculum. We study the classics—Dickens, Austen, the poetry of Donne, Keats—as well as contemporary classics—Brecht, Graham Greene, Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald.”

I nodded mutely. Aside from Dickens and Austen, I had no idea who these writers were.

“We think it is wise for you to participate in a bridging course.”

I wanted to protest, did you not read the reference that Mr. Shipp gave me?
Lucy Lam is one of our strongest English students. Her dramatic monologue from the perspective of Charlie from
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
was one of the most creative pieces of extended fiction in the class.

“Now, you realize that we are not picking on you,” she explained, in the way a doctor tells you that an anesthetic is not going to hurt before the amputation. “In fact, Lucy, it was your English essay that gained you this scholarship in the first place. It was outstanding. Many of the students who sat the exam, who appeared to have crammed for mathematics, neglected their writing. Many pieces were, I'm afraid to say, very poor. There was even an essay where the candidate thought he was some kind of hoodlum from the Bronx whose brother was in prison. Although we commend great imaginative feats, that one was the unfortunate result of a mind subjected to too much American television.” I didn't say anything while she cast her eyes heavenward in silent lamentation. “Naturally, that student did not make it into Auburn Academy.”

“Weren't there some other good essays, though?” I asked, and immediately realized my mistake—that I was implying most of the essays were crap and mine was outstanding. Back at our old school, Linh, this would have been taken as a simple question, a display of polite humility. Here it was a judgment, one I was not entitled to make.

“Fishing for compliments, are we, Miss Lam?” Mrs. Grey asked, one eyebrow raised. Once more I realized that at Laurinda, you had to think very, very carefully every time you considered opening your mouth. “Of course there were. In fact, there was one other remarkable piece, the runner-up essay, about the founder of Amnesty International.”

“How come you didn't pick her?” I asked. It was yet another mistake, turning me transparent like the curtainless window of our house, where outsiders could peer in on a place where there was nothing worth stealing. How could I have known it was a
her
? “Or him,” I added.

“We found
her
piece—yes, it was a she, and she was close competition for you, you may be interested to know—we found her piece too stilted. Her grammar was perfect, her writing was fluent and sophisticated, but there was just something off-kilter about it. Almost as if she'd memorized a speech.”

Here you could not be mediocre, but you had to be well balanced. Not too real, yet not too fake. Tully tried to be someone she was not, Ivy was exactly who she was, and both were unacceptable at this school. That was probably what made me the ideal scholarship recipient. I was smart enough, but I had no particular sense of ownership over my thoughts. It was you who gave me a sense of belonging, Linh, with your magnetic ways and madcap schemes. Without you, I felt like a cipher.

“This is what will happen,” Mrs. Grey continued. “You will take some remedial lessons to get you up to scratch, and then you will be transferred back to ordinary English.”

If you'd been with me, you would have thrown a fit. How dare the school think I was not ready for Green and Fitzsimmons and whoever else when they'd given me a scholarship based on my essay writing? You would have prodded me to defend myself. But you weren't there, and I didn't want to make ripples.

“You should feel very lucky,” instructed Mrs. Grey. “I have arranged for you to have a one-on-one tutor twice a week. Mrs. Leslie is a Laurindan herself, and also the president of the Laurinda Book Club. She knows the English syllabus inside out.”

The last time I had one-on-one lessons with anyone was in Grade One with the school speech pathologist, because I pronounced all my
r
's as
w
's. That was to fix a flaw that, although “weally endeawing” as a little kid, would have screwed me up big-time as a teenager. I wondered whether there was something about me that only Mrs. Grey could see, something that, without intervention, would doom me to failure.

Gina was another girl who stood out from that first day's blur of faces, because she had dyed hair the hue of a cherry lollipop, cut in a bob that ended beneath her chin. You could easily locate her in any classroom—she was like a round sale sticker on a plain carton of eggs. We weren't allowed to have any earrings except small studs, but Gina had tiny diamonds that she hoped no teacher would notice. Also, while the rest of us had blank nails, hers were white-tipped and glossy with clear paint.

Gina had the hots for Mr. Sinclair, badly. He was a new teacher, I learned, and when we first entered the room we could see only the back of his suit because he was at the whiteboard. It seemed that all male staff were required to wear suits to work; the women had to be dressed in the female equivalent, which was usually an elegantly sculpted work dress, a cashmere twinset, or slacks and a blouse.

When Mr. Sinclair finished, he stepped back, and we saw what he had written:
POLITICS: From the Greek—“poly” meaning “many,” and “ticks” meaning “bloodsucking creatures.”
All the girls except Gina made a kind of
huh
noise, as if they were too clever for such a bad pun.

When Mr. Sinclair turned around, the girls expected to see some sort of “hangin' wid ma homies in da hood” teacher. You know the type, Linh: forty years old, dadlike but still thinking he's funny as hell. Instead, they saw how young Mr. Sinclair was, and how attractive. Take a bunch of girls and separate them from the boys from kindergarten on, and that is the kind of thing they will notice.

Gina was noticing it more than anyone. I swear, Linh, you could see the impure thoughts forming on her features. Secretly, I liked this about her, that she didn't seem to have a filter between her thoughts and her face.

We expected Mr. Sinclair to point to the board and read out what he had written, after which all the girls would laugh, just because he was so cute and they wanted to make a good impression. But he didn't. Instead, he introduced himself and started the lesson. Politics, Mr. Sinclair told us, was about governments. “But if you want to break it down further, it is essentially the study of people and power.”

Glancing around the room, I could already see how this was playing out in our class. The desks were arranged in a U shape around Mr. Sinclair's front table. “Socratic learning,” he called it, but Chelsea pointed out that Socrates had never included any women in his teachings. She wasn't a bimbo after all, I saw, but was just prone to say snide things every seven minutes or so, as if she had bitch Tourette's. She, Amber and a girl named Brodie Newberry were seated at the bottom end of the U, as far away from the teacher as possible, but also with the best view of the whole show.

Brodie was a tall, dark-haired girl who didn't say much, but it was an unsettling silence. She had dark eyes that were neither green nor gray; they seemed to absorb rather than reflect your image if you looked into them. I had the feeling that there were things beneath the surface waiting to float up when they stopped swimming. I realized then that I had seen Brodie before: she was one of the prefects who had marched into the auditorium bearing the school banner.

At the other end of the U, directly opposite me, was Gina. It turned out, Linh, that she would not budge from that position all term. She told us she was so close she could smell Mr. Sinclair's aftershave, and it smelled like CK One.

A pattern was set that first day: Chelsea or Brodie would offer their views, or shoot questions at Mr. Sinclair, and sometimes Amber would back up her friends. Because the three girls were hogging Mr. Sinclair's attention so regally, often for twenty minutes at a stretch, the rest of us felt like we were watching a trial on a television set we could not switch off. At times it seemed the girls were judges and Mr. Sinclair was a defense lawyer, and we were the bored jury listening to the case of some white-collar crime we did not understand.

“Why do people think the Whitlam dismissal was such a bad thing if the government was in such a shambles that no bills were being passed?” demanded Chelsea, as if her life depended on it.

Mr. Sinclair was the ever-patient explainer, but his Socratic method wasn't working. I wasn't understanding very much at all. How did these girls know so much about the world, enough to be able to form opinions about it? I still didn't know who Whitlam was, and these conversations in class didn't offer me any firm foothold.

Sometimes I detected an answer that was not quite right, and I waited patiently for an opening, a small gap of silence in which I could say something or ask a question. But the moment I opened my mouth to say, “Amber, I think your definition of a constitutional monarchy…,” the gap would close again. Already they were talking about a referendum for a republic, and my half sentence would be left dangling. Often I felt ridiculous, like a choir member still singing the chorus when everyone else had moved on to the next verse.

Pretty quickly I learned the nicknames of all the teachers. Mrs. Grey was known as the Growler, probably because if you were stuck in her office with the door closed for longer than fifteen minutes, you usually came out in tears. Ms. Vanderwerp was Ms. V and Mr. Sinclair was simply H.O., standing for “Hot One,” even after Gina found out that he was married and had an infant son.

I saw his wife picking him up one day after school in a car that had a baby seat in the back; as he approached, she wound down her window and stuck out her tongue at him. It is hard to explain why, but I found that charming, Linh. Probably it had something to do with how
ordinary
she was. Even from a distance I could tell that she was not as attractive as he was, though I would never agree with Gina, who muttered, “Why is he with that fugly cow?”

Gina was a bit of a loner, but she didn't seem too bothered by it. She was the sort of girl who wanted a boyfriend so badly that she gravitated toward whichever group happened to be discussing their crushes or their boy troubles. I'm not sure how the other girls felt about this, but I think sometimes they were just happy that Gina put herself forward so they didn't have to look so desperate or dumb. They would be like, “Oh, we usually talk about intellectual stuff like the role of class in Ruth Park's novels, but since Gina is here…”

On that first day at lunchtime, I found my first friend. Or, more accurately, she found me. Katie sought me out and gave me a more interesting tour of the school than Mrs. Grey had, that was for sure. I discovered that all the opulence my father and I had seen on the official tour was in contrast to the student corridors, which were littered with rubbish.

Our lockers were our only private spaces, and some girls lined them with photos of their pets or pop icons, and inspirational cards. The inside of my locker was completely blank, which was the way I wanted it, and I always shoved my bag in there. I decided not to leave it on top of the lockers, because Katie had warned me that some girls would trawl through bags; anything inside was fair game.

There weren't many places to go at lunchtime. So that the grass would stay perfectly green, we weren't allowed on the lawn at the front of the school. According to Katie, the performing arts center had taken up most of the space where an oval used to be, and we weren't allowed in there during lunch or recess. Yet even back when there was an oval, the girls weren't allowed on it, because it was connected to a little park reserve and the teachers were scared that pedophiles or flashers might be loitering nearby.

There were two tennis courts, but those were usually locked during lunch and recess, as were the seven music rooms. You weren't allowed to go in there to jam with the guitars, because that kind of thing was reserved for the talented.

Katie, who had been at Laurinda since kindergarten, pointed out all the occupied places: this corner was where the musicians hung out, in that stairwell dwelled the debaters, on this patch of concrete were the high-achieving Mediterranean girls (at Christ Our Savior we called them the Smart Wogs, remember? Yvonne was the smartest of them all), and here and there sat the little satellite groups of Year Sevens, Eights or Nines, who might as well have been invisible.

There was one unoccupied bench, near the rose garden—in fact, with a direct view of the blooms—but Katie steered me away from it. “The Cabinet sits there,” she said. “They'd start a War of the Roses if anyone took their spot.” She laughed.

“What's the Cabinet?” I asked.

Katie told me how, in the 1890s, Laurinda had been a finishing school for young ladies. After the girls were educated, they were said to be “in the Cabinet”—which meant on display to eligible bachelors who might become their husbands. Those who did not get picked from the Cabinet were left on the shelf, shoved to the very back, where they were condemned never to appear in the wedding announcements of newspapers. Many of them had returned here to teach.

Although most girls these days aimed to go to university, not to sit at home embroidering linen for their hope chests, the things that mattered then—attractiveness, wealth, personality—still mattered in determining your Cabinet position. Over time the term had evolved to name the unspoken hierarchy at Laurinda: a trio of girls so powerful they were collectively known as “the Cabinet.” It seemed that the Cabinet had always existed, although its members constantly changed, morphing into new faces every few years. They were the ones responsible for keeping the elusive “Laurinda spirit” alive.

This year it was Amber, Chelsea and Brodie, three top-shelfers who were protected like finest porcelain by the administration and taken out regularly to show off their kiln marks, the stamp of the school's quality.

But I didn't understand why it was Amber, Chelsea and Brodie who were at the top, Linh. Sure, they were pretty enough, but (with the exception of Amber) there were a dozen more beautiful girls on campus. Amber and Brodie were also teacher's pets of a kind, and in any other school that did not lead to high status. But here, strangely enough, it seemed to increase their power.

Amber's beauty was so distracting that she didn't need to develop much of a personality. Brodie, on the other hand, reminded me of Tully in her steely ambition and competitiveness. You didn't want to be a threat to Tully because you'd wound her fragile sense of self—jealousy and insecurity and fear would flash across her face so transparently that you'd feel bad. But I had the feeling that you didn't want to be a threat to Brodie because she would cut you down.

Unlike Tully, Brodie did not seem assailed by self-doubt over her intelligence, or by the fear that her future would be determined by her performance on exams. The difference was that Tully wanted so desperately to be in, whereas Brodie was already in. She had been in since she was in kindergarten, and she was determined to keep others out. Brodie did not smile very often, but when she did, it was not an invitation to friendship but a signal to ward off closeness. It seemed that if she looked at you, you had to pay your dues. Other girls were always smiling at her, but I wondered if they were baring their teeth from fear—like animals did when threatened.

Katie and I found some steps outside the maintenance shed, near the side entrance of the school, and that became our spot. We watched as Mrs. Grey conducted tours for the occasional visiting families of prospective international students, declaring with expansive hand gestures, “Here is where the girls play tennis” and “The young ladies like to hold music recitals in our new music rooms. Do you play an instrument, Swee Ling?”

When this happened, Katie would smile at me and I would smile back, and I felt like we were in this together. It didn't take me very long to figure out that Katie was a loner, and why she was. She just couldn't stop talking. But I liked Katie and I let her talk.

The Cabinet paraded through the college at lunchtime. They could talk to everyone and anyone, even though they did not do so too often, but no one talked to them for fear of being ignored.