Lucy and Linh

by Alice Pung

  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.

 
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 h
ell. 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.