by Alice Pung
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.
“Oh my God, that was sooo hard,” Brodie exclaimed after a math test one afternoon.
“I know, hey?” said Chelsea. “That last page was crazy scary.”
Brodie turned to the girl behind her. “Did you find it difficult, Nicola?”
“Not really,” replied Nicola, flattered to be asked. “I’ve been studying really hard for it for a week.”
“You mean you didn’t find it very difficult?” asked Brodie. “Wow, Nicola. Wow. Everyone found the last page impossible. I thought there were some trick questions in there. In fact, I’m sure there were.”
Nicola’s face crumpled. “What do you mean?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh, then don’t worry about it. You must have aced the test! You are a math genius, Nicola.”
And with that they walked away, leaving poor Nicola to fret for days until the results came back.
It was bad timing that Laurinda held the annual Senior School Art Retrospective Exhibition on Valentine’s Day, especially as it was at Auburn Academy. The exhibition was supposed to showcase the works of last year’s students, but nobody cared about them when the fresh scent of hormones from this year’s male cohort was in the air.
We were walking to the boys’ school, a little way up the street, when Mrs. Grey noticed that Gina’s face had the flat brown color and texture of an unsliced supermarket bread loaf. “Gina Grant, what is that on your face?” she yelled.
We all turned back to look. Even a neighborhood old guy watering his camellias jolted, his hose making an arc across the footpath.
“My features, miss.”
“Answer my question seriously! I’m sick of your antics. Are you wearing makeup?”
Gina was sent back to Laurinda to wipe it off. “Look at the shitload of makeup on your face, Growler,” she muttered as she turned back.
Just as she passed the Cabinet, Amber sang in a whispery voice, very quietly and almost imperceptibly, “Slut, slutty slut slut.”
—
At the exhibition, we went around looking at paintings and sculptures on themes such as despair and anorexia and war, while the boys snaked their way around us in sniggering huddles. Basically, we pretended that they were there to inconvenience us, blocking our view.
Gina was the only one making it obvious that she was excited to be around the opposite sex. Others were more discreet, although I noticed the Cabinet was not immune to the charms of the Auburn boys. They had begun acting coy. You’d never think that these were the same girls who planned world domination in our politics class.
I happened to be standing near them, beside a pink papier-mâché sculpture of a brain with electrical wires jutting out of it, when an Asian boy with glasses walked by. Amber nudged me. “Look, there’s one for you.” She and Chelsea giggled.
It was incredible how they assumed that I would not be interested in any other type of boy, but that’s how they were. From their white-daisy bouquet of slim pickings, they cast out all the yellow chrysanthemums, and anything brown was considered wilted.
Back at Christ Our Savior, a cute boy was a cute boy, even if he was a bit of a loser. But here it seemed that cuteness had to be filtered through quite a few lenses. It reminded me of going to the optometrist and having to read the letters on the wall, how each lens would be placed before my eyes until the fuzziness disappeared and the letters became sharp and distinct. That’s how Laurindans saw their boys—in fine, fine detail, down to the cut of their button-up shirts.
But it seemed to me that all these girls were myopic, because the guys they considered popular were not necessarily the hottest. Some were downright dweeby. And the hotter guys from Auburn Academy—a tall, dark, handsome one called Harshan, and the Marlon Brando look-alike Emilio—were treated like outsiders. Maybe these guys were too visceral for them. Laurinda girls were into Jane Austen heroes, not hunks.
Harshan had skin the color of a violin and an earring in one ear; I noticed it as he leaned over to poke a finger at one of the wires of the brain sculpture. When Chelsea spoke to him, she didn’t ask what he thought of the sculpture. Instead, she seemed to want to foster some cultural cohesion by asking, “So what part of India are you from?”
“I was born here, actually,” he said in a friendly way. “My parents are Sri Lankan, from Fiji.”
Even someone like Harshan was not immune to the charms of the Cabinet, I saw, particularly with Amber standing there. Here was the thing about the accidental artwork of her face—a few millimeters off and her eyes would be set too close together; a few millimeters apart and her mouth would make her chin look sunken. It was this tenuousness that made her so hot, that made boys feel they were living on the edge just by looking at her.
“Same diff,” said Amber, and she and Chelsea giggled. They were flirting with him; they assumed Harshan understood they were not racist, because they had deigned to speak to him. But they had no real idea what the difference between Sri Lanka and India was—and, making it worse, they didn’t care. One was Dilmah tea and the other Gandhi. We didn’t study South Asian history at this school.
“Ignorant bitches,” he muttered under his breath.
“Excuse me?” Amber’s eyes widened.
“What did you call us?” Chelsea turned toward him. “That is sooo offensive. Oh my God. Geez, some people can’t take a joke,” she pouted. I could see she was wounded because her eyes glittered like anthracite. Suddenly, it seemed, this was all Harshan’s fault—he was the brute, insulting these two young Laurinda diplomats who meant well, who were curious about his culture. They were nice girls, and he was a condescending, sexist pig.
Harshan looked down at them, and I could tell that all the beauty he’d seen there had dissolved. Then he did something completely unexpected, which made them squeal. He lowered his head and bowed from the waist—a long, drawn-out bow that came to just above the hem of their skirts, his back straight as an ironing board. He slowly came up and held his hands in the prayer position. Bobbing his head from side to side, he said, “Oh, golly gee, ma’am, I’m welly, welly solly—please accept my most humble apologies.” His face was hard but, unlike Chelsea’s, it was not brittle. He turned and walked away.
Amber and Chelsea burst into laughter. “Stupid curry muncher,” said Chelsea, and then told a story about how guys like that were always trying to pick her up at Urban nightclub and how they couldn’t dance for shit.
I moved away from the brain sculpture.
—
Amber returned from Auburn Academy with a pen. It had a plastic heart at the top that lit up, and it played a tinny song when you wrote with it. I’m not sure which boy had given it to her, but Amber was ecstatic, flashing it around class, showing teachers and using it to write, until Mrs. Trengrove said that the music was too distracting; could she please use a normal pen like everyone else? Even that did not ruin her heart-thumping joy, and she bounded to class, skipping and leaping, showing off her gazelle legs.
There was love elsewhere too.
In politics, someone had put a single heart-shaped chocolate wrapped in gold foil on Mr. Sinclair’s desk. We all knew it was Gina. He walked to his desk, put down his planner and lesson folder, and pretended not to see it.
“Sir!” Chelsea called out. “Sir, someone left something for you!”
He also pretended to be deaf.
“Sir,” Chelsea repeated, “I think someone left you a present.”
He looked down at his desk, at the very spot where the chocolate was, so we knew that he knew it was there. As much as he tried, he wasn
’t very good at feigning surprise. His face was turning as red as his hair.
“Oh,” he exclaimed.
Poor guy. Perhaps teachers’ college hadn’t taught him what to do in this scenario. We could tell he was wishing for the chocolate to disappear. To acknowledge that it was there, and that it was intended for him, would be like, well…like taking candy from a minor.
We all started to laugh, which gave him an opportunity to try to be a teacher again. “All right, cut it out. That’s enough carrying on.”
“What are you going to do with it, Mr. Sinclair?”
“Ooh, you have a secret admirer!”
“I wonder who it is!”
“Someone loves you, sir!”
“Yes, very funny,” he said drily. “Now, where did we leave off last class? The American electoral system, I believe.”
You had to hand it to him—no one gave a toss about how the Americans elected their president, but he plowed on regardless. The girls were too distracted by that little gold object on his desk, a symbol of their power over this awkward but endearingly attractive man.
I could look at them all, Linh, and tell myself how ridiculously these girls were carrying on, but during recess, sitting with Katie, who genuinely didn’t care about the art show visit or about getting presents, I felt a pang. As she talked, I started to fall into my usual reverie about the sort of year I might have had if I hadn’t changed schools. Maybe, if I had stayed at Christ Our Savior, I might have had a boyfriend from St. Andrew’s….
There’s a secret to getting a boyfriend at fifteen, and it is this: you have to have a group of friends. You’ll never get picked up alone unless by creeps, or unless you are extremely beautiful (and even then you’ll mostly get creeps), because alone you have no personality. It’s only when you’re with your friends that you start to shine.
Boys are the same. You see a boy around his mates, and you can pick whether he is the clown of the group, the quiet philosopher or the alpha male. Alone, you can’t tell because he’d act differently, and of course he can’t tell anything about your personality either. When alone with a member of the opposite sex, we feign indifference, even though we yearn to be exaggerated versions of ourselves, filled with extra bravado or extra niceness.