by Alice Pung
When the bell rang, we stood up to leave. I watched Ms. Vanderwerp walk away to her next class. There was something slightly blurred about her whole being, as if she were a watercolor painting that someone couldn’t be bothered finishing; not only that, but they didn’t even care enough not to smudge it with their smock sleeve.
—
No one had explained to me why Ms. Vanderwerp carried wipes around with her at all times, but after my fourth history class I figured it out. The Cabinet showed me.
One afternoon Amber came to class looking pallid and unwell. She took out a pocket pack of tissues and placed it on her desk. “Are you okay?” I asked. She hadn’t seemed sick that morning.
She nodded. When Ms. Vanderwerp was handing out a photocopy about America’s involvement in World War II, Amber let out a massive, whooping sneeze just as the teacher was near her desk. Ms. Vanderwerp jumped backward, almost falling over Katie. All the beige seeped out of her face as she righted herself. Instead of saying, “Bless you, Amber,” Ms. Vanderwerp kept her distance and opened all the windows of the room. “Amber, dear, would you like to go to the sick bay? You look quite unwell.”
“No, I should be all right, Ms. V.”
Then I noticed Amber’s smile, and how the color of her face didn’t particularly match her neck. I saw what I hadn’t noticed before—that whenever anyone coughed, Ms. Vanderwerp would open a window. Whenever anyone sneezed, she would turn around toward the whiteboard as if she needed to write something or rub something out.
I heard Brodie snigger behind Ms. Vanderwerp’s back while she busied herself writing on the board, and I realized that what Amber had done was all an act—an act of talcum-powder torture, carefully timed to churn up Ms. Vanderwerp’s worst fears.
—
That same afternoon, when I returned home, Mum had fixed the Lamb’s blue snot problem. She had caught a bus to Sunray’s fabric store and bought five yards of very, very fine bridal netting, which she hemmed at the top and passed a drawstring through. At the bottom she sewed an enormous circle of stiff copper wire. She gathered the drawstring at the top and hung the contraption from a ceiling beam, trapping the Lamb’s box inside like a bee inside a butterfly net.
—
“Mr. Lamb, look at you!” I squealed. “You have your own little hideaway!” I squatted on the floor and lifted up the circular base to peer at him.
“Gah!” he said, dribbling. He was eating one of those iced cakes in plastic wrappers, the cakes that never went bad.
“He only stays in here with me during the day while you are at school,” Mum told me. “Take him into the kitchen and give him some mashed soup from the pot on the stove top. Then let him walk in his baby walker while you are doing your homework.”
Although Lamb had recently learned to walk, we often put him in his playpen to prevent him from bumping into boxes or sharp corners or crawling toward dangerous objects, like the fabric cutter or the ironing board.
I lifted the Lamb from his box, and he was still holding on to his one-eyed duck. But the moment I set him down on my lap, he decided to pee on my blazer.
“Oh, no! Crap, Mum!”
“What happened?” My mother was panicking. “Did he fall?” She came rushing toward us. Then she noticed the rivulet running down my pocket, collecting in dark droplets on the concrete floor.
“Why didn’t you put a nappy on him?” I shouted.
“He has a rash on his bum.” She picked him up and showed me.
“Eww, I don’t need to see that!”
“It’ll come out with a wash,” she said, patting my damp sleeve with her hand, but that only made me angrier.
“You can’t put something like this through a machine! You have to dry-clean it!”
I had forgotten that I was talking to a textiles expert, and my mother had had enough of me. “For the last six months, all you have been going on about is your clothes,” she yelled. “Summer dress this, winter kilt that. How do you think a three-hundred-dollar uniform will help you study better, huh?” She washed the sleeve of my blazer with Imperial Leather soap, then dried it with a hair dryer. It did not shrink.
The truth was that I’d always felt grimier than most of the girls at Laurinda, even before the Lamb peed on me. I felt grimy because Stanley was a grimy place, Linh. When the wind blew the wrong way, you knew how foul the fumes of the Victory Carpet Factory could be.
—
Not long before, Mrs. Leslie had made me write about a childhood memory which evoked a sense of place that no longer existed except in memory. I wrote about being a really young kid and standing next to my grandma in Hanoi, helping her sell boiled eggs. Of course, I didn’t remember very much except the way the market smelled, and how there were sometimes runaway chickens on the ground.
“I cried when I read this,” Mrs. Leslie said.
“Sorry,” I replied. “Was it that bad?”
“Oh, no! No, no, Lucy!” she insisted, not getting that I was joking. “No, darling. It was just too beautiful. It was just so special.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what was so special about using a cute toddler as a cheap marketing tool, Linh, but hey, it seemed to push Mrs. Leslie’s buttons in a good way. I was glad, because although I had mixed feelings about her daughter, I really liked Mrs. Leslie.
The boys had their sports. Every weekend they would play tennis and cricket against the other schools in their league. Their sport was serious, a way for them to exercise their competitive streaks, for those streaks to burst into glowing colors for the school and smear their rivals. If an Auburn boy played particularly well, he was celebrated by his team. An individual skill or talent brought them all a step closer to victory.
We had sports too, but our sports always seemed an inferior imitation of the boys’. They had cricket, we had softball. They had basketball, we had netball. Girls wanted to play the former; no boys wanted to play the latter. While some of the girls went to see the boys play, none of the boys ever came to Laurinda games. And then some of the girls had ballet, which was more a daily practice in perfectionism than a sport.
If we tried to do four or five jumping jacks to warm up before class, we would be met with “Girls, don’t be silly. You’re not freshmen.” The gym was the only place for that kind of behavior, and we had gym only once a week for two hours. The girls had to get their kicks another way.
Over the weekend Gina had gone into the city, and when she was at the Dux department store, she ran into the lead singer of Mercury Stool, her favorite band. She grabbed a blue notebook and pen from the stationery department she had been standing in and ran after him.
“Let us have a look, hey, Gina?” Brodie said, and the girls milling around Gina parted like the Red Sea. Brodie took the book from her and examined it. “Wow, this is amazing,” she marveled to Amber, and passed it along.
Amber held the book up to the light. “Incredible.”
“You are so lucky!” fawned Chelsea.
“Thank God they didn’t charge me extra because it had his signature on it!” Gina said, suddenly shy, realizing these girls held her sacred object in the same reverence.
“My father will get it valued for you by his friend Gregory Mitchell,” Amber offered, handing it back.
“No, thanks, Amber. I’m never going to sell this!” Gina hugged the blue notebook to her chest.
“Come on, Gina. I mean, I know you think it’s priceless and all, but Gregory can tell you how much it will be worth in ten years’ time,” said Chelsea. “Gregory valued a Neighbours swap card my mum’s had since 1987, and you wouldn’t believe how much it’s worth today.”
“I don’t care how much it’s worth to others,” said Gina. “It can’t mean more to anyone else than it does to me.”
I saw Chelsea rolling her eyes at Brodie.
“Well, he can at least tell you how to mount and frame it properly for your room,” said Brodie gently. “Come on. We’d like to do this for you.”
Week after w
eek, Gina asked about her notebook. Week after week, Amber told her it was with Gregory, getting valued…until one morning. A crowd milled around Amber, who sat slumped at her desk. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her huge eyes filling with tears when Gina arrived. “I feel so guilty. Gregory lost it. He said he would look into it, and must have left it around somewhere….He thinks his wife put it out in the recycling.”
“On the bright side, I suppose it must not have been worth as much as we thought,” Chelsea said, patting Amber on the back. Because Amber was crying so much, Gina could not. But I watched her as she tried to keep her chin under control. This school sure taught you stoicism.
—
Another time, the Cabinet turned on Katie. “What are you doing your oral assignment on?” Brodie asked Katie, who considered herself a Russian history expert.
“Tsar Nicholas’s family, and the mystery of Anastasia. Lucy and I are thinking of reenacting the murder of the royal family, but from a modern-day forensic scientist’s perspective.” For two days, this project had been all Katie would talk about at lunchtime.
“I don’t think it’s a group assignment, Katie.”
“Ms. Vanderwerp said that we could work together.”
“Well, Ms. Vanderwerp told me that it was an oral presentation, to assess our speaking skills. That’s what she said to me. But if you want to make a song and dance about Tsar Nicholas and his family, by all means go ahead.”
“I’ll go and ask Ms. Vanderwerp.”
“Sure, and of course she’ll say yes to you, Katie—if you really want to torture us with fifteen minutes of your version of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”
Katie made no move to see Ms. Vanderwerp.
“But we could totally do it,” I told her at recess. She was sitting glumly, the quietest she had ever been. “Come on, Katie, it’ll be fun.”
“Nah.”
“But you said you’ve already started writing the script.”
“Nah,” Katie said sadly. “Don’t want to look like a fool.”
When the week of the presentations arrived, Katie stood up and read from two pages of notes. “Nikolay Aleksandrovich Romanov was the last emperor of Russia and grand duke of Finland, known as Bloody Nicholas to his enemies because of his approval of anti-Jewish massacres and pogroms, and his execution of political rivals.”
Katie’s sentences were far too long and left her breathless; she’d forgotten that words typed on a page were different from spoken words. In the middle of her talk, the Cabinet stood up and left the room. Katie noticed and looked up, losing her place. She looked back down at her notes and finished her talk, but when she walked back to her desk I could see that she was shaking.
Suddenly the Cabinet reappeared, in full costume—Brodie in a fake beard and a greatcoat with epaulettes, Amber in a long gown and tiara. Chelsea was a younger girl with a frock that fell beneath her knees and a yellow ribbon in her hair. They had created a slide show of images that, when projected onto the wall behind them, served as historical backdrops: the tsar’s palace, the carriage ride in the night, the murders, the forensic scientists and their theories. The last slide was a picture of a bookshelf, with Brodie replacing a book titled Shelving the Enigma.
At the end, the whole class clapped.
“They copied us!” Katie hissed to me.
“It’s not copying when no one else has done this sort of thing before,” Chelsea said, smiling.
Katie looked pleadingly at Ms. Vanderwerp.
Fortunately, it was Katie, and not Brodie, who had spent entire lunchtimes last year sitting in Ms. Vanderwerp’s little office with her Russian dolls, her photos and postcards of Moscow’s underground railway. It was Katie who had regaled Ms. Vanderwerp with stories of seeing Lenin embalmed in his glass coffin and her theories of the tsar’s missing daughter. It was Katie who had made sure that she did not sneeze or cough in Ms. Vanderwerp’s presence.
After class, as Katie and I were walking out, the Cabinet followed us. “I know you feel like we stole your idea,” said Brodie. Damn it, the Cabinet was always a step ahead—they even denied us the pleasure of backstabbing them! “But do you two seriously think you could have pulled off something like this?”
“You guys were great,” Katie conceded. “Really.”
“Thanks, Katie,” said Brodie generously. “But you know what? You were our inspiration. When we saw how revved up you were, we thought, hey, why not? Why not go all out? After all, if Katie Gladrock is not afraid to put herself out there, even risk embarrassment, well, neither are we!”
“You are a champ, Katie,” gushed Chelsea. “A champ.”
Linh, these girls were like the disembodied clowns’ heads you find at carnivals, the ones with the open mouths. The game looked so easy, but only when you played it did you realize that the heads were always turning from side to side, reminding you, “No! You can’t win!”
When the Cabinet left us alone, we found our usual spot near the maintenance shed.
“They’re kind of mean, aren’t they?” I asked Katie.
“Oh, no, the Cabinet’s all right,” she reassured me. “Once you get over their pranks, you’ll see they’re okay. I mean, they were really nice to get Gina all those Mercury Stool posters.”
“But they lost her notebook!”
“Yeah, but they felt really bad about it. Amber was crying, didn’t you see?”
Was Katie blind? “But they stole your idea!”
“It was a bad one anyway,” Katie said. “They improved it. Come on, Lucy, as if we were going to get up there and do what they did.”
“We were!” I said. “We were so going to do it!”
“Well, you would have been the only one up there, because I wasn’t going to.”
For the first time, I heard a hint of defensiveness in Katie’s voice. I’d assumed that she and I felt the same way about the Cabinet. I’d assumed we saw them through the same lens.
“Our parents used to be friends,” Katie confessed. “In fact, it was Brodie’s mum who introduced my mum to my stepfather. They were really close back then.”
It now dawned on me that I was like a brand-new camera; all my snapshots were only a few months old. But Katie was an old Kodak with a very long roll of film inside, filled with images and events from a decade spent at Laurinda.
Poor Katie, I thought. She acted as if this tenuous link to the Cabinet actually meant something.
—
The next week, when results came in, Ms. Vanderwerp read them out to the class:
Katie: A+
Brodie, Amber and Chelsea: B+
“What?” Chelsea whined.
“I assessed you not just on this one assignment, but on your work across the whole term,” said Ms. Vanderwerp.
“That’s not fair!” protested Amber. “You never told us you were going to do that!”
“Our assignment alone would have bumped up our term’s marks to an A at least, wouldn’t you say, Ms. Vanderwerp?” Brodie was using her most reasonable voice, which was like a knife dipped in Nutella: so sweet and soft on top that you could easily overlook the menace that lay beneath.
“Your group assignment was excellent,” Ms. Vanderwerp said. “But all term, you three girls have been distracted—and, what’s worse, distracting others too. You don’t seem to take history seriously. So I am afraid I had to deduct marks for effort. You need to learn to apply yourselves consistently, not just when it suits you. I’m sorry, girls.”
“You’re not, but you will be,” Chelsea muttered quietly, and then blew her nose loudly into a tissue. It was like a trumpet heralding war.
I had the feeling that something was about to happen, but I couldn’t talk to Katie about it at school. She was so garrulous that she could speak for thirty minutes straight, and her pet topic this week was Mussolini and fascism in Italy. I had to think of a way to make her listen.
I decided I would telephone her at home. That way we would be free from the eavesdropping of oth
er girls, and I might just get a chance to say something that would not be interrupted.
Linh, I really didn’t need you to be there, but you came anyway, and I was grateful. You still found my Laurinda life fascinating back then. We sat on my bed, and you had the Lamb in your lap. Do this, you instructed me in a crazed Southern preacher drawl. Lead the poor blind soul out of the dark! Switch the lights on in the Cabinet for her!
We waited for the Lamb to stop squealing and clapping over your performance before I picked up the phone and dialed.
“Who is this, dear?” her grandmother said when I asked to speak to Katie.
“A friend from school,” I replied.
When Katie answered, she said, “Oh, hi, Lucy!” all excited to hear from me. I guessed that no one ever called her.
“Hi, Katie,” I said. “Listen, I’m a bit worried about stuff going on at school. So I thought we could talk about it.”
And—hallelujah!—she asked me to explain. I managed to get through a minute’s worth of words before she cut me off.
“Lucy, you’re worried about nothing,” she said. “I get that you’re coming to a new school and everything must seem so weird, but it really is nothing to stress over, I swear. All the girls at Laurinda are nice.”
“But I am worried,” I said. “I’ve been here long enough now to see the way things are and it creeps me out.”
“No,” Katie replied firmly, “Lucy Lam, you see things as you are. And you see them wrong. I get that you’re Asian and respectful and came from a Catholic school and all that, but you don’t understand pranks.”
At that point, you pulled the phone from my hands and switched it off. You hung up on her! You said, What kind of racist shit is that?
She’s not racist, I explained. She likes Asians.
Don’t say I don’t look out for you! you told me as you redialed her number. “Katie,” you said before I could stop you, “why do you keep defending those bitches?”
“What?” I could hear Katie on the other end. “Who is this?”
“Lucy.”
“No, it’s not. You sound nothing like her.”