by Alice Pung
—
Going to the social was tolerable, then, if not exactly fun. I appreciated that the Cabinet had invited me to go with them. I wasn’t sure whether this had changed our friendship or whether I would still be treated like the perpetual exchange student in their little group. I soon found out.
Brodie stared at me with her scary dark eyes. “We like you, Lucy. You’re loyal, and you keep quiet about things.”
“Not like Katie,” said Chelsea. “Tattling bitch.”
I think they were waiting for me to bag Katie or Ms. Vanderwerp and pledge allegiance to them. But I remained silent, and I suppose after a while my silence became unnerving.
“We know your former friend dobbed on us, Lucy,” spat Chelsea. “We know she went to the Growler and told her who it was that pulled the prank on Ms. V.”
“We also know she dobbed on Gina too.”
The Cabinet had got only one out of two correct. Katie might have ratted on Gina, but she would never touch the Cabinet. “I don’t think Katie would tell on you,” I said.
“Aww, Lucy, you’re too sweet, but terribly naïve. You think that just because you wouldn’t, others wouldn’t as well.” That was Brodie. “But what you don’t understand yet is that the Growler depends on us to keep the others in check. You think the administration can just yell out orders from above and get all the students to comply? Not on your life. We have a crucial role. We tread gently, my friend. We play harmless pranks, but our pranks have serious consequences.
“Listen, Lucy. When my dad went to Auburn Academy in the eighties, there was a teacher named Mr. Hadley. He was this old, drooling man, close to retirement, but still clinging on to teaching shitty math. He was probably the sole reason why the school was always beaten by Forbes College in university acceptance for ten years straight. The boys hated him. He couldn’t explain anything properly, and when the boys didn’t understand he would just speak more loudly and slowly, as if they were deaf.”
“Maybe he was deaf!” interrupted Chelsea.
“So one day they went to the butcher and got a pig’s head. They put a wig on it and some makeup, and glued on some fake eyelashes. They put the head in the teacher’s drawer in the classroom so that it lay on one cheek, and they arranged the hair to cover its piggy snout. When Mr. Hadley came to class that day, all the boys had their heads on their desks, shoulders shaking, except for one boy, whose hands and desk were all smeared with red ink from a pen. ‘What’s going on?’ Mr. Hadley kept saying, but no one moved, and that one boy was just staring at the teacher’s desk. When Mr. Hadley noticed droplets of blood on the floor, leaking in small plops from his desk, he finally opened the drawer.
“And he pissed himself. He literally pissed his pants. There was a spreading dark patch on the front of his pants, and the front of the room started to smell. He had to leave, walking out with his legs all funny. Needless to say, he went into early retirement.”
I had no idea why they were telling me their stories.
“When Mr. Wang came to teach us Chinese in Year Seven,” Chelsea said, “he was probably, like, only eight years older than us. He had a really thick accent, so thick it was kind of hopeless trying to understand him. And he’d picked a stupid first name: Carmen. What the hell? Didn’t he know it was a girl’s name? When he told us that the Chinese put their surnames before their first names, from that day on we called him Wanker Man. Wang Carmen—get it? And there was nothing he could do because it was his name!”
“Yeah, I remember in Year Seven,” Amber began, “some girls filled a condom with water and put it on my seat just before I sat down. My dress was wet for ages. I laughed about it at school, then cried for hours when I got home. But I didn’t go off and have a nervous breakdown.”
“An insecure person here is like a loose nut,” said Chelsea. “You just have to screw them up properly.”
“We really got rid of Ms. V,” breathed Amber, slightly incredulously, as if she was David after he’d felled Goliath.
“We purified the school,” said Brodie, but by now it was hard to tell whether she was being ironic or deadly serious. Her laugh sounded like a machine gun, and her braces glinted like a steel trap. Sometimes Brodie said the most ridiculous things in dead seriousness, and sometimes she said the most serious things with deadpan mirth.
And that, I learned, was how you blurred the lines between good and bad.
Dear Linh,
I was beginning to notice things that I should not have noticed, and to take an unhealthy interest in things that had never before interested me. Of course, back at Christ Our Savior we noticed girls who had stuff. On casual day, we all knew that Lisa’s white peacoat cost $79.95, because we went to the mall after school and tried it on for ourselves. We crowded around Lisa and told her how good it looked and how jealous we all were. And that was it, Linh. We didn’t lie awake at night burning with bitterness. But something new was happening to me. Now I felt a desire for things that I could not voice.
If houses were faces, then the houses in Stanley would be middle-aged men with most of their teeth knocked out or rotted to the core, surviving on welfare and reeking of beer, with a few vehicular misdemeanors to their names. Everything was so cheap and tacky here, I now saw. All the trees looked like shrubs. The great big concrete slabs of the Corinthian Hotel made it look more like a mausoleum than the classical Roman establishment it was modeled on. Even the Donaldsons’ gnomes looked gauche; it occurred to me that they must have got them from the Reject Shop.
At the Sunray market I saw an old Laotian woman sitting on a faded plastic chair, eating a banana and scratching her right big toe. I saw Filipino ladies carrying their fake Louis Vuitton and Chanel handbags to buy fish at the wet market. The dollar store that I loved so much, the place that brought such endless cheap joy to the Lamb, seemed like a roomful of junk. All the things that I had once loved so much now seemed sad.
Back at Christ Our Savior, most of us lived in the same dumpy houses, so we didn’t see them as cluttered with boxes of fabric or cheap imported knickknacks. We were too busy doing things—jumping on our mums’ sewing machines to make tote bags and summer shorts with the scraps left over from the floor, concocting seven different ways to use up a sack of potatoes, and even trying to arrange for our baby siblings to be betrothed to each other when they grew up. Silly, daydreamy girl stuff.
None of us at Christ Our Savior thought it was unusual that the Lamb came everywhere with me. They did not treat him like a specimen from another planet, existing solely to give them their daily dose of cute. Nor did they secretly shudder if he sneezed and snot popped out of his nose like two green worms. They would just hand me a box of tissues, or wait patiently for me to change his nappy. They did not mind if he sat on the floor with us while we were doing our homework, and they would grab some used paper and a pen for him too.
Now that my life had shrunk down to homework, and the Lamb, and sewing after school, my mind started wandering to places I had no business being in.
—
“Are you going to masturbate?” Gina asked me one morning, and I thought that I must have heard incorrectly, or that she was speaking to someone else, or that she was revealing her true sexual orientation by coming on to me.
“Yes, she’s coming with us,” Chelsea said, seeing the bewilderment on my face, and laughed. “That’s what we call this illustrious event in the Laurinda-Auburn calendar: the Mass Debate. And we get to wrestle the boys for the top position.”
When we arrived at the boys’ school, I soon found out the reason for the name, Linh—the Auburn boys used language that had played with itself so much it had gone blind. I lost track of what they were supposed to be arguing. I should have felt smug accompanying the Cabinet to their debating finals, but instead I felt as though I was watching it all from a great distance.
Brodie, Amber and Chelsea were on the negative team. None of them had jobs, but they all had very strong opinions. The final speaker for Auburn, a boxy boy n
amed Aaron, was almost apoplectic in his insistence that young people deserved as much pay as your minimum-wage working adult because they worked just as hard and learned twice as fast. His hands moved about like those of a mime artist on speed, so confident was he in the power of his words.
All those Laurinda girls and Auburn boys, in love with their own voices and ideas, so certain of going to university and winning internships, of moving to Canberra and maybe becoming politicians, so they could make decisions that affected people like my mum, and decisions for the grown-up versions of our Christ Our Savior friends, girls who believed that if they lived decent, small lives of community service, their worlds would be safe. Our poor ignorant mates, Linh—they had no idea that beliefs which would affect their lives were germinating at these little debates, forming in the minds of these girls and boys who were practicing to rule in two decades’ time. I wish I could say I admired their intellects, but I knew that intellect was not the be-all and end-all. I wish I could say I didn’t have a chip on my shoulder, but I knew I had a whole Pringles factory up there.
The girls won the debate by a narrow margin. Afterward, the boys’ team milled around the Cabinet.
“Hey, Brodie, you were good.”
These Auburn boys and Brodie understood each other. They were on the same plane, while I was far below, paddling furiously on a life raft.
I didn’t recognize anyone. The boys seemed handsome-forgettable, but of course I couldn’t look directly at their faces. They all looked desirably good, because they all looked decent, neat and clean. I could understand why some people fell in love with a uniform. These boys’ school uniforms were like suits, not only suggesting their future careers, but also preventing them from getting up to no good, like the boys of Stanley did.
I saw how Samuel, Aaron and Raymond ignored Amber altogether: they either didn’t look at her while they were talking, or didn’t talk to her while they were looking. Of course, they paid me no attention either. Yellow fever had not reached here, and I doubted it ever would. Girls like me were just not considered hot.
The Cabinet girls hadn’t acknowledged or introduced me, so it was hard to be part of their conversation. I’d never been much good at finding openings in conversations here. I treated having conversations like stuffing envelopes—the moment a gap appeared, I was worried I’d insert the wrong thing, and it would be sealed and delivered. Or I’d insert something too large to fit through the post, and it would not be accepted. Most people were happy to send off junk mail, though, which was what small talk was sort of about. I stood around awkwardly while they talked. When there was a long silence, Raymond turned my way.
“Guys, this is Lucy,” explained Chelsea. “She’s new at Laurinda.”
“Oh, really? Are you on exchange?” asked Raymond.
“No, I’m local.”
“What part of Asia are you from?” he asked, as if he had not heard me.
Why couldn’t we talk about books or politics, or even movies we’d seen recently (he at the cinema, me on illegally copied DVDs)? Amber could stand there thinking about taking a dump and the boys would presume the faraway look in her eyes signified deep thoughts and ineffable longings. When my face was passive, I was inscrutable and sullen.
I must have stayed silent for a moment too long, because Chelsea replied, “She’s Chinese.” Then she said to me, “You know, Aaron went on the China trip last year.”
I turned toward Aaron. “How was it?” I asked. “Were the people really friendly despite being so poor? And was the food really great?”
He didn’t detect my sarcasm. “Oh, yes. It’s a remarkable culture.”
What fifteen-year-old uses the word remarkable?
Raymond nudged Aaron. “Aaron went to Chongqing,” he said. Maybe I was imagining it, but he seemed to take great pleasure in pronouncing the word like a racist chant. “Chong Ching,” he repeated, and snickered.
“What part of China are you from?” Aaron asked me, in the way you would ask a four-year-old to hold up a handful of fingers to show their age.
“I was born in Vietnam.”
“Hmm, how does that work?”
“Well, my mum went into labor and I popped out.”
There was an awkward silence; my joke was hanging there like a tightrope walker without a net.
“I mean,” he patiently explained, as if talking to someone who had just clambered off a boat and had to fill in an immigration form in a language they couldn’t read, “why was a Chinese girl born in Vietnam?”
Linh, you would have retorted with “What’s a white guy like you doing being born in an Aboriginal country?” but I didn’t. “My grandparents migrated to Vietnam,” I said. It sounded like I was apologizing for getting his question wrong, when he was the one who hadn’t understood me. “Because of the famine. In China.”
Don’t get me wrong, Linh, these boys did try. The Laurinda girls too, because they were “nice girls.” But they all began from a distant and inoffensive place of extreme politeness, and the first thing they noticed was our differences. They didn’t understand that we were teenagers in the exact same way they were. I wasn’t suddenly an expert on the Moon Festival or the My Lai Massacre, just as they didn’t know about the history of the national anthem or the early Dutch discovery of Australia before Captain Cook.
“I see,” said Aaron, even though he didn’t.
Suddenly the boys spotted another Laurindan they recognized. As Trisha walked past, Aaron called out, “Hey! It’s Trisha ‘Maestro’ MacMahon!”
And then, Linh, Trisha turned toward the boys, as if the Cabinet was not standing there, and replied, “Do you want aural pleasures, boys?” She had a surprisingly husky voice. I’d only ever really seen her from a distance, but up close Trisha was quite gorgeous: raven-haired with sharp cheekbones.
“How do you know each other?” asked Chelsea.
“Trisha has been playing for us,” replied Raymond. “She played last week at our assembly.”
“Really?” asked Brodie.
“Really,” replied Trisha.
“She was damn good too,” enthused Aaron.
I stood a little to the left while they continued talking, and then a bit farther apart, until I saw a wall of old oil paintings in which I could pretend to be engrossed.
—
“Why weren’t you debating?”
This was a new voice.
You know, Linh, it really doesn’t take long for a fifteen-year-old girl to fall in love. A boy only needs to look at her in the right way or talk to her in the right way. To see her in the right way. I had been pretending to carefully examine a portrait of an old man with a monumental mustache, while trying to block out the praise fest going on behind me. I turned around and came face to face with Richard the Lionheart. He was standing close enough that I could see the freckles on his nose. He looked at the painting.
“Ah, the old hat.”
“What?” I knew it was rude, but “I beg your pardon” sounded like a middle-aged person’s reprimand.
“H.A.T.,” he explained. “Hugh Auburn the Third, founder of our august institution. His eyes are popping out because of the strain of holding his bladder in. It was a six-hour sitting. They had to capture every strand of his facial hair.”
Against my will, I smiled. I didn’t laugh, because it wasn’t that funny, and I didn’t want to sound like a bimbo. You had to be very careful when you talked with boys in public: every sound and movement was magnified, blown out of proportion like a grotesque foil character balloon. One little prick and you were deflated.
“Our debate finished early, so a few of us came to see the Division A teams.”
Earlier, I’d heard debates going on in other rooms that sounded far more fun than ours. One room in particular sounded like one of the parliamentary question time sessions that they showed on television at three in the morning.
I didn’t know how to talk to boys who were past the nappy-wearing stage of life. “What did you thi
nk?” I asked. “The boys were pretty good, weren’t they?”
“No,” said Richard. “They were tools.”
Then I did something that I had not done too often this year. I laughed. I had not expected such honesty—or such audacity. You could never, ever say something like that with the Cabinet so close by; they had sonar hearing like bats. Fortunately, Aaron and co. were too engrossed in their conversation to hear.
That was another difference between girls and boys: boys were insulted only if you yelled it in their faces. Otherwise, they were oblivious.
Amber was telling them about some old Italian men who had tried to pick her up at the Amalfi Coast last summer. Richard turned his head around to look. I felt a little miffed, but the fact was, everyone noticed Amber. She was like the sun: you could pretend it wasn’t there, but you’d still feel its heat.
“Those boys—what kind of tools were they?” I asked. “Screwdrivers or hand drills?”
Aaron would probably have tried to explain the double meaning of tool to me, but Richard just smiled. He put his hand on his chin and pretended to muse on this.
“Screwdrivers,” he decided. “Or maybe even sharpeners.”
“Sharpeners?”
“They were so anally retentive that if you shoved a pencil up Aaron’s arse, it would be filed to a lethal point.”
“Hee hee. You could sharpen a few of them and use them as darts,” I suggested. “It would bring new meaning to the term backstab. You could throw them at people and they’d get a visit from E. coli and friends.”
Richard laughed. His laugh was both awesome and embarrassing in its loudness and enjoyment. Someone had found me funny at last. It wasn’t as if I’d been hankering to be the class clown, but I felt like I’d lacked a personality for more than half a year. Finally someone had seen a small glimmer of what I once was—it was a blissful feeling.
“Colon and buddies.”
“Salmon Ella and the Fecal Crew.”
“Hey, that’s a great name for a band,” Richard said.