by Alice Pung
I did not fall for her flattery.
“No,” I said slowly. “Maybe how different schools cultivate different cultures of fairness. For instance, at my old school we had a student representative council—”
“But you’re not meant to be talking about your old school,” interrupted Chelsea. “You’re representing Laurinda, remember?”
“Hmm,” mused Brodie. “How about you focus on the two schools’ different academic standards and extracurricular activities? Do you think that would be a good approach?”
“I’m not sure about that,” said Amber. “The last time I spoke outside of school was at Poppy King’s Red Lipstick Luncheon. Those ladies liked hearing personal stories of motivation and success.”
“I think what Lucy is doing is very different,” said Brodie.
“You’re right,” I said. “Maybe I will talk about how broke my old school was and how it’s a hundred times better here.”
“We didn’t mean it like that!” protested Chelsea, with her sensitive-offended look. She paused and pouted so that I could apologize, but I ignored her.
I hadn’t meant to blurt any of this out. I wanted to keep my cards close to my chest, but once I got started I couldn’t contain myself. “I suppose I’ll also mention our culture of fairness and respect toward teachers.”
I watched a vein in Brodie’s temple throb as she tried to work out the best way to deal with this unexpected revelation: that while I was sitting there with them, silent and smiling, I was thinking all the time, and I was judging them.
Chelsea looked incensed; two red patches appeared on her cheeks, like sunburn.
But Brodie simply turned to me and said, “Lucy, you’re just going to be wasting your time, when you could really be impressing the audience with the story of your own achievements.”
They thought I was like them, and that I would want to use every opportunity to show off.
I did not reply. Usually my silence rendered me invisible, but this time the quiet was ominous because it was a silence I had caused deliberately.
“The teachers must think you’re so innocent, Lucy Lam, with your sad, big brown eyes,” hissed Chelsea. “But we know. We know what you’re like. You may look timid, but you’re devious.”
Then I knew. I knew that the Cabinet did not want me messing things up for them. Next year we would be at the senior campus, and they wanted to maintain their unassailable Unholy Trinity, their position at the top. Because it appeared to the teachers, and especially to Mrs. Grey, that they had taken me under their wing, whatever I said would be a reflection of their work.
They had to keep me in line. They were the ones who would be held responsible for me, the ones whose duty it was to infuse me with the Laurinda spirit. Being a Laurinda young lady was all about controlling your impulses when it was beneficial to you. You moved by stealth, and maintained clean nails.
I stood up. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”
“Where?” demanded Brodie.
“To the bathroom.”
“No!” shouted Chelsea.
If they weren’t deadly serious, this would have been hilarious—just like the time they tormented Ms. Vanderwerp and then told me to wet my pants rather than leave the room.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, and this time I really did leave.
—
Most of the bathrooms at Laurinda were disgusting. There was a visitors’ bathroom in the main building that had gleaming white tiles and lavender hand soap in a pump, but the ones we used had stone walls, concrete floors, 1950s stainless steel sinks, and mirrors so old that they were dark at the edges.
There were four toilets in the Year Ten bathroom, but the lock of the last stall didn’t work. Often that was the cleanest toilet, if you didn’t mind leaning forward to hold the door closed with your fingertips while sitting down to do your business. If there was no one else in the room, I always used that stall.
When I walked in and saw that it was occupied, I peered into each of the other three stalls. Two of the toilets were coated with thick, smeary dark brown crap on the sides of the bowls, and the third had a disgusting coiled floater on top of the water. This was a new low even for Laurinda.
Trisha MacMahon was standing at the sink, washing her hands, so I told her how much I enjoyed her music.
“Thanks,” she replied. “Can’t believe how often they want me back! Can’t believe how disgusting these toilets are either. I’ve come in twice in half an hour but the last one’s never free.” She bounced out of the bathroom but I decided to wait.
About three minutes later, who should skulk in but the Cabinet. I opened my mouth to say something but Brodie put a finger to her lips. She and Amber glanced at the occupied stall and exchanged a look, then Amber nodded.
Chelsea watched this wordless communication. There was glee in her eyes as she readied herself at the sink in front of the closed stall’s door. Then she swung her body around and gave the broken door a swift and sharp and forceful kick—a very hard one—and then came a sound I would never forget, a sound like when you snap apart a cooked chicken wing.
It all happened so fast and so silently that I had no time to warn whoever was in there. I expected a snap like that would be accompanied by a monstrous howl, but all we heard was one “Ahhhhhhh,” one long weeping “Eeeeee,” and very shallow and fast breathing followed by more whimpering.
Inside the stall, with her green cotton underpants still around her knees, was Nadia Pinto—Nadia of the wrong socks and severe psoriasis. She was clutching her left hand with her right, and mewing like a cat hit by a car, her eyes and nose and mouth leaking.
Although there was no blood, I could see that there was something very, very wrong with Nadia’s fingers and wrist.
“Oh my God,” cried Brodie in genuine dismay. “Oh my God!”
“What the—?” Chelsea was also incredulous, but I didn’t know that she had any right to be. She knew someone was behind that door, she also knew the door had a broken lock, and she was the one who had kicked it in.
Brodie dashed over to Nadia. “Oh, oh. Oh, we’re sooo sorry,” she cried. “Oh, no. Oh, no. Can you get up?”
Tearfully and obediently, Nadia stood up. I watched as Brodie pulled up Nadia’s green cotton underpants for her, all the while murmuring, “Oh, we’re so sorry. We need to get you to the hospital.” I watched as Brodie walked Nadia out of the bathroom, a hand on her shoulder holding her close, leading her to the school office.
News like this travels fast, and soon gawkers were milling outside the office, so much so that they were later told off for obstructing the ambulance. When it arrived, Brodie was still by Nadia’s side, her protector, hissing at anyone who got too near. She climbed in the back with Nadia.
As it drove off, I saw Brodie peering at us from the back window. Tears were streaming down her face.
Less than a week later, all four of us—Brodie, Chelsea, Amber and me—were summoned to the school conference room. We sat on one side of the table, while on the other side sat Nadia Pinto, her mum and dad, and Mrs. Grey.
“We need to understand why this happened,” explained Mr. Pinto, a rotund man with a patient air about him. He looked accustomed to rooms such as this one, with its antique carpet, oval mahogany table and glass cabinets.
“We just didn’t know,” began Amber. “Sometimes the stall doors swing shut by themselves when there’s no one inside.”
“Yes,” conceded Mrs. Grey. “They’re all designed like that.”
“We had all come in at the same time,” explained Chelsea. “All the doors were closed, and the only way you can tell whether a stall is occupied or not is by the little green VACANT sign. Well, all the signs said VACANT. We had no idea that the lock was broken, or that Nadia was inside.”
Brodie put her head in her hands. “We’re so sorry. I pushed the door open—I didn’t know Nadia’s hand was there.” She started to weep softly. “It wasn’t even that hard a push,
but the door jerks open so violently, and Year Eights have such little hands and…oh God…” Brodie couldn’t continue because she was so devastated. “I’m so sorry. I wish it had been my hand.”
The Pintos looked at each other. “Don’t be like that,” offered Mr. Pinto gently, “it wasn’t your fault.”
Mrs. Pinto reached over and patted Brodie’s hand. “You stayed with our daughter for hours, and then came back to visit her the next day too.”
Mrs. Grey made no interjections, but her eyes bored into us the whole time.
Only Nadia seemed unfussed by the whole thing. Her hand was bandaged up. She had two broken fingers and a broken wrist, but they would heal just fine, the doctors had assured her. In fact, she seemed positively happy about the whole experience. “Brodie was so kind to me,” Nadia said. “She held my other hand all the way in the ambulance.”
“Mrs. Grey, thank you for meeting with us,” concluded Mr. Pinto. “We were worried that perhaps there was something Nadia was not telling us. You know, like bullying or some such thing. She’s such a quiet girl, and sometimes we can’t tell these things. But it appears this was all an accident. We’re sorry for taking up so much of your time.”
Then he turned to us. “We know it was an accident,” he said. “We’re glad that you responsible older girls have explained what happened and are taking such good care of our daughter.”
Nadia looked at me and smiled. I supposed she recognized me from our meeting outside Mrs. Grey’s office, when I’d offered her vague words of comfort. I knew she trusted me. She felt like we were on her side, and that this fortunate “accident” had aligned her stars with those of the glorious Cabinet.
I smiled back, tight-lipped, guilt-ridden.
—
At lunchtime, the Cabinet got the keys to one of the soundproof music rooms, and we met there. When the door was closed, Brodie let rip. “Damn it, Amber! I can’t believe we had to talk to the Growler about this. We weren’t meant to get the Indian girl!” she shouted. “I thought you said she was still in there!”
“But I saw her go in!” cried Amber. “I saw her walk into the bathroom!”
Suddenly it all made sense. I’d been a bit slow on the uptake, but it struck me exactly who they had intended to get.
“Trisha MacMahon walked straight back out again,” I told them. “She was put off by the crap you smeared all over the toilets, so she just washed her hands and left.”
“Why didn’t you bloody tell us that?” cried Chelsea.
“Because you didn’t tell me what you were going to do!” I retorted, and that shut them up.
“Lucy,” said Brodie in an even voice—she had calmed down now—“we did not want to get you involved in this, you understand.”
“Yeah, even though she started the whole thing,” muttered Chelsea.
“Oh yeah?” I was mad now. “How did I start it? By clapping loudly?”
“Yes, you created a megalomaniac who thinks she’s top shit,” spat Chelsea.
“People like her music at assembly! Where is the crime in that?”
“There are quotas,” explained Brodie. “In a place like this, there must be quotas. And Trisha is demonstrating that it’s okay to hog the quotas. You of all people, Lucy, should understand that there are finite places, and we believe in equal access. It’s the very reason you’re here at Laurinda.”
“You make no sense,” I said. “What is this crap?”
“Those girls,” sighed Amber, talking to me as though I was really, really slow, “those girls are like dumb animals. Did you see the way that stupid Indian girl looked at us?”
I didn’t bother to correct her about Nadia’s ethnicity, because there was no point.
“They are like dumb animals who will stomp their feet at any bull, and with enough stomping you get a stampede.” Chelsea’s metaphors were getting even stranger. “Now, tiny Lucy Lamby, do you want to be crushed in this wild stampede?”
There was nothing more to say, but Chelsea took my silence as assent and turned toward Brodie. “Good one today, Brode. That weeping shit really got us out of trouble with the popadam’s parents.”
“Screw you, Chelsea!” Brodie suddenly shouted, livid with rage that her tears might be seen as fake. “Don’t you understand anything?”
Chelsea’s mouth was open wide. She had no idea what was going on.
“Damn it, Chelsea, we’re not racist!”
—
“I’m not made for this school,” I told my father that evening after dinner, when Mum went back into the garage. “I want to go back to Christ Our Savior.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, alarmed. “Are you failing?”
“No!”
“Are you being bullied?”
“No.”
“Then what’s wrong? Are they going to cut your scholarship?”
Here was my trump card. “Maybe,” I answered, in a tone that implied it was the school’s decision and no fault of mine.
Now my father was really alarmed. “But why?”
“I’m not involved enough. I don’t do any sports or drama or play an instrument.”
“Ridiculous. You are involved academically, and that’s what counts.”
I could not tell my father I was no longer one of the top students. “They feel I am not part of the community.”
“What can we do to fix that?” my father asked. “What sport would you like to play? What activities can you join? Do you want to learn an extra hobby?”
“No.”
“You’re not doing much to help yourself.” He shook his head sadly.
He wasn’t one of those fathers who didn’t mind if their daughters didn’t care about school as long as they knew how to boil a good pot of rice. No, he wanted me to make something of myself. I remembered how once, when I was in elementary school, one of his factory friends had come over and accidentally spilled a cup of coffee on my homework. That evening my father copied out all three pages of the handout in his best calligraphy so I could fill in the blanks. I also remembered how he used to make me work through my school readers with him not once but three times every evening.
“I’m not fitting in,” I confessed.
“Nonsense. What about that friend of yours, Amber? You’re always going to her house after school. It looks like you’re making friends very well.”
“Those girls only like me because I don’t talk that much.”
It was true. I was tolerable to them because I never expressed my opinions, so I always seemed to reflect their best selves back to them. I suppose I made them feel magnanimous, kind and tolerant.
“Why do you care so much about your classmates anyway?” Dad asked. “It’s not like you will see most of these people again once you finish school. When you are successful, they will be the ones at your doorstep.”
I almost laughed, imagining the Cabinet sitting on the stoop of my future house, waiting for me as I returned from my work as a bank relationships adviser or something like that, which only my parents and the good people of Stanley would think was impressive.
I cared because I saw the Cabinet every single day, and when you are fifteen, a year is longer than when you are twenty-five or thirty-five, and the future is stretched out like an unknowable measuring tape.
“You have a scholarship here,” railed my father, as I knew he would. “There is no opting out of it. The reason you feel like you’re not doing so well is because the standard is a lot higher at this school. But that’s not a bad thing—it’s a good thing, an excellent thing.”
Yeah, yeah, I thought. Confucius says, hang around those better than you because you will better yourself.
I knew I was being ungrateful for my good fortune, and I was sorry I had ever mentioned my dissatisfaction to my father. The truth was that I could not escape my circumstances, nor did I really expect him to allow me to change them.
I decided I wasn’t going to hang around with the Cabinet anymore.
It wasn’
t a difficult decision, Linh, because if I continued to spend time with them I knew I would go mad. Also, although I knew you were still angry with me, I had the feeling you might come around. My worst fear was that I might lose you entirely. The school was driving me insane, and it had nothing to do with the difficulty of the work. It was the other stuff I couldn’t bear—the way the place could swallow you whole if you let it.
The Cabinet fascinated me in the way that movie characters did. Their lives didn’t seem quite real—they didn’t seem quite real. I often felt as though I was on the set of a TV show, where the grouting on the tiles was still ivory because no one actually lived there. The grout around Amber’s bathroom floor tiles was perfectly white, I recalled as I was cleaning ours at home with a toothbrush. A few days later it would be gray again, and in a few weeks it would be black. It was as if grime attached itself only to certain types of people, and once you were marked, you were marked for life.
I had become self-conscious about things that never bothered me before. The way my teeth were slightly yellow. How my nylon socks lost their elasticity at the top after a term of washing. And just my general grossness, the way I must have smelled. It got to the point where if I needed to go to the bathroom at school, I would wait until the whole room was empty, then I would wet two paper towels in the sink with warm water and soap, and take them to the stall to clean myself. I knew that if I hung around these girls for much longer, I would also start worrying about getting fat. There was already enough wrong with me that I didn’t have room for any more insecurities.
In the end, leaving the Cabinet was easier than I had expected it to be. I just stopped going to their corner of the school yard and went to the library instead. Never big on confrontation or closure, I did to them exactly what I had done to Katie.
Katie and Siobhan were close now, the sort of closeness where they whacked each other playfully with their books, shared lunches and made plans to visit Katie’s farm in Mallah over the holidays. I saw them and felt a familiar ache in my chest, Linh, an ache the exact shape of you.
I wasn’t afraid of being alone, but I was afraid of what people would think about my solitary state. People, even well-intentioned people, were always trying to take away our quiet little successes and joys and replace them with big, overarching fears. At this school, the worst thing was trying to rise above the limits set for you by the minds of others. Each girl was an island of her own dreams and insecurities, thoughts that made us different in a deeper way than the differences of musical tastes, clothes or even culture. Thoughts about the best way to be stoic, how to live with very little control in life, how to make the most of a miserable time doing something that you were supposed to love. And if people thought that fifteen-year-old girls never thought about these sorts of things, it was only because we didn’t have the words to express them.