by Alice Pung
“I have a photo of Mr. Sinclair’s bum!” Gina was waving around a printed photo in the classroom before politics.
“Where the hell did you manage to get a photo of his bum?” Chelsea asked.
“At the Year Ten social. See?” Gina held out the photo so Chelsea could see. It was too far away for me to get a close look. Then she added, “Lucy was a good decoy.”
“What?” Brodie yanked the photo from Gina’s hands. “Let me see that. Oh, my,” she giggled coyly. I had never heard her giggle before. “That is a good angle. Look, there’s Lucy, smiling away in the background.”
“Yeah, she kept him talking so I could get a good shot.”
“You’re a liar!” I yelped.
The two glanced at each other, as if to confirm that, yes, Lucy Lam did have a habit of going off at the slightest provocation; Lucy was so unhinged that her door was practically falling off. Discipline, self-control—that was what eleven years at Laurinda had given these girls, and they were things I lacked.
“You don’t even like him anymore!” I accused Gina, to tell her that I knew she was up to no good. But as soon as I’d uttered the words, they were taken to mean something entirely different.
“Ooh, this is very interesting,” remarked Chelsea. “I didn’t know Lucy had a crush on Mr. Sinclair. I thought she liked Richard Marr.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it!”
“I also have a photo of Lucy making eyes at Mr. Sinclair!” said Gina. “It’s very sweet. Wanna see?”
Katie and Siobhan entered the room. “What’s happening?” Katie asked.
“Grab the photo from Brodie!” I shouted.
But Brodie now had both hands behind her back and was smiling like a sunflower. “Touch me and it will be harassment, you lezzo,” she sneered at Katie. She sat down in her seat just as Mr. Sinclair entered the room.
All through class the Cabinet and Gina smiled at me, challenging me to say something. Then Chelsea giggled.
“Got something to say?” Mr. Sinclair asked her.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” she replied earnestly. “My sister’s reading a book at uni called The First Stone, by Helen Garner. Have you heard of it, sir?”
“No,” he said, but his response came so quickly that I wondered whether he was telling the truth. I’d never heard of the book—they were always citing sources I didn’t know—but I knew Chelsea was getting at something.
“Chelsea, is this relevant to lawmaking by subordinate authorities, which is our topic today?” he asked.
“Well, it’s about politics and power. It’s about these two girls at a college—”
“I’m sure it’s a fascinating book for you to discuss on your own time, but today we are focusing on delegated legislation, if you please, Chelsea.”
The class continued, with Mr. Sinclair writing on the board and explaining things, and us distractedly taking notes. I had to find a way to get that photograph from Brodie, I kept thinking. I should have grabbed it and torn it up the moment Gina had dangled it in front of us.
A thought flashed through my mind: stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.
“Mr. Sinclair,” I said. “They have a photo of you.”
“Pardon, Lucy?”
“They have a photo of you from the social. They took it from behind you.”
At first Mr. Sinclair didn’t register what my last sentence meant. But then he did, and at the same time he realized my tone was not light or fun. “And where is this photograph?”
Brodie glared. Gina looked like she wanted to kill me. Amber kept her head down.
Katie spoke up. “Brodie has it.”
“Come on, Brodie,” Mr. Sinclair said, extending a palm. “Hand it over.”
Brodie sat there, staring blankly at him. “Hand what over, sir?”
“The photograph. Now!”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir. I don’t have any photograph.”
Mr. Sinclair gave a great sigh of exasperation. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t, sir, and I would appreciate it if you stopped looking at me like that. It’s creeping me out.” She then made a big show of turning over her folder, turning out all the plastic loose-leaf pockets and flipping through the pages of her exercise book. There was nothing there. She stood and emptied the pockets of her skirt. A handkerchief with lace edging, half a packet of fruit Mentos. That was it.
“No other pockets,” she concluded, as if she were the one conducting the investigation, the head of the police force.
How could it have disappeared like that? I hadn’t heard her tear it, I hadn’t seen her eat it. Then I realized what she had said: no other pockets. She wasn’t wearing a blazer! She didn’t have hers with her, but Amber was wearing hers.
“Amber Leslie has it!” blurted Katie, just as Amber was giving Brodie a sideways curve of a smile.
“I do not!” declared Amber. “How dare you, Katie, you liar!”
“Amber Leslie, stand up and come over here now,” Mr. Sinclair said. “With your things.”
I had no idea where he was going with this and I hoped he knew what he was doing.
Amber stood and walked insouciantly toward Mr. Sinclair, until she was directly in front of him. “Yes, sir?”
“Give me the photograph.”
She made the same display of turning out her books and folders and her skirt pockets, and the two side pockets of her blazer, which were piped with gold and maroon. “You see, sir? Nothing.”
Of course, every girl in the class knew there was one pocket she had not turned out. Edmondsons was as expensive as hell, but they were definitely quality suppliers. Every girl’s blazer had an inner pocket sewn into the lining.
“Sir, it’s in the inside pocket of her blazer,” Siobhan said.
Of course. Mr. Sinclair wasn’t going to touch Amber’s blazer.
“I don’t understand why you’re picking on Amber,” muttered Chelsea. “It’s not as if she’s the type to go around taking pictures of people’s bare behinds for kicks.”
Mr. Sinclair paled. It was not just a cliché. One moment he was normal-toned, even a little red from frustration, and the next time I looked at his face I realized why redheads were more susceptible to skin cancer. I didn’t know how to tell him that he was being had, that there was no nude photo.
“Search me,” Amber said, her hands undoing the top button of her blazer. “Or, if you’d like, I can take it off for you….”
“No!” yelled Mr. Sinclair. “You stay right where you are, Amber Leslie! All of you—stay exactly where you are until I come back.”
When he’d left the room, Amber smiled coyly and took off her jacket. She whirled it above her head with one finger and threw it onto Mr. Sinclair’s desk, to the whoops and hollers of her friends.
No one else was celebrating. This had gone on long enough, and it wasn’t funny.
“Come on, everyone, give Amber a big round of applause!” shouted Brodie.
Only two other pairs of hands started clapping, steadily and slowly increasing in tempo, a three-person percussion dance track for Amber’s performance.
“This isn’t funny,” I said.
Gina and Chelsea clapped louder, raising their hands above their heads and whooping, like some kind of tribal spirit-rousing routine. “Wooo! Woo! Woo!”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” exclaimed Siobhan. “This is so pathetic.”
Siobhan would never have said that earlier this year. Something was happening at last. Something had roused the soporific inhabitants of Laurinda, made them shake the dust from their hair. I finally understood—the Cabinet was now collapsing, the glass had fallen off the hatch and people were climbing out. Still, Brodie stood firm in her center position on the top shelf, using whatever charm she still had to keep the girls in their places, and entreating the others to close the damn door and replace the glass. Now I understood why the Cabin
et had taken the extreme measure of bringing Gina into their group. It had been an act of desperation.
But now most of the eyes in the room were not focused on the Cabinet. Stella rolled hers at Katie. Katie sighed dramatically and raised her hands in the air. Even Trisha MacMahon gave me an elusive smile, as if to say, how ridiculous. Then she made her long pianist’s fingers into a pistol and raised it to her temple. Shoot me now.
“Where do you think he’s gone?” asked Amber, still believing she was the center of attention. “He’s missing the show.”
“The sexy, sexy show!” whooped Chelsea. “Amber, you sexy beast! Shove it down your skirt, Amber! He’ll never find it.”
“This is seriously not a joke,” warned Katie.
“Shut up, Miss Tautology,” sneered Brodie.
“Come on and show us what you’ve got, Amber!” Gina hollered.
Amber pulled the photograph out of her blazer pocket and slowly rotated her hips in time to the claps. Just as she was shoving the picture down her skirt, pushing down hard because she wore it extra-tight to accentuate her funnel waist, Mr. Sinclair came back into the room. And he had brought Mrs. Grey with him.
They both stared at the scene, the three girls cheering, Amber’s jacket spread out on Mr. Sinclair’s desk, thrown with perfect precision so its sleeves dangled over the edge as if hugging the wood, and Amber dancing around seedily and ramming something down her skirt.
“Give me that!” snapped Mrs. Grey, extending her arm.
Amber, who only a few moments ago had been so brave, so crazy, so wild and so full of her own power, stopped. Her hand was still wedged in her waistband.
“Now!”
Amber pulled out the creased photograph and handed it over.
Mrs. Grey looked at it. “Back to your seat, now! And take your blazer with you.”
Amber picked up her blazer and went back to her seat.
“Unbelievable!” scoffed Mrs. Grey. Then she turned to Mr. Sinclair. “Well, Howard, I hope this has restored some order to your classroom.” The unequivocal contempt in her tone turned up the corners of Brodie’s mouth. Mrs. Grey had spoken to Mr. Sinclair not as a colleague, or even an adult, but as if he were a child who had tattled on another, younger kid for stealing his toy. “No more silly business,” she said.
Before she was out of the room, Katie blurted out, “I think Gina has more! They’re in her folder.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Katie!” She turned toward Gina. “You have no reason to hold onto any more photos from that batch, Gina. Do you understand me?”
Gina looked at the woman she called the Growler, the woman she and the Cabinet thought they could outsmart, yet who could in an instant make her feel trivial and ridiculous and childish. “Yes.”
Those photographs, in the span of half an hour, had become worthless currency. No one cared anymore. Even Mr. Sinclair was ashamed, ashamed that he had panicked over something so trite, ashamed that the photos didn’t even come close to confirming his worst fears that, somehow, someone might have snapped a picture of him at the men’s urinals, ashamed that when Amber had started to unbutton her blazer he had been so out of his mind with worry that he had run out for backup and dragged in the strongest and most powerful woman he knew, the Head of High School. The woman who could make anyone feel trivial and ridiculous and childish.
We all knew who ran this ship.
—
News always traveled fast at Laurinda. When Katie told Siobhan and Stella about how my days at the school were numbered, they too were furious. So I was surrounded by unexpected allies as I waited by the gate after school for my bus.
“Getting rid of the scholarship girl just because you spoke the truth,” Siobhan declared. “How low can they get?”
Trisha MacMahon joined us. “I have rehearsal this evening, so I’m just hanging around,” she said, by way of introduction. “Can’t believe they’re thinking of kicking you out.” I knew she’d had a soft spot for me ever since she found out I had started the applause for her at assembly. “They were going to break my hands, those bitches.” Trisha flexed her beautiful fingers. “I really should think about getting these things insured.”
The girls told me that the Cabinet had let Nadia Pinto join them for half a week last term while I was away, as they prepared her for the conference. Trisha had heard Amber yelling at the Year Eight girl. “No, Nadia, you can’t just read off the page. You have to memorize the whole thing. Jesus, it’s only ten minutes!” Nadia must have cried at least five times under the Cabinet’s tutelage. The final straw had come from Chelsea. “Wear a maxi pad, in case you get nervous and piss yourself,” she’d told her. Once the conference was done, Nadia steered clear of the Cabinet, and not even Brodie’s velvet assurances could bring her back.
“But you were the first girl to leave them,” Siobhan told me. “You set it all in motion.”
I didn’t think I should take credit for something I had done for my own self-preservation.
The four girls waited with me until my bus arrived. As we chatted, I sensed an invisible barrier had dissolved. Now there was no ominous force judging us for every decision we made, nor were we worried about how we seemed to each other. Trisha told us that she’d joined a band with two Auburn boys, and that the one she had the hots for, Spinky, was going to drive her home after rehearsal. Siobhan told us how she was going to quit French lessons next year because she had failed her last test. And I told them about my morning meeting with Mrs. Grey.
“They can’t just kick you out,” Katie declared. “I mean, come on, what grounds do they have?”
My bus arrived and I got on and looked out the window. The girls waved. The bus was heading back to Stanley, but I knew now with certainty that I did not want to stay there for the rest of my days. Something had shifted: maybe there was a future for me at Laurinda after all.
Dear Linh,
The final day of term was “Celebration Day,” a day for the Year Tens to celebrate their graduation to the senior campus. We filed out of our classes after lunch and walked down the Avenue of Alumnae behind the school. It was a paved path with little metal plaques set in the center of each stone tile. Each plaque had a past student’s name on it, but the students were not chosen because of distinction or achievement. They were there because they or their parents had paid for the honor of letting future students walk all over them. Goodbye, Grace Gladrock, I thought. Goodbye, Gloria Green. Goodbye, Dianne Archer. Goodbye, Margaret Thorpe.
This past term, Katie, Siobhan, Trisha, Stella and I had formed our own loose group, but it was a group in which no member was in thrall to any other. I could spend a few days by myself in the library and not be ejected from the group, and Trisha had her separate life of musician friends. We felt a freedom to be ourselves—something we hadn’t felt at school all year. It was surprising to discover that even though we’d been in classes together, we’d known so little about one another until now. How ordinary and comforting it was to know that others held the same feelings, fears and aspirations, even if we had different goals.
We each had to ring an old brass bell to symbolize how our voices had made a difference at the school. When Katie did it, her face was flushed, as if she was going to cry. She had spent four years here. I imagined the end of Year Ten at Christ Our Savior, and my friends going to Mass. There would be no bell for those girls to ring, even though it would be the last time—the very last day—some of them would be in high school. Even so, many of them would be more educated than their parents. There would be hugs and congratulations, but they’d never sign each other’s uniforms with permanent markers, which was what some of the Laurinda girls were planning to do after school. They’d work out who had kid sisters who might need their clothes.
We filed into assembly, where the whole school was gathered, and offered an onstage farewell. “Concordia prorsum, semper progrediens, semper sursum,” we sang in Latin. Forward in harmony, always progressing, always aiming high…
I had once thought this way about my life—before I received the Laurinda scholarship. But I knew now that success had to mean something to me, not only to those around me. You could do all the right things and still feel as though you had failed. For example, at the start of the year Mr. Sinclair had thought he was an excellent teacher, and he was. But when students started disliking him and hinted that he possessed not only a busy mind but busy hands, everything went downhill. Now he was doubting his teaching instincts. What was worse, he felt threatened by a bunch of teenage girls, and he probably didn’t know whether his paranoia was necessary for his survival or just irrational fear.
Onstage, I was closest to the curtain, hidden behind Gina’s hair and Siobhan’s shoulder. Still, I could see the front row of the audience. Mrs. Grey was sitting there, her large hands in her lap, watching us. Some of the teachers were singing along, but she wasn’t.
I wondered what made her tick. I thought about how, a fortnight ago, for just the second time this year, I had gone to see her of my own volition. I had decided on a course of action and I needed her approval.
—
“Why are you here to see me?”
I handed her two typed sheets of paper.
“What is this? An English essay? I don’t want to read your essay drafts.”
“It’s a speech.”
“The education conference was months ago.”
“It’s not for that, Mrs. Grey. I would like to give a speech at Valedictory Dinner.”
I knew the audacity of my request would shock her, and it did. “You can’t volunteer for a thing like that, Miss Lam,” she said. “You have to be nominated by a teacher.”
“Mr. Sinclair has nominated me. His note is attached.”
She looked down and, sure enough, saw that I wasn’t lying.
Lucy Lam has shown extraordinary improvement in her one year at Laurinda, he had written. I believe she would be the ideal candidate to deliver the closing address at Valedictory Dinner and give the vote of thanks.
“The talk is two weeks away. This is very late notice.”
I knew very well that once she wouldn’t have hesitated to give one of the Cabinet permission to speak at assembly at short notice, but I also knew that things had changed for the Cabinet now. In class, when they tried to make their usual snide remarks, they were either quickly cut down with even snarkier comments—“Speak for yourself, Chelsea, you philistine”—or met with indifferent silence.