by Alice Pung
They were just words, I thought. I would go home this evening to a mother who couldn’t even write me a note, and I’d know exactly where I stood. But I also knew now what I had always doubted: that I could make it at Laurinda.
Chelsea and Amber suddenly appeared too.
“Oh my God!” squealed Chelsea. “Lucy Lamby, who could have guessed that you were such a sly little fox? Following us all year to suss out how we led the school! Ooh, ooh, Brodie, we’d better watch out.” She gave me an affectionate punch on the shoulder, but Brodie looked as if she wanted to punch me in the face.
“Do you want a picture with us?” Amber asked.
They still thought they were the school’s illuminati, granting me access to their world. I’d proven myself to be a worthy competitor and now they wanted me on their side. I looked at them—Brodie decked out in so many school medals that her torso looked bulletproof, Chelsea still referring to me by pet names, and Amber with her camera ready to immortalize me in their ranks. They looked kind of ridiculous.
“No, thanks,” I replied, and walked away.
—
Mrs. Leslie and her cluster were standing near the bar with glasses in their hands, their daughters nowhere in sight. “Very surprising for him to have won the Pulitzer,” she was saying to her group of Laurinda ladies, “because the last book, as I recall…” She then noticed me. “Lucy, you star!”
Even Mrs. White gave me a gigantic hug. “Chelsea could take a leaf out of your book,” she told me. “Where are your mum and dad? We want to congratulate them!”
“Oh, they couldn’t make it tonight,” I said, ignoring their pitying expressions.
“You’re the girl who taught us how to make rice-paper rolls!” declared Mrs. Newberry. “My, you’re a dark horse.” I had no idea whether that was a compliment or an insult. “Thank you,” she added, “for being such a good influence on Brodie.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I laughed, wondering whether Brodie had told her how I’d sworn at her at the school gate.
I looked around. Everyone was being so pleasant to each other, filled with good cheer and good manners. The final words of a play I had once read came back to me: They were not good. They were not bad. They were just nice.
—
“Congratulations, Lucy,” came a familiar voice from behind me. “Spoken like a true Laurindan.”
Mrs. Grey.
And with those words, it hit me that she was the only adult here who knew what I was really capable of. Unlike Mrs. Leslie, who just saw me as a sweet girl who wanted to do well in life, Mrs. Grey appreciated that my ambitions were larger than even I had recognized. She had taken a chance on me instead of choosing the more malleable Tully, and against all expectations, she had let me deliver the closing address at the dinner. Only she understood the insinuations in my ad hoc speech; only she recognized how deeply I understood the machinery of her school.
And only she appreciated how far I had truly come—from the startled girl who had blurted out all her feelings when nudged, to this true Laurindan who now layered her words with care and cunning. She was the only person in this room who had peered into my heart and recognized my dark and secret need to be acknowledged.
It was then that I finally accorded her the respect she was due.
—
And so here we are, Linh, at the end. You like to think that within you there is quiet courage and conviction, a sense of righteousness that is not judgmental. That’s what you like to think about yourself. But you’re wrong. You are not truly good until you are tested, and even then you might become a worse person.
I’d seen how the top-performing girls at Laurinda were cultivated like hothouse strawberries—bright and lush. Out in the real world, they would bruise. I wanted to see how the Cabinet would cope in two years’ time, when they would be in the same classes as my most driven and hardworking Christ Our Savior friends, and the most tenacious and gifted public school students, the hardy evergreens and olive trees and root vegetables that would last all through winter.
In Stanley, we all knew that going to university guaranteed that we would never have to work like our parents did in the factories or garages. Yet I still think about that day on the 406 bus and how we backstabbed that poor girl with teeth like brittle toffee who gave her bag its own seat. When Tully had turned and muttered, “Look at her, Linh. So selfish,” an older woman behind you had yelled, “Stop speaking your own bloody language on a public bus—youse don’t belong here!”
“Of course I don’t,” Tully had calmly said in our secret language. We knew you couldn’t put someone like that in their place by yelling back. “One day I’m going to be out of here, out of Stanley, and I’ll pull my parents out too, and we’ll never look back.”
But it was I who got out, and Tully who stayed.
So, this is my last letter to you, Linh. See, I promised it would be a long one. It’s the last one because you’ve been with me a year longer than I thought you’d be, and for that I am grateful. I learned that to have integrity means piecing together all the separate parts of yourself and your life.
So goodbye, my constant friend. I am grateful that I carry a little piece of Stanley with me wherever I go, wherever I end up.
Love always,
Lucy
CANDIDATE NUMBER: 267
Please provide a written response in argumentative, expository or imaginative style to the image below:
There are colors everywhere. Although it seems dark in this room, the woman and the baby who spend most of their day here know where to look for the colors. Down on the floor there are sweeping traces of a hundred gowns in multitudinous hues. Up against the metal sides of the shed there are rolls and rolls stacked like wallpaper.
The woman must make sure that the baby does not crawl on the concrete and swallow seed pearls or inhale an emerald sequin from the floor. But these days they are seeing less and less of the sequins. These days they get boxes and boxes of polar fleece or rolls of stretch material because now people want pants to salute the sun. The window is high and bolted shut so thieves can’t come in and steal the colors.
Beneath a fluorescent bulb glowing like an upside-down mushroom, dust motes rain down like furry spores. The woman is turning a collar-shaped piece of iron-on interfacing over in her hands. This woman has never picked up a book in her life, but that piece of man-made fiber is her special script.
She is an olden-day smith of trade and skill, and she can tell the difference between silk and nylon-blend satin without needing to conduct the burn test that we are taught in science. She knows how to cut across the grain with her eyes closed. She knows what kind of stitch is needed for denim if the overlocker breaks down. She knows how a piece of jersey will drape across a chest, and she can cut a winter coat from a piece of wool weave without a pattern. What she does is classified by those who have authority to classify jobs as “unskilled labor,” but only the second half of that is true.
People think that if you sit in a dark and silent shed all day working, your internal universe must be equally dark. It is quiet in this room, but it is a good life, because the woman and her baby get to spend the whole day together every day, surrounded by all these colors.
Thank you to Chris Feik, my editor of thirteen years: as always, the silent alchemist behind all my books.
Thanks to Julian Welch for his extraordinary attention to detail in making sure Lucy and Linh is the best version of itself.
Thanks to the wonderful team at Black Inc. for all their enthusiasm, their hard work and the perfect cover, and thanks to Clare Forster at Curtis Brown for her support and encouragement.
To all the resilient teenagers in the western suburbs I’ve known over the years, who were the inspiration for Linh: thank you for letting me into your lives. Thanks also to the countless teachers who good-humoredly shared their horror stories with me, yet continue to dedicate themselves to their profession. They are true unsung heroes.
Thanks to the staff and st
udents of Janet Clarke Hall for creating a culture opposite to that of Laurinda, for proving it can be done and for showing this writer so many examples of kindness and integrity every day.
Thank you to John Marsden and Melina Marchetta, whose books guided me safely through my own teenage years, and whose hard-won wisdom I still carry with me as I write. I know I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Thank you, KBH, my friend, for being my first reader and the one person who I knew would “get” it. Finally, there will never be enough thanks for my love, Nick, who is an oasis of patience and calm, who listened to the plot unfold for over two years and who watched Mean Girls with me in celebration—you are a champ.
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