by Alice Pung
“Sure,” she said, and left me alone.
The next two lunchtimes I did the same thing, and each time Katie came to find me, I was very pleasant to her. “I’m sorry, Katie,” I said the first time, “I’ve got to finish off some work for Politics.” The next time it was: “I’m a bit stuck on this unit in Biology about genetics.”
The final time she came, I sighed and said, “More work from Mrs Leslie. Apparently I’m really behind.” I looked back down at the exercise book in front of me, filled with lists of words from Gatsby and a paragraph about the Jazz Age.
“Oh,” said Katie. I knew she had spotted that paragraph, and I cursed myself, because I had the feeling that she might be about to give me a twenty-minute lecture on the era. But she didn’t sit down. “Well, good luck,” she muttered, and left.
I could now hear my own thoughts, something that had become harder and harder to do the more I hung around Katie. I didn’t need new friends anyway, Linh, when I still had you to confirm I wasn’t going mad or seeing things. You were now coming over after school every day, minding the Lamb as I did my homework. It was such a relief. You made me feel more myself again.
*
In History the next day, instead of our usual work, Ms Vanderwerp had brought in a copy of Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear. She handed us some photocopied passages from it, including: “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
“I disagree with this,” commented Katie. “How can those who are oppressed be considered corrupt? I mean, it’s not their fault they’re living under dictatorships. They’re not the ones doing the bad things.”
I put my hand up.
“Lucy?” Ms Vanderwerp was always happy when I spoke up, because it was so rare.
“It’s not saying it’s their fault,” I explained. “It’s just saying that fear corrupts them. Like, people living under dictatorships dob in their own families to the authorities.”
“Well, then,” she said, “let’s explore the effect of fear and power on . . .”
“Excuse me, Miss,” Chelsea interrupted, “but we’ve already done this with Mr Sinclair.”
“You mean you’ve talked about the political situation in Burma?”
“No, we’ve talked about how power is used and abused, and all that stuff.”
“Well, for those of you who were not lucky enough to be in Mr Sinclair’s Politics class, this discussion will be of interest, I’m sure,” continued Ms Vanderwerp.
“Umm, no, it’s not,” said Gina bluntly.
“Discussions about history and war are always interesting,” Ms Vanderwerp continued. But what she didn’t see was that you can’t teach anyone about power when you don’t have much of it yourself. “Live in peace, or die in pieces,” she said. No one laughed, so she laughed by herself.
Ms Vanderwerp laughed at her own joke.
I saw Chelsea roll her eyes at Amber.
Amber pretended to pull out her own fingernails with the fingers of her left hand as tweezers.
Chelsea stuck out her thumb and forefinger to make a gun. She then pointed the gun at her own temple and pulled the trigger. Shoot me now.
Then came the incident that altered the course of our year. Afterwards, some girls blamed Ms Vanderwerp, but the saddest thing was that she was doing it all inadvertently, with her wet eyes always looking on the verge of tears, and that catch in her voice when she spoke, like a zipper that would not go all the way up, revealing an embarrassing gap. There was something about her that reminded me of an aunt who was always knitting scarves you’d never wear.
When I arrived for History the next morning, I could not sit in my usual spot because Brodie and Chelsea were crowding around Amber. As I entered the room, I heard Chelsea squealing, “Quick! She’s coming!”
For a second I thought they were working on some plot they planned to unleash against me. But when the three girls looked up and saw it was me, they seemed relieved. “Quick, shut the door!” they hissed. I did as instructed, and realised that my paranoia was misplaced vanity. Of course they were plotting against someone else. Why would they target me?
I didn’t dare tap either Brodie or Chelsea on the shoulder and ask for my seat back. But I edged closer, hoping they would notice me and leave so that I could sit down. I saw Amber had a thick red marker pen in one hand with the lid off. I could smell the ink in the air, the same strangely delicious artificial scent that nail polish gives off.
Chelsea was crouched on the floor. In front of her was a silver thermos cup emblazoned with the school logo; you could buy them for $25 at Edmondsons. Steam was coming from its open top. And in her lap, on top of a pile of tissues laid flat against the material of her kilt, was something red.
I saw what it was, but it seemed so bizarre, so repulsively wrong, that I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t look again because Chelsea picked the taboo object off her lap and plonked it into the thermos of hot water like a teabag.
Pulling it out by its string, she got up and ran towards the door with Brodie. Just at that moment the door opened, and Katie stumbled in. “Hey, what’s happening?”
“Katie, get in your seat now!” yelled Brodie.
“But what are you doing?”
“Bloody hell, Katie, just sit down!”
The Cabinet had always been cruel in a silky, nice way, never before so crudely as this. Stunned, Katie found her seat and sat down.
“Quick, the tape!” Brodie hissed, and Chelsea tore a strip of masking tape from a roll and handed it to her. Chelsea then passed Brodie the offensive object. Brodie, who was the tallest girl in their group and could reach the top of the doorframe, taped it firmly in place.
And so the deed was done.
Stuck there, dead in the middle of the doorframe, the thing swung from its string like some kind of eyeless cotton roadkill.
Chelsea and Brodie ran back to their desks and sat down. The door of the room was still closed. “No one say a word!”
We all sat at our desks straighter than usual, like a classroom of perfect Singaporean cram-school candidates. No one moved. It was only for a few seconds, but we all looked in toxic shock at the object, coloured with a red permanent marker and dipped in hot water, steaming there, swinging there, like a sick abortive art project, in the middle of the doorframe, but low enough so that when the door eventually did open – and it would open any second now – Ms Vanderwerp would walk in, oblivious, carrying her green A4 spiral bound-teacher’s planner and cylinder of wipes. She would walk in, and she would not know what had whacked her in the middle of the forehead until she turned back to take a second look.
And that is exactly what happened.
The door swung open, because Ms Vanderwerp was always a minute or so late.
She stumbled in, and was hit in the forehead.
Immediately, her hand shot up to wipe away the unexpected moisture.
Looking at her hand, she saw that it was now covered in a streak of watery red.
She looked back behind her to see what had struck her, and when she turned back to face the class she looked at the room like a person who had unexpectedly found herself blinded. Her eyes had never swum so much behind her glasses, like blue fish whose water was rapidly draining out of their bowls.
All this seemed to happen much slower than I imagined it would, which made the incident even more awfully slapstick.
Now, any reasonable person would quickly spot that watery red was not the colour of blood, and that the fluid didn’t even smell like blood. But Ms Vanderwerp had no time to reason this through in her head.
Why would such a thing still be warm? And yet it was the icky warmth of the water, the diluted hue of red and the steaming wad of expanded cotton swaying from side to side, that escalated her disgust and confusion. Her mouth turned into an infinity sign of horror.
No one laughed, or said, “Miss, Miss, it’s a joke!”
“Argh!” she screamed, and it was a rough scream. I had always imagined that if Ms Vanderwerp were to raise her voice, it would be high. But this was the scream of a cement truck on its first rotation. It was a scream of breaking rock. It was the first time that tremulous, gentle voice had made a noise that was clear and full of conviction.
For a moment, the blue fish behind her glasses looked as if they could be saved: I could see the tears filling up their bowls, overflowing down the sides of her face. Then she was out of the room.
*
“Quick, someone shut the door!” shouted Brodie, and Amber dashed from her seat and grabbed the handle. She had the presence of mind not to slam it and so draw attention to Room 105.
“She was crying. Did you see? Tears were coming out of her eyes!” That was Katie, whose mouth was an O.
“Shit. Shit. Shit!” Amber panicked. Her panic was like an actress’s, her hands wrung at the wrists as if doing an imitation of alarm.
We all looked up at the doorframe, and it was still there, a macabre microphone amplifying what they had done to poor Ms Vanderwerp.
Still standing by the door, Amber jumped up and pulled the tampon string from the doorframe. She held it out in front of her as if it had somehow transformed into an actual used sanitary item, and it suddenly seemed as nauseating as the real thing. She headed towards the only bin in the room.
“No, no!” hissed Brodie. “What if they search the bin?”
“Well, I’m not putting that back in my bag!”
“Put it in your thermos, Chelsea,” ordered Brodie.
“Eww,” Chelsea complained.
Amber ran to Chelsea’s desk, opened her thermos and dropped the tampon in. She screwed the lid back on as if she were screwing down the cover of a black manhole that could unleash gollums. Some water spilled onto Chelsea’s desk and she wiped it off with her sleeve, scowling.
Then Amber paced back to her own seat next to me. I could hear her breath, like a series of sighs, both exhausted and excited. A creepy thought snuck up on me, Linh, that this reaction sounded almost post-coital. Gross.
There was movement from the other side of the room. Katie stood up.
“Katie, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Brodie in a whisper.
“I can’t take this,” Katie said.
“Stop being a drama queen. Sit down.”
“You’re all so dead,” warned Katie.
“Yeah?” challenged Chelsea. “Well, you’re part of this too, so don’t pretend not to know about it, you self-righteous bitch. You sat in the classroom and did nothing. You wanted to see what would happen.”
Brodie examined the room with her murky lion’s eyes. “All of you are part of this,” she said.
“I need to go to the toilet.” I stood up.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Chelsea didn’t know whether I was being funny or smart or what. “Piss in your pants.”
I sat back down.
“No one say a word,” hissed Chelsea.
We sat for a minute or so in silence, broken only by Chelsea giggling once or twice in panic. I didn’t dare look at Amber, in case she saw the expression on my face. Stupid bitches, I thought.
The wait seemed like a small eternity, even though it was less than a minute; I wondered why we sat there glued to our seats instead of dispersing because there was no longer a teacher in the room. But deep down, we knew there was nowhere for us to go, and that if we did that we’d get into even more trouble.
In some self-denying part of their brains, the Cabinet probably thought that things could continue as normal, that if they did what we were trained to do at this school – be Young Ladies, innocuous, innocent and well behaved – the repercussions would not be so bad, that the incident would be put down to Ms Vanderwerp’s fragility, and how she could not control a class.
But I knew that every teacher would see through this lie.
After a time, we heard heavy, determined footsteps outside. The Growler stormed into the room, looking around, making sure we felt her gaze. “Who is responsible for this?” she hollered.
No one said a word.
She slammed the door shut. “Despicable, vile act of bullying!” We would all get detention and stay in at lunchtime unless someone spoke, she announced. “Come on, own up – all of you are witnesses.”
Then it dawned on us. As if we thought we could lie about it! As if we could pretend it had never happened! All that time wasted hiding evidence, when the Cabinet could have spent the remaining moments of the class devising one good collective story.
Mrs Grey looked around. Her eyes were like a sniper’s, and when they stopped on a student, her words became ammunition. “Siobhan?”
Siobhan looked down at her desk.
“Meredith? Isabelle? Stella?”
They all remained silent. Then she turned her gaze on me. Thin red trees of veins had etched themselves into her cheeks. “Lucy?”
I kept my jaw clamped and lowered my head.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! None of you are going out to lunch until somebody owns up. You’ll have a whole hour to think about what you have done. I expected better than this from Year Tens.”
An hour. I could see Amber’s back relaxing, curving back into the chair. During that hour, she would be able to rally the troops and concoct a convincing story. She looked at Chelsea – but that was a mistake, because Chelsea could not stop a smirk from insinuating itself on her sharp little face.
“Chelsea!” hammered the Growler. “What do you have to smile about?”
Chelsea looked down at the table again.
It was peculiar: the Growler had not asked Chelsea whether she knew who was responsible for this vile act. In fact, she’d not asked any of the Cabinet; she hadn’t even glanced their way. Surely the next person to be asked to report on school transgressions would be Brodie, the prefect? But no.
“When I leave, the teacher on yard duty will stay with you through lunchtime,” the Growler said.
Amber’s shoulders slumped. All plans of insurrection were thwarted.
*
The teacher on duty was Mr Sinclair. He came into the classroom and didn’t say a word as he closed the door behind him.
From his seat behind his desk, he looked at us for a long while. It was not a good look. Even Gina, who would have given her mum’s signed Michael Bolton album to have Mr Sinclair look at her for longer than three seconds, suddenly did not want his eyes on her.
Finally, he spoke. “You girls are in serious trouble, I hear.”
At first, they tried to get Mr Sinclair on their side. “But, Sir, it was only a joke.” Amber was thick – she hadn’t noticed that Mr Sinclair had begun not with a question but with a statement. Still, they tried to buddy up to him.
“We didn’t mean to,” whined Gina.
I’d never seen such a look on Mr Sinclair’s face, and I never wanted to again. I doubted that even his wife or mother had seen it. It was a look of incredulity, but not a “do you take me for some kind of fool” look. No, it was a look that reflected the lie back to the liar.
“How dare you?” bellowed Mr Sinclair – Mr Sinclair the Hot One, Mr Sinclair who had awkwardly ignored his Valentine’s Day gifts, Mr Sinclair with his Socratic classroom. “How dare you do this to a colleague of mine? One of the nicest people in this college.”
Ms Vanderwerp was genuinely kind, it was true, and no genuine kindness could exist without vulnerability here.
“You girls should be ashamed of yourselves.”
And all of a sudden, we were.
Even Chelsea’s sneer was wiped from her face. We were all ashamed, deeply ashamed. This was not like the Growler growling at us, telling us we should be ashamed of ourselves, all day, every day, for every trivial transgression, like wearing our ribbons criss-crossed around our ponytails or speaking up accidentally at the same time a teacher was speaking. This was real shame, because we respected Mr Sinclair.
“
All of you – you, Sammy. You, Caitlin. You, Gina . . .”
“But, Sir, I didn’t do anything!” protested Gina.
He looked at her. He didn’t have to say anything. He was telling her off with his eyes, and it probably dawned on Gina at that moment that having this achingly handsome older man telling her off did not elicit the same sweetly masochistic feelings that Elizabeth Bennett had when Mr Darcy yelled at her.
It was frightening to be really put in your place.
“You girls think that your charm will get you things in life,” Mr Sinclair said to us. “But let me tell you how wrong you are.”
And he did. Chelsea became defensive. Her chin was up, and her light brown ponytail sashayed like a thoroughbred pony.
While the Growler had been focused on catching the culprits, waiting to see which one of us would dob in our mates, Mr Sinclair didn’t seem to care who had done it. In his eyes, we all had.
“In your adult lives, if you did anything like what you’ve done here today, you would be fired from your jobs. You’re insulated because of your privilege, but you won’t be insulated forever.”
Gina had her head down. Little gasping sounds were coming from her corner of the room, and Meredith put an arm around her.
“Now, tell me, why did you feel the need to pull something like this?”
I saw in an instant how self-deluded we’d been, thinking that a class of fifteen-year-olds could make a grown man feel bumbling and awkward. We had nothing over Mr Sinclair. He was his own person, with his own wife and son, and he didn’t care what we thought. Even his bumbling charm might have been an act. This didn’t make me lose respect for him; I saw it as a necessary strategy against us.
None of us could look at him.
*
We were kept back again for fifteen minutes after school, so that the Growler could again try to weed out the culprit. When she finally let us go, Chelsea burst out laughing. “Vile, dees-pick-able act of bullying,” she shrieked in a theatrical voice. “Stupid old cow.”
“Now, tell me –” Gina, who was following behind, did her own imitatation – “why did you feel the need to pull something like this? The only thing he pulls is himself!” Her face was still blotchy-red, though, and I expected the waterworks would resume as soon as she got in her mother’s car.