Lucy and Linh (20 page)

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.

We were playing a game, and it was very different from the one being played beside us by Brodie and Trisha and Aaron, or by Amber and her fawning young men. Our game was not about demonstrating our intellect or sex appeal, or making mission statements. Our game had started off with having a laugh at another's expense and had now become a
Simpsons
episode—random and unexpected. This was the first time—the first time!—since arriving at Laurinda that I had felt anything like the spontaneity and fun that I had felt back at Christ Our Savior with you, Yvonne and Ivy.

“Were you that noisy group in Room 109?” I asked.

“Uh, yes, unfortunately.”

“Well, you sounded like you had more fun than we did.”

“Heh, heh.” He had been in the other room debating minimum wages too, but in Division B, against other Auburn boys. He told me how he knew a little bit about junior wages because his father hired young workers for his footwear shop. Junior wages were the only way that young people in his town got any sort of employment, he had argued, and they made it possible for his dad to keep the business going.

But a boy named Eamon had declared that Richard's dad was too tight to pay proper legal wages and was exploiting the kids. Then the third speaker for the affirmative had concluded with “Richard here is as mincing in his words as he is with the shoes he tries on in his dad's shop when no one is watching!” The room had exploded in laughter, although a couple of boys—Richard's mates—had yelled, “Low! Low!” and “His store sells sneakers, you morons.”

“Such idiots,” laughed Richard, with genuine amusement. “That's private schools for you. My dad thought he was sending me to
Dead Poets Society.
‘O captain! My captain!'—my arse. Look at these ferals. Here come some more now.”

Harshan and an Asian boy named Anton approached—the same boy Amber had thought would make a good boyfriend for me. This was Richard's gang, I realized.

“We have to go now, Lucy,” Chelsea was saying to me. Then she saw Harshan and gave him a glare.

“See you,” Richard called after me. “Pass on my regards to Ella the Salmon.”

“Dork,” muttered Chelsea.

I loved Richard the Lionheart, I decided. I loved all his little trio.

“I thought today was delivery day?” I asked Mum when I arrived home, eyeing the boxes of folded and ironed shorts in our living room.

There was something comfortingly chaotic about home. Things didn't necessarily make more sense than the crazy order at school, but they were at least so random as to be reassuring. For example, after spending an afternoon trying to do quadratic equations, I might come home to see our phone iced with toothpaste, or find a sock stuffed with crushed cupcake. In the Lamb's world, all sorts of combinations were possible.

“No, Sokkha didn't come today,” my mother replied. “There's a letter for you. I think it's from the school.”

It was another reminder about participation in Saturday sports.

“Can you watch the Lamb?” my mother asked. “I'm going to chop up some hunks of bony meat on the kitchen floor. I don't want him coming near the cleaver. Give him a banana.”

I picked him up and patted his back. In more than half a year, he did not seem to have got any heavier. I sat him down on the sofa and peeled a banana. Then I cut slices off for him. In the center of each slice was a sort of face, the features formed by the black seeds. Each slice had a different expression. “Look, Lamby! Look at this!” He squealed with delight.

While he was eating his banana pieces, I took out the letter from the school and cut it in half. Then I folded two leaping frogs. I put one on the floor and pressed its back. It sprang forward. The Lamb thought it was magical. I gave him one and we had a paper frog race, though after a while his frog was all sticky with banana mush.

Dad returned from work and took the Lamb to the park, leaving me to finish cooking dinner with Mum. We laid out newspaper on the floor in front of the television. We had never used a dining table. When we had guests, they were usually the type to sit on the floor as well. At the end of the meal, we just scrunched up the newspaper and chucked it in the bin. It had never bothered me before, but now I understood just how uncivilized we were. We were like animals in a kennel, except that we cleaned up our own litter.

Things like this had begun to appall me, things that had never bothered me before, like the way my parents slurped their soup. When I say
slurped,
imagine the loudest and most obscene sucking sounds you can think of, sloppy chewing and gulping like cartoon characters. That sort of eating. But of course, even though it frustrated me no end, I could never tell them this.

I remembered that a few years ago, a friend of Dad's from the factory, Jimmy Macintyre, had invited our family over to his house for dinner. I could see that Mum and Dad were trying to do their best, in unfamiliar surroundings, to behave with a different sort of decorum. Even holding a knife and fork properly took a lot of effort. It was not that they couldn't do it—my parents were not clumsy imbeciles—but there was a graceful technique to scooping food into your mouth that was different from simple eating. And there was one thing they did glaringly wrong—they always ate with their mouths open. Chewing like cows.

It was a very uncharitable thought to have about your parents, but there it was, and once I thought it I could not undo what it was doing to my face. I was ashamed not of them but of myself, because their kind of rudeness was not deliberate and had the same unself-conscious quality as children picking their noses. Their rudeness was not directed at anyone, unlike the way Amber spoke to her mother.

But now, sitting on the floor, watching my parents became almost intolerable. I readied myself to make a simple request, to ask them to be less uncouth even though they would not see the point because we were at home, but still. As I opened my mouth to speak, my mother suddenly said, “The fabric cutter sliced the top of Sokkha's middle finger right off. That's why he didn't turn up today. His wife just called to tell me.”

In a different household, this might have been met with exclamations of “Oh, how awful” and “I hope he's okay.” But my father simply asked, “Would you like me to do the delivery, then? Do you think he will be able to work again?”

“He'll be back at it in a week. It's only the first joint of his middle finger.”

“That's good. Good for him, and good for us.”

“You have the hots for Richard Marr,” declared Brodie the next day. So that was his surname. She had saved me from having to look it up in the Auburn yearbook.

“Aww, how sweet, Lucy has a crush!” mooned Amber.

Richard and I were private, I thought, but I knew I had no right to think this. Nothing at this school was private. They had seen us talking together.

“He's all right,” conceded Chelsea, “but his friends are really offensive.”

“What did he say to you?” asked Amber. “We heard you guys laughing about something.”

“Bacteria,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“We were telling jokes about bacteria.”

“Oh, wow, he's perfect for you, Lucy!”

It was the first time that the attention of the Cabinet had focused on me alone. It was a nice feeling, actually. It was as if my “crush”—which I had neither confirmed nor denied—was showing them that I was a little like them, that I too could feel this way toward a boy. But my glory was short-lived.

“You know what?” added Chelsea. “That's exactly the sort of pickup line I can imagine a geek like Richard using. To an Asian girl, no less.”

“Yeah, some people love Asian girls—and I'm not just talking about bacteria boys either,” Amber declared bitterly. “My mum has a thing for Asian kids. She reckons they all listen to their parents and finish their homework and do whatever their mums and dads say without whinging.”

That wasn't fair! I thought. As if we wanted to go home to open buttonholes or iron collars or prepare stinking pig's hocks for dinner, or boil eggs or wash floors or wipe the bums of babies or do any of the other dozen jobs we had to do. It had nothing to do with us feeling self-righteous or better than anyone else.

“Well, well, well, Lucy, what can we tell you about Richard Marr?” asked Brodie. “We keep a mental file on him, as we do most of the Auburn boys. He sure comes from some bad blood.”

“What, he has AIDS?” I asked.

“No! No, no, no!” replied Brodie, taking me literally as usual. “Oh, dear. No. Just bad relations, bad
associations.
”

The Cabinet exchanged a look. They didn't tell me what was so wrong with Richard, but they'd let it be known that they would not deign to be around such a person, and that there was something wrong with me if I chose to. I did not know what their look meant, but I knew that I wasn't their friend after all. I was their prop.

When Term Three began, Trisha was back on the piano at assembly. She was becoming a regular—it was her third performance this year.

A fortnight later, when Trisha walked offstage once more, Brodie turned to Amber and shook her head slowly. Amber understood and nodded. It was just too much. “She's getting way up herself,” muttered Chelsea, who was always their ventriloquist's doll. “Stage hog.”

The fifth time we saw Trisha MacMahon at the piano, the Cabinet decided it was time to deal with her.

“Now, Trisha, we understand that you are monumentally talented,” said Brodie one morning, “but maybe at assembly we could hear something other than Beethoven or Tchaikovsky?”

They formed a tight circle around Trisha so that the teachers would think we were just having a little chat as we walked to class.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Trisha, nodding enthusiastically. “I'll tell Mrs. Grey I'll play Rachmaninoff next week.”

What was worse than Trisha not picking up on Brodie's polite cease-and-desist was the Cabinet finding out that Trisha herself was organizing all these performances. She had probably volunteered for the Auburn assembly too.

“Geez, I'd hate to be up myself,” muttered Chelsea.

“Pardon me?” asked Trisha.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, I heard you.”

“Don't you think that the opportunities at Laurinda should be shared?” queried Amber.

“But everyone likes my performances!” protested Trisha.

“Stop it, please, Trisha,” Brodie said quietly. Her quiet voice could stop arguments in their tracks. “Stop it before you embarrass yourself.”

At recess that day I could not join the Cabinet because Mrs. Grey wanted to see me. I sat on the bench outside her office, next to a tiny girl with a face too small for her large features. Even though she had beautiful big eyes and lips like pillows, the disparity made her look a little clownish. She was picking miserably at the hem of her blazer.

After a few moments of silence, I tried to make her feel more at ease. “What are you here for?”

She looked down, and at first I thought she was extremely shy, until I saw that she was pointing to her feet. Then I noticed that her socks were not the regulation anklet length, but long and white, even though they were now pooling at her ankles. Like her face, her legs seemed to be covered with scaly acne.

“I forgot to get a uniform pass,” she whispered. “I didn't think I needed one because of my psoriasis, but Mr. Abraham noticed them and sent me here.”

“Don't worry,” I reassured her, “it's not a big deal.” Secretly, I knew better.

“Nadia Pinto,” called Mrs. Grey's secretary, and the girl stood up and disappeared behind the door.

Ten minutes later she came back out with red-rimmed eyes. Nadia Pinto didn't look at me as she walked back to class.

It was my turn.

Mrs. Grey's eyes were the color of pickled onions, shot through with hair-width strands of red. Her cheeks were etched with lines to match. The girls were saying she was a closet alcoholic.

“I'm concerned about your performance, Miss Lam,” she said as soon as I sat down.

“But I'm working hard, Mrs. Grey.” I racked my brain to see where I had gone wrong. I'd had good results on my midyear exams. “Maybe I could go back to remedial English with Mrs. Leslie?” I offered disingenuously.

It turned out she wasn't talking about my academic performance.

“It seems to me, Miss Lam, that you've become uninterested in what Laurinda has to offer. You've become lackluster. Insipid.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Grey, I don't know what you mean.”

“Not taking advantage of all the remarkable opportunities here for you. You have not attended any Saturday morning sports.”

“I thought they were voluntary…,” I began, and trailed off, immediately realizing it was the wrong thing to say.

“You did not come to our Constitutional Convention in Term Two.”

Of course not, I wanted to tell her. I'd have had to stick toothpicks in my eyes to prop them open.

“You did not get involved in drama or music.”

“But I did some debating,” I protested feebly.

“You attended the debating finals. That is not the same thing. The truth of the matter is that you are not becoming the well-rounded individual that we envisioned when we accepted you into this college. Do you think that is a fair assessment?”

No, I wanted to say. It's crap.

“The letter from your former principal said that you were involved in the school choir and Tournament of Minds, and that you started a book club.”

Ah, the halcyon days of youth, I wanted to say to her. Alas, my mind is not as sharp as it once was. Actually, this would not have been far from the truth, because I was feeling exhausted all the time now, and I didn't do half as much as before.

I forced myself to look Mrs. Grey in the eye in case she thought I was being evasive. I didn't see myself reflected back. She seemed to see me solely as a human doing instead of a human being, and all my doings had to add to the prestige of Laurinda. At that moment I felt nothing but repulsion as I looked at the white orbs of pearl hovering above her neckline. Someone who wore the remains of sea mollusks strung around her neck and would make a thirteen-year-old cry over wearing the wrong socks was not someone I respected.