Laurinda (23 page)

L
ess than a week later, all four of us – Brodie, Chelsea, Amber and me – had been 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 toilet 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 toilet doors were closed, and the only way you can tell whether a cubicle 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 recognised me from the 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! 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 toilet block!”

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 loos, 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 retarded, “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 towards Brodie. “Good one today, Brode. That weeping shit really got us out of trouble with the pappadum’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 Saviour.”

“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 primary 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 perfect white, I recalled as I was cleaning ours at home with a toothbrush. A few days later it would be grey 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 toilet at school, I would wait until the whole toilet block was empty, then I would wet two paper hand towels under the sink with warm water and soap, and take them to the cubicle 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.

We talked all the time, but we hadn’t yet learned the words to link thoughts and ideas with any depth of feeling because we didn’t really talk to adults. We only talked to each other. And within this little world, we imprisoned one another. You could be anyone you wanted, Linh – until you were judged and held captive by everyone else’s thoughts. Nothing has a stronger hold over a girl than the fear of the thoughts of her peers – thoughts that change five times in a day. No wonder things are so complicated with teenagers.

So I went back to the library and to flicking through old yearbooks. This time I started at the end of each book, because that’s where all the extracurricular activities were – the photos of Laurinda girls and Auburn boys engaged in debating, drama, sports and music. I was searching for one specific face.

And there he was, in a photo from Year Seven, in the junior orchestra. He played the trumpet. He had the same gap between his front teeth, and the same straw-coloured hair. He was chubby and looked about twelve years old. He looked exactly the same in the next photo in Year Eight, but things had changed by Year Nine. He’d grown horizontally and lost his festive plumpness. He looked dignified with his trumpet against his chest and the school colours sewn on his blazer pocket.

Knowing that Richard the Lionheart – and presumably his allies – understood the undercurrents of our schools as I did made me feel less alone. I imagined the two of us standing strong against the slings and arrows of outrageous wealth. I imagined us forming a secret pact, a duo that wrote about the bizarre things we witnessed at school. We would meet up once a week at the Sunray Public Library to exchange notes. We would fall in love as we wrote a great satirical novel together about private colleges, won over by each other’s wit.

We would get married; Harshan and Anton could be his groomsmen, and Yvonne and Ivy would be my bridesmaids. The Lamb could be the ring-bearer. We’d have our reception at the Mirabella Centre in Sunray because they served crab claws. He would sell his dad’s shoe store when his dad retired, and we would use the money to start a French hot bread cafe in a posh suburb, filling the walls with shelves of books.

Then I stopped, realising how stupid my fantasies were.