Lucy and Linh (26 page)

Soon it was the last weekend of the holidays. I would be back at school in two days. Every time I thought about going back, I felt like I had live spiders in my stomach. Saturday was one of those unexpectedly hot days near the end of the year, a day of blue sky and acacia scent. “Maybe you should take the Lamb to the shopping center,” Mum suggested. “It's clean and cool there.”

We caught a bus to Sunray, and I parked the Lamb's stroller out in front of the plaza. I went into the supermarket, carrying him in my arms. I loved supermarkets. You didn't need to travel outside your suburb to see the world in one place, each state's and each country's produce stacked neatly on shelves and racks: bananas from Queensland, dates from the Middle East, sweet soy sauce from Indonesia, nougat from Italy, prawns from China, and frozen dinners from America.

The Lamb and I spent a long time in the candy aisle. “You can only have one, Lamby,” I said to him. “Only one, so choose carefully.”

At the checkout I balanced the Lamb on my hip. I decided I would take him to Wendy's to get a Funny Face cone. I didn't care that they cost $3.30. This would be a special treat. I knew I was behaving like a typical Stanley teen mother, but I now understood how their days would stretch on for ages and then suddenly snap back because of an emergency, and how much of this seemed beyond their control, so they could think only about the next thing to do to make their babies happy, and then the next thing after that.

The Lamb spotted more candy at the checkout counter, and he grinned with recognition and pointed. He was squirming on my hip and I was trying to stop him from grabbing at them when he lunged and almost fell out of my arms. For balance he grabbed the hair of the lady behind, who was leaning over to take a roll of cough drops.

“Ouch!”

When I turned back to apologize, the woman's head was down and she was rubbing her hair with both hands. I noticed her groceries on the conveyor belt: a small tub of strawberry ice cream, a single-serve gnocchi heat-and-eat meal, and a block of rum raisin chocolate. Small treats for a single older lady. How terrible that the Lamb had marred her day.

“I'm so sorry,” I said, hoping that she would not be one of those horrible git-lost-we-was-here-first welfare women, the type to say, “Teach ya son to keep his paws to himself, whydoncha?”

But when I looked up from the groceries and saw the woman's face, I recognized her. Her cheeks were more concave, her hair was grayer and longer, but it was definitely, unmistakably her.

The last person I expected to see.

“Ms. Vanderwerp!”

She looked at me through eyes that squinted a little, as if trying to see through a thick fog. I bet she doesn't even remember me, I thought. I bet she wants nothing to do with that school, that class, forever and ever.

Recognition lit up her goldfish-bowl glasses.

“Linh?” she asked me. “Linh Lam,” she repeated. “Is that you?”

She could never get my name right.

And then, embarrassingly, in the middle of the checkout line, I started to cry.

After Ms. Vanderwerp had run her groceries through (and paid for mine as well), after we had collected the Lamb's stroller from the front of the plaza, after she'd taken the Lamb to the newspaper stand to get a stuffed wombat while I went to the bathroom to wipe the tears and snot from my face, she led me to the food court.

We sat on the white plastic benches. She had collected some hand wipes from KFC and gave the table a good wipe-down with three of them. Then we both sterilized our hands with the remaining wipes and shared an order of fries.

I told her how sorry I was to be part of the class that had tormented her. I began to sniff again, but knew I had no right to be such a crybaby. I was in the wrong, and I had been cowardly that day.

“You had nothing to do with it, sweetheart,” she said.

She was trying to make me feel better, but this wasn't some historical moment she was teaching me about. This was stupid teenagers messing with her life. When she called me sweetheart, it made me even sadder. She told me that kids pulled pranks all the time, and that she had been in a vulnerable state back then.

“I shouldn't have reacted like that,” she said. “I gave some of you poor girls a good scare, didn't I?” She tried to make light of it, though she could tell I wasn't convinced. “I've been a teacher for a while, Linh,” she said. “I've taught in tough state schools, large Catholic colleges and one or two private girls' academies. In no other place have I encountered such disrespect and nastiness, from top to bottom. I'm not blind. I saw how those girls treated Katie, how they ignored you. I saw how they imposed their will on the other students. But they were clever about it.”

It was like being bitten by a spider, I thought, with venom you couldn't squeeze out because you couldn't locate a raised red welt. No one would believe it if you told them, because the spider had left no evidence. Only when the toxicity spread through your body would anyone realize what was happening, and by then it would be too late. That was how it was at Laurinda with the Cabinet running the show.

Ms. Vanderwerp smiled a strange and sad half smile. “The funny thing, Linh, was that of the three girls, the prefect was the one who'd mostly been indifferent toward me. She never seemed to join in while the other two carried on and mucked about. But when I gave her that B-plus for their assignment…well, sometimes still waters have piranhas beneath.”

She told me that Brodie's sleek, seething mother had gone straight to see the Head of High School. Ms. Vanderwerp had been called into the meeting. “Don't you think you are blowing things a little out of proportion?” she had asked. “Students get B grades all the time.”

Mrs. Grey had opened up Brodie's school file and pointed to the neat columns filled with identical alpha symbols. “Look, Martha. The mark you've given seems a little inconsistent with Brodie's other marks, don't you think?”

“But a B-plus hardly constitutes failure,” replied Ms. Vanderwerp.

“Perhaps you might want to consider a…reevaluation?” suggested Mrs. Grey.

Ms. Vanderwerp then turned and spoke directly to Brodie's mother. “With all due respect, Mrs. Newberry, if Brodie believes a B-plus is tantamount to failure, perhaps Brodie needs to learn how to fail a little.”

After Brodie's apoplectic mother left the meeting, Mrs. Grey shook her head. “That mark is going to cost us a fifty-thousand-dollar donation.”

“It seems petty,” Ms. Vanderwerp replied, not heeding the warning, “to withdraw a donation just because your daughter got a B-plus.”

“Gloria Newberry will make it seem like you're the petty one, Martha.” Yet Mrs. Grey had no choice but to let the lower mark remain.

“And then, a few weeks later, that incident in our classroom happened,” Ms. Vanderwerp concluded. “So you see, Linh—it was between them and me.”

Yet I knew the old Linh Lam would have spoken up in that classroom.

But the old Linh had allies, and the old Linh knew she had a place at her old school. It's so much easier to be a hero when you know you belong.

Now Linh was no more, because over the past three terms I had turned into a stranger named Lucy.

Ms. Vanderwerp had no idea how close I'd got to the Cabinet, or of the explosive end to our time together. I didn't want to tell her about any of that, so instead I told her all about the Lamb, while he dozed in his stroller and she patted my hand. She murmured kindly about what a hard time it must have been for all of us.

“You know, I understand how you feel, Linh. My father was in the hospital earlier this year.”

No wonder she had been so anxious at school. When the Lamb was sick, it had consumed us: the checkups, visits to the pharmacy, the nurse looking over our house.

“I'm sorry,” I told her. “Is he okay now?”

“No, dear. He passed away.”

I didn't know what to say—it was too sad. I started to cry again, but she said, “It's all right, Linh. He was eighty-nine.” She sighed. “Boy, but those last few years were really, really tough. Endless hospital visits and chemotherapy, and everything had to be sterile because his immune system was so weak.”

Her eyes blurred behind the glasses, but they did not spill. Drawing her shoulders back and composing herself, she said, “Well, Lucy, what happened to me with those girls was a blessing in disguise. I got to spend the last weeks of my father's life by his bedside. It put me at ease to know he was not alone at the end.”

When we parted, the kindest farewell I could give Ms. Vanderwerp was a wave. I had been crying into a tissue, and she probably did not want to be hugged.

The encounter left me disturbed and agitated. I could not stop thinking about the rottenness of Laurinda. The thought of going back for the final term made my heart palpitate the same way it had before the Lamb went to the hospital.

“Maybe it's a good idea for me to stay home for a few more days, to make sure the Lamb is fine,” I said to my mother on the final Sunday of the holidays.

“He's already fine.”

“But just for a few more days…”

“We have an air purifier now,” Mum said. “I don't know what happened at that school to make you afraid to go back.”

“Nothing!”

“Then you must return. Return and do your best. That's all I ask of you.”

“You don't get it, Mum,” I protested. “I'm trying my best in my studies. But this school isn't just about study. It's a hard place. Girls are judging me all the time.”

“People have their own business to mind. I don't believe they are all watching you to see what you're doing.”

My mother did not have the remotest understanding of high school.

“Take my new job,” she said. “When I started, I was scared to death of the machines, and it smelled so bad. My fingers weren't used to the cold. I thought the foreman would surely fire me after the third day. But I plodded on.”

“Yes, Mum, but you've never been around people like this. They're watching me, waiting for me to mess up.
All the time.
”

My mother sighed. “Why can't you just ignore it? Ignore it and keep your head down and work hard, like Tully did.”

“I'm not Tully!” I shouted. “I'll never be Tully.”

“But you'll also never be like that tall girl from your new school,” Mum said. “The one who came over. I know this has something to do with her.”

My mother, she didn't miss a thing.

“Keep your head down and soon she'll stop bothering you,” she said.

“But, Mum,” I protested. I had no idea how to make my mother, who'd spent the better part of a decade in the dark of the garage, understand this school, let alone how the Cabinet imposed their will. “You've never been around
groups of people like this.
”

“You were too young to remember,” she told me, “but one day when we were on the boat—I think it was the fourth day—some Thai pirates came. At first we thought they were fishermen, but then we saw the knives in their hands. Suddenly they were on our boat, yelling and waving those knives around. We couldn't understand them but we knew enough to get down on the deck and press our stomachs to the floor while they searched for any gold we might have.

“It seemed like the time went on forever. I had you flattened next to me, and prayed that you would not start crying. During that endless wait, even when there was silence, no one wanted to be the curious one. There was only one person killed that day, and he was the first to raise his head. After that, the pirates left without looking back.”

My mother's point was this: be vigilant and be silent. It was almost our family motto. That was how we inched ahead, unthreatening and undetected. I had to go back to school, and Mum was saying that this was how I would get through the final term. I should lie low and let the perils pass over me. After all, if the school could forget Ms. Vanderwerp so easily, then I could make myself invisible too, so that people would likewise forget my terrible last day of Term Three. Probably no one would even notice my return, I thought, because the Cabinet would have been doing their best to efface me.

I had no choice but to drag myself forward, softly plowing through time, moment by moment, until I pulled through to the other side of Year Ten.