by Alice Pung
“Good. Ming’s out on parole and trying to stay clean. I think the family sent him back to Vietnam so he could be away from the wrong crowd.”
“I heard that.”
She looked a little surprised. “So you still keep in touch?”
“Yes,” I lied.
The truth was, I didn’t know much about how my old friends were doing, beyond the occasional talk with you, Linh. And I wasn’t sure whether those talks would be happening anymore. This conversation was making me feel very uncomfortable, and there were still twenty minutes to go before we reached Stanley.
“Hey, nice trousers,” I said to her, and meant it.
That was one of my greatest achievements at Christ Our Saviour. I had a real connection to that uniform, even though the blazer pocket was just velcroed on. In my Laurinda blazer, with its embroidered and immutable crest, I felt like an imposter.
At lunchtime the next Monday I was in my usual corner of the library, having a look at a Caravaggio book. Chelsea came bounding up to me like a deranged filly. “Hey, Lucy, Lucy, hey! What are you doing?” I held the book close to my chest. “Just looking at something.” It was a painting called The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, which showed some guy poking his finger into the ribcage of Jesus.
“Why don’t you come and join us for lunch?”
“Oh, okay.” What else could I do? Admittedly, I was curious about the Cabinet. I wanted to know whether Katie was right about them. I’d seen Amber at home and she hadn’t seemed that impressive. In fact, all three Cabinet members, from my limited interactions with them, seemed petty and kind of boring – but maybe that was because they were with their parents. They were the sort of girls who acted one way towards adults and another towards people their own age.
I walked with Chelsea to the Cabinet’s bench. When Amber and Brodie saw us coming, they patted the seat next to them. They wanted me to take Chelsea’s usual spot.
This was even more awkward than being in Mrs Grey’s office, or that afternoon with their mothers. It was some little game, I guessed, and I wanted nothing to do with it. “It’s okay, I’ll sit on the grass.” I didn’t want to stay for long.
“Well, then, we’ll all sit on the grass,” decided Brodie.
I knew that it was not my mum’s rice-paper rolls that had got me into their secret society, but something else. I was interested to find out what they talked about among themselves, and how it was that they had the whole school in their thrall. What I was most curious about, though, was why they had suddenly decided to take an interest in me.
First we talked about Amber’s party, but it was as if we had gone to two separate parties. Amber and Chelsea and Brodie had been to an outdoor one where there was finger food and attractive boys and a swimming pool, and I’d gone to a party where there were seven little kids who wanted me to fold them origami things and watch Dorothy the Dinosaur for the fifth time.
Mr Sinclair walked past. “Look at that,” muttered Chelsea, “dressing like a peacock to impress the girls.”
To be honest, Linh, I didn’t understand how a navy suit and maroon tie were peacock-like.
“Now, Chelsea, be nice,” warned Brodie. “We do, after all, have a nice girl with us. Wouldn’t want to corrupt her.”
“Hey, Lucy, you gave me such a cool present,” Amber said.
“You’d left by the time presents were opened,” said Brodie, “but you should have seen the look on her mum’s face.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, worried.
“Don’t worry,” reassured Amber, “my mother thinks anything above the knee is slut clothing. I can’t believe you got me that skirt. I didn’t even know they were in Coast & Co. stores yet.”
I couldn’t keep from smiling. They weren’t, I wanted to tell her, but stopped myself. Let them think that I was the coolest girl in the history of Laurinda. It occurred to me then that even though I didn’t like the Cabinet very much, for some reason I wanted them to like me.
*
In a little over a week, I discovered that Amber and Brodie had almost as much contempt for Chelsea as I did, except that instead of keeping quiet about it, they made fun of her.
“Hey, Chelsea, we heard that Jason from Auburn has the hots for Aminah.”
And Chelsea would go off like a firework, because she had the hots for Jason herself.
It took me another week to work out why they let her hang around with them. They’d been at this school together since kindergarten. They’d been friends for too long, and had spent too much time in each other’s houses, which meant they could not detach from her without their parents getting involved. It wasn’t even that Chelsea was a rebel or a bad girl, though I guess that would have made her more interesting. It was just that she was so resentful and cynical.
She was also a buffer. Brodie and Amber kept her around because, without her, they would kill each other. With her there, they could be friends. They could pretend that they were not constantly competing. Not having hung around with boys had heightened their femininity and bitchiness in equal measure.
And now the Cabinet didn’t mind having me around. This was unexpected and strange. It wasn’t as if my Saturday afternoon culinary skills had suddenly made me indispensable to their operations. They never picked on me the way they did Chelsea. They never paid me much attention, come to think of it, but when they did, they were nice enough.
“Hey, Lucy,” Chelsea would ask “what do you think of Mrs Goninan’s shoes?”
“They keep her feet dry and warm,” I’d say, deadpan.
“You’re a crack-up.”
From that time on, the Cabinet took good care of me. They became my benefactors.
I started to rethink things. So this was what Katie saw in them – they could be so helpful, and accommodating, and accepting. They even made sure I sat at the front with them during assembly, even though I wasn’t a prefect. Of course we would never be equals, but the more I hung around them, the more I realised how much I didn’t mind. They were like three big albino rats in a cage full of brown mice. You wanted to be close to the glorious creatures, not only because they were so compelling, but also because you hoped that if they smelled your familiar scent often enough, they would not eat you.
At the next assembly, Trisha MacMahon played the piano for a second time, which was unheard of at Laurinda, because there were heaps of gifted students. But Trisha really was something else. When she finished and the girls again gave their polite hand-pats, I couldn’t help myself and I clapped loud and hard in the front row. I wanted her to know that at least one person appreciated her passion. Brodie and Amber looked at me, startled, and then Amber flashed me a wry sideways smile.
Then, surprise of surprises, Brodie, Amber and Chelsea began to clap like crazy as well. “Woohoo!” Amber whooped.
“Woo!” whooped Chelsea, “good on you, Trisha!”
And because the Cabinet made it okay, suddenly the whole school began to applaud like mad, stamping their feet and hollering their support. Trisha stood up, bewildered. A smile spread across her face and she took a bow. She felt like a rock star. As she walked off stage, I even detected a tiny skip in her step.
“You are so cute, Lucy,” said Amber as we walked out of the auditorium. “Isn’t she just adorable?” she said to Brodie.
*
I waited for Mrs Leslie at the front door of her classroom. She had a remedial History class with Gina.
“Lucy!” exclaimed Mrs Leslie after Gina had left. “What can I do for you?”
I made sure the coast was clear, then tried to give back her $50.
“No, Lucy, stop this nonsense!”
“But the food didn’t cost that much, Mrs Leslie.”
“I can’t take a gift back. You also gave us your time.”
“I can’t accept money,” I said, and I must have said it with some severity, Linh, because she looked taken aback. I realised she was worried it would seem she was trying to buy my time and effort, which I kn
ew was not her intention. But there was nothing I could say that would not make her feel even guiltier, so I just looked at the floor.
At last she replied, “Then, Lucy, at least let me know how much you spent so I can reimburse you.”
“It wasn’t really that much.”
“How much, Lucy? Forty dollars?”
“Seventeen sixty-five.”
“Really?” She didn’t believe me.
“I’m not lying.”
She put the fifty back in her purse and pulled out a twenty. “Please take this.” She shoved it in my hands. “No ifs, no buts! We had a wonderful afternoon, Lucy, and we are grateful to you.”
“No worries, Mrs Leslie.”
I returned the money to my father. What was I going to do with it? Buy Coast & Co. fashions? Go clubbing? Buy Bacardi Breezers?
“What’s this?” Dad asked when I gave it back to him.
“That excursion got cancelled.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. But don’t give this back to me. Just save it for next week’s groceries.”
In the second-last week of Term Two, I went with the Cabinet to the Year Ten Auburn–Laurinda social. Amber had called up my father a week before to ask in her sweetest voice if I could go to a dinner dance with her and a few other girls from school. Ordinarily, my father would rather break my legs than let me go dancing, but after she called, he almost commanded me to go. “You’ll meet new people there,” he said.
I’d gone straight to Amber’s house after school because I didn’t want Mrs Leslie driving by to pick me up from Stanley. Imagine my mum staring mouth agape at their fancy car, and the snot-nosed Lamb wailing as I walked out the door – it would have tinged the whole evening with futility and guilt. I knew I should have been in the garage helping Mum with her latest order, but instead I would be standing against a wall watching crowds of strangers jerk about.
The theme was (PARTY) ANIMALS, as our tasteful black and white zebra-patterned invitations put it, but the Cabinet did not seem to take that very seriously. “Lame,” Chelsea remarked, and a week before the social she handed each of us a headband with furry animal ears attached. Amber was a rabbit (the ears were suspiciously like a Playboy bunny’s), Chelsea was a bear (but not a grizzly one, more a fluffy bedside creature), and Brodie was Minnie Mouse. Predictably, I got lamb’s ears.
My mother had made me a new cotton floral dress with buttons down the front, but I had my old jeans in my bag as well as a black shirt, because I wasn’t sure how dressed up we were meant to be. All I had to do was change from my school uniform into my dress, so I was ready in five minutes. But Amber and Mrs Leslie spent almost two hours in the master bathroom doing god knows what. They invited me in too, but after a few minutes of watching Amber get sprayed all over with a can of tan, I decided to go and sit on the sofa and read a book. She eventually emerged in a surprisingly modest floral dress a lot like mine.
*
Some of the Auburn boys were in oversized T-shirts or huge flannel shirts and wide denim pants. Others were in neatly ironed navy, black or maroon shirts and jeans. One boy came as a circus ringmaster, armed with a plastic whip, while a few others wore khaki safari outfits with fake guns (hunters, ha). The majority, though, had plastic masks of gorillas, grizzly bears, tigers, sharks or other meat-eating fauna. It was creepy, the girls being so exposed (bare legs, bare arms, some tasteful cleavage) while the boys were so masked.
As soon as we arrived at the venue, Amber, Brodie and Chelsea snuck into the toilets. Amber emerged in two satin slips, pale pink and black, one on top of the other. The black one was longer and had lace at the bottom, while the pink one had lace on the bodice. She also had on a holey crocheted cardigan, and her pretty Mary Jane shoes had transformed into heavy black lace-up Doc Martens. She looked like she’d been punched in the face, but I think that was the smoky-eye look popularised in Bella magazine.
Brodie had on a floor-length, strappy slip thing that was the shade of a three-day-old bruise – it shimmered purple, green and black. And Chelsea – well, Chelsea wore a black cat-suit with high military boots, and an olive silk teddy over the top of that. And they all put on their animal ears.
I thought they had reached the pinnacle of grunge sophistication, while I was still stuck in my stupid green and white daisy frock because I had expected it to be like Amber’s birthday party. My jeans and shirt were back at her house, so I couldn’t change. And to top it all off, I had to wear the lamb’s ears.
Since I was dressed for the part, I took the position of wallflower, planting my roots on one side of the room and clinging to the bags I was meant to mind for Amber and Chelsea while they giggled and sashayed their way to the centre of the dance floor. As they gyrated, a photographer took pictures of them for the yearbook.
After a while I was aware I wasn’t alone, but I stared straight ahead, in case my neighbour didn’t want to talk to me. If I turned my head around to look, that would look too eager, as though I was desperate for company – which I was.
“Hey, Lucy, you look like you’re having fun.”
It was Mr Sinclair. Most girls would have been mortified to hang out with a teacher at a social. Not me. I was relieved someone was speaking to me. Mind you, if this had been a couple of months earlier, he would have had a tight band of girls crowding around him, springy and giggly.
Thankfully, he did not ask me to dance with him. That would have been a pity dance, terrible and awkward. He just said, “Ah, dancing. I’ve never been good at that sort of thing.”
Of course, I didn’t believe him.
“Music,” he began, “music should mean something. It is the stuff that gets angry young men and women believing in causes, or feeling like someone equally angry and insightful understands them. But what is this? ‘Someday you will find me caught beneath a landslide in a champagne supernova in the sky’ – what does that even mean?”
“I don’t know, Sir. Maybe no one taught him not to mix metaphors. Or maybe it’s a zen koan.”
“Ha!”
I smiled. I asked him what he thought of our new prime minister. I asked him whether he thought the PM’s stance on gun control after the recent Port Arthur massacre was good. Whether he preferred Socrates or Seneca. Would he have drunk the hemlock, or stayed alive and not been a troublemaker in Athenian society? You see, Linh, when I wasn’t feeling intimidated, I could carry on a conversation well enough.
There was a sudden flash as someone took a photo of me and Mr Sinclair talking, and we both looked around to see who had taken it. No one was there, so it must have been the girl compiling the yearbook.
“Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want,” blared the music. “So tell me what you want, what you really, really want . . .”
“What exactly does she want?” asked Mr Sinclair.
“Don’t you understand? What she ‘really, really wants is to zig-a-zig-ah’.” Standing in front of us was a boy dressed in jeans and a button-up shirt. My heart rate increased – but then, my heart rate increased in the presence of any boy, because I had so few encounters with them. I wanted to flee.
“Ah!” laughed Mr Sinclair. “Thank you for enlightening me, Richard. But now I’m curious about something else. Why do you have a lion attached to your shirt pocket?”
“A clue,” said the boy. “What vital organ beats beneath my shirt?” He turned to me and smiled – and I swear, Linh, he might have winked as well, but I was too shy to look him in the eye.
“Your heart,” said Mr Sinclair. “Oh, I see. Very clever, Richard the Lionheart.”
I didn’t know whether that was actually very clever or just plain embarrassing, so I said nothing and turned my head towards the dance floor. I watched the Cabinet dancing, hair all shook up, their slip dresses flashes of colour in the centre of the room. When the song ended, Amber headed straight towards me, cheeks pink and warm, eyes shining. “Oh, there you are! Come and dance the next one with us, Lucy!”
Now, let me tell yo
u, Linh, lest you think I am a cliché, a living walking example of a high-schooler’s desperate desire for popularity gone wrong, that there is nothing more powerful than the feeling of belonging to a group. She dragged me to the centre of the room, and I had no choice but to do the best I could. It was conscription, this, and I hated every moment of it, but I learned to creatively convulse like the rest of them, until time was up and we could go home.
*
Going to the social was tolerable, then, if not exactly fun. I appreciated that the Cabinet had invited me to go with them. I wasn’t sure whether this had changed our friendship or whether I would still be treated like the perpetual exchange student in their little group. I soon found out.
Brodie stared at me with her scary dark eyes. “We like you, Lucy. You’re loyal, and you keep quiet about things.”
“Not like Katie,” said Chelsea. “Dibbing, dobbing bitch.”
I think they were waiting for me to bag Katie or Ms Vanderwerp and pledge allegiance to them. But I remained silent, and I suppose after a while my silence became unnerving.
“We know your former friend dobbed on us, Lucy,” spat Chelsea. “We know she went to the Growler and told her who it was that pulled the prank on Ms V.”
“We also know she dobbed in Gina, too.”
The Cabinet had only got one out of two correct. Katie might have ratted on Gina, but she would never touch the Cabinet. “I don’t think Katie would tell on you,” I said.
“Aww, Lucy, you’re too sweet, but terribly naive. You think that just because you wouldn’t, others wouldn’t as well.” That was Brodie. “But what you don’t understand, yet, is that the Growler depends on us to keep the others in check. You think the administration can just yell out orders from above and get all the students to comply? Not on your life. We have a crucial role. We tread gently, my friend. We play harmless pranks, but our pranks have serious consequences.
“Listen, Lucy. When my dad went to Auburn Academy in the seventies, there was a teacher named Mr Hadley. He was this old drooling man, close to retirement, but still clinging on to teaching shitty maths. He was probably the sole reason why the school was always beaten by Forbes College in the matriculation for ten years straight. The boys hated him. He couldn’t explain anything properly, and when the boys didn’t understand he would just speak more loudly and slowly, as if they were deaf.”
