Laurinda by Alice Pung

he fall?” She came rushing towards us. Then she noticed the rivulet running down my pocket, collecting in dark droplets on the concrete floor.
    “Why didn’t you put a nappy on him?” I shouted.
    “He has a rash on his bum.” She picked him up and showed me.
    “Eww, I don’t need to see that!”
    “It’ll come out with a wash,” she said, patting my damp sleeve with her hand, but that only made me angrier.
    “You can’t put something like this through a machine! You have to dry-clean it!”
    I had forgotten that I was talking to a textiles expert, and my mother had had enough of me. “For the last six months, all you have been going on about is your clothes,” she yelled. “Summer dress this, winter kilt that. How do you think a $300 uniform will help you study better, huh?” She washed the sleeve of my blazer with Imperial Leather soap, then dried it with a hairdryer. It did not shrink.
    The truth was that I’d always felt grottier than most of the girls at Laurinda, even before the Lamb peed on me. I felt grotty because Stanley was a grotty place, Linh. When the wind blew the wrong way, you knew how foul the fumes of the Victory Carpet Factory could be.
    *
    Not long before, Mrs Leslie had made me write about a childhood memory which evoked a sense of place that no longer existed except in memory. I wrote about being a really young kid and standing next to my grandma in Hanoi, helping her sell boiled eggs. Of course, I didn’t remember very much except the way the market smelled, and how there were sometimes runaway chickens on the ground.
    “I cried when I read this,” she said.
    “Sorry,” I replied. “Was it that bad?”
    “Oh, no! No, no, Lucy!” she insisted, not getting that I was joking. “No, darling. It was just too beautiful. It was just so special.”
    I wasn’t exactly sure what was so special about using a cute toddler as a cheap marketing tool, Linh, but hey, it seemed to push Mrs Leslie’s buttons in a good way. I was glad, because although I had mixed feelings about her daughter, I really liked Mrs Leslie.

T he boys had their sports. Every weekend they would play tennis and cricket against the other schools in their league. Their sport was serious, a way for them to exercise their competitive streak, for that streak to burst into glowing colours for the school and smear their rivals. If an Auburn boy played particularly well, he was celebrated by his team. An individual skill or talent brought them all a step closer to victory.
    We had sports too, but our sports always seemed an inferior imitation of the boys’ – they had cricket, we had softball. They had basketball, we had netball. Girls wanted to play the former; no boys wanted to play the latter. While some of the girls went to see the boys play, none of them ever came to Laurinda games. And then some of the girls had ballet, which was more a daily practice in perfectionism than a sport.
    If we tried to do four or five star jumps to warm up before class, we would be met with, “Girls, don’t be silly. You’re in senior year.” The gym was the only place for that kind of behaviour, and we only had gym once a week for two hours. The girls had to get their kicks another way.
    Over the weekend, Gina had gone into the city, and when she was at the Dux department store, she ran into the lead singer of Silverchair, her favourite band. She was too far from the music department to grab a CD, so she grabbed a blue notebook and biro from the stationery department and ran after him.
    “Let us have a look, hey, Gina?” Brodie said, and the girls milling around Gina parted like the Red Sea. Brodie took the book from her and examined it. “Wow, this is amazing,” she marvelled to Amber, and passed it along.
    Amber held the book up to the light. “Incredible.” “You are so lucky!” fawned Chelsea.
    “Thank God they didn’t charge me extra because it had his signature on it!” Gina said, suddenly shy, realising these girls