Laurinda by Alice Pung Page B

backdrops: the Tsar’s palace, the carriage ride in the night, the murders, the forensic scientists and their theories. The last slide was a picture of a bookshelf, with Brodie replacing a book titled Shelving the Enigma .
    At the end, the whole class clapped.
    “They copied us!” Katie hissed to me.
    “It’s not copying when no one else has done this sort of thing before,” smiled Chelsea.
    Katie looked pleadingly at Ms Vanderwerp.
    Fortunately, it was Katie, and not Brodie, who had spent entire lunchtimes last year sitting in Ms Vanderwerp’s little office with her Russian dolls, her photos and postcards of Moscow’s underground railway. It was Katie who had regaled Ms Vanderwerp with stories of seeing Lenin embalmed in his glass coffin and her theories of the Tsar’s missing daughter. It was Katie who had made sure that she did not sneeze or cough in Ms Vanderwerp’s presence.
    After class, as Katie and I were walking out, the Cabinet followed us. “I know you feel like we stole your idea,” said Brodie. Damn it, the Cabinet were always a step ahead – they even denied us the pleasure of backstabbing them! “But do you two seriously think you could have pulled off something like this?”
    “You guys were great,” Katie conceded. “Really.”
    “Thanks, Katie,” said Brodie generously. “But you know what? You were our inspiration. When we saw how revved up you were, we thought, hey, why not? Why not go all out? After all, if Katie Gladrock is not afraid to put herself out there, even risk embarrassment, well, neither are we!”
    “You are a champ, Katie,” gushed Chelsea. “A champ.”
    Linh, these girls were like the disembodied clowns’ heads you find at carnivals, the ones with the open mouths. The game looked so easy, but only when you played it did you realise that the heads were always turning from side to side, reminding you, “ No! You can’t win! ”
    When the Cabinet left us alone, we found our usual spot near the maintenance shed.
    “They’re kind of mean, aren’t they?” I asked Katie.
    “Oh, no, the Cabinet are all right,” she reassured me. “Once you get over their pranks, you’ll see they’re okay. I mean, they were really nice to get Gina all those Silverchair CDs.”
    “But they lost her notebook!”
    “Yeah, but they felt really bad about it. Amber was crying, didn’t you see?”
    Was Katie blind? “ But they stole your idea! ”
    “It was a bad one anyway,” Katie said. “They improved it. Come on, Lucy, as if we were going to get up there and do what they did.”
    “We were!” I said. “We were so going to do it!”
    “Well, you would have been the only one up there, because I wasn’t going to.”
    For the first time, I heard a hint of defensiveness in Katie’s voice. I’d assumed that she and I felt the same way about the Cabinet. I’d assumed we saw them through the same lens.
    “Our parents used to be friends,” Katie confessed. “In fact, it was Brodie’s mum who introduced my mum to my stepfather. They were really close back then.”
    It now dawned on me that I was like a brand-new camera; all my snapshots were only a few months old. But Katie was an old Pentax with a very long roll of film inside, filled with images and events from a decade spent at Laurinda.
    Poor Katie, I thought. She acted as if this tenuous link to the Cabinet actually meant something.
    *
    The next week, when results came in, Ms Vanderwerp read them out to the class:
    Katie: A+
    Brodie, Amber and Chelsea: B+
    “What?” Chelsea whined.
    “I assessed you not just on this one assignment, but on your work across the whole term,” said Ms Vanderwerp.
    “That’s not fair!” protested Amber. “You never told us you were going to do that!”
    “Our assignment alone would have bumped up our term’s marks to an A at least, wouldn’t you say, Ms Vanderwerp?” Brodie was using her most reasonable voice, which was like a knife dipped in Nutella: so sweet and soft on top that