Lucy and Linh by Alice Pung

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 three-hundred-dollar uniform will help you study better, huh?” She washed the sleeve of my blazer with Imperial Leather soap, then dried it with a hair dryer. It did not shrink.
    The truth was that I’d always felt grimier than most of the girls at Laurinda, even before the Lamb peed on me. I felt grimy because Stanley was a grimy 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,” Mrs. Leslie 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.

The 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 streaks, for those streaks to burst into glowing colors 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 the boys 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 jumping jacks to warm up before class, we would be met with “Girls, don’t be silly. You’re not freshmen.” The gym was the only place for that kind of behavior, and we had gym only 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 Mercury Stool, her favorite band. She grabbed a blue notebook and pen from the stationery department she had been standing in 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 marveled 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, realizing these girls held her sacred object in the same reverence.
    “My father will get it valued for you by his friend Gregory Mitchell,” Amber offered, handing it back.
    “No, thanks, Amber. I’m never going to sell this!” Gina hugged the blue notebook to her chest.
    “Come on, Gina. I mean, I know you think it’s priceless and all, but Gregory can tell you how much it will be worth in ten years’ time,” said Chelsea. “Gregory valued a
Neighbours
swap card my mum’s had since 1987, and you wouldn’t believe how much it’s worth today.”
    “I don’t care how much it’s