Lucy and Linh by Alice Pung Page A

worth to others,” said Gina. “It can’t mean more to anyone else than it does to me.”
    I saw Chelsea rolling her eyes at Brodie.
    “Well, he can at least tell you how to mount and frame it properly for your room,” said Brodie gently. “Come on. We’d like to do this for you.”
    Week after week, Gina asked about her notebook. Week after week, Amber told her it was with Gregory, getting valued…until one morning. A crowd milled around Amber, who sat slumped at her desk. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her huge eyes filling with tears when Gina arrived. “I feel so guilty. Gregory lost it. He said he would look into it, and must have left it around somewhere….He thinks his wife put it out in the recycling.”
    “On the bright side, I suppose it must not have been worth as much as we thought,” Chelsea said, patting Amber on the back. Because Amber was crying so much, Gina could not. But I watched her as she tried to keep her chin under control. This school sure taught you stoicism.
    —
    Another time, the Cabinet turned on Katie. “What are you doing your oral assignment on?” Brodie asked Katie, who considered herself a Russian history expert.
    “Tsar Nicholas’s family, and the mystery of Anastasia. Lucy and I are thinking of reenacting the murder of the royal family, but from a modern-day forensic scientist’s perspective.” For two days, this project had been all Katie would talk about at lunchtime.
    “I don’t think it’s a group assignment, Katie.”
    “Ms. Vanderwerp said that we could work together.”
    “Well, Ms. Vanderwerp told me that it was an oral presentation, to assess our speaking skills. That’s what she said to
me.
But if you want to make a song and dance about Tsar Nicholas and his family, by all means go ahead.”
    “I’ll go and ask Ms. Vanderwerp.”
    “Sure, and of course she’ll say yes to
you,
Katie—if you really want to torture us with fifteen minutes of your version of
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
”
    Katie made no move to see Ms. Vanderwerp.
    “But we could totally do it,” I told her at recess. She was sitting glumly, the quietest she had ever been. “Come on, Katie, it’ll be fun.”
    “Nah.”
    “But you said you’ve already started writing the script.”
    “Nah,” Katie said sadly. “Don’t want to look like a fool.”
    When the week of the presentations arrived, Katie stood up and read from two pages of notes. “Nikolay Aleksandrovich Romanov was the last emperor of Russia and grand duke of Finland, known as Bloody Nicholas to his enemies because of his approval of anti-Jewish massacres and pogroms, and his execution of political rivals.”
    Katie’s sentences were far too long and left her breathless; she’d forgotten that words typed on a page were different from spoken words. In the middle of her talk, the Cabinet stood up and left the room. Katie noticed and looked up, losing her place. She looked back down at her notes and finished her talk, but when she walked back to her desk I could see that she was shaking.
    Suddenly the Cabinet reappeared, in full costume—Brodie in a fake beard and a greatcoat with epaulettes, Amber in a long gown and tiara. Chelsea was a younger girl with a frock that fell beneath her knees and a yellow ribbon in her hair. They had created a slide show of images that, when projected onto the wall behind them, served as historical 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,” Chelsea said, smiling.
    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