Lucy and Linh by Alice Pung Page B

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 was 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 realize 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’s 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 Mercury Stool posters.”
    “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 Kodak 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 you could easily overlook the menace that lay beneath.
    “Your group assignment was excellent,” Ms. Vanderwerp said. “But all term, you three girls have been distracted—and, what’s worse, distracting others too. You don’t seem to take history seriously. So I am afraid I had to deduct marks for effort. You need to learn to apply yourselves consistently, not just when it suits you. I’m sorry, girls.”
    “You’re not, but you will be,” Chelsea muttered quietly, and then blew her nose loudly into a tissue. It was like a trumpet heralding war.

I had the