Laurinda by Alice Pung Read Free Book Online Page A

first day’s blur of faces, because she had dyed hair the hue of a Redskin lolly wrapper, cut in a bob that ended beneath her chin. You could easily locate her in any classroom – she was like a round sale sticker on a plain carton of eggs. We weren’t allowed to have any earrings except small studs, but Gina had tiny diamonds which she hoped no teacher would notice. Also, while the rest of us had blank nails, hers were white-tipped and glossy with clear paint.
    Gina had the hots for Mr Sinclair, badly. He was a new teacher, I learned, and when we first entered the room we could only see the back of his suit because he was at the blackboard. It seemed that all male staff were required to wear suits to work; the women had to be dressed in the female equivalent, which was usually an elegantly sculpted work dress, a cashmere twinset, or slacks and a blouse.
    When Mr Sinclair finished, he stepped back, and we saw what he had written: POLITICS: From the Greek – “poly” meaning many, and “ticks” meaning blood-sucking creatures . All the girls except Gina made a kind of “huh” noise, as if they were too clever for such a bad pun.
    When Mr Sinclair turned around, the girls expected to see some sort of “hangin’ wid ma homies in da hood” teacher. You know the type, Linh, forty years old, dad-like but still thinking he’s funny as hell. Instead, they saw how young Mr Sinclair was, and how attractive. Take a bunch of girls and separate them from the boys from kindergarten on, and that is the kind of thing they will notice.
    Gina was noticing it more than anyone. I swear, Linh, you could see the impure thoughts forming on her features. Secretly, I liked this about her, that she didn’t seem to have a filter between her thoughts and her face.
    We expected Mr Sinclair to point to the board and read out what he had written, after which all the girls would laugh, just because he was so cute and they wanted to make a good impression. But he didn’t. Instead he introduced himself and started the lesson. Politics, Mr Sinclair told us, was about governments. “But if you want to break it down further, it is essentially the study of people and power.”
    Glancing around the room, I could already see how this was playing out in our class. The desks were arranged in a U-shape around Mr Sinclair’s front table. “Socratic learning”, he called it, but Chelsea pointed out that Socrates had never included any women in his teachings. She wasn’t a bimbo after all, I saw, but was just prone to say snide things every seven minutes or so, as if she had bitch Tourette’s. She, Amber and a girl named Brodie Newberry were seated at the bottom end of the U, as far away from the teacher as possible, but also with the best view of the whole show.
    Brodie was a tall, dark-haired girl who didn’t say much, but it was an unsettling silence. She had dark eyes that were neither green nor grey; they seemed to absorb rather than reflect your image if you looked into them. I had the feeling that there were things beneath the surface waiting to float up when they stopped swimming. I realised then that I had seen Brodie before: she was the prefect who had marched into the auditorium bearing the school banner.
    At the other end of the U, directly opposite me, was Gina. It turned out, Linh, that she would not budge from that position all term. She told us she was so close she could smell Mr Sinclair’s aftershave, and it smelled like Calvin Klein One for Men.
    A pattern was set that first day: Chelsea or Brodie would offer their views, or shoot questions at Mr Sinclair, and sometimes Amber would back up her friends. Because the three girls were hogging Mr Sinclair’s attention so regally, often for twenty minutes at a stretch, the rest of us felt like we were watching a trial on a television set we could not switch off. At times it seemed the trio were judges and Mr Sinclair was a defence barrister, and we the bored jury listening to some