Laurinda by Alice Pung Read Free Book Online Page B

white-collar crime we did not understand.
    “Why do people think the Whitlam dismissal was such a bad thing if the government was in such a shambles that no bills were being passed?” demanded Chelsea, as if her life depended on it.
    Mr Sinclair was the ever-patient explainer, but his Socratic method wasn’t working. I wasn’t understanding very much at all. How did these girls know so much about the world, enough to be able to form opinions about it? I still didn’t know who Whitlam was, and these conversations in class didn’t offer me any firm foothold.
    Sometimes I detected an answer that was not quite right, and I waited patiently for an opening, a small gap of silence in which I could say something or ask a question. But the moment I opened my mouth to say, “Amber, I think your definition of a constitutional monarchy . . .” the gap would close again. Already they were talking about a referendum for a republic, and my half-sentence would be left dangling. Often I felt ridiculous, like a choir member still singing the chorus when everyone else had moved on to the next verse.
    Pretty quickly I learned the nicknames of all the teachers. Mrs Grey was known as the Growler, probably because if you were stuck in her office with the door closed for longer than fifteen minutes, you usually came out in tears. Ms Vanderwerp was Ms V and Mr Sinclair was simply H.O., standing for “Hot One”, even after Gina found out that he was married and had an infant son.
    I saw his wife picking him up one day after school in a car that had a baby-seat in the back; as he approached, she wound down her window and stuck out her tongue at him. It is hard to explain why, but I found that charming, Linh. Probably it had something to do with how ordinary she was. Even from a distance I could tell that she was not as attractive as he was, though I would never agree with Gina, who muttered, “Why is he with that fugly cow?”
    Gina was a bit of a loner, but she didn’t seem too bothered by it. She was the sort of girl who wanted a boyfriend so badly that she gravitated towards whichever group happened to be discussing their crushes or their boy troubles. I’m not sure how the other girls felt about this, but I think sometimes they were just happy that Gina put herself forward so they didn’t have to look so desperate or dumb. They would be like, “Oh, we usually talk about intellectual stuff like the role of class in Ruth Park’s novels, but since Gina is here . . .”
    *
    On that first day at lunchtime, I found my first friend. Or, more accurately, she found me. Katie sought me out and gave me a more interesting tour of the school than Mrs Grey had, that was for sure. I discovered that all the opulence my father and I had seen on the official tour was in contrast to the student corridors, which were littered with rubbish.
    Our lockers were our only private space, and some girls lined them with photos of their pets or pop icons, inspirational cards and Blu-Tack. The inside of my locker was completely blank, which was the way I wanted it, and I always shoved my bag in there. I decided not to leave it at the top of the lockers, because Katie had warned me that some girls would trawl through bags; anything inside was fair game.
    There weren’t many places to go at lunchtime. So that the grass would stay perfectly green, we weren’t allowed on the lawn at the front of the school. According to Katie, the Performing Arts Centre had taken up most of the space where an oval used to be, and we weren’t allowed in there during lunch or recess. Yet even back when there was an oval, the girls weren’t allowed on it, because it was connected to a little park reserve and the teachers were scared that paedophiles or flashers might be loitering nearby.
    There were two tennis courts, but those were usually locked during lunch and recess, as were the seven music rooms. You weren’t allowed to go in there to jam with the guitars, because that kind of