Lucy and Linh by Alice Pung Read Free Book Online

the exam, who appeared to have crammed for mathematics, neglected their writing. Many pieces were, I’m afraid to say, very poor. There was even an essay where the candidate thought he was some kind of hoodlum from the Bronx whose brother was in prison. Although we commend great imaginative feats, that one was the unfortunate result of a mind subjected to too much American television.” I didn’t say anything while she cast her eyes heavenward in silent lamentation. “Naturally, that student did not make it into Auburn Academy.”
    “Weren’t there some other good essays, though?” I asked, and immediately realized my mistake—that I was implying most of the essays were crap and mine was outstanding. Back at our old school, Linh, this would have been taken as a simple question, a display of polite humility. Here it was a judgment, one I was not entitled to make.
    “Fishing for compliments, are we, Miss Lam?” Mrs. Grey asked, one eyebrow raised. Once more I realized that at Laurinda, you had to think very, very carefully every time you considered opening your mouth. “Of course there were. In fact, there was one other remarkable piece, the runner-up essay, about the founder of Amnesty International.”
    “How come you didn’t pick her?” I asked. It was yet another mistake, turning me transparent like the curtainless window of our house, where outsiders could peer in on a place where there was nothing worth stealing. How could I have known it was a
her
? “Or him,” I added.
    “We found
her
piece—yes, it was a she, and she was close competition for you, you may be interested to know—we found her piece too stilted. Her grammar was perfect, her writing was fluent and sophisticated, but there was just something off-kilter about it. Almost as if she’d memorized a speech.”
    Here you could not be mediocre, but you had to be well balanced. Not too real, yet not too fake. Tully tried to be someone she was not, Ivy was exactly who she was, and both were unacceptable at this school. That was probably what made me the ideal scholarship recipient. I was smart enough, but I had no particular sense of ownership over my thoughts. It was you who gave me a sense of belonging, Linh, with your magnetic ways and madcap schemes. Without you, I felt like a cipher.
    “This is what will happen,” Mrs. Grey continued. “You will take some remedial lessons to get you up to scratch, and then you will be transferred back to ordinary English.”
    If you’d been with me, you would have thrown a fit. How dare the school think I was not ready for Green and Fitzsimmons and whoever else when they’d given me a scholarship based on my essay writing? You would have prodded me to defend myself. But you weren’t there, and I didn’t want to make ripples.
    “You should feel very lucky,” instructed Mrs. Grey. “I have arranged for you to have a one-on-one tutor twice a week. Mrs. Leslie is a Laurindan herself, and also the president of the Laurinda Book Club. She knows the English syllabus inside out.”
    The last time I had one-on-one lessons with anyone was in Grade One with the school speech pathologist, because I pronounced all my
r
’s as
w
’s. That was to fix a flaw that, although “weally endeawing” as a little kid, would have screwed me up big-time as a teenager. I wondered whether there was something about me that only Mrs. Grey could see, something that, without intervention, would doom me to failure.

Gina was another girl who stood out from that first day’s blur of faces, because she had dyed hair the hue of a cherry lollipop, 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 that 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