Lucy and Linh Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Alice Pung

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2016 by Lucy Kim

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Australia by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd, Collingwood, Australia, in 2014.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pung, Alice

  Title: Lucy and Linh / Alice Pung

  Other titles: Laurinda

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2016] | Originally published in Australia by Black Inc. in 2014 under title: Laurinda. | Summary: In Australia, Lucy tries to balance her life at home surrounded by her Chinese immigrant family, with her life at a pretentious private school.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015024300 | ISBN 978-0-399-55048-5 (trade) | ISBN 978-0-399-55049-2 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-399-55050-8 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Cliques (Sociology)—Fiction. | Immigrants—Fiction. | Asians—Australia—Fiction. | Australia—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P86 Lu 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2015024300

  ebook ISBN 9780399550508

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Term One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Term Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Term Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Term Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Valedictory

  Chapter 1

  Acknowledgments

  For KBH and the Lamb

  Life is nothing but high school.

  —Kurt Vonnegut

  Dear Linh,

  Remember how we used to catch the 406 bus after school, past the Victory Carpet Factory and the main hub of Sunray, through to Stanley? What an adventure, we used to think then. What a waste of time, looking back now. It was a waste of time because the bus would always worm its way back to Stanley, following exactly the same route, stopping at the same places and collecting the same people, who did the same things every same day.

  Remember that girl from St. Claire’s who put her bag on the seat next to her so that no one else could sit down? And how we thought, typical of girls like that. When she got the vibe that we were talking about her behind her back, she turned around and told us to get stuffed. But that wasn’t the most shocking thing about her. The most shocking thing was that where we had expected to see white teeth all even like a picket fence, they were herded behind that ugly gate in her mouth. Looking into that paddock of crumbly yellow rocks straining to break free from barbed wire, I thought, no wonder you’re going back to Stanley.

  This is how I see it now. An old strip of seven shops, each with an identical metallic snake of a roller shutter coiled at the top. At night, with those iron blinds lowered, the street looked like a long, continuous, dirty warehouse, all graffiti and concrete.

  There was the local fish-and-chips shop, the Happy Oyster, which had never seen an oyster, joyous or otherwise, from the first day of its existence. A shop selling smokes, with incredibly expensive and lewd painted plaster figurines in its window—women with serpents and black leather straps instead of clothes. And a hairdresser that still called itself a barber, with a red, white and blue pole at the front and posters in the window of great haircuts from 1983.

  The largest shop was the convenience store that tried to pass itself off as a mini-mart, with faded packets of instant noodles and cans of soup not seen in a proper supermarket for years. The whole strip could probably rustle up only two or three trays of vegetables. The place that got the most business was Stanley Spirits on the corner. People went there mostly to get beer—half a dozen cans of VB at a stretch, VB standing for Victoria Bitter, which could also express the sentiments of the male residents of Stanley aged between seventeen and seventy. My mum never bought anything from this strip. Instead, she caught the bus to neighboring Sunray and its market, where she could get tomatoes for a dollar a pound if she went near closing time.

  Ours was the only blue house in Stanley, and I don’t mean a pale blue washed out with a lot of white. I mean blue the color of that bubble-gum-flavored ice cream all kids love until they get older and find out how many chemicals are in every scoop. Now I feel the same way about our home. But when I was younger, I loved how it stood out; it was the kind of house a kid would draw, a rectangle in blue and a triangle in red.

  To our left were the Donaldsons, a lovely older couple who owned a Dalmatian that barked at all hours of the day. They’d come over once a year, two days after Christmas, to give us cake and handfuls of chocolates that tasted like brown crayons. A few months later, at Chinese New Year, Mum would ask me to walk over with coconut sweets or spring rolls, and sometimes I’d bring moon cakes from the Lunar Festival. “Aren’t you a sweetie,” they’d say.

  The Donaldsons’ house was white, and its cement-rendered front was not pimpled with mold. They had a carefully maintained garden of bougainvilleas, cacti and fuchsias, and an upright mailbox—no small feat in a place like Stanley, where teenagers would drive by with cricket bats, in cars that they’d buy for two hundred dollars and spend two thousand tricking out. Most of the mailboxes in Stanley leaned to one side, as if wincing from their blows.

  The most enchanting thing about the Donaldsons’ house was this: around their front yard were seven little gnomes and a toadstool, each partly hiding behind a flowerpot or shrub. The kids who loved to smash everything that was standing never touched the Donaldsons’ peekaboo gnomes.

  That’s what I see, Linh, but I also remember that our closeness to the Donaldsons didn’t stop the kids from knocking over our mailbox. Once they even chucked a rock through our front window. I suggested to my father that it was because our blue house was such an irresistible target, but no way was he going to repaint it. When we first moved in, my father took great care to water the plum tree at the front and the apricot tree at the back. After a while he got
too busy and said it was a waste of water. “Let the rain take care of it,” he said, but the rain was as half-arsed in its dripping as everything else around here, and eventually the apricot tree dried up. The plum tree survived but bore sour pellets.

  Mum spent most of her days indoors, only going out to shop and collect the mail from our mailbox, or to attend church. She’d always wanted me to go to a Catholic school, which was how I ended up at Christ Our Savior. My father, who didn’t really believe in God—not since most of his family went missing, presumed dead, in Vietnam—wanted me to win a scholarship to somewhere else.

  He also wanted me to stop wasting time doing things for the neighbors and to start hunkering down. “Why do you always interfere with her homework?” he asked my mother. “Where were you when your god was handing out the brains? Holding the door for everyone?”

  He wanted me to get out of Stanley. He wanted me out of there for my own good. Where we lived was not a place where good stories began, but a place where bad stories retreated, like small mongrel dogs bitten by much larger, thoroughbred ones.

  Reading back through this first letter to you, I can see I knew even then that where I was going, you were not coming along, and that I would have to leave you and all of this behind. But I did not understand then, as I do now, how difficult it would be to create a thoroughbred from mongrel stock.

  When my dad dropped us off at the front gate, the first things I saw were the rose garden spreading out on either side of the main driveway, and the enormous sign in iron cursive letters spelling out LAURINDA. No “Ladies’ College” after it, of course; the name was meant to speak for itself. Then there was the main building: four sections of sandstone brick, and the giant cream tower in the center. This place is giving us the finger! you squawked when you first saw it, Linh.

  I thought that in a black-and-white photograph, it could be mistaken for the main house of a plantation in the Deep South of America. I could imagine young ladies in white gloves with lace slingshots, lying in wait to kill a mockingbird or two. It was beautiful, but as it was guarded by a gate and set against the enormous lawn, the beauty snuck up on you, like a femme fatale with a rock.

  We could make fun of it because we knew we’d never enter the school itself, only the gym, a massive, windowless box that looked like a giant’s shipping container. There was a sign stuck to the door: YEAR TEN SCHOLARSHIP EXAMS THIS WAY. Rows of plastic chairs and tables had been set up, with numbers taped down the sides. It was morgue-cold in there, as though we were going to be strapped into those seats and have our minds dissected in some awful autopsy.

  There were over three hundred students in the room but only two of us would make it through this elimination round: a boy for Auburn Academy and a girl for Laurinda. This was the first time Laurinda and Auburn had offered “Equal Access” scholarships, which were supposed to go to kids with parents the school considered broke.

  That morning, all the parents were begging the deities, white-knuckled with want, for their kid to be the one who made it through. There were two types, I noticed: the ear pullers, who drove off immediately after giving their kid a serious stare and a punishing pointed finger, and the bum wipers, who stayed as long as they could, until they were kicked out because the exam was about to begin.

  It was good to see some familiar faces from Christ Our Savior. Tully was there, and Yvonne and Ivy. They were trying out because they hadn’t made it into Hoadley Girls’ State Selective School and their parents were giving them a rough time at home. And you, of course, Linh.

  I felt sorry for Tully. The way her mother was dragging her to the gym by the elbow, it was as if she was heading for the firing squad. “Your cousin Stephanie got into Hoadley seven years ago,” we overheard Mrs. Cho muttering, “and there is no way that you could be dumber than Stephanie.”

  Now Stephanie was an accountant who sat on her bum churning through numbers all day instead of standing in a factory pulling out chicken gizzards. My parents had taken me to visit her when I was seven. I stared and stared at the badges on her red woolen jacket and her checkered skirt with a big metal pin through it. “She had to take a test to get into the school,” my father told me as he drove us home that evening. “She has a good future ahead of her.”

  As a kid, I wasn’t forced to think about The Future much, but I knew I wanted to be dressed like Stephanie in a royal outfit that magically seemed to make adults take you seriously and ask you quiet and sincere questions and listen to your answers. None of that “Wah, what a pretty girl you are!” which seemed to be the only way adult strangers behaved toward me back then.

  As I walked to my place in the gym, I saw Tully hunched over the desk ahead of me, her back a hard cashew curve and her fingers at her temples. I thought of all those afternoons when she couldn’t hang out or even do homework with us because she was being whisked away to some tutoring program or other.

  When the exam began, the gym fell so quiet that I could hear myself blink. It must have been like this all the time for Tully, I mused, her whole life one exam after another in white-walled tutoring centers run by dour former math teachers or engineers whose qualifications were not recognized here. She would be used to this silence.

  We walked with Tully, Ivy and Yvonne when it was over to catch the bus home. Ivy and Yvonne had been such close friends since Year Seven that they had identical haircuts. They commiserated with each other when their parents made them find after-school work at the local Kumon tutoring center and Kmart, and they planned to run away together when they turned twenty, before their parents could send them back to Vietnam/Malta to get cheap eyelid surgery/nose jobs and/or husbands.

  As we walked, we wah’ed over houses with roofs like red bonnets on top of white faces with unblinking bay-window eyes, fanned by decades-old London plane trees. Ivy and Yvonne skipped down the sidewalk, playing the old game of avoiding the cracks in case we broke our mothers’ backs. Tully had her fingertips in her jeans pockets; occasionally she would pull out a soggy tissue and wipe her nose.

  I could hear Ivy bellowing down the quiet street that Yvonne had stepped on a crack.

  “I did not, bitch!” Yvonne screeched back. I noticed the airy curtains of a house ripple.

  “Be quiet, youse!” you said. “People are watching us.”

  “Let them watch!” yelled Ivy in glee.

  “We probably interrupted their eleven o’clock croissant.”

  We caught up with Yvonne and Ivy.

  “What did you write about for the final essay?” It was the first time Tully had opened her mouth since the exam. For fifteen minutes, it had been set in a straight line, with a small hook on each end, as if latched to her chin and dragging her head down.

  In the last part of the exam, we’d had to write an essay based on a badly photocopied picture of a person sitting behind a desk in the dark, a candle burning. The picture was done in the style of the drawings in the Good News Bible—with swirly lines and no features, so you couldn’t see the facial expression.

  “I wrote about feeling trapped in an exam that will decide whether my father will disown me,” Yvonne joked. “This is my second go! Sixty bucks down the drain again, just because my dad won’t accept that I’m not a genius like you, Tully. What did you write about?”

  “I wrote about Peter Benenson, who founded Amnesty International,” said Tully. “I figured they wanted us to show that we knew about world issues, and they might give bonus credit if we knew about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

  “Waahh,” breathed Ivy, and she whacked Yvonne on the shoulder. “We’re stuffed, my friend. I wrote about how when my brother Ming went to prison, he missed Asian food so much that in the exercise yard he watched the pigeons and wanted to kill and roast one, like quail.”

  I saw the upside-down hooks on Tully’s face turn themselves the other way.

  “What the hell, Ivy?” Yvonne said, laughing. Then she turned to Tully. “Man, Tully, that is what they call a sophisticated ess
ay. You’ve got the scholarship in the bag.”

  “Hear me out!” declared Ivy. “I thought that if I wrote about true life in—what did Mr. Galloway call it?—an ‘evocative and poignant’ way, those examiners would be amazed by my ability to portray real life and feel sorry for me. Two birds with one stone, my friends. Two birds, one massive stone.”

  Suddenly Tully turned toward you. “What did you write about, Linh?”

  You just laughed. “Something stupid.”

  I noticed that Tully’s eyes were two small, desperate fires, but I didn’t say anything. I stayed quiet. Tully, who had more As than a wholesale box of batteries, had been sitting in front of me for the whole three hours, distracting me with her rocking backward and forward. Fifty minutes into the exam, she had put her hand up for another blank writing booklet. Throughout the test, she was practically coughing up her lungs in the near-silent room.

  I knew she would get the scholarship. She was like an Olympic gymnast who had been training for this moment her entire life. Nothing else was allowed to matter. She was not allowed to do sports or drama, or take an interest in anything frivolous. She could read about the end of apartheid in South Africa, but she couldn’t read the arts pages of the newspaper if her parents were home. That’s how crazy they were. She could talk about the Geneva Conventions but she wouldn’t know how to boil an egg. She certainly wouldn’t know that sleep was something people did to feel rested and more awake.