Read an extract from Laurinda by Alice Pung
In Laurinda, Alice Pung tells an involving, original story that captures the drama and pain of school life today, as well as revealing much about the choices of young women.
In anticipation of the release of this new young adult novel later this month, you can read an extract below.
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 centre. This place is giving us the finger! you squawked when you first saw it, Linh.
I thought to myself 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 an A4 sign stuck to the door: YEAR TEN SCHOLARSHIP EXAMS THIS WAY. Rows of plastic chairs and tables had been set up, with numbers sticky-taped down the side. 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 povvo.
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 kids 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 Saviour. 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 woollen jacket and her chequered 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 towards 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 whitewalled tutoring centres run by dour former maths teachers or engineers whose qualifications were not recognised here. She would be used to this silence.
When it was over, we walked with Tully, Ivy and Yvonne 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 centre 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. The girl was practically viral.
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.”
