Lucy and Linh Read Online Free Page A

“This is the student handbook, and in it you will find all you need to know about Laurinda,” she announced, as if the school itself were a great lady I was supposed to study up on. “And in this folder is our uniform list. Note that we have only one supplier, Edmondsons.”
    She put both hands on her desk and stood. “Now I will show you around.” I noticed that her nails were painted the same color as her lips.
    “The rendering is very beautiful,” my father commented as we stood in front of the main building. “My Italian nephew Claude is a renderer on the Gold Coast.”
    Dad was taking the “displaying diversity” part too far, I thought.
    “It’s actually sandstone,” explained Mrs. Grey. “Sydney Basin Hawkesbury sandstone. Very few buildings in Melbourne around the turn of the century were built with this material, which was imported from New South Wales.”
    It was only much later that I realized sandstone was not the same as a rendered façade—back then I was just as lost as my father, and we stood there willingly being edified by a being who knew so much more than we did.
    “We have three campuses at Laurinda,” Mrs. Grey told us as she led us away from the main building. “The junior school is down the road. This is the middle school campus, for Years Seven to Ten. Next year, when Lucy is in senior school, she will go to the campus on Arcadia Avenue.”
    We stood on the small lawn at the center of the school, and Mrs. Grey pointed up. The bells in the tower, she explained, were shipped from London in 1886. They stood in the Barry Wing, the oldest part of the school, named after Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who had sentenced Ned Kelly to hang.
    She shuttled us down some more corridors, all the while continuing her commentary: In this wing, Dame Nellie Melba once had dinner with the attorney general. In that wing, two weeks ago, the vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne had held a meeting about the future of higher education with the leaders of the nation’s other top five universities. “It was an honor to host that delegation,” said Mrs. Grey, with as much reverence as the nuns at Christ Our Savior would have shown had a flock of archangels descended to announce the Second Coming.
    She then showed us the new performing arts center, a massive spherical affair made of glass and metal that could seat five hundred people, and the seven individual rehearsal rooms, each containing a different set of musical instruments. My father made the appropriate wide-mouthed sounds of awe.
    After the tour, Mrs. Grey took us back to the main wing. “We’re looking forward to having you join the Laurinda community next year, Lucy,” she said to me, and then shook my father’s hand.
    —
    And so, Linh, my final term at Christ Our Savior went by very, very quickly. If I had known how quickly it would pass, I would not have spent so much time in class daydreaming about when my new uniform would arrive. I would not have walked around comparing our school’s rented, pale green, three-bedroom cement music house across the road with Laurinda’s performing arts center. I would not have looked at our teachers and thought, geez, Mr. Galloway is really nice but he spelled
liaise
wrong on the board. And I would not have been miffed when Ivy and Yvonne kept riling me. “We will miss you sooo much,” Ivy said. “Don’t forget us when you go to your rich school, bitch!”
    But you kept bringing me back to myself, Linh, forcing me to notice those moments. You’d laugh like a mad person at Ivy’s awful jokes.
    “What’s the definition of a smart-arse?” she’d ask.
    “I dunno,” you’d reply.
    “Someone who can sit on a tub of ice cream and tell you what flavor it is!”
    “Ha! I have a better one. What’s brown and sticky?”
    “Gross…we don’t want to know.”
    “A stick! Ha!”
    When old Mr. Warren wore shorts to school, you said, “Hey, sir, nice legs! You should be on a