Free Laurinda by Alice Pung

out a pair of jeans or trimmed their edges in preparation for the overlocker. I imagined the branches on the tiny trees of his lungs overhanging with blue threads. Enough time and breathing, I imagined, and each organ would be encased in a little knitted blue pouch.
    “Aiyoh,” my mother sighed. “We need to find a better place for him to sit during the day.” Then she added, needlessly, “Don’t tell your father.”
    She took the Lamb back in her arms. “Poor little Lamby.” She handed him to me. “Take him to the kitchen and sit him down in his high chair while you do your homework. Give him his bottle too.”
    Later, when my mother came out for a coffee break and saw the crumpled letter in the bin, she pulled it out. “Why did you throw this away? What does it say?”
    “It’s nothing, Mum. The school just wants us to play sport on Saturdays.”
    “Then go if you want.”
    “Nah.”
    “Aha! You can even take the Lamb with you. Then he won’t have to stay with me in the garage.”
    My mum didn’t understand some things, Linh, like the way you couldn’t have a baby on a hockey field or netball court. To her, sport was play, and if I wanted to play with some of the girls in my class, then the Lamb could come too, and the ones who were off the court could look after him. She had no idea that we would have to go to Alberdine Park on Saturday mornings and stay there for four or five hours. There was even a compulsory sports uniform, which consisted of twelve different items, all bearing the college crest: two polo tops and two swim caps (one for school events and one for house events), bathers, spray jacket, microfibre trackpants, leggings, athletic shorts, a netball skirt, a cap, socks and a sports bag.
    My mother had no idea how seriously Laurinda took its play.

M rs Leslie, my remedial English teacher, was the most attractive older lady I had ever seen. She was skinny in a way that women my mother’s age in Stanley weren’t, and the warm lines around her eyes made her even more lovely. All her blouses were silky and pastel, and all her cardigans were the colour of small woodland animals. She came in four times a week, just for me . The two of us sat in the corner of the library when everyone else was in normal English class.
    I felt very lucky indeed.
    She was also Amber’s mother.
    We were studying a book called The Great Gatsby , which was about a rich man in a pink suit who had huge parties in his house on a long island shaped like an egg. I thought he was possibly gay, with his fashion sense, and that his love for that rich fairy-floss Daisy was fake because all she did was play tennis and complain about the heat. Who Gatsby really wanted to be with was Tom, which is why he killed Tom’s mistress. There was a line in it that said Gatsby would never look at another man’s wife, which supported my theory.
    I was really looking forward to sharing my insight with Mrs Leslie. I never spoke up in normal English class but I thought that we’d have deep and meaningful talks since she was the head of the Book Club. But no, in the first lesson she gave me an essay structure to learn (introduction, body and conclusion). She had also come armed with vocabulary lists based on the book.
    She told me she liked how I expressed things so concisely and asked if I had read The Lord of the Flies .
    “No, but I might know him.”
    “Pardon?”
    “I know the leading distributor of jeans zippers in Australia,” I joked, but she didn’t find it funny. I guessed it wasn’t the time to tell her your joke, Linh, about how Hamlet was the son of Piglet.
    So I sat there miserably as Mrs Leslie tested me on words I didn’t know, like “extemporise” and “supercilious”.
    Then she read passages out to me and asked me to explain what they meant. I had no idea why she was testing my comprehension as if I were ten years old, so at first I replied with stuff like, “This passage shows that the story is set in New York,