Free Laurinda by Alice Pung Page A

which is a rich and cultured part of America.”
    “Have you been to New York, Lucy?” she asked me.
    “No.”
    “Then you can’t make generalisations like that. Not all of New York is wealthy or cultured. Think about the valley of ashes.”
    Eventually, I started to cotton on to what Mrs Leslie wanted. My answers became more detailed, and not all about plot. I learned to judge the characters as I’d judge real people. “Nick secretly admires Gatsby but due to his class and circumstances, and also to him being related to Daisy, he can’t openly admit it. To do so would be to admit that he hangs around shady people and condones their dodge,” I would write in my essays. Or: “The green light is supposed to be a metaphor for Gatsby’s hope, because it is far away and flashes and blinks, to emphasise that hope is often elusive. But no one ever speaks about Gatsby’s envy, which the green could also symbolise.”
    I had no idea why, but this last comment really did it for Mrs Leslie. Her brown eyes lit up. “You are really engaging with the text and learning the skill of analysis,” she praised. “What do you mean by Gatsby’s envy?”
    I thought of all the people I knew in Stanley who looked at the houses along Ambient Estates with the same metal-rimmed, wide-eyed Eckleburg-yearning as those living in the valley of ashes. I thought of how hard we tried – you, me, Yvonne, Ivy – to look sophisticated with our imitation perfumes and gold buttons and makeup, when true Laurindans never wore such stuff, and how the plainness of their clothes did not conceal the fact that their tops were made of Angora and their shoes of calfskin. I’d only been at the school for a few weeks when I realised we were the ones standing on the shore in our pink suits, suddenly tacky, suddenly left so far behind, and that – unlike Gatsby – most of us could not afford a boat to take us across to the other side. The only way to get there was to do it individually, sink or swim, and of course very few swimmers made it.
    “Gatsby wants the status they have, but he can’t get it no matter how rich he becomes, because his wealth is shonky . . . I mean, ill-gotten.”
    “Spot on, Lucy!” cheered Mrs Leslie.
    Then she asked me how I was settling into the school.
    “Good,” I said. “Katie has been a good friend to me.”
    “Katie,” Mrs Leslie said slowly. “Is that Katherine Gladrock?”
    “Yes,” I replied.
    Then she chuckled. “Sweet girl. But awfully dull.”
    *
    For my first History essay for Ms Vanderwerp, I received thirteen out of twenty. Thirteen out of twenty! A bare pass. She had also written a note: “A good effort, but your argumentative skills need improving. Please come and see me.” And she got my name wrong again. I don’t know how difficult it was to forget “Lucy”, but somehow she did.
    Ms Vanderwerp’s office was a small cramped corner thing, bigger than a broom closet but only just. It smelled of Pine O Cleen, and on an overhead shelf she had three cartons of wipes and two boxes of tissues.
    “Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “I can see that this is the first History essay you’ve written. It was a good attempt. But you didn’t sustain a consistent argument about what could have caused World War One.”
    “My argument is that many things happened to cause the war, and no one thing made it happen.”
    Ms Vanderwerp looked at me for a while, then told me that my conclusion was satisfactory but that I had to structure my argument to reflect it. She allowed me to resubmit because it was my first essay. When she returned it with a sixteen out of twenty – a mark that would have made Tully weep inconsolably – I felt like I’d got the hang of things.
    So for my next two assignments, I followed the same formula. Many things in history happened to cause X, Y or Z. There was no decisive moment.
    “Lucy, your writing skills are vastly improved,” Ms Vanderwerp told me, “but the questions are