Free Lucy and Linh by Alice Pung Page B

what we’d eat for dinner, or when I could go out, or who I could sit next to in class. Who cared what a fifteen-year-old thought?
    When the bell rang, we stood up to leave. I watched Ms. Vanderwerp walk away to her next class. There was something slightly blurred about her whole being, as if she were a watercolor painting that someone couldn’t be bothered finishing; not only that, but they didn’t even care enough not to smudge it with their smock sleeve.
    —
    No one had explained to me why Ms. Vanderwerp carried wipes around with her at all times, but after my fourth history class I figured it out. The Cabinet showed me.
    One afternoon Amber came to class looking pallid and unwell. She took out a pocket pack of tissues and placed it on her desk. “Are you okay?” I asked. She hadn’t seemed sick that morning.
    She nodded. When Ms. Vanderwerp was handing out a photocopy about America’s involvement in World War II, Amber let out a massive, whooping sneeze just as the teacher was near her desk. Ms. Vanderwerp jumped backward, almost falling over Katie. All the beige seeped out of her face as she righted herself. Instead of saying, “Bless you, Amber,” Ms. Vanderwerp kept her distance and opened all the windows of the room. “Amber, dear, would you like to go to the sick bay? You look quite unwell.”
    “No, I should be all right, Ms. V.”
    Then I noticed Amber’s smile, and how the color of her face didn’t particularly match her neck. I saw what I hadn’t noticed before—that whenever anyone coughed, Ms. Vanderwerp would open a window. Whenever anyone sneezed, she would turn around toward the whiteboard as if she needed to write something or rub something out.
    I heard Brodie snigger behind Ms. Vanderwerp’s back while she busied herself writing on the board, and I realized that what Amber had done was all an act—an act of talcum-powder torture, carefully timed to churn up Ms. Vanderwerp’s worst fears.
    —
    That same afternoon, when I returned home, Mum had fixed the Lamb’s blue snot problem. She had caught a bus to Sunray’s fabric store and bought five yards of very, very fine bridal netting, which she hemmed at the top and passed a drawstring through. At the bottom she sewed an enormous circle of stiff copper wire. She gathered the drawstring at the top and hung the contraption from a ceiling beam, trapping the Lamb’s box inside like a bee inside a butterfly net.
    —
    “Mr. Lamb, look at you!” I squealed. “You have your own little hideaway!” I squatted on the floor and lifted up the circular base to peer at him.
    “Gah!” he said, dribbling. He was eating one of those iced cakes in plastic wrappers, the cakes that never went bad.
    “He only stays in here with me during the day while you are at school,” Mum told me. “Take him into the kitchen and give him some mashed soup from the pot on the stove top. Then let him walk in his baby walker while you are doing your homework.”
    Although Lamb had recently learned to walk, we often put him in his playpen to prevent him from bumping into boxes or sharp corners or crawling toward dangerous objects, like the fabric cutter or the ironing board.
    I lifted the Lamb from his box, and he was still holding on to his one-eyed duck. But the moment I set him down on my lap, he decided to pee on my blazer.
    “Oh, no! Crap, Mum!”
    “What happened?” My mother was panicking. “Did he fall?” She came rushing toward us. Then she noticed the rivulet running down my pocket, collecting in dark droplets on the concrete floor.
    “Why didn’t you put a nappy on him?” I shouted.
    “He has a rash on his bum.” She picked him up and showed me.
    “Eww, I don’t need to see that!”
    “It’ll come out with a wash,” she said, patting my damp sleeve with her hand, but that only made me angrier.
    “You can’t put something like this through a machine! You have to dry-clean it!”
    I had forgotten that I was talking to a textiles expert, and