Laurinda by Alice Pung Page B

That’s how Laurindans saw their boys – in fine, fine detail, down to the cut of their Country Road shirts.
    But it seemed to me that all these girls were myopic, because the guys they considered popular were not necessarily the hottest. Some were downright dweeby. And the hotter guys from Auburn Academy – a tall, dark, handsome one called Harshan, and the Marlon Brando lookalike Emilio – were treated like outsiders. Maybe these guys were too visceral for them. Laurinda girls were into Jane Austen heroes, not hunks.
    Harshan had skin the colour of a violin and an earring in one ear; I noticed it as he leaned over to poke a finger at one of the wires of the brain sculpture. When Chelsea spoke to him, she didn’t ask what he thought of the sculpture. Instead, she seemed to want to foster some cultural cohesion by asking, “So what part of India are you from?”
    “I was born here, actually,” he said in a friendly way. “My parents are Sri Lankan, from Fiji.”
    Even someone like Harshan was not immune to the charms of the Cabinet, I saw, particularly with Amber standing there. Here was the thing about the accidental artwork of her face – a few millimetres off and her eyes would be set too close together; a few millimetres apart and her mouth would make her chin look sunken. It was this tenuousness that made her so hot, that made boys feel they were living on the edge just by looking at her.
    “Same diff,” said Amber, and she and Chelsea giggled. They were flirting with him; they assumed Harshan understood they were not racist, because they had deigned to speak to him. But they had no real idea what the difference between Sri Lanka and India was – and, making it worse, they didn’t care. One was Dilmah tea and the other Gandhi. We didn’t study South Asian history at this school.
    “Ignorant bitches,” he muttered under his breath.
    “Excuse me?” Amber’s eyes widened.
    “What did you call us?” Chelsea turned towards him, “That is sooo offensive. Oh my god. Geez, some people can’t take a joke,” she pouted. I could see she was wounded because her eyes glittered like anthracite. Suddenly, it seemed, this was all Harshan’s fault – he was the brute, insulting these two young Laurinda diplomats who meant well, who were curious about his culture. They were nice girls, and he was a condescending sexist pig.
    Harshan looked down at them, and I could tell that all the beauty he’d seen there had dissolved. Then he did something completely unexpected, which made them squeal. He lowered his head and bowed from the waist – a long, drawn-out bow that came to just above the hem of their skirts, his back straight as an ironing board. He slowly came up and held his hands in the prayer position. Bobbing his head from side to side, he said, “Oh, golly gee, ma’am, I’m welly, welly solly – please accept my most humble apologies.” His face was hard but, unlike Chelsea’s, it was not brittle. He turned and walked away.
    Amber and Chelsea burst into laughter. “Stupid curry-muncher,” said Chelsea, and then told a story about how guys like that were always trying to pick her up at Urban nightclub and how they couldn’t dance for shit.
    I moved away from the brain sculpture.
    *
    Amber returned from Auburn Academy with a pen. It had a plastic heart at the top that lit up, and it played a tinny song when you wrote with it. I’m not sure which boy had given it to her, but Amber was ecstatic, flashing it around class, showing teachers and using it to write, until Mrs Trengrove said that the music was too distracting; could she please use a normal biro like everyone else? Even that did not ruin her heart-thumping joy, and she bounded to class, skipping and leaping, showing off her gazelle legs.
    There was love elsewhere, too.
    In Politics, someone had put a single heart-shaped chocolate wrapped in gold foil on Mr Sinclair’s desk. We all knew it was Gina. He walked to his desk, put down his planner