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swim around in each lens.
    Ms Vanderwerp explained that we would be studying twentieth-century history, from the causes of World War One to the Vietnam War. She had a trembly voice, the sort an old woman who served Iced VoVos might have, but she wasn’t even that old. When she wrote on the whiteboard, her hand was shaky too. On her desk sat a cylinder of wipes. Sometimes she would emit a nervous laugh, but most of the time her mouth drooped as if she’d had a stroke.
    I was seated next to a girl named Amber Leslie. Ms Vanderwerp had arranged us in alphabetical last-name order around the room. “Easier for me to remember you in the first few weeks,” she told us.
    When she called out my name, she got my first name, middle name and surname mixed up. She apologised when her watery-bowl eyes found me in the room.
    “Just call me Lucy,” I said.
    She smiled. “Thank you, Lucy,” she said, as if I had just invented some kind of life-changing super-mop to free her from many hours of housekeeping.
    Out of the corner of my eye I saw Amber Leslie smile. I turned towards her, and the first thing I noticed was that she had very unusual lips. Her top lip was puffier than her bottom lip and jutted forward a little – not because buckteeth were giving it a nudge, for Amber had small, perfect white teeth, but almost as if her chin was shyly pushing her bottom lip behind her top one She had the endearing jaw of a baby, springbok-brown eyes and a fringe that was trimmed so that two-thirds of her forehead lay bare.
    I’m not doing a very good job of description, Linh, because those features and haircut sound as if they belong to a drooling asylum inmate, but on Amber Leslie they were mesmerising. Because each one of her features was individually so striking, it took me a moment to realise that her face as a whole was stammeringly beautiful, a rare combination of beauty, innocence and experience that would surely provoke asthmatic lust in boys and mute envy in girls. She also smelled like the Body Shop’s Fuzzy Peach Perfume Oil.
    Distracted by Amber, I didn’t notice that Ms Vanderwerp was handing out term outlines, until one of the girls piped up: “Ms V, hey, Ms V, this term outline is for the Year Eights.”
    “Oh,” she exclaimed, taking a closer look, “I’m afraid it is. Oh dear. My apologies, girls.” At least she didn’t call us young ladies. “I must have left the others by the photocopier. Won’t be long!”
    After she left the room, some of the students looked at each other. It was a look that made me realise Ms Vanderwerp was prone to such mistakes. At Christ Our Saviour, whenever teachers left the class, girls would start calling out to each other across the room: “Hey, Melissa, lift up your fringe and give us a look! Aww, come on, they’re not that bad. They’ll grow back!” Or: “Quick, Tully, give us the answer!” But quietness at Laurinda didn’t necessarily mean good behaviour, I saw, or even indifference. Many things were going on in that quiet – a raised eyebrow, a rolling eyeball, a deliberate sniff. The room was soon reeking with the odourless stench of collective contempt.
    When Ms Vanderwerp returned, she passed around the correct handouts. She had been gone for less than three minutes, but I could feel something had shifted. “Thank you,” I said automatically when she came around to my desk, but Amber Leslie didn’t.
    There was another girl I noticed on that first day, Linh, and that was because she was so rude. “Typical,” she muttered when Ms Vanderwerp had called the roll and made us all move seats. “Typical,” she groaned when Ms Vanderwerp told us that we would be studying twentieth-century history. When I heard her sigh her third “typical” as Ms Vanderwerp left the room, I realised that here was a sagacious reincarnate who could predict the turn of events with pinpoint accuracy, which is probably why life bored her so much.
    Her name was Chelsea White. Unlike Amber’s