She plonks herself down, backpack and all, onto one of our metal folding chairs. The water bottle makes a loud thud as it hits the chair, but she doesn’t notice, just crosses her arms and stares at me.
‘She’s not going to sign the form, you know.’ The know-it-all arch of her eyebrow is so perfect, I wonder if she’s practised it before.
‘I know.’ I snatch a pen from the kitchen drawer and scrawl on the line on the form. It’s not the first time I’ve forged Ma’s signature, and I’m sure Lily’s done it a million times too. But we have an unspoken agreement between us: we protect Michael from Ma’s tendencies, the bad ones at least, while we can.
Lily lets out a not-so-subtle huff behind me. ‘You know, if I get another lecture from Lucy, I’m going to tell her it’s my sister’s fault. I’m not taking the fall.’
‘Sure, whatever. And don’t call your teachers by their first name.’
I place the butter in a used Ziploc bag and put it back in the freezer, where Ma insists on keeping it. The bread bag I tie up tightly and then knot it up in another plastic bag and stick it in the freezer. Everything in our house is tied up in plastic bags of some kind: all our food containers, cleaning supplies, even the picture frames on the shelves are sealed in clear plastic. Ma hates dust but she doesn’t like dusting, so every few weeks, she just replaces the plastic bags because they’re cheap. Any eco-warrior would be terrified stepping into our house, but no one ever comes over, so there’s no worry.
‘Lucy tells us to call her that,’ Lily retorts. ‘She says that children are human beings and deserve to be treated with the same respect as adults, so I can express myself to my full potential.’
I try not to roll my eyes. Thanks to a scholarship, Lily attends a rich private school just outside of Glebe. With a natural penchant for melodrama, Lily’s sounding more and more like her well-off peers. I just hope they don’t rub off too much.
‘Ze2 ze2, I can’t find my other sock,’ Michael calls out to me from his bedroom.
‘Do you want me to help you?’
‘No!’ Michael is going through a phase of being very particular about his privacy, especially with his sisters. He won’t let us in when he’s dressing or bathing, and will only let Mummy see him naked, which is making things harder for me and Lily as Ma’s good moods are getting fewer and fewer. I miss the little guy who runs around naked with his half-done-up nappy trailing behind him.
Lily rolls her eyes again. ‘Oh gosh! I’m never going to get to school.’
‘Be quiet.’ I call through the closed door, ‘Michael, you have five seconds to come out of there or I’m coming in!’
‘Noooo!’ The door bangs open and Michael is standing there in his school shirt and trousers, a striped sports sock on one foot and a grey knee-high sock on the other. I walk into his bedroom and get on my hands and knees to look.
I snatch at what I hope is a grey sock but it turns out to just be a giant dust bunny under the bed. Yuck. If Ma saw this, she’d lose it.
‘Anna, I need my socks.’ Michael stamps his feet.
‘Aannaaaaaaa! I have to go!’ Lily’s screeching makes me wince.
‘Sorry, squirt, no time.’ I beckon him over and fold the knee-high sock over a few times to try to even the two out.
I help Michael into his shoes and then put on his backpack. It’s almost as big as Lily’s, and he bends backwards slightly from the weight. ‘And good news, Ma signed your slip!’ I wave it in front of him.
He frowns as he takes it from me. ‘Really? But you said she was asleep.’
‘Ah, she was. But she woke up for a bit and then went straight back to bed. I think she’s really tired.’ My lying is pathetic and isn’t fooling anyone, not even a five year old. But there’s no time to argue. I grab my own schoolbag, an over-the-shoulder messenger bag that I bought with the money I saved from the one- and-only paid babysitting gig I ever had, before Ma forbade me to babysit at strangers’ houses. ‘How do I know their house is safe? They could do drugs or sell the guns.’ The woman paying me to babysit worked at the Woolies down the road and was hoping to pick up an extra shift on the public holiday. But there was no use pointing this out to Ma.
Although these days, it doesn’t seem to matter. She’s so often in bed.
As I leave for school, I pause by Ma’s door but don’t go in. The shadows are gone now. At least for today, there are no more signs to consider.
2
Ji6
I’ve been dreading today. It’s my Pathways Advisement session, where students are made to talk about their future and what they’re going to do with their lives. Pathways is something the school has been really pushing, and this year it’s a requirement for all Year Elevens to check in by the end of first term, so they can ‘see how we’re going’.
I go to the office for my appointment. There are three other girls already waiting, taking up the bench so I have to kind of stand and lean awkwardly beside them. I don’t know who they are but I’m pretty sure they’re Year Twelves. They, of course, pretend not to see me.
‘Oh my gosh, I literally stayed up studying allllll night. I didn’t sleep at all. I’d be dead right now if it weren’t for this coffee.’ One girl chugs her venti Starbucks.
‘Girl, you’re crazy to be doing fourteen units this year,’ another girl chimes in. ‘Why didn’t you do it last year? Year Eleven doesn’t count!’
‘I know, uggggh, I’m so stupid,’ Venti Coffee moans. ‘Ugh. If I don’t get a 99.7 ATAR, I’m going to kill myself.’
I cast my head down and pretend to rub at a spot on my uniform. These girls are pretty much standard Shore Lakes High Asians—smart overachievers who take all the extension classes and get 99.99s on their ATARs. I know the type, with their tiger mums, classical piano training and MD dreams.
‘You know, these days it’s sooooo competitive.’ One of the other girls tosses her silky black hair. ‘Like, you could get a 99.5 and still not get into the course you want. Like, what gives?’ She puckers her Insta-perfect lips and I rub harder at the non-existent spot.
‘Oh my gosh, can you imagine? You’d end up, like, a real estate agent or have to be a middle-aged barista or something.’
What’s wrong with that? I wonder, but another part of me is squirming because I know what a huge disappointment it would be if I ever said that to my own Chinese family.
‘Anna Chiu?’ I’m spared further ATAR dramas when Miss Kennedy calls me into her office.
‘Anna, please have a seat.’
Miss Kennedy’s office is all white, clean and bright, accented with pastel stationery from kikki.K. I know the brand because I’ve spent too much time at Westfield staring at the pristine notebooks and matching accessories. I have never lusted after anything like I have over fairy-floss-pink paperclips in a matching bird’s nest dispenser.
‘So how are we, Anna?’ Miss Kennedy smiles, her plump lips shiny with gloss and not a brush of make-up out of place. She doesn’t wait for me to answer as she pulls out my file—a crisp manila folder from a curved stack, arranged in rainbow colour order. She studies its thin contents.