Lucy and Linh Read Online Free PDF Page A

friendships with your classmates. You will be dearly missed. We wish you all the very best at your new school. Remember, you will always be welcome here at Christ Our Savior—”
    “Whoa!” you interrupted, because you didn’t want me to get too emotional in front of the class—that’s how good a friend you were, Linh. “This cake is awesome! Mr. Warren, you’d better not stand too close, because the knife’s coming out and the first cut is the deepest!”
    When the buses dropped us back at the school to collect our bags, we saw a group of St. Andrew’s boys loitering near our fence.
    “Ooh, Yvonne, your lover boy is here!” teased the girls.
    “Shut up,” said Yvonne.
    We all knew that one of the boys, Hai, had the hots for Yvonne. When we grabbed our bags and headed toward the gate, he and his mates were there to greet us, every one of them dressed in black T-shirt and jacket and jeans. “Yo, Yvonne, check this out, me and ma homies are going to sing you a song, baby gurrllll.”
    “Oh my God, so embarrassing,” said Yvonne, covering her face with one hand.
    All his mates made gangsta gestures, pointing toward him like he was a Southeast Asian pop star, and he started to belt out a popular American song—but
in Maltese.
As the only Viet kid in a class full of kids from Malta, he spoke Maltese better than he spoke English because all his mates were Maltese. When he finished serenading Yvonne, we all clapped, and then Hai dropped to one knee and asked if Yvonne would be his girlfriend.
    She squealed and laughed and said, “Oh, you are too embarrassing,” and of course we egged her on until she eventually said yes, which was what she had wanted to do in the first place. Hai jumped up and squeezed Yvonne in a massive bear hug and then kissed her cheek, and all the while she was shrieking, “Eww, gross!”
    I sighed inwardly. Boys, I thought. I would sure miss those boys when I went to the new school.
    Suddenly Ivy hollered, “Hey, guys, it’s her last day!” She pointed, and all eyes turned to me and I went red. The paradoxes of being a teenager: I didn’t like this attention, and yet secretly I
loved
it.
    “Oh yeah? Where you going?” the tallest boy asked.
    These cute Maltese boys—I just knew Ivy was going to explain to them that I had won a scholarship to Laurinda, like it was a huge deal—and of course it was, except not to these guys. It was the sort of thing that would make them think I was a snob who reckoned she was too good for this suburb. That thought suddenly made me feel very sad.
    Luckily, you jumped in. “
I’m
going away,” you lied, but I didn’t mind. I never minded when you did those crazy things, Linh. “It’s
my
last day!”
    “Oh yeah? Where’re you going to?”
    “Juvie, yo.”
    The tall boy knew you were BS’ing, but he played along. “What for, gangsta?”
    “Give her a kiss on the cheek and she’ll tell you.”
    Holy Mary! Even you could not believe Ivy had blurted that out, Linh. But it was our last day of term, and you were in a reckless mood. You grinned and turned your cheek to one side.
    The tall boy smiled and came closer. Everyone whooped. Then you turned the other cheek.
    “Wow,” you breathed afterward, flapping your hands as if you’d just stuck them in hot coals. “Discount day. Two for the price of one!”
    As we walked home that last afternoon, you with that dopey grin stamped on your face, I thought about the summer before I had started Year Seven at Christ Our Savior. I was a pretty shy kid, but I had read every edition of
Smash Hits
and
TV Hits
at the library over those holidays to train myself to be a teenager. I thought that if I knew what was in them, I would have things to talk about with the cool girls. It never occurred to me that what I knew wouldn’t alter the personality I had—not until I came to that first homeroom and Mrs. Abrams sat me next to Melissa for roll call. All year I had nothing much to say to her, because she lived