Laurinda

I never tell them about our lives. You know why? It is not because I am ashamed. It is because some things are just good, too good to be judged.

People, even well-intentioned people, were always trying to take away our quiet little successes and joys and replace them with big, overarching fears.

And here was the bitter paradox of adolescense: alone, I was most myself, most true. But the self that really mattered was the self that was visible, the self that could be shown to other people.

I wish I could have told you how much talking and writing to you meant to me all year. How you were my bullshit detector. How you listened and kept me true, even when I wanted to block my ears, because you had no filter between your thoughts and your mouth. How you were my best friend, and how it was only because of you that I never felt isolated or desperate to attach myself to anyone at Laurinda.

I was crying out of frustration, frustration that I could not be left alone, that no girl at this school could possibly be allowed some space to breathe and sort out her own thoughts.

I'd never been much good at finding openings in conversations here. I treated them like stuffing envelopes- the moment a gap appeared, I was worried I'd insert the wrong thing and it would sealed and delivered. Or I'd insert something too large to fit through the post, and it would not be accepted

All teenagers are drama queens inside their minds, even the mousiest of us. We load and reload movies of ourselves in heroic postures and outlandish triumphs, movies that if they were ever to be played in front of an audience of people we know and love, would cause us to shrivel in shame

I'd seen how the top-performing girls at Laurinda were cultivated like hothouse strawberries - bright and lush. Out in the real world, they would bruise. I wanted to see how the Cabinet would cope in two years' time, when they would be in the same classes as my most driven and hard-working Christ Our Saviour friends, and the most tenacious and gifted public school students, the hardy banksias and olive trees and root vegetables that would last all through winter.

To be part of the Cabinet, I'd had to keep my true self apart. and there's only so much of yourself you can hide, Linh, before you start to fall apart.

...If you have enough inner resources, you can be by yourself for a long time and not feel smaller because of it.

Life is nothing but high school.” —Kurt Vonnegut

There is nothing more powerful than the feeling of belonging to a group.

There was something creepy about the femininity at Laurinda, something so cloistered and yet brimming with stifled sex that it reminded me of the Victorian whalebone corsets we once saw at the Werribee Park Mansion, which kept everything cramped tight, until the stitches unravelled and out poured mounds of naked pink and white. It was the femininity of tiny éclairs and teacups, crocheted collars and little pearl earrings, the young-girl-to-old-woman transition that skipped sexuality altogether, so that when you saw it - in Gina, for instance - it was as garish as a scarlet A on the chest.

There's a secret to getting a boyfriend at fifteen, and it is this: you have to have a group of friends. You'll never get picked up alone unless by creeps or unless you are extremely beautiful (and even then you'll mostly get creeps), because alone you have no personality. It's only when you're with your friends that you start to shine.

After my breakdown, and the Lamb’s hospital visit, I did not yearn for excitement. I liked the quiet company of the Lamb and Professor Gombrich. I liked spending time with Mum at home, and doing things that made an immediate difference to our lives: cleaning dishes and doing laundry and cooking a huge pot of stock. There was nothing wrong with this, I thought.

You are not truly good until you are tested, and even then you might become a worse person.