Silver

Chapter 12 - then

Our Family Matters teacher called the class back from our 'group discussion'.

'Okay, Millie, what do you think makes a good relationship?' Millie paused, we hadn't been discussing the group questions at all, and now she was having to provide feedback to the whole class.

'Honesty, openness, loyalty, trust,' she said, unflinchingly. Perhaps she had been thinking about what happens after the wedding after all.

'Excellent, Millie, very well said. Sylvie, did you talk about how women can make their careers and family life work well together?'

I faltered, if I was to take a lead from my mother, I would say outsource the raising of the children to a nanny and the father. Instead I said, 'Um, women need to be organised.' A couple of the girls laughed. I wasn't trying to be funny.

Miss Morgan moved on to the next victim, 'Lisa, how would you try to create work/life balance?'

Just then, the bell for lunch rang. Everyone turned off their zaplets and started standing up from their chairs noisily. It was another badly-designed lesson by Miss Morgan, 90% 'group discussion' time (aka general chit chat time) and 10% class time. Family Matters classes, three times a week, were a waste of time. I didn't learn a useful thing.

Millie and I had lockers side-by-side in the corridor. We shoved our zaplets into the bottom shelf of our lockers and grabbed our earpieces from the top shelf. We stuck the recording devices into our ears, and both said, 'testing, one, two' as we always did, into the microphone. It made us giggle every time.

The earpieces are the main reason my mother chose this school. They're a groundbreaking device that are used by only the most exclusive schools to clamp down on schoolyard bullying. There's a surveillance team hired to monitor our conversations. They can't listen to all our conversations all the time, apparently they dip in and out of different girls' conversations. The thing is, you never know when they could be listening.

If you're caught not wearing the earpiece, you get a strike. Teachers prowl around the schoolyard at recess times seeking out girls who are not wearing their earpiece. Three strikes and you get a detention.

Everyone is wary of what they say at break times. I would've loved to tell Millie what a waste of time I thought Family Matters classes were, but this would be classified as an 'anti-social' comment. Likewise, we were not allowed to voice opinions on any of the other girls in the school, participate in gossip or general bitchiness.

At the end of each day, names of offenders were called over the loud speaker in homeroom, as a way of publicly shaming girls with anti-social behaviour. There were usually only one or two names called out a day, some days there were no names called at all. At 3.15pm, when we heard the crackle of the loudspeaker, all the girls froze in their seats, hearts pounding, perhaps recalling the one not very nice thing they had said all day.

If there was someone in the class who was called, they stood up, red faced, eyes downcast. A feeling of paranoia washed over the other class members, as they wondered whether it was them who was being bitched about. What could this girl have said about me? Every girl in the class would think. The offender left the room immediately, with every pair of eyes in the class piercing at her.

No one spoke about what happened in anti-social behaviour detention. The rumour was that it's a two-hour reform session, that a hard-core counsellor deconstructs offenders' inner thoughts and fears and leaves them as a quivering mess. There was one girl from our class, Colleen, who never returned to school after her reform session.

Millie and I had lunch in our usual spot, sitting at the top of the cold polished concrete steps in the emergency exit to the sports hall. Dad had made me a ham roll with homemade sundried tomatoes and pesto mayonnaise paste.

'I should run the menu past your dad. He knows food,' Millie said.

Not the wedding thing again. 'Sure, he'd love to help you out.' I said. But I couldn't explain why I felt so irritated by this.