She wasn’t even convinced the Marias liked each other, but she couldn’t deny they were more powerful together. No matter how blatantly they flouted the rules, hiking up their skirts or painting their nails, nothing had ever touched them. They were only more popular and more poisonous. It was better to have friends you didn’t like than no friends at all.
It didn’t really matter what she said in reply to Elaine’s question, in the same way that a cat didn’t care which way the mouse twisted. But Adeline’s patience for long games had worn thin.
“Find out for yourself. Pat me down.” She threw out her arms, making Siew Min yelp. “I don’t have cigarettes or a lighter. You want me to show you?” She rummaged in her pockets and pelted its contents at them: her coin purse, a pen, a packet of chewing gum. Shehad a reputation to uphold—one that the Marias had been very successful in helping to create—and so if they wanted crazy, they could get crazy.
She made a show of kicking off her shoes and turning them over in front of their faces, demanding, “See what you want yet?”, and relishing in their growing horror. Finally, when she tugged down the collar of her blouse to put her hand through her bra, Elaine snapped.
“Okay! Just get back to class.”
En Yi and Siew Min looked disgusted. Elaine threw Adeline one last contemptuous look and hooked her elbows around the other girls’. They flounced away, a mutter ofXiao Siaowhipping around the door.
Adeline smirked as she put her shoes back on and washed the remaining ash off her hands. She would gladly drop out of school, if not for her mother’s fervent belief in St. Mary’s vision for its students:godly women of the future. The school led daily devotions, taught in English, and produced accomplished girls who would secure respectable, even distinguished, jobs. It was a modern institution, and like tattoos, drugs, or long hair on men, magic was for uneducated gangsters. It had no place in the proper city, which her mother had worked so hard to raise Adeline in.
The teachers were keeping a sharper eye out now that it was approaching seventh moon and the veil to hell was thin. Any girl caught with talismans or suspect potions was immediately taken to task, even though the most you found around here were harmless trinkets to lose weight or encourage a boy to fall in love with them. Most St. Mary’s girls accepted that all this was beneath their shiny badge, and should be shunned.
Adeline’s fire, however, was not these novelty magics. She’d understood that even before coming to school, thanks to her mother’s very clear rules:Keep it small, keep it hidden. She couldn’t stop, but if she followed those rules, she didn’t have to stop.
Even if her mother had.
Ash scrubbed away, Adeline grabbed her things off the floor and swiped a coat of gloss over her lips, taking her time to get to first period in the new wing. St. Mary’s had started as a modest single room of eighteen girls whose merchant fathers donated to the school’s founding. Its enrollment had quickly outgrown its premise, though, and so it began buying up the land around it, adding one wing and then a chapel, until the original schoolroom had to be torn down entirely to build a larger, taller one in its place.
Now with two thousand students to its name, St. Mary’s had recently added a new block of classrooms for the older girls. There were rumors that pieces of the original schoolroom still remained—in the foundations, or perhaps in chalk dust that had stuck stubbornly to a corner. Unlike the newer government schools erected by policy, St. Mary’s had grown from honest kinship and the mission of faith, a century’s worth of success to show in its funds. But the enrollment was rising still, with the way families had bloomed after the war and the growing demand for English education. The administration was talking about establishing a bigger campus. Not an expansion this time—they had run out of neighboring land to acquire. They would have to move all the girls somewhere else entirely. It would be a long, disruptive, tedious affair, worse before it got better.
Thankfully, Adeline would already be gone by then.
CHAPTER TWODRESSING FOR THE AGE
After she’d changed out of her uniform, Bus Sixteen took her almost to the department store. Sometimes nearer, sometimes farther, depending on what shape the roads were in that day. Today the bus rattled right through, past a little park that hadn’t been there before, and deposited her around the corner to Jenny’s. When Adeline was a child, the store had been a modest one-room in Chinatown. In the years since, it had become two vaulted stories in colonial white, fringed by a manicured garden with flower bushes amidst paved paths and raised fountains. The old painted sign had been replaced by shining engraving, the creaky fans by a bubble of lightly perfumed air-conditioning. The one room had become a dazzling glass-fronted atrium with glossy pink tiles and a staircase sweeping up to the upper floor, which held the men’s, children’s, and other lifestyle sections. Upstairs was where the offices were, as well, and where the offices were, Adeline’s mother was.
The ground floor was a flowering boulevard of bright prints and flowing bohemian silhouettes. It bustled with a cheerful Friday afternoon buzz. Five years ago, as the class of working women rapidly expanded, cheongsams had still been the height of women’s fashion. These days shoppers came in wanting to look like Parisian models or American film stars. The impractical cheongsams were relegated to the back, for stately visits and more traditional occasions. Western fashion was in full swing. A new nation, more cranes than real birds by the roads, Hollywood films and American fast foodsweeping up the populace, televisions in every home—possibility was in the air. Everyone was looking to update, and they came to Jenny’s to learn how. Tai tais in pearl necklaces gossiped in mingled languages over silk blouses. Haughty twenty-somethings eyed minis and vinyl go-go boots with dreams of nights out, while husbands and boyfriends skulked in their footsteps. All their faceless hands brushed against the clothes on the racks as they browsed. Adeline slipped through the customers, hands moving as well, dipping in and out as she made her way to the stairs.
“—going to see the opera on Friday and a film after—did you see what’s playing?”
“—color looks atrocious on me—” There, a slim ring.
“—some property in Kuala Lumpur, I’m sure he got the money from some loan shark—”
“—sound of the construction, day in, day out. Now I got a migraine—”
“—braised fish!I said it was our anniversary; I wanted filet mignon—”
“—about to go back to Oxford—” There, a velvet coin purse.
“—hosting the datin, completely sprung it on me—”
“—want to open flights to Saigon again—”
“—that article about how many prostitutes have diseases? They need to just clear the whole street out, don’t know why the government not doing anything—”
“—appropriate for the reunion, or not? They already don’t like me—”
Here, a wallet sticking out a back pocket. Adeline slipped it from the man’s jeans as she sidled past, flipping it open to look carelessly through its contents and taking twenty dollars before tossing it back onto the floor along with the coin purse. The ring was pretty, and she kept it on her finger. The owners of the other items would find them again sooner or later. Adeline had always had the grand sense that everyone who came into Jenny’s belongedto her and her mother. They came here to dress themselves, they swapped out hangers and stripped in the changing rooms; here, everything on their bodies was in a temporary state. They came on and off all the time. Adeline was merely speeding up the process. Anyway one day this would all be hers.
The pickpocketing was a bad habit she’d acquired when she realized she was quite good at it. People let her get close to them. Small, young schoolgirl. She didn’t register as a threat, and that fascinated her. She was admiring the ring—a false gold band set with a cheap green stone—when she realized someone was snapping their fingers at her.
“You.” Snap, snap. It was a familiar customer, an older woman with a gaudy European purse and an elaborate perm who wanted to show off more wealth than taste. “Last week I saw this skirt in a brown color. Why is there no more on the rack? And why have you not replaced it?”
The woman’s proper name was Fan Tai Tai; the staff privately called her Ma Fan Tai Tai, because of how often she harassed salesgirls and wouldn’t take anyone else’s advice. The brown, for example, would be a hideous color that would make her look ten years older—certainly not a choice any of the women from old families would have made. Adeline assumed she was new to the wealth, perhaps recently well-married or with a husband that had struck a successful business venture.
