“Bring meat home, four hundred grams of beef,” my mother had instructed me the night before. “Don’t pick the pieces that are brown, and don’t loiter.”At Vinh and Robina’s Meats, Tully’s mother greeted me as I walked in the store. “Wah, look at you, Lucy, so smart in your uniform!”At school I may have looked like a try-hard, super-polished version of everyone else in my immaculate uniform, but in this neighbourhood I stood out like a beacon, a sign to small business owners and factory workers that the next generation would belong to a different class. This was an outfit not made for messing up, or for hacking away at cow carcasses, or for hiding in back rooms threading needles. This outfit was made for a seated life, a life of air-conditioning, long lunches and weekends away in semi-rural cottages.“How are you finding the work at the school?” asked Tully’s mother.“Okay, Mrs Cho,” I answered. “There’s a lot more of it than at Christ Our Saviour.”“Of course there is!”
