Looks Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,

  Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the U.S.A. by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008

  Copyright © Madeleine George, 2008

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  George, Madeleine.

  Looks / by Madeleine George.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Two high school girls, one an anorexic poet and

  the other an obese loner, form an unlikely friendship.

  eISBN : 978-0-670-06167-9

  [1. Body image—Fiction. 2. Eating disorders—Fiction. 3. Anorexia—Fiction. 4. Obesity—Fiction.

  5. Friendship—Fiction. 6. High schools—Fiction. 7. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G293346Lo 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007038218

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  for my family

  1

  Start in the sky. Look down at the valley. Green, plush, peaceful landscape. Drop down a little, toward the town, then skim over it, past the low beige buildings of the university, the clean white spires of the Congregational churches, the flat green welcome mat of the town common, out toward the edge of town, toward Valley Regional High School, a rambling, one-story brick building surrounded by soccer fields, field hockey fields, football fields, parking lots. Hover above Valley Regional High. Watch the crowd of kids as it streams into the school like water sucked down a storm drain. And listen: even from this high up you can hear the hum of a school on the first day back in September.

  Now drop, plummet straight down like a stone, through the pebbly roof and the air-conditioning ducts and the bundles of wiring and the soft acoustic tiles, until you burst into the teeming front hall of the school. Float up by the ceiling where you can take it all in, the blended smoothie of backpacks and T-shirts and freckled shoulders and tank tops, ponytails and crew cuts and hoop earrings and knotted leather necklaces. Wince at the noise, the crashing surf of screeching, laughing, yelling.

  Now pivot, face the light blue cinder-block wall next to the main doors of the school. Someone is standing there, pressed into the auditorium door alcove, someone so huge and still she might be mistaken for a piece of architecture if it weren’t for the sky blue windbreaker that marks her as human, the backpack sitting limply on the floor by her feet.

  Look at her. Nobody else is, but you look at her. Look at Meghan Ball.

  Meghan’s head is tipped down, the low fringe of her mouse-brown bangs concealing her face, but her eyes are open. From this close you can see they are a silvery gray, as live and shimmery as beads of mercury, and they’re darting back and forth like laser scanners. No one may be looking at Meghan Ball, but Meghan Ball is looking at everyone.

  Through the veil of her hair, Meghan sees Tamara Scales press her purple-painted fingertips into Ashley Hobart’s pale arm, sees Ashley lean in to catch Tamara’s whisper (so Ashley must have forgiven Tamara for making out with Curtis Yazbek—or are they just faking being friends?), sees Randy Ryman biff the bill of Tim Court’s baseball cap (Randy’s still trying to kiss up to Tim after Tim took the fall for that Motel 6 party the cops busted), sees Debbie Fillipi reach out and grab the hand of a new girl with too much eyeliner on, sees Jenn Massey, Debbie Fillipi’s best friend, take a step back, fake a hard smile (new girl must be Jenn’s replacement, payback for Jenn spreading it around that Debbie got a nose job in seventh grade . . .). Wrist snap, high five, smirk, hug, nod—Meghan records every gesture, every flick of every kid’s eye, incorporates it into her information collection, the vast archive of Facts about People she maintains in her mind.

  If she could, Meghan would stay here all day, wedged out of the way, safely overlooked, perfectly situated to scan and gather. But the first bell rings, roasts the air, and Meghan knows she only has two more minutes before she will be forced to head to homeroom.

  Meghan Ball is at once the most visible and invisible person in school. In the obvious way, she is unbearably visible. She takes up the most space of any person in the entire school—in the entire town, in fact. She is impossible to overlook in class pictures or on the risers during chorus concerts—they always make her stand in the back row, where her round head hovers above a space big enough to accommodate three normal-sized kids. She has a back as wide as a basketball backboard, perfect for spitting on and pelting things at. In this way, Meghan is a walking bull’s-eye target.

  But then, just when she feels like she can’t get any bigger, when she’s feeling brontosaurically huge and exposed, someone will walk right past her—right past her—saying something totally private they would never want anyone else to hear, just as if Meghan wasn’t there at all—like right now, right this very second, watch:

  Kaitlyn Carmigan—bleached and bronzed from a summer spent at her family’s place in Maine—pulls out of the crowd, dragging sweet-but-dumb Jessie Sturm by the arm. She hustles Jessie over to the sports trophy case, about twelve and a half inches away from where Meghan is standing. Kaitlyn’s flushed face is buzzing with a secret—she huddles up with Jessie, her back to Meghan, but speaks in a voice so clear and excited that Meghan has no trouble hearing every word she says.

  “You heard about Liz.” A statement, not a question—that way when Jessie says no, Kaitlyn gets to act all shocked and sorry for her. Meghan floats an inch closer to the trophy case, then another.

  “Um . . .” Jessie shrugs pitifully.

  “You haven’t heard about Liz?” Here it comes. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you haven’t heard about Liz!”

  “What about Liz? What happened to Liz?”

  “Okay, guess where Liz was all summer long?”

  “Um . . . violin camp?”

  “That’s what she told people.”

  “But I got a postcard from her from New Hampshire. . . .” Jessie looks miserable, wracked with the agony of being the last to know. Meghan slides another silent inch closer—she’s no more than half a foot away from them now.

  “Yeah, she totally was in New Hampshire, but no way was she at music camp. Hannah went to see Justin at C
amp Allegro, ’cause you know Justin plays like the oboe or whatever, and Liz was absolutely not there and Justin said she hadn’t been there all summer.”

  “So where was she?”

  Kaitlyn pauses for maximum drama.

  “Fat camp.”

  Meghan feels the bottom of her stomach drop out—a guilty lurch, like she’s just been caught breaking a rule. That word is like a swear word meant just for her; it’s like another name for her in this school.

  “What?” Jessie cries, crestfallen and confused. “But . . . I mean . . . but Liz isn’t fat. Not fat enough for fat camp, anyway.”

  “She didn’t used to be. But did you see her yet today?”

  Jessie shakes her head.

  “Well I totally heard that girls at fat camp are experts at sneaking junk food, and I guess it is so true—you have to see her. She is totally ten pounds fatter than last year.”

  “I can’t believe she didn’t tell me,” Jessie murmurs.

  “Yeah, well, she didn’t tell anybody. And you can’t tell her you know, okay? It’s a total secret. Hannah said we have to pretend we don’t know.”

  Jessie nods, eyes wide. “Okay,” she says.

  “Okay!” says Kaitlyn brightly, moving away from the trophy case, passing so close to Meghan she almost brushes against her windbreaker. “So who do you have for homeroom this year?”

  It’s amazing what people will say right in front of you when you’re obese, like you’re deaf or something, like you’re retarded. Or like you don’t even speak the language, like you’re a tourist lost in the land of the thin.

  The second bell rings, a metallic howl.

  Reluctantly Meghan breaks away from the wall, like an ice shelf breaking off the Antarctic. She moves like a glacier, silent and slow. She shrinks away from all physical contact, zeroes out her eyes. In this way she makes it along the not-too-crowded east corridor, then down the steps, then through the fire doors into the packed sophomore hall.

  She shoulders through the crowd, blacking out her peripheral vision so that all she can see, at the end of the dark tunnel in front of her, is her goal: homeroom, C23. She is getting closer, closer, having no particular feelings, when she senses the light, feathery jostle behind her, hears the quiet laughs sucked up the nose into snorts that let her know they’re massing at her back.

  They can’t be more than eight inches away from her. If she turned around she could look them right in the eye—but she doesn’t know what they would do if she turned around, since turning around is not in the script she and they have co-written and somehow, tacitly, agreed to perform. Anyway she doesn’t need to turn around, because she knows exactly who it is back there, can imagine in sharp-focus detail their Red Sox caps, their Abercrombie shirts, the spiky bangs jutting out over their grinning, Cape Cod-tanned faces. It’s essentially the same pack of ten boys who’ve been making Meghan their ritual sacrifice object since seventh grade. Some subset of the ten is back there right now: Chris and/or Matt G. and/or Matt T., maybe one or both of the Farmington twins, and/or Jared and/or Shane and/or Mike and/or Freedom. (Freedom Falcon, whose hippie mom must curse the Goddess every day for sending her such an evil, meat-headed son.) And their leader, J-Bar. J-Bar’s always there.

  She feels J-Bar slide up against her back now, bring his humming blond head down next to her ear. His voice oozes out of him like rancid caramel.

  “I want you to have my babies, Butter Ball.”

  A wave of hissing snorts and chuckles from the guys.

  “Don’t you want to have my babies? Come on, gorgeous, you know you want me. Say you want me. Tell me you want me, Butter Ball.”

  C23 passes on her left but she can’t stop, can’t turn, can’t even speed up when they’re on her like this. Just go, go, steady, steady, until they decide they’re done and they peel off and dissolve.

  “I bet you feel like a big waterbed, don’t you, beautiful. I just want to flop down on top of you and bounce all night long, boing, boing, boing—”

  “Jay!” Samantha Suglia, J-Bar’s sunny-faced, honey-haired field-hockey girlfriend, calls to him from the door to C29.

  “Yo, Sam,” J-Bar says in his public voice, deep and resonant, empty of all the rust and sewage that trickles through the voice he uses on Meghan.

  Like a school of fish the boys turn toward Samantha. Meghan is forgotten, freed as suddenly as she was snared, and she accelerates to make it the long way around to homeroom—can’t risk backtracking, can’t risk facing them again—before the third bell rings.

  Homeroom is as loud as feeding time at the pound. Every ex-freshman, every fresh sophomore from Zoe Abbott to Steve Czarniewski is penned into C23, sitting on each other’s desks, comparing new piercings, telling summer stories, squealing and yelping and chattering and laughing. Mr. Cox stands, huge and bald and mute as a nightclub bouncer, at the front of the room, his massive arms hanging limp from his shoulders.

  “Settle down now,” he rumbles. Nobody even turns in his direction. “Come on now, I need butts in seats, people.”

  Facts about Mr. Cox: He’s the head of phys. ed., the varsity and JV basketball coach, and, improbably, the teacher of tenth-grade health. He’s very into the martial arts (Jackie Chan is his personal idol) and for one quarter a year, when he’s teaching self-defense, he makes everybody call him Sensei Cox. Unlike most guys who shave their heads, he didn’t do it to disguise the fact that he was losing his hair. He shaved off his whole head of thick salt-and-pepper hair all of a sudden, along with his eyebrows and arm hair and presumably—ack—every other hair on his body, one day last winter after his wife left him for the basketball coach of Gateway Regional High, right after Gateway beat Valley Regional in the semifinals. Since then Mr. Cox’s eyes have had a clogged, stupid look, kind of like a pair of tiny glazed doughnuts.

  The door swings open and J-Bar strides through it, grinning and glowing like he’s running for Congress. In her seat at the back corner of the room, Meghan takes a deep breath and disappears. But it’s a reflex, not a real precaution—J-Bar’s not remotely interested in her in homeroom and never has been in all the years they’ve had it together. J-Bar shouts, “Coach!” and crosses to Mr. Cox, puts his arm around his shoulders like he’s greeting his favorite uncle. The noise in C23 rises from a gabble to a roar. Then a blast of static from the PA speaker above the blackboard stuns everyone into a mid-sentence silence. Even J-Bar drops obediently into his seat.

  “Welcome students. And staff. Of Valley Regional High to day one of a new year,” drones the nasal voice of Ms. Champoux, the pit bull in a perm and polyester blazer who commands the meek team of secretaries in the front office.

  Ms. Champoux (“like the hair soap,” Meghan once heard her say flatly) is fierce in person, but over the PA she has the voice of a depressed Muppet, piped through the nose and totally toneless, never rising or falling even to indicate the beginning or end of a sentence. She reads the morning announcements like a first-grader reading a picture book aloud, pausing in places that don’t make sense and pronouncing a like eh and the like thee. She is also cataclysmically bad at pronouncing people’s names—so bad it’s almost like she does it on purpose. Even normal names get mangled in Ms. Champoux’s announcements: Michael Andrews becomes Michelle Anderwise, Jenny Harwood becomes Jeannie Whoreweed—and forget about poor Rogelia Jaramillo and Xibai Qing.

  Facts about Ms. Champoux: Her secret dream in life is to work in the criminal justice system as a cop or parole officer or maybe a prison guard. She loves the police shows on TV, memorizes all their tough, hard-bitten jargon and actually uses it in daily life—more than once Meghan has heard her refer to the sullen kids splayed out on the orange plastic chairs outside the principal’s office as perps.

  Ms. Champoux hates her job; Ms. Champoux hates reading the morning announcements; Ms. Champoux is terrible at reading the morning announcements. If Valley Regional High were a humane institution, someone would tap Ms. Champoux on her shoulder-padded shoulder and lead her g
ently away from the PA mike, sit her down to a task she was actually good at, like detecting the forgeries among the day’s absence notes. But Valley Regional High is not a humane institution. It’s more like a cruel and unusual penal colony in which every inmate and every guard is punished, each according to his deepest fear. Thus Ms. Champoux, world’s worst public speaker, is assigned the task—till the day she dies—of reading out the morning announcements.

  “I have an exciting. Announcement to make. After meeting over thee summer with representatives from thee English department our principal Dr. Dempsey. Has decided to institute a new meditation period as part of morning announcements. Every morning we will share eh. Short inspirational poem by eh. Well-known writer followed by eh thirty-second silent meditation period during which students and staff are invited to think about what. Thee poem means to them. Dr. Dempsey does ask that students respect thee silent thirty-second period and keep it—” Ms. Champoux falters. “Silent.” She breathes for a second, heavily. “To kick off thee first day of this exciting new policy we. Have eh poem called ‘Thee Road Not Taken’ from thee great American poet Robin Forest.” A scuffling noise, some brief urgent whispering, then the PA cuts out with a click. After a beat it pops back on. “Correction,” mutters Ms. Champoux. “Thee great American poet Robert Frost.”

  By C Period, which is going to be geometry, Meghan feels like she’s already lived a dozen exhausting lives. When she walks into Room B14 and sees that it’s one of the rooms with only blue desk chairs in it, she feels her heart sink—the blue desk chairs are the narrow ones, the ones she has to wedge herself into inch by gasping inch, the ones she’s been known to get stuck in once she’s clamped between the seat and the wraparound desk. In the far corner of the room, partially obscured by a cluster of tanned midriffs and low-rider jeans, she spots J-Bar, wheaten head thrown back in laughter, his long, white-Nike’d feet propped up on the desk in front of him. She doesn’t have it in her to perform her desk-chair comedy routine for him right now. Suddenly, desperately, she needs a break.