Looks Page 16

  Mr. Handsley jogs off to the side again. The Persimmons look at each other dolefully and shuffle back into the same lifeless configuration they were in before their teacher interrupted them.

  “So, um . . .” Aimee taps Meghan’s shoulder lightly. “The bell’s gonna ring soon and I just—where do you want to meet today?”

  “ThatIwasconstantCimbershouldbebanish’d,” J-Bar mumbles onstage.

  “Louder,” prompts Mr. Handsley.

  “O Caesar!” Shane howls.

  “Better!” shouts Mr. Handsley.

  “HencewiltthouliftupOlympus—” J-Bar grunts.

  “Mr. Bartlett, no no no and no!”

  “What about my house?” Meghan says absently, not able to look away from the riveting scene onstage.

  “Great, yeah, where’s that?” Aimee asks.

  “Speak from here”—Mr. Handsley claps his palm to J-Bar’s bedsheet-wrapped abdomen—“not from here.” He slaps J-Bar’s broad chest with his open palm. J-Bar flinches but Mr. Handsley doesn’t let up. “This is the source of the emperor’s voice!” He goes to put his hand on J-Bar’s stomach again but J-Bar takes a step back.

  “Don’t touch me,” J-Bar mutters, threateningly serious.

  “Hey,” Aimee says loudly in Meghan’s ear.

  Meghan manages to tear her eyes off the deconstruction of J-Bar and turns to look at Aimee.

  “Why don’t we meet at the old barn, you know where that is?” she asks Aimee.

  “I said quit it!” J-Bar shouts, a real, ragged shout—uncontrolled and full of emotion.

  Meghan whips back around only to see Mr. Handsley sprawled out flat on his back and J-Bar running toward the edge of the stage. Without breaking stride he leaps off into the blackness, toga billowing around him like a cape, and disappears.

  It dawns on Meghan instantly: Something huge just took place, something that will change the future of Valley Regional High. And I was looking away when it happened.

  For a long, fractured second nobody moves. Then, hesitantly, Mr. Handsley begins to stand up, getting first to his knees, then hauling himself laboriously to his feet, brushing dirt and sawdust off his trousers and sleeves.

  “Persimmons, thank you for your work. Take five,” he says quietly to the remaining thespians. Sedately he crosses the stage and trots down the steps to the pit, following J-Bar but not chasing him.

  Shane says something out of the side of his mouth and the leftover Persimmons wander aimlessly away, jumping off the lip of the stage and dispersing individually into the darkness.

  More than anything else right now, Meghan wishes she could be wherever J-Bar and Mr. Handsley are. The confrontation that’s going down between them right now must be so juicy, so unbelievable—all she wants to do is leave Aimee here in the dark and go find out where J-Bar went when he ran.

  “So you were saying we should meet at the barn?” Aimee prompts, trying to get Meghan’s attention. “You mean the one that’s out near my house, in the middle of the cornfield?”

  “Yeah, that one. It’s near my house, too.”

  “Oh, you live out there?”

  Meghan nods. “Meet me there at four thirty?”

  “Cool.”

  The bell rings—a distant echo of a bell here, deep in the cave of the auditorium.

  “Um, wait,” Aimee calls after her as Meghan turns to leave. “Can I ask you one more thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “Um, can you tell me your name?”

  Meghan’s already overfull heart constricts and spills sloppily over the sides. She can’t remember the last time she spoke her name out loud.

  “Meghan,” she says.

  “Hey. I’m Aimee.”

  “Yeah,” says Meghan Ball. “I know.”

  16

  When Aimee gets off Bus 12, the Toyota is parked at the edge of the cul-de-sac. Her mother’s home early from work. Naturally, since Aimee got into bed and turned off the light at six P.M. last night to preempt another Conversation, her mother has taken a half day today—of all days—to make sure it happens now.

  In the kitchen her mother has clearly been waiting for her, leaning up against the counter in half-undone work clothes and flip-flops, with a bright, fake-relaxed expression on her face, sipping a Diet Coke.

  Aimee decides to make things easy on both of them and match her mother’s mood. “Hi!” she says, chipper as a cheerleader. “You’re home early!”

  Her mother smiles and nods, but eyes Aimee with mild suspicion.

  “That’s right, I am. I thought we could spend the afternoon together,” she offers. “Finish up our Conversation from the other day.”

  “Oh, um, that sounds great, I really wish I could, but I promised . . . my friend I’d meet her this afternoon. I didn’t know you were gonna be home early.”

  “Cara?” her mother asks with genuine eagerness. “You’re meeting Cara?”

  Aimee swallows.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Well why don’t you and me sit down and have a snack together, just for a couple of minutes, and then I’ll drive you over to her house.”

  “Well . . . actually I’m supposed to meet her right now. She’s waiting for me.”

  “Okay, I’ll drive you right now. We can talk in the car.”

  “Thanks, Mom, that’s so nice, but I can walk.”

  “To Albemarle Road? That’s nuts, it’ll take you hours.”

  “I’m not—we’re not—I’m not going to—”

  Right now, as her mother stands there in front of her desperately trying to do the right thing, Aimee wants to tell her the whole story from beginning to end, from the first moment Cara burst into her life, perfect and glittering, all the way up to this afternoon, when Cara’s gone and she’s about to go meet the most despised girl in school, a girl made of mud and cellulite, in the ruins of an abandoned barn. She hears Bill’s voice in her mind: “She’s a resource, Ame, use her!” She sees her mother’s open, pleading look, practically begging her to tell her what’s going on. Aimee takes a breath to tell her the truth, but something catches in her throat.

  “We’re not meeting at her house,” Aimee explains feebly. “We’re meeting in the woods. Out in back of Riverglade.”

  Her mother’s expression clouds over with confusion.

  “To do some nature writing,” Aimee adds hurriedly.

  Her mother’s face clears.

  “How wonderful,” says her mom. “How creative.” Her mother’s eyes fill with that clear yearning that makes Aimee want to look away, that open, watery wish that Aimee will somehow manage to be okay. It’s awful to lie to your mother when she’s looking at you like that. Aimee hangs her head; this is shame.

  “Sweetheart, can I tell you why I like this girl? It’s not just because she seems like she must be a very nice person, although she does seem like she must be a very nice person. I like this girl because she’s supportive of your poetry writing, and I know how important your poetry writing is to you. I’m so proud of you for working so hard on it. And you know who else would be proud if he knew you were sticking with it is Bill.”

  Shame, shame, shame.

  “You should call him sometime and let him know what you’re up to.” Aimee’s mother is speaking carefully now, as if she’s rehearsed this speech several times in her head. “I want you to know that it’s okay with me if you stay in touch with him. I know that you two had a special connection and I don’t want that to disappear just because Bill and I didn’t work out. You shouldn’t have to lose him as a friend just because he’s not with us anymore.”

  He’s not dead, thinks Aimee, he’s living in a bachelor pad in Maple Park. Aimee wonders if her mother read an article on this in one of her magazines, or saw a segment about it on Oprah: How to Help Your Kids Stay Friends with Your Ex-Boyfriend—Even When You Hate His Guts!

  “Okay,” Aimee says, nodding, trying to look like the idea is just occurring to her, “maybe I’ll call him again sometime. Just to say hi.
”

  Her mother nods and smiles sadly, and Aimee wonders suddenly if she said the wrong thing, if she was supposed to say, No, no, I would never call Bill—I don’t need him, I only need you. But it’s too late, she’s said what she’s said.

  “You are a very special, very talented girl,” her mother says now, lifting off the counter where she’s been propped and taking a couple of tentative steps toward Aimee. “Bill always told me that you were something special. Not that I needed him to tell me that, but I mean his expert opinion was that you were a gifted girl. And I know that if you put your mind to it and keep working hard, you can be a writer when you grow up. If that’s what you want.”

  Flushed with embarrassment, Aimee nods a straggly nod. She doesn’t know whether she should say something to make this stop or just keep quiet and let her mother run out of steam.

  “I’ll always be proud of you, no matter what,” her mother says. “And I need you to know that I’ll do anything I can to help you if you’re having a problem. Any kind of problem at all.”

  Her eyes fill up with the beginnings of tears, and she reaches out and lays her hand on Aimee’s arm. Aimee freezes under the weight of the wooden touch. Her mother’s palm is damp with Coke-can sweat and it just lies there, inert, on Aimee’s numb forearm. They stand there for a moment, locked in that position, like two marionettes trying to bring each other to life.

  After a moment her mother sighs a brief sigh, retracts her hand, and turns back to the counter. Aimee can see her pulling herself together, tidying herself mentally, like a sped-up film of a jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces that were spread across the table suddenly swooping together to form a whole.

  “Okay,” her mother says brightly, “so if you don’t have time to eat something with me then why don’t I make you up a snack pack to share with Cara. If you guys are going to go nature hiking you’ll need something to fortify you along the journey, don’t you think?”

  “Okay,” Aimee says agreeably. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Her mother moves around the kitchen with practiced efficiency, gathering snacks and tucking them into a paper lunch bag. Chips, nuts, granola bars—not a thing that Aimee would ever let touch her lips.

  It’s okay, though, she thinks as her mother folds down the top of the bag and hands it to her with a tender smile. I bet I know someone who’ll eat them.

  When Aimee emerges from the scrappy woods behind the last row of condos out into the broad gray late afternoon, the fat girl (Meghan is her name) is waiting for her, planted by the end of the barn, a sky-blue blip against the beige-yellow cornstalks. As Aimee gets closer to her, she starts to have that mixed feeling that the fat girl (Meghan, Meghan!) always arouses in her. It’s like putting her normal feelings into a blender and watching them spin and blur. Excitement, revulsion, curiosity, tenderness, fear, pity, shame, disgust . . . each feeling flashes cleanly through her and then gets sucked into the center of the emotion whirlpool. This must be why no one’s friends with her, Aimee thinks. How can you be friends with someone who makes you feel so many things at once just by looking at them?

  Meghan hovers, anchored at the barn’s corner, hands shoved deep into the front pockets of her windbreaker, staring at Aimee unblinkingly as she approaches. Aimee tramps through the crunchy, ankle-high cornstalks feeling more watched than ever before in her life. When she makes it to about twenty feet away from the barn, Meghan lifts off her spot by the corner and comes toward Aimee. She smiles a little, just a very little.

  “Hey,” says Meghan.

  “Hey,” says Aimee.

  “Follow me.”

  Aimee nods, smiles a very little back. Meghan turns and starts off across the cornfield, Aimee following as they head into the deep woods on the other side.

  In the woods, as they tramp along a path that follows the bed of a little creek, Aimee can’t take her eyes off the fat girl. She moves like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, so heavy and so graceful at the same time. She’s clearly been on this trail so many times that she could navigate it with her eyes closed—without even looking, she seems to know every branch to brush back, every log to clear, every rock to sidestep. She walks faster and faster the deeper they go into the woods; pretty soon Aimee’s breaking into a jog every few steps to keep up.

  The faster Aimee moves the floatier she feels—she thinks back, but she can’t remember the last time she put something in her mouth. At her center Aimee feels her hunger harden into a steel rod, and her whole body starts to dissolve around it, vaporizing into a mist that spirals around that solid core. The smells of the forest intoxicate her: the tangy smell of pine needles, the smoky smell of decaying leaves, the tarnished-nickel smell of the water in the creek . . .

  Ahead of her in the murky gray forest light the fat girl recedes and comes closer again, wavers in and out of focus. Suddenly Aimee has the feeling that she’s fallen into a fairy tale, that she’s following a huge, delicate supernatural creature—part beast, part sprite—back to its lair. Enchanted, she lets her eyes follow the fat girl’s every movement, the way she reaches out to touch certain leaves and branches as if she’s communicating with them or extracting magic oils from them. Although she’s stumbling, barely able to keep up, it seems to Aimee from the depths of her trance that if she reaches out toward the creature or calls her name or disturbs her in any way the creature may spook and bolt, or turn around and cast a spell on Aimee, or vanish into a shimmer of air. . . .

  After five minutes or fifty—Aimee has no idea—the fat girl turns back to look at her and holds aside a thick branch of pricker bush, gesturing for Aimee to pass by. They emerge into a grassy backyard: swingset with a canvas fort on top, mini trampoline, big blue two-story house, deck with a barbecue on it, garage to one side. Beyond the house Aimee can see other two-story houses a few wooded acres away. She rubs her eyes to sharpen her swimming vision.

  The magical creature lives in a subdivision.

  “You don’t look so great,” Meghan says to her. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ve been sick,” Aimee explains, trying to sound nonchalant but slurring her words.

  “You need a drink of water or something? Or something to eat? Come on, come inside, I’ll get you something to eat.”

  Aimee barely registers the walk up the wooden steps to the deck, the squeal of the plate-glass door as Meghan slides it open. The shift from cool outdoors to warm indoors as they enter. The distant coo of classical music, the enveloping smell of baking bread.

  “Meegee!” From somewhere in the blurry room in front of them, the voice of a happy child.

  “Oh—my goodness, who is this?” A warm voice, a surprised voice, a woman’s voice.

  “This is Aimee. Go ahead, Aimee, sit down.” Meghan gives Aimee a little push, and Aimee feels herself folded into a chair.

  She looks around her, makes out that the room they’ve walked into is an open-plan dining room/kitchen/den. The chair Aimee’s sitting in is pulled out from a dining-room table heaped from end to end with random stuff—books, newspapers, half-finished puzzles, a vase with dried flowers in it, Transformers and G.I. Joes and X-Men, open pots of fingerpaint, a Monopoly board set up for the middle of a game.

  “Drink this.” Meghan reappears at Aimee’s side with a red plastic cup full of water. Obediently, Aimee takes it and drinks. It tastes like cold crayons. Her vision begins to clear.

  Across the table, behind the jumbled sea of stuff, Aimee sees a woman with an affectionate, chubby face and a single gray braid down her back sitting next to a small boy, maybe four years old, who’s kneeling on a chair pounding his little fist into a lump of something sticky on the table.

  “Meegee, we made play dough,” the small boy tells Meghan.

  “How awesome,” Meghan says to him. Her face sweetens all over when she looks at him. “Aimee, this is my mom, Joanne. And this is my little brother Jesse.”

  “Hi,” says Aimee.

  “Welcome, Aimee,” says Meghan’s mom, Joanne. “Are you all
right? You look a little faint.”

  “She’s been sick, she just needs some water and maybe a snack,” Meghan says before Aimee can open her mouth to explain. “Is there bread? Is it ready?”

  “As a matter of fact, it wants to come out of the oven right about . . . now.”

  Joanne gets to her feet, revealing a short sturdy body in overalls and an apron smeared with streaks of paint, flour, glitter.

  “Bread!” Jesse shrieks, whaling on his lump of play dough with both hands. “Me too bread, me too me too!”

  As Joanne moves past Meghan into the kitchen area, she reaches up with both hands and squeezes Meghan’s cheeks, smoothes her stringy bangs up off her forehead, and then kisses each of Meghan’s round cheeks where her hands had been. There’s a ritual quality to the series of gestures, like she’s done them all a thousand times before in just that order.

  “Beauty,” she says, and beams at Meghan.

  Meghan rolls her eyes. “Mom . . .”

  As Joanne goes to deal with the bread, Meghan pulls out a chair next to Aimee’s and sits down opposite her little brother.

  “So buddy, what’d you do today?” she asks. Her voice in this house is open and calm and full of colors, so different from the narrow, tense voice Aimee’s heard her use at school.

  “Made play dough,” Jesse answers fast. He reaches up to wipe his nose with the back of his hand and leaves a smear of play dough across the middle of his face. Meghan doesn’t mention it.

  “And what else?”