Looks Page 17

  “Went to see the miniature donkeys.”

  “This guy down the street has a little field with these two miniature donkeys.” Meghan fills Aimee in. “Jesse likes to go look at them and feed them lumps of sugar. What’re their names, buddy?”

  “Fred and Ginger,” Jesse says, fast again, like Meghan’s testing him to see how quickly he can answer. Then he turns to Aimee and addresses her seriously: “What’s the rule?”

  “Um, I don’t know what you mean,” Aimee says.

  “No, what’s the rule with Fred and Ginger?” Jesse demands impatiently. “Hands flat, hands flat, that’s the rule!”

  “You have to keep your hand flat while you’re feeding the donkeys the lumps of sugar or they might bite you a little,” Meghan explains.

  “Oh . . .”

  “See?” Jesse holds his doughy hands up in a gesture of total obviousness, like Aimee is being ridiculously obtuse.

  “Bread, bread, bread,” Joanne announces as she brings a big plate of thickly cut slices of white bread down into the center of the cluttered table. The plate balances, slanted, half on and half off a collapsing stack of old National Geographic magazines, but to Aimee it’s a beautiful thing to behold—the bread is so freshly baked that it’s steaming, and the smell that comes off it is like an embrace, as warm and comforting as flannel bedclothes or a freshly washed towel after a bath.

  “Everyone help themselves,” Joanne urges, and Meghan and Jesse both reach over and grab slices of bread off the serving plate. Aimee watches Meghan tear into her piece with her teeth, feels something she hasn’t felt in a long time: her mouth watering.

  Tentatively, Aimee reaches out to touch one of the pieces of bread, just to see what will happen. She hasn’t made any physical contact with an actual piece of bread in months, maybe even a year—the reaction could be major. She lets her fingertips just brush the surface of the last piece of bread on the plate. It’s soft and inviting; she listens for the sizzle but hears nothing. Now she puts her whole hand down on the slice, feels its warmth spreading across her palm and rushing up her arm. She’s about to start massaging the piece of bread a little, to make absolutely sure it’s not going to trigger a reaction, when she realizes that all three other people in the room have stopped what they were doing and are watching her curiously.

  “What are you doing?” Jesse asks.

  “Um . . .”

  “Go ahead, Aimee,” Joanne says encouragingly. “Try it. I think you’ll like it.”

  Fighting back a wave of fear, Aimee brings the warm piece of bread to her mouth, bites off a tiny piece. And chews.

  She expects sizzle, she expects nausea, she expects oblivion. But what she gets is flavor. Wheaty, yeasty, warm. The tiny bite of bread fills Aimee’s mouth with the flavor of safety, and of joy.

  “It’s good,” she says, her voice small. She’s afraid if she says anything more she might cry.

  Joanne smiles big. “I knew it,” she grins. “Nobody doesn’t like my bread.” She comes around to sit back down beside Jesse, puts her hand on the back of his neck in a casual gesture of adoration. “So you girls want to do some play-dough sculpting with us? We’re going to make animals and robots, right Jess?”

  “That’s okay,” Meghan says hurriedly. “Actually Aimee came over ’cause we’re working on this project. We’ll just take some bread up to my room.”

  Meghan’s room is nothing like Aimee would have imagined, if she had ever bothered to imagine it. But it’s exactly like the rest of her cluttered house. Her room is like the back room of a cheap antique shop—every single surface is covered with stuff, seemingly from every phase of a person’s life, from a My Little Pony collection displayed on one shelf to a full set of leather-bound supermarket encyclopedias lined up on another, from heaps of dirty clothes to a chemistry set to a pile of teddy bears in one corner, from stacks of chunky paperback novels to what looks like a bug-catching kit spread out on the floor by the bed. Every single inch of wall space is covered with pictures of actors torn from magazines or posters, posters overlapping posters, of everything from Maroon 5 to maps of the world to pictures of Saturn and its rings. On the wall by the head of the unmade bed is a signed, framed photograph of Hillary Clinton.

  Meghan settles herself on the floor among the piles of stuff, leans back against her bed, and rests her crossed arms on the hump of her belly.

  “Your mom’s nice,” Aimee offers, looking around her for a bare spot of floor to sit on. Meghan reaches out and clears a space in the debris with a swipe of her arm, shoving a short stack of Teen People magazines and two naked Barbies and a tangle of pink-and-white ankle socks under her bed.

  “Yeah,” Meghan agrees. “She’s super nice. She doesn’t see anything she doesn’t want to see. That keeps her happy.”

  Aimee notices a shadow slip through Meghan’s eyes as she says this, a brief moment of cloud cover.

  “What do you mean?” Aimee asks. Meghan shakes her head.

  “Whatever,” she says, shaking her head to dismiss the whole topic. “The point of us being here isn’t my mom, it’s Cara. She stole your poem, and now you want revenge.”

  “Uh, no,” Aimee says, startled. “I never said anything about revenge. I just want my poem back.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Meghan seems to think this over.

  Aimee is mesmerized by the bulge of Meghan’s neck, the expanse of her chest under her T-shirt, her great sloping belly. She steals quick looks at Meghan’s astonishing body, trying not to lapse into stares no matter how much she wants to consume her with her eyes.

  “You might end up accidentally getting revenge on her,” Meghan says thoughtfully, “if you steal something from her. I mean, stealing is not a very nice thing to do. Revenge might be unavoidable, I don’t know.”

  A curious look, calm but rippling with energy, passes over Meghan when she says the word revenge, as if her face is the surface of a glassy lake full of dark creatures thrashing around in its depths.

  “Okay,” Aimee offers tentatively. “If it’s unavoidable, I guess.”

  “What does she get for winning this competition?”

  “Um, well first of all, she gets the poem read aloud during morning announcements on Monday.”

  Meghan smiles faintly. “Interesting,” she murmurs.

  “And then the poem gets sent to Washington, D.C., to be judged by famous writers and—you know what, it doesn’t even matter what she gets, I don’t care about that. I just want my poem back, that’s all I care about.”

  “Okay, we’re gonna steal it back. If it’s gonna be read during announcements on Monday then it’ll be in a manila folder in the top left-hand drawer of Ms. Champoux’s desk by one o’clock tomorrow.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Meghan shrugs her shadow shrug, so small it’s more like a change in her attitude than in her physical position.

  “The secretaries have a routine. Ms. Deckel finishes putting together the next day’s announcements by the end of D period. Then Ms. Frattarola proofreads them by the end of E period. Then Ms. Champoux puts them in the folder in her desk by the end of F period. I’ll swing by the office during G period tomorrow and lift it. Easy.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “It’s just bio, no big deal. Ms. Snell is wicked brain damaged from years of handling the formaldehyded frogs with no gloves. She’s delirious half the time. She barely notices me when I am there.”

  “No, yeah, but I mean, can you steal something out of a desk right in the middle of the front office? During school?”

  “Can I steal from Ms. Champoux?” Meghan waves the question away. “Please. Like candy from a baby. I’ve lifted passes from her desk a billion times.”

  “Passes?”

  As Meghan’s secret life of crime begins to take shape in Aimee’s eyes she feels a flash of fearful respect for the girl sitting almost motionless across from her.

  “Blank passes,” Meghan says simply. “For freedom of movement.”
<
br />   “Freedom of movement,” Aimee echoes.

  “The swiping part’s totally easy. What’s hard is figuring out what to switch it with.”

  “Well, why do we have to switch it with anything?” Aimee asks.

  “Because . . .” Meghan looks up at the ceiling, thinking. Aimee follows her gaze and is surprised to see a poster of a family of meerkats tacked up there. “Because it’s an opportunity, I guess. This thing is going to be read out loud to the whole school, with Cara’s name attached to it. Can you imagine what that could do for us?”

  “But I, I don’t want it to do anything for us, I just don’t want people to think my poem is hers.”

  “Okay, I get it. You’re a nice person.” Meghan peers at Aimee intently and Aimee gets that creepy ticklish feeling—the same feeling she got every time she caught Meghan staring at her from across a parking lot or hallway or room—as if Meghan’s gaze is weirdly sucking something out of her and glazing her with a protective coating at the same time. “But aren’t you even a little mad at her?” Meghan leans forward a little and looks so deeply at Aimee that Aimee has to look away. “She stole your private thoughts, doesn’t that piss you off? You trusted her, and you opened up to her, and she totally betrayed you. Doesn’t she deserve to be punished a little?”

  “Maybe,” Aimee says reluctantly.

  “Definitely, I think. And see, here’s what we can do—it’ll be so simple. You can write a new poem and sign Cara’s name to it, and during G period tomorrow when I swipe her stolen poem I’ll just replace it with the decoy one you wrote. Then Ms. Champoux will read the decoy on Monday morning, and everyone will think Cara wrote it. There won’t be anything she can do.”

  Aimee squirms uncomfortably. “I don’t know,” she says. “What should I write for the decoy? Maybe something, like, with a really awkward meter or something, so people think she doesn’t understand iambic pentameter?”

  But Meghan is completely lost in a reverie, Aimee sees. Her eyes are open but all they’re seeing is what she’s imagining—they flicker with delight at the scene she sees playing out in her mind. After a moment she comes back down to earth, registers Aimee’s presence in the room, and smiles a deliciously mischievous smile.

  “I’ve got it,” she says, hushed. “I know what the decoy has to be about. Get a pen. Do you have paper? I’ll get you some paper. You need to take notes.” As Aimee reaches into her satchel for a pen, Meghan rummages under her bed, feeling around with her hand until she pulls out—improbably—a crisp brand-new legal pad, which she shoves abruptly in Aimee’s direction. “Now I’m going to tell you a story,” Meghan says, “and your job is to turn it into a poem that sounds like it’s from Cara’s point of view.”

  “I’m ready.” Aimee feels her heart beating fast, feels herself caught up suddenly in the excitement of the project.

  “Okay,” Meghan says, and closes her eyes. “Picture a shed, in a field of tall grass behind an old house on Sunset Avenue. . . .”

  17

  G period. Meghan is on her mission to the office, but something major is going down. As she approaches the office door she sees that Ms. Champoux is blocking it from the inside, her back pressed against it to keep people out. Inside, Meghan sees Dr. Dempsey arguing with Mr. Handsley. Clearly their fight has spilled out of the principal’s office into the main office. Meghan’s desperate to hear the content of what’s going on—she scuttles around the corner and down the hall a few feet to the interoffice mail room, which has an access door at the back of it leading into the hall with Dr. Dempsey’s office. Luckily that door is unguarded, and she eases through it and lodges in this back hall, watching from the shadows as the scene unfolds in the outer office.

  “This student claims that you manhandled him—”

  “Manhandled!” Mr. Handsley cries, aghast. “Manhandled, that is a ridiculous allegation! I have never manhandled a student in my thirty-eight years of teaching, nor do I intend to manhandle a single student in however many years I may have left. That is a preposterous allegation. I barely touched the boy.”

  “But you did touch him.”

  A pause. Meghan feels her heart sink. No, Mr. Handsley, she thinks, say no!

  Mr. Handsley speaks carefully. “I made light physical contact with Mr. Bartlett’s solar plexus to encourage him to utilize his abdominal muscles to project his voice into the auditorium.”

  “You touched his stomach?”

  “I lightly tapped . . . in the middle of a group of . . . in a roomful of . . . I was coaching him through a performance!”

  “The parents are real unhappy about this, Joe. And Rich is behind them.”

  “I’m stunned to hear it,” Mr. Handsley says drily.

  “He’s pushing for disciplinary action.”

  “Against me?” Once again Mr. Handsley gasps. “You’re telling me that man never touches his athletes when he’s coaching them? He never once makes physical contact?”

  “What Rich does when he coaches isn’t the issue here. The issue here is what happened in that auditorium.”

  Another pause. Meghan imagines Mr. Handsley slumping down in his vinyl chair.

  “This is harassment,” Mr. Handsley says quietly.

  “Yes, that’s the charge the Bartletts are going to bring.”

  “No, of me! This is harassment of me! I gave thirty-eight years of my life to this school and I’ve labored to keep our graduates from sinking ever deeper into the mire of unpreparedness every year, and now this yahoo is trying to badger me out of my job so you can install some shrinking violet in my place who will hand out gentlemen’s Cs to every one of his so-called athletes.”

  “There’s no conspiracy here, Joe, and I think you know it. Between you and Rich I don’t know which of you is more paranoid.”

  “That man has been trying to get me fired since the day he arrived!”

  “Rich Cox doesn’t call the shots around here, I do.”

  “Then rein him in! Don’t let him do this to me!”

  “I’m afraid I’m with Rich on this one, Joe. I have to put the welfare of the student body first.”

  Now there’s the kind of stunned silence that follows a slap. When Mr. Handsley speaks again his voice sounds broken.

  “If you think I’m a threat to the student body . . . if that’s the position of the administration of this school, then I will not stay here another minute.”

  “Now, Joe—”

  “I will not remain in the employ of an administration that sees me that way.”

  “Joe—”

  “I tender my resignation, effective immediately.”

  “Joe, will you please be reasonable here?”

  Meghan hears Mr. Handsley storming toward her hiding place and flattens herself as quickly as she can behind the nearest filing cabinet. When Mr. Handsley strides past her on his way out the door, he comes so close she can smell his dandruff shampoo.

  After school, Music Practice Room D. Aimee looks up expectantly when Meghan tugs open the door.

  Aimee is sitting cross-legged on the filthy carpet, her back pressed against the graffiti-covered, pockmarked wall. Meghan almost never has the fluorescents on when she’s in here, and as well as she feels like she should know this place, she’s noticing some details as she looks around that she never saw before. Once, long ago before the advent of Ritalin and Adderall, this practice room was used as a prison cell for kids with “behavior problems.” The walls bear witness to this abandoned purpose—Meghan can’t believe, as she looks around at them now, that she never noticed before how they scream out against injustice on all four sides: FIGHT BACK, says the wall above the piano in jagged Sharpie letters; RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, the wall by the door urges in letters carved a half an inch deep into the crumbling drywall. SUCK ME DEMPSEY, commands the wall above the garbage can. Aimee sits in the middle of this silent riot, stick legs crossed in their black fishnets, more a reed in the river than a Buddha, but still beatific.

  “So? Did you get i
t?” Aimee asks, hopeful.

  “I tried, but there was a big thing going on in the office during G period—I couldn’t get to the desk. I could try to lift it now but I just passed the office and Ms. Champoux is in there alone—I just don’t see how I can do it if she’s the only one in there. I need at least a few seconds of distraction.”

  “What about me? I can be very distracting,” Aimee offers.

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t think that’s such a good idea. The office is a really sensitive place.”

  “Well can you wait and go do it after she leaves?”

  “No.” Meghan shakes her head. “She’s always the last out on Fridays, and she locks the place down when she goes. They’ve got grades in there and disciplinary files—they shut the main office up like a bank vault.”

  “Well we have to do this now,” Aimee says, her voice rising. “This is our last chance before Monday morning. I think you should let me help you. I might be more useful than you think.”

  Meghan deliberates a beat, then nods.

  “Okay,” she says.

  At the door to the office Meghan leans down to speak low into Aimee’s ear.

  “Ask her about the new in-school suspension rules,” she whispers.

  “Ask her what about them?”

  “Ask her if she thinks they’re justified under juvenile criminal law. She has a lot of opinions about that.”

  “But why would I walk into the office after school and ask her about juvenile criminal law?”

  “Tell her you’re working on an article for the school paper and you heard she was an informed source about the issue of in-school suspensions. She’s going to go for it, I promise. Then I’ll come around and make the trade in her announcements folder while she’s not looking.”

  “She’ll see you, she’ll totally see you!”

  Around the edge of this Meghan hears the unspoken implication: How can she not see you?

  “She won’t see me,” Meghan says. “I promise. I’ve been right under her nose a million times and she never, ever sees me. Trust me.”

  Aimee looks dubious, but when they walk through the door Ms. Champoux looks up, makes eye contact with Aimee only, and says, “Yes? What can I do you for?”