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  Ms. Flenser, the geometry teacher, new to Valley Regional this year, is standing behind her desk at the front of the room, bouncing rhythmically against it in what looks like a nervous tic.

  “Will you people take your seats please so we can get started?” she barks out in the strangled voice of a seal, even though the bell won’t ring for another two minutes.

  In one visual gulp Meghan takes in the new math teacher: the wide, loose ass inside the too-tight pink pants, the faint mustache on her upper lip, the way she’s digging the uneven nails of her right hand into the picked-raw cuticles of her left, the way the shapeless hair draped over her scalp trembles like a slab of liver every time she bounces off her desk. Okay, Ms. Flenser is an angry person. Ms. Flenser will not be spontaneously delighted to give Meghan a health pass on the first day of school.

  Meghan pants a little, quietly, into the collar of her windbreaker so her skin will be sufficiently clammy and pale. She tousles her bangs discreetly, pulls some hanks of hair into her eyes. Then she assembles her most anguished migraine face, takes a deep breath, and shuffles toward Ms. Flenser’s desk.

  The nurse’s office is a windowless cinder-block cell painted maximum-security green. It has two banks of fluorescents on its ceiling, but for as long as Meghan’s been coming here the left-side bank has been out and the right side has suffered from an epileptic tremor, so the light in the room has the silty, flickering quality of a tank in a cheap roadside aquarium. The room reeks of something tangy and powdery—Ace bandages and antifungal creams—and even though it’s the kind of smell that makes normal people gag, to Meghan it’s the smell of relief, the smell of revelation. When she pushes open the door to the office and it hits her for the first time since June, she takes a deep drag of the stale, acrid air.

  Facts about Mrs. Chuddy, School Nurse: Mrs. Chuddy is as plump and merry as a garden gnome. She is cheerful and kindly and round all over—round-cheeked, round-eyed, hugely round-boobed, her round head haloed by a spherical perm. Mrs. Chuddy only ever wears two kinds of tops: cardigans with cheerful barnyard scenes knitted into them, and sweatshirts emblazoned with cheerful, tongue-in-cheek slogans: SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED is one of her favorites; BECAUSE I’M THE GRANDMA, THAT’S WHY! is another. Mrs. Chuddy is the most gullible person Meghan has ever encountered. Maybe it’s because, even though she’s a health professional, she doesn’t really care about symptoms, she cares about caring. The world makes her heart break; she feels sorry for everything that lives and breathes. It’s this sympathy that has made her Meghan’s single most valuable source in school.

  Now she hands Mrs. Chuddy her pass. Mrs. Chuddy tips the globe of her head to one side, makes a murmuring noise at the back of her throat as she copies Meghan’s name onto her sign-in sheet.

  “Meghan honey, so soon?” Mrs. Chuddy murmurs, peering up at her through her round, red plastic-rimmed glasses. Meghan shrugs, apologetic. “What is it, honey, a migraine?” Meghan nods. “Already? On the first day of school?” Meghan shrugs again, lets her tearful eyes drift up the wall.

  Mrs. Chuddy sighs a bosomy sigh, full of pity for the great, helpless creature she sees before her. “Oh honey, I hoped I wouldn’t see you around here so much this year. But it’s all right, if you’re sick, we’ll take care of you.” Bracing both puffy hands on the fake wood of her desk, Mrs. Chuddy pushes herself to her feet and scrapes back her chair with a metal squeal.

  “Your usual spot?” Mrs. Chuddy asks. Meghan nods, and Mrs. Chuddy trundles toward the sickroom to pull a fresh length of wax paper over the bed closest to the door.

  “Bed” is really too generous a word for this thing—it’s a bench with a hard vinyl surface and a slightly raised end: the blunt idea of a pillow. Lying down on it is about as comfortable as lying down on the hood of a car. But Meghan could care less. She lies back on it now—the wax paper crackles—and lets her eyes flutter closed in a consumptive swoon. In the doorway Mrs. Chuddy sighs, tsks her sympathy; Meghan imagines her thinking, Poor, poor thing.

  “Lights off?” says Mrs. Chuddy, hushed and motherly. Meghan nods, and Mrs. Chuddy flips the switch off at the exact moment that Meghan flips her eyes open to a darkness so familiar, so full of possibilities, that she can’t keep a grin from breaking over her face.

  Here in the dark she disappears completely, her body dissolves, but every one of her senses sharpens: vision, scent, memory, hearing. Meghan tilts her head toward the door and curves her whole self into a listening device. She wakes up every sleeping cell in her body to listen. She makes her skin listen, she makes her eyelashes listen. She stills her breath, lets it in and out of her lungs in faint wisps. She listens so hard she feels her heartbeat slow.

  After only a minute it begins. Mrs. Chuddy’s phone rings—two quick bleats, an interoffice call.

  “Health office?” says Mrs. Chuddy in the innocent tone she always uses when she first picks up the phone. There’s a moment’s pause. Then her voice drops down into its intimate range: “Yes? Oh, yes? Oh, Vivvie, what is it?” Score: It’s Vivvie Vaughan, the guidance secretary, Mrs. Chuddy’s best friend and confidante. “No,” Mrs. Chuddy says reassuringly to Ms. Vaughan. “No one’s here, go right ahead.”

  Pause while she gets the first line of the story.

  “Oh, he didn’t now! He sent a memo complaining already? On the first day of school?”

  Who sent a memo complaining about what?

  “I know, I thought he’d cool off over the summer.”

  Cool off from . . . ?

  “Well if he starts rocking the boat this year he knows what’s in store for him. Last year was a warning, wasn’t it. With the school board and . . . Yes. Oh yes. Oh my yes. And now that Skip’s given him the morning announcements thing, you know he’s going to expect a little cooperation in return.”

  Skip is Dr. Skip Dempsey, Principal. And the boat rocker who got the morning announcements thing is . . . ?

  “Well you know that I adore the man. I always have. I used to be in aquarobics with him at the Y, you remember, and we just had the best time in that class. The best exercise I ever got was the workout he gave my sides making me laugh every Wednesday. He’s a peach and I want nothing but the best for him. But sometimes he doesn’t know when to stop. He just pushes and pushes until people can’t—”

  “Hello?” From across the room, another voice.

  “Oh—oh yes honey, come in!” Mrs. Chuddy murmurs something inaudible into the phone, then Meghan hears a clunk as the receiver hits home. Her jaw clenches with frustration at the interruption.

  “Yes, honey? What can I help you with?”

  “Yeah, I’m having an allergic reaction?”

  It’s a girl’s voice, crisp and cool. Meghan doesn’t recognize the sound—a new freshman?

  “Allergic reaction? Oh, you poor thing!” Meghan hears Mrs. Chuddy get sloppily to her feet. “Did you eat a nut? Did you eat a little piece of nut by mistake?”

  “No, it was soy milk.”

  “Soy milk? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m positive.”

  “Well I don’t know, honey, I never heard of someone being allergic to soy milk before.”

  “Well I’m definitely having a reaction, and soy milk is the only thing I had so far today.”

  Something about this voice, thin as paper but sharp as a paper cut, makes Meghan want to see the girl it belongs to. Very carefully, a millimeter at a time so as not to cause a single wax-paper crackle, Meghan peels herself up off the bench to get a look at this girl. She winches the top half of her body forward until she’s within viewing range of the desk outside.

  The first thing is that the girl is extremely thin. She looks like a refugee from a famine-stricken nation whose American host family just bought her new clothes at the mall. Her shoulders, round and knobby, stand out like newel posts inside her black turtleneck. Her legs are as thin as arms in her jeans, and her arms are folded squarely across the empty space of her chest: the anorexic’s classic posture of self-defen
se. On her head is a floppy black velvet hat—kind of like a cross between an Abraham Lincoln stovepipe hat and a beret—and her pinched, angry face peers out from underneath it, pressed in between two beige wedges of hair. The narrow line of her lipsticked mouth is so dark it looks black. Her pointy chin juts out at a go-ahead-make-my-day angle. She doesn’t look like a girl who’s having an allergic reaction. She looks like a girl who’s having a fight.

  “Now honey, I only want to help you feel better, but are you absolutely sure you’re having an allergic reaction?”

  “I think I know when I’m having an allergic reaction because it happens to me all the time, but if you’re asking me for some kind of proof that I’m having one then my pulse rate is a hundred and eighty-four beats per minute and I’m hyperventilating and feeling dizzy and disoriented and I’m having trouble concentrating in class. Are you trying to say I’m making this up?”

  “Of course I don’t think you’re making it up.” Mrs. Chuddy sounds a little hurt. “I just thought that maybe you—never mind. What can I do right now to help you feel better? Do you have your epi pen with you?”

  “My what?” The thin girl blinks.

  “Your epi pen? To give yourself an antihistamine injection? Didn’t your allergist prescribe you one?”

  “Um, not yet. He’s going to, though. Soon.”

  Obviously the thin girl has no idea what an epi pen is. Rookie mistake, Meghan thinks. Always get real meds to back up a fake illness. It can be hard to put one over on an actual doctor, but that’s what makes headaches so perfect: you squint a little and you cry a little, and who can prove that you don’t really have one?

  “All right, honey. Well you make sure you get that prescription. Allergies are serious business—that epi pen could save your life.” A mild note of superiority has crept into Mrs. Chuddy’s voice; Meghan recognizes it from when she trades stories with Ms. Vaughan about Ms. Verlinsky, the slutty child development teacher. Clearly Mrs. Chuddy feels like she won this little battle.

  “Okay,” the thin girl says, and some of the wind has gone out of her sails.

  “Would you like to lie down for the rest of the period? I’ve got one person in my sickroom but there’s two beds in there.”

  “Sure,” says the thin girl.

  “Just tell me your name so I can check you in as present.”

  “Aimee Zorn,” says the thin girl. “With an i and two e’s.”

  Park yourself, weightless, up against the sickroom ceiling. Spread yourself, formless, across the acoustic tiles. Look down in the dark at the pair of girls lying on the pair of vinyl beds. See how the thin girl curves away toward the wall, pulls the brim of her velvet hat down to cover her face. See how the fat girl stares up at the ceiling, her head roiling with silent plans. See the plans get more and more complex, more and more lushly illustrated, until they play like tiny fantasy movies on the screens of her eyes. Squint and look closely—you can see what the fat girl’s imagining: the accidental run-in in the next couple of days, the gradual getting to know each other, the slow sharing of spaces, the slow sharing of secrets. Look at how her jaw hardens as she dreams this, fierce and determined: she is going to know the thin girl. The thin girl has been brought here for her. Whatever it takes, she is going to make their friendship happen.

  The thin girl wraps her arms around her chest and tightens into herself like an embryo. Watch how the space between them widens and darkens.

  And wait—wait for the bell to ring.

  2

  “Also soy,” says Aimee from the breakfast nook. “I’m putting soy on the list.”

  Her mother has been moving briskly around the kitchen making dinner, but she comes to a careful halt when she hears this.

  “Soy?” says Aimee’s mother. “What do you—?” She sighs. “Who’s allergic to soy?”

  Aimee shrugs. “Me, apparently. I had a wicked bad reaction to some soy milk today.”

  “Well I’m sorry to hear that but . . .” Her mother trails off. She’s standing at the sink in her six o’clock outfit, work clothes still on but half disassembled: blouse untucked, sleeves rolled up, heels and pantyhose off, replaced by the pink plastic flip-flops she wears around the house. The outlines of morning makeup are still crusted to the edges of her features, the blackened inner corners of her eyelids, the dry, dark pink perimeter of her lips. She looks to Aimee like a stewardess at the end of an eighty-hour flight.

  Her mother shakes her hands off into the sink, crosses to the table, and lowers herself into the chair next to Aimee’s. She scoots her chair one precise inch closer to Aimee and takes a deep breath, the sign that she’s about to start a Conversation.

  “I want us to have a Conversation,” she says.

  “About what?” Aimee digs the sharp exclamation point of her elbow into the table, savors the zing of pain it sends up into her hand.

  “Honey.” Aimee gives her mother an innocent look, eyebrows raised. “Look,” her mother says, a tiny bit desperately. “Obviously I want to respect your body, and its needs, and its innate, ah, wisdom, about what belongs in it and what doesn’t. But I also feel like, sweetheart . . . what’s left for you to eat?”

  Aimee looks past her mother, out the breakfast nook window, across the sloping front yard to the cul-de-sac, the four identical condos facing their condo like mirror images. In the lawn the sprinkler pops its little reptile head up out of nowhere and starts hurling whips of water into the air. Subdivision magic.

  “String cheese is left,” says Aimee. “And carrots, and yogurt. And peppers and broccoli and kale. And Jell-O—is there any?”

  “Jell-O?” Aimee nods. “There are three batches in the fridge,” her mother says.

  “Sugar-free?”

  “Yes but honey—”

  Aimee jumps from her chair, strides across the room, and pries open the sucked-shut door of the fridge. There they are: lime, lemon, and cherry, glowing like stoplights on the middle shelf. Their glistening surfaces ripple, underripe.

  “I just made them,” her mother says. “You have to give them a few hours.”

  “Thanks,” says Aimee. She heads for the door.

  “Hey hey, are we done here?” her mother asks, a tiny bit sharply. Aimee turns, gives her her blankest look.

  “Aren’t we?”

  “Well, I was going to ask about your first day.”

  Aimee waits, motionless. Her mother sighs.

  “How was your first day of high school?” she asks.

  “Fine,” Aimee says.

  “Did you meet anybody new?”

  Like a flash flood the image courses through Aimee’s mind: the giant girl, slow as a prehistoric creature, the boys like a pack of wolves at her back, the girl’s eyes behind her bangs open but seeing nothing, silvered over like the eyes of a dead fish on ice. The images are so vivid in Aimee’s mind’s eye that for a second she’s afraid her mother’s seen them, too.

  “Well did you? Meet anybody new?” her mother asks again, a tiny bit hopeful. “Anybody who seems like they might turn out to be a new friend?”

  “No,” says Aimee. “Nobody.” She turns and heads out the door.

  “I’m steaming vegetables,” her mother calls after her. “I’m steaming broccoli and I’m steaming kale. Are you gonna have some with me?”

  “Later!” Aimee yells back, gathering speed, taking the carpeted stairs two steps at a time.

  Upstairs, Aimee stands for a moment in the hall outside her room. She can envision every detail of what’s on the other side of the closed door: bookshelf, bulletin board, bureau, bed—a family of harmless, cream-colored cartoon characters, her furniture, boring and stupid and not what she would have chosen. Almost nothing in her room is there on purpose—it’s all shipwrecked stuff that ended up there by accident, as if the wave of her life broke over her bedroom and left a bunch of stuff stranded there like driftwood on a beach. Like her Breyer model horse collection, for example, which she only has because her grandmother started giving her
one model horse every year on her first birthday and never stopped. And her cheesy posters of kittens that she used to think were cute, and her cheesy Victorian dolls that she can’t remember how she got, and her cheesy ballet- themed bedspread . . . it’s like a display room in a department store, the room of a fake girl. Sometimes Aimee imagines taking the few things she actually cares about out of that room—combat boots, a couple of skirts and shirts and hats, the sandalwood-scented candle she bought at the hippie shop, all six of her filled-up poetry notebooks—and dousing the rest of her stuff with lighter fluid, tossing a lit match into the room, and slamming the door shut behind her as it bursts into a whoosh of cleansing flames.

  That is never going to happen.

  In the meantime, Aimee can’t bring herself to reach out and open the door to that museum of randomness. She stands, frozen, not moving forward and not moving back.

  At the other end of the hall from her room, the door to Bill’s study stands partway open. The late-afternoon light pouring out of it is strong and unfiltered, since when Bill left he took not only all of his furniture but also the expensive wooden-slat blinds off the windows. “They’re my favorite part of the room,” he had explained to Aimee sheepishly when she caught him unscrewing them from the woodwork, standing on his desk in his big sock feet, curly head bent against the stuccoed ceiling.

  She walks slowly toward the study now, drawn by its light like an earthling in the thrall of a downed UFO. She hasn’t been in the study at all since Bill finished moving the last of his stuff out two weeks ago. When she gets to the door and pushes it all the way open, the bareness of the room hits her chest like a shove. Her insides begin to shrink, as if her heart has sprung a leak and is slowly deflating.

  The big metal desk, which Bill bought off a crooked janitor for five bucks on his last day of college, is gone. The ergonomic desk chair, which he could never remember tipped back and was always spilling his coffee in, is gone. The two huge filing cabinets, which he called his “henchmen,” are gone. The three framed early Springsteen posters are gone. And the books. Bill’s books are gone.