Looks Read online

  In the corner of the room, by Mr. Handsley’s desk covered in spent coffee mugs and heaps of manila folders and collapsing piles of papers, Meghan spies Aimee Zorn pulling something furtively out of her backpack, looking around her, guilty as a criminal. Aimee unfolds the piece of paper she’s produced from her bag and smoothes it out on a clear spot on the desk. She finds an inbox marked PHOTON on the corner of the desk and lifts up the top couple of papers lying in it, is halfway through sliding her own paper underneath them, when the far office door opens, the one that leads to the foreign language teachers’ office, and Cara Roy enters.

  Aimee freezes. Cara strides toward Aimee, smiling broadly, and Aimee panics, starts to pull her paper back out of the inbox. Cara comes to stand next to Aimee and lays her hand gently on Aimee’s arm, the arm that’s holding the piece of paper. Meghan wants to go, but she can’t stop looking, can’t take her eyes off the place where Cara’s touching Aimee. Aimee’s eyes are locked on the place, too, quietly horrified, like there’s a little fire burning on her sleeve where Cara’s hand is. Cara says something to Aimee—they’re too far away for Meghan to make out the words—gives Aimee a gentle, encouraging look, and Aimee nods. She’s edging away from Cara even as she’s nodding—Meghan sees the bend in Aimee’s body, as if she’s the pulled string of a bow and arrow, curved tautly away from Cara, like she might snap at any moment.

  In a series of bright flashes Meghan sees how it could go between them. She’ll catch Aimee, maybe, in line for the bus after school one day, or maybe she’ll just wait until Cara leaves right now and snag Aimee as she comes out of the English office. Or for some reason—why?—she imagines running into Aimee in the woods out west of town near where they both live: Meghan will be sitting on the big rock by Thorn Creek where she likes to hang out, and Aimee will walk right up to Meghan, and she’ll be weirdly happy to see her, like she’s been looking for her, and she’ll be like, “Hey,” and Meghan will be like, “Hey.”

  Then Meghan will say, “I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

  She will say, “There’s something you need to know.”

  Meghan the soothsayer will say, “I have to tell you about a mistake you’re making.”

  And Aimee the Jell-O eater will say, “Tell me everything you know.”

  But then something shifts between Aimee and Cara. Cara says something to Aimee that makes her laugh a little, and she lifts her hand off of Aimee’s arm, and Meghan watches Aimee relax, watches her slide the piece of paper all the way into the Photon inbox. Then Aimee looks up and makes sudden, total eye contact with Meghan, and her eyes widen and then narrow a little. Before Cara can turn and catch Meghan spying, Meghan drops her gaze to the floor and scoots down the hall like a luggage cart.

  6

  “This is so exciting, isn’t it, guys? Our first meeting of the year with submissions!”

  Cara Roy has brought snacks to the second meeting of the Photon editorial collective. The circle of girls nibbles daintily, like a hutchful of bunnies, on the Pepperidge Farm jam-filled cookies they helped themselves to from the little display Cara laid out on Mr. Handsley’s desk: cookies fanned out on a plastic plate, a short stack of pink scallop-edged napkins on either side of the plate like a pair of spread hands, offering it.

  Aimee has taken one single cookie, placed it at the edge of her desk where everyone can see it. But when she looks down at it her throat thickens with revulsion. She hasn’t eaten anything since the two slices of apple she managed to swallow in front of her mother this morning, and her whole body is bright with hunger. A single crumb of Pepperidge Farm cookie on her tongue would bring on a gale-force reaction in her body when it’s empty like this. When she picked it up she used a double layer of napkins—even letting the skin of her fingers come in contact with a cookie’s fat-saturated surface would make the sizzle start up at the back of her neck.

  Her mind returns instead, again and again, to the three carrot sticks that are waiting for her, tucked into the front pocket of her backpack in their Ziploc bag. Aimee doesn’t want to eat the carrots—putting food of any kind into her body would ruin the perfect, pinging hunger she’s cultivated all day long—but the carrots want her: they’re humming to her from the backpack by her feet. Aimee thinks about how perfectly they’re shaped, like miniature felled timber, how exactly she would be able to bite into them—five distinct times per stick—but how jagged and cold they would feel as she chewed, how their starchy taste would practically sting in her nose, how their edges would graze her soft throat going down. How having eaten them would feel like having said something terrible she could never take back.

  “Okay, we had a fantastic first week for submissions,” Cara enthuses. “Already we got two poems and three short stories. So like we did last year, I photocopied the submissions we got and whited out the names of the authors so the selection process will be anonymous. I’ll be the only one who knows who wrote the pieces we read. Anne Marie, would you mind passing out the copies?”

  Anne Marie leaps from her chair like she’s spring-loaded, takes up the pile of collated submissions from Cara’s desk, and starts distributing them with a waitressy smile, glossy brown curls bouncing around her head.

  “Okay,” says Cara, “why don’t we start with the poem on the first page? Start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, right?” She smiles a goofy, self-deprecating smile. “So who wants to read this poem out loud for us?”

  Aimee watches a cat’s cradle of looks zing around the room, girls making little flickers of eye contact with each other, sorting out among themselves who they think wrote the poem. The only person who doesn’t play, who keeps her eyes locked on her paper, is pudgy Moira Dahlquist; clearly this is Moira’s poem. After a moment of silent negotiation, Becky Trainer takes control.

  “I will,” she says brightly.

  “Great.” Cara nods.

  Becky holds the submissions packet up in front of her, adjusts her shoulders, and lengthens her neck before she reads:

  “When the dawn begins to crest Like a robin’s feathered breast Hallowing the sky above Like the gray wings of a dove Soon will come the bird of day To bloom like sun and fly away.”

  “Great,” Cara says firmly and immediately, “great. Okay, so let’s first say what we like about this poem.”

  Aimee looks down at the stanza parked, square as a cinder block, on the paper in front of her. She tries to figure out what exactly it is that she hates so much about this poem, why it makes her want to roll her eyes and mime sticking her finger down her throat. Is it the cheesy rhymes? Is it the fake poem-y sound of saying “soon will come the bird” instead of just saying “the bird will come soon”? Is it the fact that the last line makes no sense, or the fact that the whole thing sounds like a cheap knockoff of something out of A Child’s Garden of Verses? In the backpack at her feet the noise from the carrot sticks rises to a soft, rhythmic thrum, like the whir of a washing machine on spin. Aimee badly wants to reach down and open the Ziploc and touch the carrots, just stroke them lightly with her fingertips—

  “I have to say?” asks Becky. “That I think this poem is really great? I really like the way the author uses similes?”

  “Yeah, and I really like the rhymes,” offers Laurie, a girl so boring even her voice is as bland as a dairy product. “They’re so nice.”

  Tall, wiry Yael speaks up next, talking around the pencil she’s been chewing on the whole time: “I like how the poem is kind of nostalgic, you know? Like it makes me think of the Colonial American poems we read in Ms. Bradshaw’s class, does anyone remember those?”

  Nods and yeses from about half the circle.

  “And I really like the way it makes me feel,” says Anne Marie. “Like, hopeful about dawn, and the future, and, like . . .” She trails off. “Birds.”

  “Great,” says Cara. “Great, I agree with all that. I think the poem is really strong. Now if we were going to give this writer editorial advice, what would we tell him or he
r?”

  The room is suddenly absorbently silent, every girl peering deep into her paper. Then Aimee sees a little flash of eye contact pass between Becky and Anne Marie. Anne Marie nods a tiny nod, and Becky’s hand goes up.

  “Becky?”

  “I think—I mean, I absolutely love this poem? But I think, I don’t know, the last line might be a little off? I mean it fits the meter and everything really nicely, but the thing about the sun blooming? It feels like a . . .”

  “Mixed metaphor,” Anne Marie supplies.

  “Right, like a mixed metaphor, like does the sun really bloom? I don’t know. But it’s really no big deal, it’s not like a real criticism or anything.”

  “Okay, great,” Cara agrees. “So if we were going to give editorial notes to this writer, we might ask him or her to take another look at the mixed metaphor in the final line.” Cara is scrupulously—but effortlessly—avoiding looking at Moira as she speaks. “Great, that’s so great. Guys, I think we have a winner. You’re looking at our first official selection for the fall issue!”

  Becky bursts into applause but falls still almost instantly when nobody joins her. Aimee sees Moira smile a small smile down into her lap.

  “Okay,” says Cara, “turn to page two!”

  Aimee turns the page and there it is, spread out in front of her: her fat girl poem. It’s so weird to see it there, this thing that was totally personal, totally hers, like a tooth in her mouth or a vein in her wrist, extracted from the privacy of her notebook and pinned out here on the page for everybody to see and peer at and judge.

  The carrots begin to thump like drums at her feet, and Aimee feels a surge of electricity come off them, a staticky pulse of carrot energy that shoots out of the backpack and through her legs. A wave of goose bumps passes over her as another pulse follows, and another—Aimee needs to make the carrots shut up somehow, maybe shove the backpack away from her with her foot, or bring the Ziploc bag into her lap where she can stick it up her shirt and muffle it—

  “Who wants to read our second submission out loud?”

  Becky raises her hand but Cara smiles at her as sweetly as a nun.

  “Becky, you’re such a great reader, but we rely on you way too much in this group. Why don’t we give you a break and let somebody else have a turn?”

  Becky drops her hand and blushes all the way down into her boat-neck collar.

  “Moira? How about you?”

  Moira nods nervously, picks up her packet in trembling hands, and begins to read, lisping:

  “the fat girl grinds through the crowd

  a monstrous machine

  draped under the wide blue tarp of her windbreaker

  hidden behind her quivering curtain of hair

  she has thighs like a sofa

  hands like hams

  eyes like a dead fish’s eyes

  she is the garbage girl

  everything she ever ate is still inside her

  and they can smell it on her

  rotting . . .”

  Something light and airy begins to swell inside Aimee as she listens to her poem being read aloud. It feels like a balloon inflating in her stomach and it makes her giddy, like she might float up off her chair if she doesn’t grip the desk with both hands. Because as she listens to her poem being read aloud she can tell that it’s good. Even here in this temporary classroom it’s good. Even being read aloud by a girl who lisps like a cartoon puppy it’s good. She did exactly what Bill said to do, she wrote it down just like she saw it, and it works. As Aimee listens to her own poem she gets a perfect picture of the fat girl walking past her in the hall; she feels the rolling thud of the fat girl’s movements and sees the silvery patina over the fat girl’s eyes—all of it, all of it, just like she described it.

  My poem makes the fat girl come to life, Aimee thinks. My poem makes the fat girl real.

  “ . . . they circle her,

  swirling and cawing

  ravenous seagulls flying over a landfill

  scavenging for bits of her flesh

  as they swoop in to pluck out her decaying eyes

  she opens her mouth

  but doesn’t make a sound.”

  “Great,” Cara says as soon as Moira finishes, “great. So let’s first say what we like about this poem.”

  Aimee watches the silent scramble to identify the author taking place in the eyes of the editorial collective. If she looks down she knows they’ll know she wrote it, and anyway she’s proud of her poem, she doesn’t feel like looking down. She keeps her head up, following the looks as they swerve and skitter around the space. Across the circle she sees Cara look directly at her, a deep, thorough, penetrating look. The carrots send a single prickly shock wave through her ankles and Aimee flinches, kicks her backpack a couple inches under her chair with her heel.

  After a second of silent conferral the girls seem to decide that whoever the writer is, she’s not in the room. Then they let loose.

  “I don’t know, it’s so . . . dark,” Anne Marie says.

  Becky cocks her head quizzically, like a spaniel, as she considers her paper.

  “It’s really, I mean some of the verbs are really active and everything?” Becky asks. “But the images are like, really upsetting?”

  “Okay,” says Cara, “but sometimes upsetting images can be the best things in a piece of writing.”

  “It seems kind of harsh,” offers Edith in a small voice.

  “Yeah, it feels a little, I don’t want to say that it’s gross . . .” begins Yael.

  “Look,” Moira cuts in, her usually quiet voice surprisingly shrill. “The bottom line here is that this piece is mean.”

  “What do you mean ‘mean’?” Cara leans her chin on her hand and gives Moira her full, concerned attention.

  “Well, okay, I’ll just say it. We all know who this poem is about. And the writer is comparing her to, like, garbage? And saying she’s rotten smelling? And the person who the poem is about doesn’t get to defend herself or anything, like see, even in the poem she’s silent at the end, she just stands there and lets the seagulls pick her eyes out and ‘doesn’t make a sound,’ see what I’m saying? And if we publish this poem it’s like Photon will be saying we also think that person is like a garbage dump, we also think that person is rotten smelling, and I don’t think we should let our journal be used as a weapon that way.”

  The other girls in the circle nod solemnly.

  “That’s right,” agrees Anne Marie. “That’s what I meant by ‘dark.’ I meant ‘mean.’ I don’t think we should be mean.”

  “I agree,” Yael chimes in. “Personal insults aren’t appropriate subject matter for Photon.”

  “I don’t want to be used as a weapon,” boring Laurie murmurs.

  Aimee’s breathing is shallow. The carrots begin emitting a tiny high-pitched whoop, like a miniature siren going off by her feet. Surely the other girls can hear it. Surely any second now she’ll get up helplessly from the circle and drag her backpack to the bathroom and cram a whole carrot stick into her mouth, bite down on it and explode the beautiful hunger she’s been building like a glass palace in her body all day long.

  Cara nods thoughtfully. “Okay,” she says, “can I just interrupt and say that I think this is a really important thing for us to talk about? Like, what are our responsibilities as an editorial collective? Do we have to agree with every opinion that’s in every piece of writing we publish? I don’t know, I don’t know what I think about that. What do you guys think?”

  “But we’re not talking about some abstract opinion!” Moira blurts out before anyone else can answer. “We’re talking about do we turn Photon into a place where you can make fun of a girl who’s already completely made fun of and hated in school. And who can’t defend herself. Right?” Moira looks around her for support, but now that Cara has expressed some ambivalence the other girls hold back, waiting to see what side she’ll come down on.

  “But the question is, I mean if we even r
eally do believe that we know who the poem is about, do we think it’s actually making fun of her?” Cara wonders.

  “I think it’s totally obvious that it’s making fun of her,” says Moira. “I mean, ‘a sofa where her thighs should be’? That’s exactly like calling someone ‘thunder thighs,’ it’s no different or more poetic than that.”

  When she says the words “thunder thighs,” two little pink blotches pop out on Moira’s cheeks, and Aimee understands that chubby Moira has been on the business end of that insult more than once.

  “Okay, I see your point, Moira, I completely understand what you’re saying. But don’t you think there’s a lot of beauty in this poem? Maybe not the usual kind of beauty, but . . . kind of like an ugly beauty?”

  “I don’t know what ‘ugly beauty’ means,” Moira sniffs, and folds her arms across her chest.

  “Like okay, does anyone else see what I mean?” Cara turns to the group and they stare back at her warily. “Let’s say you didn’t go to Valley Regional and you didn’t think you knew who this poem was about. Wouldn’t you like a lot of things about this writing? Like look at line seven. Don’t you think that’s really amazing, how the writer compares the character’s eyes to a dead fish’s eyes? Come on, we were just saying how we liked the strong similes in the last piece and that simile is just as strong. And personally I think the fact that you knew right away who the person in the poem is shows that the writer did an amazing job of including really specific details about his or her subject matter. We always talk about how specific details are what makes good writing good, right? Don’t you think that’s going on here? I personally can totally see the scene this writer’s describing.”

  “I see what you’re saying, Cara,” Anne Marie agrees cautiously. “This writer has a lot of good skills.”