Looks Page 8

  “Before we get started with activities today I wanna have a little talk with you people about something serious going on in this school.”

  Mr. Cox begins to pace: two steps left, rock up on his toes, two steps right, rock back on his heels . . .

  “This school has a reputation you can be proud of. It’s a reputation that your athletes have worked hard to earn. We had two varsity basketball players in last year’s all-state game, a school record. And you remember when Valley Regional took it to state, that was an H. of a year. And you know last season we came this close to kicking Gateway’s narrow butts in the semis.”

  J-Bar and his crew lead the class in a boisterous round of applause.

  “But there are forces at work in this school, people—and I’m not gonna say who, I’m just gonna say forces—that are trying to bring down athletics at Valley Regional. It’s been starting in little ways, like your poetry disrupting morning athletics announcements, or good kids, good athletes getting punished for leaving class to attend away games. But when those little things start happening, you gotta look alive, because it’s a sign that the whole school is going soft. It’s a sign that we’re losing respect for ourselves, people!”

  Again the jocks applaud. Mr. Cox presses on.

  “But I’m here to tell you today I’m not going to let that happen. I’m not going to let this school go soft. I may not be able to make the rules in other teachers’ classes, but when it comes to what goes down in this gym, I’m telling you, from now on, the buck stops here. No more doctor’s notes. No more candy-ass excuses. You come in here on time, at the beginning of class, suited up and ready to participate . You hear me? You got scoliosis? Stand up straight and get in the game. You’re coughing up blood? Cough it up on the court, cough it up in your pinny. I don’t want to hear about it. The only thing I want to hear about in this gym from now on is how badly you want to get your hands on the ball. Is this clear? Am I making myself clear?”

  A roar of approval from J-Bar’s corner. Freedom and Shane pump their muscular fists in the air and lead the chant:

  “Coach. Coach. Coach. Coach.”

  The wispy-pretty girls peer at each other with half-lowered eyelids as if to say, Just try and take away my PMS excuse. Lucas and Timothy swallow, Adam’s apples bobbing, as panicked as kittens in a lions’ den. They look like they want to grab each other’s hands and huddle up for protection. Meghan breathes shallowly and stares straight forward, her mind racing to piece together a new kind of excuse—a trump card, something too horrible to debate, something even Mr. Cox has never heard before.

  Mr. Cox slaps his flippers together and shouts, “All right, nice and fired up—I love it. Now let’s see some hustle on this floor!”

  He smiles then, Mr. Cox actually smiles, and for a split second Meghan sees, like a shaft of light falling through the crack of an open door, the man Mr. Cox probably is inside, a man who likes some things and doesn’t like other things, who eats ice cream after dinner and watches American Idol and misses his wife, is stubbornly waiting for her to come home to him before he lets even one of his hairs grow back. But those aren’t Facts, that’s all just Meghan’s imagination, and a nanosecond later the smile is gone and Mr. Cox’s face falls back into its hulking concrete grimace.

  “Line up on the blue line by height!”

  Mr. Cox claps again and everybody gets to their feet and scrambles down off the bleachers.

  No.

  No lining up.

  No picking teams.

  No running in front of J-Bar.

  Just. No. Way.

  In the chaos of kids stumbling down off the bleachers, Meghan manages to climb down onto the floor without drawing attention to herself. She begins putting together her most pitiful migraine face ever as she moves as fast as she can toward Mr. Cox.

  “Captains by me!” Mr. Cox shouts. He turns and sees Meghan approaching him. “Ball!” He yells her name, points at her with the corner of his clipboard. Her throat closes up and her heart stands still. “Nurse!” He pivots, points the clipboard at the door.

  Sweet merciful God.

  Without a word Meghan reverses course and makes for the door as fast her body will let her go.

  The gym erupts in echoing laughter the second the locker room door closes behind her, but she’s free and full of joy—let them laugh at her if they want.

  The air in the hallway outside the gym is sweet and cool and fresh—almost perfumed. Meghan meanders toward Mrs. Chuddy’s, savoring the lilac scent of liberation.

  As she rounds the corner into the senior hall she almost collides with Aimee Zorn, who’s headed in a furious hurry somewhere.

  “Oh—hi,” Aimee says, stopping short and jumping back. “Sorry.”

  Meghan doesn’t move, doesn’t open her mouth. Now, a voice inside her head says, and it’s so loud, so urgent, so absolutely right. Tell her everything she needs to know right now, and she won’t fall for Cara’s line and you’ll save her from destruction and she’ll be so thankful to you and she’ll become your best friend and—

  “I said sorry,” Aimee says sharply, and Meghan realizes that she hasn’t responded, she’s just been standing there listening to the voice in her head. “Fine, don’t say anything.”

  Just like that Aimee’s gone, shooting like a dart from a blowgun down the hall. Meghan stands still watching her go until she turns the corner into the freshman hall a hundred yards away.

  Aimee never turns back to look at her once.

  8

  “Are you sure you want me to drop you off at the end of the street?” Aimee’s mother asks, pulling over to the curb and putting the Toyota in neutral. “Why don’t you let me take you right up to the house?”

  “Mother, no.” Aimee looks hard out the window of the car, away from her mother, who clutches the steering wheel with both hands and leans forward to peer at her daughter.

  “Well can I at least suggest that you take off the black lipstick?”

  Aimee sighs bluntly.

  “It’s not black,” she says. “It’s Black Cherry.”

  “Regardless, sweetheart, I’m just thinking that as a mom, if I saw a girl walk into my house wearing that—”

  “Mother?” Aimee turns her head sharply.

  “Fine,” her mother says, a tiny bit prickly. “I just think you’d make a better impression on your new friend’s parents if you didn’t show up looking like a trick-or-treater.”

  That’s it—Aimee’s out of the passenger seat and slamming the door of the car behind her.

  “Excuse me,” she hears her mother say, muffled, from inside the Toyota. The buzz of the passenger-side window as it powers down. “Excuse me,” her mother calls again, and Aimee stops, turns, drops her shoulders, five feet away from the car.

  “What?” Aimee demands.

  “Come back here, please.”

  “What?” Aimee asks again, but her mother just gestures: Come here.

  Aimee looks up at the sky and strides back to the car.

  “First of all, what time do you want me to pick you up?”

  “I don’t know, when we’re done. I’ll call you when we’re done.”

  “And second of all, you forgot your Danish.”

  Aimee’s mother thrusts a white box of store-bought Danish rolls through the window at Aimee.

  “Mom—” Aimee is desperate not to touch the box. “I told you I don’t want to bring those. You know wheat’s like number three on the list.”

  “You don’t have to eat them, you don’t even have to touch them, you just have to present them as a gift. It’s customary when you go to someone’s house for brunch to bring a little something.”

  “She didn’t say to bring anything!”

  “But you’re such a polite girl you thought of it anyway,” her mother says, closing the case with a no-more-arguments look.

  Aimee pauses, takes the box with her left hand. The passenger window zips closed and her mother drives off without another word.<
br />
  It’s one of the first real fall days, the chilly smells of smoke and apples seeming to rise up from the earth and sift down from the sky all around her. Gray clouds, tall trees, no breeze. The whole world quiet like it’s waiting for something. Aimee walks slowly down Albemarle Road, the grand avenue of big, relaxed Victorian houses that runs just down the hill from the center of town. The houses here are huge and they seem to recline on their foundations, wrap their gabled arms around screened-in porches, brick verandas, glassed-in greenhouses. The garages on this street used to be barns. The trees are as old as America, solid and soaring. Aimee thinks of her own little condo unit, the spindly saplings stuck in the ground around it, how tense the unit itself feels—three cavy rooms stacked on top of three other cavy rooms, tight and square, like it’s crouched on the cul-de-sac, sulking.

  As she walks, Aimee balances the box of Danish on her left palm. Inside the box the soft, gooey rolls are gummed together in a mass of bun and frosting—Aimee can see them through the little plastic window in the box top. She imagines their bready bottom, almost like flesh, seething with grease and sugar and oil, only a foil pan and a flimsy piece of cardboard away from her skin.

  Cara Roy’s house isn’t the biggest one on Albemarle Road and it isn’t the fanciest. It’s big and it’s fancy and it’s clearly very old, but it’s also modest—brown-shingled instead of patrician gray or yellow like its neighbors on either side, only one screened-in porch, and with a carport attached to one side that looks kind of cheesy, like it was tacked on around the time Bill’s office was carpeted. The house is comforted on all sides by big, lush trees—maples, oaks, and elms, their leaves all starting to turn—and there’s a willowy burning bush out in front on the lawn that’s already a flaming red. A trail of smoke rises from the chimney of Cara’s house into the Sunday morning sky.

  Aimee’s suddenly so nervous that she breaks into a jerky little jog, runs up the walk to the house to keep from freaking out and fleeing. She pretends her hand is someone else’s hand and watches it ring Cara Roy’s doorbell.

  After a beat the big mahogany door swings open and there’s Cara, in comfy pink PJ bottoms and a tank top, barefoot and tousle-headed and smiling her warmest smile.

  “You made it!” she gushes.

  “Yeah,” Aimee says dumbly, and feeling the weight of something foreign on her left hand, looks down and remembers the Danish. She shoves the box forward mechanically. “Here,” she says, “my mother made me.”

  “Oh my gosh, my favorite! That’s so nice!” Cara takes the box from Aimee and gazes down at it in shocked delight as if she’s just been handed the Crown Jewels. Aimee feels pins and needles start to prickle through her hand—it must have gone numb while she was holding the Danish.

  “Come in, come in!” Cara steps aside and Aimee walks into the dark, light, rich, airy interior of Cara’s house.

  “My mom and dad are in the den,” Cara explains as she leads Aimee through the cinnamon-smelling downstairs, all arches and sconces and elaborate wallpapers. “They have to read the entire New York Times, cover to cover, every Sunday morning or they can’t function on Monday. They have a thing about it.”

  Cara leads Aimee to the wide, arched entryway to the living room, and Aimee beholds a scene so lovely it could be painted on a souvenir plate: a crackling fire in a ceramic-tiled fireplace, flanked on either side by a pair of deep burgundy velvet couches, in each of which reclines one of Cara’s parents. Sections of newspaper are spread out all around them, cascading from the coffee table to the carpet and spread across their laps, as if they’re preparing to do a messy art project.

  Mr. Roy is gray-bearded and agile—he looks like he probably jogs and plays squash, he has that muscles-under-old-person-skin thing that reminds Aimee of beef jerky. His thick hair is as gray as his beard, and he’s got a pair of glasses perched at the end of his nose. Actually, so does Cara’s mom—they have matching nose-tip glasses. Cara’s mom is also elegantly gray; her hair is piled up in a loose bun on her head, wisps of it coming out on all sides, and she has a gentle face, a children’s librarian’s face. Together Mr. and Mrs. Roy look perfectly matched, like two bookends or two andirons, a salt and pepper shaker pair.

  Aimee thinks about her mother and Bill: loose, sloppy Bill, never standing still, always jiggling his knee or scratching his neck or bouncing on his toes, and her careful, straight-backed mother; brown, shaggy Bill and her dyed-blonde mother; grass-stained Bill and her dry-cleaned mother. She remembers the barbecue they had once at their condo, the only party Aimee remembers them ever hosting together, and how it was like the guests were on two different teams, her mother’s work friends neatly dressed, standing in stiff, uncomfortable groups, chasing bits of macaroni salad around on their plates and looking the other way when one of Bill’s raggedy writer friends told a dirty joke or farted or burped. You could have walked around the backyard and tagged each guest just by looking at them: his, hers, hers, his.

  “These are my parents,” Cara says. “This is my dad, Dick, he’s an economics professor at the university, and this is my mom, Helen, she’s an independent educational testing consultant. Guys, this is Aimee.”

  “Hello, Aimee,” says Dick Roy.

  “Hello, Aimee,” says Helen Roy.

  Why did she tell me what her parents do for a living? Aimee wonders. I couldn’t tell you what my mother does for a living even if I wanted to. This is my mother, Kathy, she goes to work every day at a place called Macrosystems. Her boss is named Paul. Sometimes when she comes home at night she has toner stains on her hands.

  “It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” Helen goes on. “Cara’s told us so much about you. We hear that you’re a gifted poet.”

  “Oh,” Aimee stammers. “Oh no, not—no—”

  “She’s being modest,” Cara interrupts. “She’s totally brilliant. Aimee is the best thing to happen to Photon since I started it last year.”

  “Well it’s a pleasure to have you in our home,” Dick says. “I’d get up, but as you can see I’m very involved in the Style Section right now.”

  “Yes, it’s very important to Dick that he find out which belt he should be wearing this week,” Helen says, making a wry face at Aimee.

  “You guys,” Cara admonishes.

  “But I already know which belt I’ll be wearing,” Helen says, “so why don’t I join you girls in the kitchen and help you get something to eat?”

  The Roys’ kitchen is a blue-and-white paradise of country charm with a wall of windows looking out over a long, lushly landscaped backyard. Mrs. Roy moves around the kitchen with efficiency and grace, fridge to cupboard, cupboard to sink, her wrists and fingers moving delicately, as if making coffee is a choreographed dance she’s practiced many times.

  “Cara has been waging an ongoing lobbying campaign to get me to let her have coffee in the mornings.”

  “I’m sixteen years old, I’m old enough to have a little caffeine!” Cara fake-pleads.

  “You’re too young. Too young for coffee!” Helen Roy swats Cara’s pink behind with the folded-up Week in Review.

  “Mom, please.” Cara meets Aimee’s eye and gives her a conspiratorial look: Moms are so silly!

  “You’re my daughter and I’m not about to let you ruin your beautiful, innocent body with even the mildest mood-modifying substance. Your mother doesn’t let you have coffee in the mornings, does she, Aimee?”

  “No,” says Aimee. She doesn’t say, One sip would probably kill me.

  “I’m glad to hear it. Coffee is for when you move out of the house or when you’re eighteen, whichever comes first. I don’t live with my parents anymore and I am somewhat older than eighteen, so I’m going to help myself to a second cup of coffee. What are you girls having, do you want me to make eggs? Dad’s going to make pancakes later, if he can tear himself away from the Arts and Leisure.”

  “That’s okay, Mom, look what Aimee brought!”

  “Ooh!” Cara’s mother coos, wide-eyed, at the b
ox of Danish. “Honey, your favorite! Aimee, how did you know?”

  Aimee watches Cara and her mom interact as if she’s at a live taping of a TV show: The Happiest Family in the World. “Episode Six: The Happiest Family in the World Makes Brunch!”

  “You girls let me know if you need anything, all right? Dad and I will be down here fighting over the crossword.”

  “They don’t really fight,” Cara explains reassuringly after her mother leaves the kitchen. “They just debate.”

  Aimee flashes back to the last “debate” she witnessed between her mother and Bill: Bill standing at the bottom of the stairs, her mother at the top, Bill yelling, “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever known in my life,” her mother hurling back, “I just want to know where you were last night. You owe me that much!” Bill yelling, “I don’t owe you a goddamned thing,” and slamming out of the house.

  “Let’s take some food upstairs so we can start sharing our writing,” Cara says eagerly, and Aimee watches Cara excise two little square hunks of Danish from the tin pan, place them on two little rosebud plates, lay a silver fork alongside each one, and tuck a little napkin under the lip of each plate. It’s perfect and beautiful, like brunch in a dollhouse.

  Cara’s room is just as Aimee would have imagined it, if she had let herself imagine it. She stands in the middle of the room after Cara ushers her in, black boots sinking into the furry white carpet, and stares at the spun-sugar perfection all around her. The walls of Cara’s room are pistachio-ice-cream green with a pattern of oak leaves and acorns stenciled in brown and red around the ceiling. The curtains are white, with matching green, brown, and red stripes at the hem. Cara doesn’t even have posters on her walls, she has framed black-and-white photographs, one of a city street in the rain and one of a mountain in the desert with the moon rising over it. In her mind’s eye, Aimee starts lunging around her own room, tearing down the posters of kittens in baskets, the soft-focus poster of the ballet shoe and single red rose on a satin pillow, even the genuine souvenir concert poster from the Born to Run tour that Bill gave her for her eleventh birthday. They’re ancient history, all of them, and they all have to go.