Looks Page 9

  Above Cara’s white-painted desk, which is neatly arranged with stacks of books and papers and binders and a bouquet of freshly sharpened yellow pencils in a mint green mug, is a carefully organized bulletin board: along the top are three vintage travel post-cards—a matching white thumbtack at each corner—of Paris, London, and Rome. In the middle is a production schedule for Photon and a pennant from Valley Regional High. And at the bottom is a row of medals and ribbons, at least twenty-five or thirty of them, pinned to the cork so that the ribbons overlap and the medals hang in an evenly spaced line against the green wall.

  “You’re not looking at the awards, are you?”

  Aimee jumps—she didn’t even realize Cara was watching her look around.

  “Um, yeah, they’re really . . .”

  Cara rolls her eyes. “Whatever, I should take them down. They’re mostly left over from elementary school and junior high. It’s conceited to even have them up there.”

  “No, it’s cool, it’s—really impressive. I’ve never seen so many medals in one place before. What are they for?”

  “JETS, mostly. Junior Engineering Team?” Aimee nods although she’s never heard of this before. “A couple from Academic Decathlon, I don’t do that anymore. A few from riding, I gave that up in eighth grade. And a few from swimming, I don’t compete anymore, I just swim for fitness on the weekends with my mom. But wait, okay, this one I’m actually proud of.”

  Cara crosses to the bulletin board and unpins the last medal in the row, a small bronze disc on a red velvet ribbon.

  “This is my National High-School Poetry Award,” Cara says, cupping the medal in both hands and gazing down at it with a peculiar look on her face, almost like she’s looking into the eyes of her beloved. She holds it up for Aimee to see. “It has a picture of a lyre embossed on it, see? The ancient Greek symbol for lyric.”

  “Wow,” Aimee says.

  “Feel how heavy it is?” Cara lays the medal in Aimee’s hand, and it is surprisingly heavy—it’s as small as a silver dollar but it weighs as much as a paperweight. “Genuine bronze,” Cara explains. “Toni Morrison put it around my neck at the ceremony in D.C. It was incredible. Actually, it was the greatest moment of my life.”

  “Wow,” Aimee says again.

  “Do you want to try it on?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “No, come on, try it on. I’ll put it on you like Toni Morrison put it on me. Bow your head.”

  Obediently Aimee bows her head, and Cara slips the loop around Aimee’s neck. The medallion comes to rest, cool and solid, against her chest.

  “How does it feel?” Cara asks, leaning in to Aimee a little, eyes wide.

  “Wow,” Aimee repeats for the third time.

  “Isn’t it incredible?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  Hesitantly Aimee closes her eyes, and Cara’s hushed voice washes over her.

  “Just feel it. Feel how it tugs on the back of your neck? And how it presses down on your breastbone a little, feel that? It’s not like any other medal I’ve ever gotten. It’s kind of magic—I can’t describe the way it makes me feel. But you could, you’re so good at description. And you feel it, don’t you? Don’t you, Aimee?”

  Aimee opens her eyes. Cara’s face is only a few inches from hers, wide open and full of wonder.

  “Yes,” Aimee says. “I feel it.”

  After a second Cara smiles ruefully and shakes her head, breaking the spell.

  “Of course it’s ridiculous to say that there’s one best poet in the whole country and that person gets a medal.” Cara reaches with both hands for the medal and lifts it off Aimee’s neck. “How can there be just one best poet? I know better than to think it really means that. It’s just a recognition of my hard work and effort, and I was incredibly grateful to be lucky enough to get it.” Cara re-pins the medal to the bulletin board, then turns back to Aimee and treats her to one of her gorgeous smiles. “So okay, are we ready to do some sharing?”

  They settle themselves on the white rug, Aimee with her back against the bed and Cara across from her beside the desk. From inside the bottom drawer of her desk Cara retrieves a pink-canvas-covered three-ring binder with the word POETRY marked in small silver letters in the top right corner of the cover.

  “I’ll go first, since this was my scary little idea,” Cara offers with a knowing smile. She pages through the binder for a second, then holds up her hand for Aimee to see. “Look at me, I’m shaking!” She shakes her trembling hand out from the wrist and laughs a little. “I’m so nervous, God! And I’m never nervous to share my writing. I guess it’s because I admire you so much. I already know how brilliant you are.”

  “Please,” Aimee begs, “stop saying that. I’m seriously not brilliant.” She feels her cheeks get hot.

  “Okay, fine, but you totally are.” Cara selects a poem from the binder and removes it with a snap, holds it up with both hands in front of her. “Calm and cool,” she murmurs to herself, like it’s a mantra she’s said many times before. “Calm and cool.” She takes a breath.

  “‘Autumn Elegy,’” Cara reads.

  “Trees die in a blaze of glory,

  but people fade away.

  My grandmother’s face is ashen—

  gray against the white nightgown,

  her hand gray against the white blanket,

  her hair gray against the white pillowcase.

  I walk out the nursing home door

  into autumn’s red,

  gold,

  orange,

  and brown.

  Even the withered leaves glow like jewels

  after my grandmother’s

  colorless room,

  decorations for

  the last party

  these trees will ever throw.”

  As soon as she’s done reading, Cara looks up and scans Aimee’s face for a reaction.

  “Awesome,” Aimee says immediately.

  “God, really?” Cara’s cheeks flood pink with relief.

  “Seriously, awesome. Is that the poem that won you the medal?”

  “Oh, no, that one was about the Holocaust. We were doing a unit on it in Euro II last year. But I don’t know, I was thinking about submitting this grandma one to this year’s competition. What do you think?”

  “Um, yeah, it’s totally great.”

  Cara narrows her eyes. “What? You think I should change something. What’s wrong with it?”

  “No, nothing’s wrong with it, it’s awesome! I was just . . . thinking that you might add, like, one or two more details about visiting your grandmother in the nursing home, like what else do you remember besides the gray and white colors in her room?”

  At this Cara smiles. “Oh, I never actually visited my grandmother in a nursing home.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just made that up. One of my grandmothers died before I was born and the other one lives in an active seniors community in Florida, she’s fine. I’m just using the nursing home as a metaphor.”

  “Oh. That’s cool.” For some reason Aimee feels mildly tricked, but she can’t tell exactly why.

  “It’s poetry,” Cara reminds her gently, noticing Aimee’s altered expression. “It’s art, right? As in artificial? You’re allowed to make things up.”

  “No, you totally are.” Aimee nods. How dumb to feel tricked by a poem. Art as in artificial. Not everything people write is true, of course not. “Well okay, so maybe you can make up a couple more details about the nursing home, then. Bill always says write it down exactly like you saw it and other people will see what you saw.”

  “Who’s Bill?”

  “Bill is my . . .” Aimee trails off. Mother’s most recent ex-boyfriend? Almost-but-not-quite stepfather? Long-lost best friend? Poetry guru? “Bill’s a guy I know,” Aimee explains finally. “He teaches poetry and he knows a ton about poetry and he, like, taught me everything I know about poetry.”

  “Well if he taught you, h
e must be amazing.”

  Aimee lets this one go without comment. “Anyway, maybe a couple more details in the nursing home part, like from the five senses?”

  “Thank you, Aimee, that’s an awesome suggestion.” Cara nods and smiles big. “I will absolutely put a few more details in the nursing home part, from the five senses. That’s going to make the piece so much stronger. See, what did I tell you—brilliant!”

  Again Aimee blushes, in spite of herself.

  “Okay,” Cara says brightly, “your turn!”

  Aimee reaches for her coat, lying in a heap beside her on the rug, and extracts from the pocket the stack of poems she brought with her, folded up into a hard square of printer paper. She unfolds them into her lap and stares down at them. It’s hard to know which one to bare in front of Cara—each one is so raw and personal. Reading any one of them aloud will be like ripping off a Band-Aid and shoving the fresh wound beneath into Cara’s face. And something about Cara’s nursing home poem is making Aimee even more scared—there’s nothing artificial in any of her poems, she’s worked hard to make sure of that.

  “If you’re too shy to read your own piece, I’ll read it for you,” Cara says, and in a flash the top poem from Aimee’s stack is in Cara’s hands.

  “Um—” Aimee reaches limply for the page but Cara lifts it up out of her reach.

  “Sometimes,” Cara says, looking not at Aimee but at her poem, “it can be amazing to hear what your words sound like coming out of someone else’s mouth. Like when Toni Morrison read my poem at the ceremony in D.C. I felt like I was hearing things in it I didn’t even know were there. So just listen to this now and see if you don’t hear something new.”

  Cara straightens her back, shifts her butt around on the white rug until she’s perfectly comfortable, and reads Aimee’s poem aloud, as clearly and confidently as a radio announcer.

  “Hunger is a blade that carves me

  I open my arms and pull the air in

  —big hug!—

  then poof, right through me, nobody there.

  It’s only me holding myself.

  My arms wrap two times

  around my own ribs,

  meet behind my back for a secret

  handshake.

  I am not what was expected.

  I’m so sharp—

  it’s cut me now I’ll cut you.

  Come closer

  closer

  No, come closer

  I’m gonna make you see what I see.”

  After she’s done reading Cara pauses, then lets out a low, slow breath.

  “Incredible,” she almost whispers. Aimee’s auto-blush surges back into her cheeks. “No, I can’t believe—this is just like with the other poem you submitted, you have this way of making us feel things without saying hardly anything, and the way you use slang, I just love how you use slang, it makes your writing feel so alive. I don’t know, you are just so amazing, Aimee, I don’t even know how to say how amazing you are.”

  “Stop it.” Aimee can hardly stand it anymore.

  “I won’t stop it until you accept that you’re a genius. Look at this, look at this, in like”—Cara counts rapidly down the page—“sixteen little lines you manage to capture the entire feeling of anorexia. I know exactly what you’re talking about here.”

  Aimee’s breath dies in her throat.

  “What do you mean, anorexia?”

  Cara falters.

  “Oh . . . isn’t this . . . a poem about anorexia?”

  “Um, I guess it’s . . . a poem about being hungry? And like, angry? But it’s not, I mean, it’s not about an eating disorder.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “I don’t know anything about eating disorders.”

  “No, sure. I shouldn’t have made that assumption.”

  The conversation sputters and coasts to a halt like a car running out of gas by the side of the road.

  After a long, uncomfortable pause Cara says carefully, still looking down at the poem, “I guess the reason why I made that assumption was because I used to be anorexic, and the poem really captured some of the feelings I used to have when I was anorexic.”

  “When were you anorexic?” Aimee blurts out, too curious to worry about being polite.

  “Junior high. Sort of seventh but mostly eighth grade.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “Um . . .” Cara looks up at the ceiling, a delicate fissure cracking through her composure. “I guess it’s sort of hard to say how I got it? I was pretty lonely then, I guess? I sort of all of a sudden didn’t have any friends? I had this one person I was really close to and then like overnight we weren’t friends anymore. That was hard. And also I was a real perfectionist, I was always trying to be, like, the perfect student, the perfect daughter, the perfect—” Cara sighs suddenly, sharply. “God, it’s so embarrassing, it’s such a cliché! My life is like every dumb eating disorder movie they show you in Health. I’m sorry, it’s such a boring story.”

  “It’s not boring. It’s not boring to me.” Aimee feels like she’d do anything to keep Cara talking. “Please just . . . tell me the whole story.”

  “Well, whatever, that’s basically it. I don’t even have to say any more. If you know all those other clichéd stories, you know mine.”

  “That’s impossible,” Aimee objects. “No one has your exact same experience. Every single person’s story is different.”

  “Maybe.” Cara looks at Aimee thoughtfully, as if she’s letting that idea sink in. “Maybe.”

  “So how did you get better?”

  “Well, first of all my doctor made me drink these protein shakes that were the most disgusting things in the entire world.”

  “What were they like?” Aimee pulls her knees in to her chest to keep herself from pitching toward Cara out of sheer curiosity.

  “They’re basically like if you put paste and dust in a blender with milk and chalk and then drank a huge glass of it. So, so nasty. Just thinking about them makes me want to hurl.”

  Aimee feels her own throat back up at the thought of being forced to drink a glass of thick, gluey liquid.

  “And then my parents also made me see a therapist, which I totally hated at first. I went in there thinking that there was nothing she could tell me about myself that I didn’t already know, but I ended up loving her so much. Carol. She completely changed my life. She helped me see that if you’re always competing to be the best at everything then you never get to actually live your life. The only way you can have a real life is if you slow down enough to really take the world in, and, like, feel what it actually feels like and see what it actually looks like around you. And you can only do that when you realize that you’re good enough just the way you are, you don’t need to be constantly proving yourself or beating yourself up for how much you suck at everything. You’re the perfect you in this moment. That’s what Carol used to say to me all the time.”

  “‘You’re the perfect you in this moment.’”

  “Yeah, isn’t that awesome? It’s sort of hard to remember, but it’s a really important idea. I write it down on the inside of every one of my textbooks as soon as I cover them, so I can see it every time I go to study. ‘I’m the perfect me in this moment.’”

  Aimee nods.

  “That way I don’t get hung up on whether or not I’m understanding things perfectly enough when I’m reading.” Aimee nods again, and Cara makes a tentative face. “Hey, um,” she ventures, “can I ask a big favor? Say no if it’s too weird, okay? Totally say no.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can I hold on to this poem?”

  Cara holds up the hunger poem.

  “Um, sure. I mean, of course.”

  “It’s just, you already know that I’m a huge fan of your writing, but this poem in particular speaks to me so intensely, I practically feel like it was written for me. It’s like you’re expressing my own feelings better than I ever could. I want to read it, like, again and again, even after you
’re gone.”

  “Sure,” says Aimee.

  Cara looks down at Aimee’s poem with the same mysterious combination of adoration and awe that she gave her own poetry medal.

  “Seriously, I don’t mean to be weird,” she says quietly, “but your poem makes me feel like I’m not alone in the world.”

  “God.” Aimee shakes her head. “That’s like, a huge thing to say.”

  “Well it’s a hugely awesome poem.”

  “You’re hugely awesome to ask for it.”

  “You’re hugely awesome to share it with me.”

  “Oh my God, we’re both so hugely awesome!” Aimee feels the laughter bubbling up from her core. “We’re the perfect us in this moment!”

  The afternoon glides over them, long and cozy and gray. Cara’s mom comes up to check on them and offer them pancakes, but Cara shoos her away—they’re too busy to break their concentration for food.

  By the end of the afternoon the sky is deep blue behind the wavy glass of the windowpanes. The lights on Cara’s desk and nightstand are on, casting a golden glow over the green-and-white room, and Aimee is stretched out on her side on the white rug, boots off in a heap by the door, feet in their striped socks exposed. Cara is sprawled out in the opposite direction and the room is strewn with poetry—drifts of it, pages scattered all over the floor. Under the bed Aimee’s plate of Danish lies, still untouched.

  Cara has read poems about a nest of baby birds, the feeling of playing the cello, a swimming hole in New Hampshire, and hunting for Easter eggs. Aimee has read poems about pain and ugliness and despair, and also a poem about the time Bill tried to make a soufflé and ended up wrecking it so badly that he flew into a rage and threw a dozen eggs at the kitchen wall one at a time, swearing at each one.

  Drunk on the elixir of sharing, Aimee has gotten looser and looser all afternoon, so that now she rolls over languidly on her back and looks up at the ceiling, as relaxed as if she were in her own room by herself.

  “So which poem do you think I should submit to the competition?” Aimee asks. “The hunger one, right? That one’s the best.”