FernFolio

Grade 10 student Meghan Ball is perfecting the art of invisibility.  Her extreme obesity makes her both the target of vicious verbal attacks by J-Bar, Valley Regional High’s star athlete, and renders her a non-person in the eyes of staff and fellow students.  Abandoned in Grade 7 by her only friend, Meghan strives to pass through her days at school without drawing attention, without being called upon in class, without having to endure the humiliation of co-ed gym classes.  She spends as much time as she can get away with in an overlooked music room whose locked door she has learned to finesse, or lying prone on a cot in the nurse’s office, with another one of her “migraines.”
Then, one day when she is lying on that cot, her daydreams are interrupted by the arrival of a second student, Aimee, who claims to be having an allergic reaction to something she’s eaten.  Accustomed to making them up herself, Meghan recognises an excuse when she hears one.  Her curiosity is further piqued when she sees that Aimee is so thin her elbows and knees are knobbly and her bones are sharp, and that the girl uses her body and her facial expressions to push people away.  Meghan recognises something in the strange girl in the velvet hat, and she decides that they are meant be friends.
Aimee is working as hard as Meghan at invisibility.  Her allergy to a couple of foods seems to have blossomed to the point where most any food threatens to evoke an allergic reaction.  Despite her mother’s constant worrying, she eats only sugarless Jell-O, apple slices and raw carrots.  Hunger has become a constant presence, one whose sharpness Aimee has grown to welcome.  Bill, a poet and her mother’s long-time live-in boyfriend, who understands Aimee better than anyone in the world, has recently moved out, taking with him his books of poetry and his gentle, supportive presence.  Though Aimee has called Bill from time to time to talk to him about school and her poetry, she’s going to learn that their relationship cannot go on as before.
One thing Aimee wants to talk about with Bill is the gigantic girl who seems to be following her around.  Another thing she wants to talk about with him is Photon, the school literary review, and its facilitator, grade-ten student Cara Ray, whose love of poetry, and admiration of Aimee’s poems has lured the lonely and prickly teen out of her shell enough to attend Photon meetings and share her writing with the enthusiastic and understanding Cara.
When the fat girl shows up in her driveway to warn her to, “Be careful with Cara… You think you can trust her, but you can’t,” Aimee reacts angrily, and threatens to call the police if Meghan approaches her again.  But, when Cara betrays her trust, Aimee has cause to remember Meghan’s warning, and finds herself seeking out the enormous girl, and asking her for help.
Written by Madeleine George, Looks is a brutal and sensitive examination of adolescence and body image, and eating disorders.  Stripped of the comfort of platitudes or happy endings, George’s story reads like scouring pad poetry; each word scrapes up against the soul.
FernFolio Editor