terrible thing to ask. Who would even think to ask such a thing? Maggie is brash and loud, but she is not cruel or unthinking.
Sometime thereafter, Mr. Knodel—as though, some students joke, to show he was not terribly handicapped by the missing testicle—takes a paternity leave. His wife has given birth to their second child. Mr. Murphy subs for him during this time. When Mr. Knodel returns, fresh from fatherhood, he seems to have been opened up. He’s become revitalized and accessible in a new way—a gleaming, avuncular oyster.
Maggie doesn’t remember exactly how she started to talk to him about her life in those after-school sessions. She’d linger after his class, or he would ask her a question when she was on her way out the door. Maggie, he’d say, with incredibly earnest eyes, and she’d hang back. Eventually, she started to tell him bits. Her dad being too drunk to drive home from the bar. That they’d had a fight last night, and she didn’t want to listen to him, because how could you listen to a father who asked you to buy him a six-pack?
If she hadn’t brought him a morsel in a while, he might prod her. He might say, Hey, everything okay at home? And Maggie would hang back and tell him whatever was new. He was a good teacher, and he cared. Sometimes there’s nothing better on earth than someone asking you a question.
Lina
There are two kinds of fifteen-year-old girls, Lina knows, and she belongs to the kind that does more sticker-collecting than French-kissing. In her bedroom she closes her eyes and imagines falling in love. Lina wants that more than anything else. She believes that girls who say they want to be successful in their careers more than they want to fall in love are lying. Downstairs her mom is cooking meat loaf. Lina hates it. Specifically, she hates the way the smell lingers. The whole house smells like meat loaf right now, and for days afterward the dust on the banisters will hold on to the browned stink.
On her forehead she has a pimple, the center of which is the color of a blood orange. It’s Friday, which doesn’t mean anything because her Fridays are pretty much like Tuesdays and if anything Tuesdays are better than Fridays because at least on Tuesdays you can be sure everyone else is doing nothing much, just like you. Some people are doing nothing much in modular homes or trailers. At least Lina lives in a decent home. There’s always something worse, though of course there’s also always something better.
But this Friday is going to be different. She doesn’t know it yet, but this Friday is going to change her life forever.
A few weeks ago, Lina’s friend Jennifer, who makes out a lot, started dating this guy Rod. Rod is best friends with Aidan and Lina has the kind of crush on Aidan that any unpopular girl has on any popular boy. He’s strong and hot and extremely quiet so that every time he opens his mouth it’s exciting. It’s only a medium crush because she barely even sees him. They share one class and have never spoken. He dates girls with blow-job lips and big breasts and a certain kind of straight, soft hair. He dates hot girls.
Lina doesn’t have dysmorphia. She doesn’t look in the mirror and see an ugly girl. She looks in the mirror and sees exactly what is there to see, wavy blond hair to her shoulders and gray-blue eyes and reddish skin that grows little rows of pimples along the hairline. She’s a normal height, five-four, and her body is normal to good: her thighs don’t touch too much and if she skips dinner she feels okay about her stomach.
But she’s not beautiful. For example, if she were suddenly to become Aidan’s girlfriend, she could not imagine another boy saying, Man, Aidan’s chick is hot.
And she’s realizing, lately, that nothing in the world could possibly be more important. Nothing else matters. Or rather, everything else would matter, because when you are hot, you have the freedom and liberty to concentrate on the rest of life. You are hot, so you don’t need to take an hour in front of the mirror to look decent. You are hot, so you don’t have to try to make someone love you. You are hot, so you never have to cry, but when you do, it is because somebody has died, and you will look