Free Look at me: by Jennifer Egan Page B

she done? She asked herself that question throughout the day, and after school, when her toxicity had abated to a point where her three best friends could approach, she’d told them what happened and put the question to them: what had she done wrong? Two of them were sleeping with their boyfriends—how was this different? No one seemed to know.
    “Next time, don’t do it unless you’re in love,” said Laurel, now the sole remaining virgin in their quartet.
    “I was in love,” Charlotte said.
    After that, Scott laughed when she passed him in the hall—limping from his wounds, on crutches for two weeks with an Ace bandage around his foot until torn knee ligaments sidelined him for good. As long as he was with other boys, he laughed, but if it was just the two of them in the hall, he turned his face away. He was afraid of her, Charlotte saw this clearly.
    Later, she came to understand that her mistake had been largely one of timing. By the end of sophomore year, she regularly heard girls talk of jumping the bones of boys they liked with no mention of love. And yet a taint still clung to Charlotte. She was seen as odd, perverse. Of course, had she been pretty—had she looked like her mother, for instance—the situation would have been different. Charlotte understood this with a deep, angry ache: There were two worlds, and in one of them, everything was harder. No one came to you, and if you went to them, you were likely to be punished for it.
    Of course she was changing schools. To escape from the people who knew her. To vacate a world where the slot she’d been allotted felt minuscule.
    Now, in the car, she said, “Mom, I think I’m going to add a new fish.”
    “What kind?” her mother asked, but Charlotte heard her distraction—they were late to meet Moose—and didn’t bother answering.
    Moose and his second wife, Priscilla, were already seated in the vast carpeted dining room at a corner table overlooking the Rock River. The Rockford Country Club was poised on a bluff directly across from Shore-wood Park, where Charlotte had stopped to watch the water-skiers this afternoon. The bleachers and water-ski jump were still visible just beyond Moose’s shoulder in the blue twilight. As always, Moose sat sideways, disliking to face the room head-on but disliking equally the vulnerability of having his back to it.
    “Moose!” Harris shouted, offering his hand and then stepping back quickly as Moose rose from his chair. “What’re you drinking there? Martini? Why not? Darling, what can I get you? Kids?” He barked the drink orders at the waitress, a college girl home for summer vacation, then heard himself and sat down, abashed. Moose awakened in Harris a manic desire to seize control, as if he were trying desperately to stave off some communal embarrassment.
    “How’s work, Harris?” Moose asked in his curious monotone, when everyone was seated.
    “Can’t complain. You?”
    “Good,” Moose affirmed, nodding slowly. “Very good.”
    Harris noted, with some satisfaction, that his brother-in-law looked like hell. Still handsome, yes (he grudgingly allowed), in a heavy-browed, almost adolescent way that invoked his mythological past, which Ellen still cherished. But Moose’s eyes were dull, as if he were asleep behind them. His shirt was wrinkled, his hair a mess, and he managed the unlikely feat of looking bloated and deflated simultaneously. Yet for all that, he retained a certain kingliness, an orb of superiority that girded him even now, in his disgrace. Harris found this exasperating.
    “What happened with the Kool-Aid wine coolers?” Priscilla asked Harris. She was a nurse at Rockford Memorial, a slender woman whose cropped hair and delicate face would have counted as gamine in New York or Paris, but in Rockford were thought to be tomboyish, odd.
    “Tested badly,” Harris said. “People thought it was trying to sell booze to kids.”
    “Imagine!” Priscilla said, with an impish widening of