Two years later Meredith still did not feel like a big girl. She and Kristy would locate the emptiest corner of the locker room and serve as each other’s shields—the changer’s body bent, the shielder’s eyes averted. Meredith regarded with a mixture of awe and disgust the girls who stood casually naked before their lockers. Of course Lisa and her pack were among this group, but there were others, too, people she actually liked. She did not understand how they could speak to each other with ease, as if their pubic hair was invisible, as if their breasts were no more to be hidden than their arms. They were like another species to her, obscene in their nonchalance.
The day ended with math. This was her wheelhouse, and thank god it came at the end of the day, in the nick of time, because math she got. When they did problems on the white board she wrote with confidence, sometimes even a cheereful, uncharacteristic arrogance. She was in Algebra II with only a handful of other students, working well ahead of the rest of the eighth grade. Today they had a test on rational functions. She had studied last night. She was well prepared. “Problem 1: Does the following table represent an inverse variation function? If so, find the missing value.” She was flying, acing it, sailing through the asymptotes and the x-and y-intercepts. With five minutes left in class and only one problem to go, her pencil point broke, and she stupidly had not brought a backup, so she had to get up and rush to the sharpener. Then the pencil got stuck in the sharpener and she had to wrestle with it and the class looked up at her, unhappily as one, and Mrs. Adolphson’s massive brow furrowed.
Meredith looked at her wrist and realized she had forgotten to check her “watch” at the appointed hour. She knew it was now well past 2:15. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was 2:40. In just a few minutes she would be headed home. Maybe she would stop at the Deli Barn on the way. Maybe she would reward herself with a large root beer. The promise of this gave her a burst of strength, and with one last violent, class-distracting grind, she was able to twist her battered pencil free.
2
When Meredith was a toddler, her big brother Evan was a jubilant first-grader. Young Evan was so jubilant that the first criticism ever leveled at him by a teacher was that he literally whistled while he worked. This had come in kindergarten, just after he’d mastered the skill and was determined to share it with the world. He sat in his miniature chair at his miniature desk in his cheerful sunlit classroom, coloring numbers and letters and dinosaurs and trees and trains. And whistling. He couldn’t stop whistling. His closest neighbors, the others in the rectangle cluster of miniature chairs at their miniature desks, could not concentrate. How to stay in the lines while the boy beside you whistles his way through the entire Lion King soundtrack?
Claire and Mark had laughed over this after the initial report at the parent/teacher conference. “We’ve clearly failed!” they said. “Our child is too happy!” In spirit only, they exchanged exuberant high-fives for having co-created a perfect child . . . and look, there was another co-creation, four years younger than the first and every bit as perfect!
But one afternoon the next year, when Claire went to collect Evan from school, the first-grade teacher pulled her aside in the main lobby and reported in a hushed voice that some of the other boys in class had been teasing Evan about his weight.
“His weight?” Claire shifted two-year-old Meredith to her other hip; Meredith was a squirrely toddler (squirrely but perfect!), rarely content to be in one position for more than about fifteen seconds. Claire knew if she put Meredith down in the school lobby, chaos would ensue. “What about his weight?”
It had never occurred to Claire that Evan’s weight might make him a target, because she had never considered him fat. She had seen plenty of fat kids in her exam rooms; most of them had a mouthful of cavities to go with their rolling stomachs. Evan was nothing like that. Evan was big, like Mark. He’d been a big baby and a big toddler and now he was a big six-year-old, more round than straight. It wasn’t his diet; it was his body type. Mark had looked the same in childhood photos, darling, thriving, not fat. Evan didn’t eat candy or drink soda and he was always running around and—
“One of the boys called him a porker,” the teacher whispered. She was a new teacher, no more than a year from undergrad, and she actually blushed when she said the word. It did sound obscene, Claire thought, especially coming out of the mouth of an adult, like it couldn’t help but have a sexual connotation, but the fact that it didn’t in this context made it seem somehow even more revolting. “Then it caught on and a few boys started doing it. Has he been upset at home?”
Claire put Meredith down but kept a firm grip on her hand. “When would he have been upset at home? When did this happen?”
The teacher smiled (a pity smile, Claire recognized) at the bouncing Evan, who was leaping from red square to black square on the lobby’s gleaming tiled floor, much to the amusement of his sister, who was attempting to twist her sweaty hand free from Claire’s fingers so that she could join her brother. “Ebben,” she said. She said this one thousand times every day. “Ebben. Ebben.” The halls were empty now and the slap of his sneakers echoed in the stairwells above.
“It started last week,” the teacher said. “I’ve spoken to the boys about it privately, but there’s one in particular who won’t let it drop.”
“Last week?” Claire said. She let Meredith go. It was like letting a puppy off a leash, her daughter around the corner and down a hallway and out of sight in seconds, Evan trailing behind. “It started last week and you’re just telling me now?”
“We try to let the kids work these things out on their own,” the teacher said, standing a little straighter. “If we involve the parents every time someone gets called a name . . . ” She trailed off, leaving Claire to assume the rest of the sentence, in which she and every other attentive parent in the world was tried and convicted. Claire realized that in the space of two minutes she had unwittingly become that kind of parent—and it wasn’t even fair; she’d asked only a single question, expressed in an entirely justifiable moment of surprise, and now she imagined she was flagged, probably forever, before she’d even had a chance to decide what kind of parent she wanted to be in this new world with these new rules.
“Really, I just wanted you to be aware,” the teacher said. “Generally we believe in awareness, not intervention.”
Hey, great motto! Claire thought. Students, teachers, parents, please take note: Awareness is now sufficient. An actual response is not necessary. Why act on what you know, when knowing is considered enough?
Meredith and Evan had wound their way back around to the front doors, so Claire took the opportunity for escape, muttered a thank-you to the teacher over her shoulder as she caught up with her children.