Read Online Look at me: by Jennifer Egan - Free Book Online Page B

of the city, as if their exertions of a hundred years ago had drained them beyond recovery. Nowadays, the action lay on the river’s east side, where Charlotte lived, whose vital artery was not the river at all but State Street, running west to east, accruing strip malls and superstores and condominium spuds as it moved farther from the old city center until, by the time it reached the interstate, five miles out, it encompassed six lanes of traffic.
    The last time Charlotte had seen Uncle Moose, she’d been seated beside him at the country club. He was a history professor at Winnebago College: a handsome, erratic man whose attention she could never fully capture. When he’d opened his wallet to pay for dinner (insisting, despite her father’s protestations), she had glimpsed inside it a picture she’d noticed before. Of water. The only picture he carried.
    “What’s that?” she’d asked, but Moose seemed not to hear. “That picture,” she said, more softly. “What is it?”
    Moose slid the picture from its cheap plastic sleeve and handed it over. It was a photograph of a river, ancient, sepia-toned, its whites bleached to snow. It had the beloved, handled look of pictures of people’s children. But it was a river. At the bottom, someone had scratched into the negative “Rock River, 1904.”
    The strangeness of this had affronted Charlotte. “What’s the point of it?” she asked.
    Moose glanced at her with dark, skittish eyes. Charlotte sensed that she’d disappointed him. “Evidence,” was all he said.
    It surprised her, how many times she’d thought of that photograph in the intervening months. Rock River, 1904. A domed building—or had she invented it? A riverboat. Church steeples. Evidence , he’d said. Evidence of what?
    The man on the grass had turned and was looking up at her. “Good evening,” he said, with odd formality. Even without her glasses, Charlotte knew she had never seen him before. He had a long gash down one side of his face. Inside his sling she saw an arm in a cast.
    “The girl in perpetual motion,” he said. “Every day, on that bicycle.”
    A weirdo, Charlotte thought, and her interest sharpened. The man rose to his feet, as if it bothered him to sit while she was standing. He wore old khakis and had a tired adulthood about him, a relief from the evil cuteness of boys her age. He moved with a limp. Charlotte wondered what had happened to him.
    “Rockford, Illinois,” he said, and the curl of his accent, which she’d barely noticed, bent against her city’s name. “So very ugly.”
    “Go back where you came from, if you don’t like it,” she said.
    He smiled. White teeth. “That’s not possible.”
    “Then don’t call it ugly.”
    He studied her. “How old are you, if I may ask?”
    “Sixteen.”
    “You’re pretty.”
    She narrowed her eyes. “I’m not.”
    “Unusual.”
    “That’s not the same.”
    “It lasts longer.”
    Liar, Charlotte thought, but she was flattered. Her build was slight but very strong; “wiry” was a word people used to describe her, though in her own view, she was distinguished by a near-total absence of breasts. She had waited, hoping they would arrive, erupt, emerge—rise from the bony tray of her chest like two lovely cakes. Last year, she had ordered a pressure device from the back pages of a magazine (it arrived in plain brown paper) and squeezed it between her palms each morning and night; at a later, more desperate juncture, she had swallowed fifty green pills of dubious provenance on successive nights, pills that made her urine smell like lavender.
    “Boys don’t like me,” she told the man, emboldened by the very fact that he was a stranger.
    “They’ll grow up,” he said, “and admire your eyes.”
    “I wear glasses.” She was holding them in her hand.
    He scanned her face as if trying to imagine it. Charlotte resisted the urge to put her glasses on. “Contacts hurt,” she explained.
    “Glasses are normal,”