A perverse instinct in Megan wanted to say, "Botero," or "Rubens," and ask the girls to model. Maybe that would have woken them up. With a few exceptions, she realized with alarm, their figures would have been large enough to satisfy either artist. She looked at the girls, not even bothering to hide their texting and snacking from her, when it hit her--not only were most of the girls overweight by at least fifty pounds--they also, without exception, had beautiful faces. Models' faces. Their cheekbones (now concealed beneath generous cheeks) had mostly been high. Their skin--dark or light--was flawless. Their teeth straight and white.
"Miss Porter?" said a blonde--Valerie--raising a dimpled hand. The rest of the class giggled, bellies quivering under shirts only just too tight.
"Sorry girls," Megan forced a laugh and shook her own honey-colored curls. "I can be a real ditz sometimes. Study--so you don't end up like me!"
The girls tittered even louder. Did they actually like her? Females--especially female students--never liked her.
"Uh, so, as I was saying, we'll be studying negative space today."
A few quizzical looks. A few other girls went back to texting and snacking.
"It doesn't sound interesting," said Megan, "but it really is." A few more gorgeous heads of hair looked down, away from her. The ship was sinking.
"Uh...you there--Raquel, right?"
A brunette looked defensively up from her phone, traces of powdered sugar around her lovely mouth. "I was just--" she began, attempting to excuse her inattention.
"Would you mind coming up here, real quick--you're not in trouble!"
Raquel, her face half-stuck in a decadent pout, extricated her bulk from her desk. The class, at least, had Megan's attention.
"Now," said Megan, "say I was going to draw, or paint, Raquel. I wouldn't just draw her. I would draw the space around her."
Valerie raised her hand again. Megan couldn't quite get over how much she looked, and acted, like she had at seventeen--only about a hundred pounds heavier. "You mean we have to draw the windows and the walls, and you, and the rest of the students and stuff?"
"Not exactly," said Megan. "If you did that, the painting wouldn't be about Raquel."
A few more of the girls were interested now. A few others she had lost forever. Raquel, at least, was paying attention.
"What I mean is this--what makes Raquel look the way she does?" As soon as she asked this, she realized it had been a poor choice of words. Raquel decided to beat the other girls to the punchline, however.
"Donuts and pizza, mostly!" guffawed the brunette, squeezing her belly with her two hands. The rest of the class erupted in laughter. Now this was strange as well, thought Megan--this decided lack of self-consciousness about weight that her entire class--and all the girls at Buttercombe--seemed to share. In any other classroom, even if a class clown had made the joke about herself, most of the girls would not have dared to laugh so loudly--being overweight was deeply shameful, a taboo. Here, girls seemed to eat without restraint, and then laugh about it with equal abandon.
Megan smiled and tried to join in the laughter. "No, that's not quite what I mean, Raquel. I mean that there is the space that's full of...you...the space that the drawing is about. The positive space. But there's also space around you, that's full of nothing. The positive space isn't the only thing that gives you shape, but also the negative space--the empty space. Today, we're drawing the empty space AROUND objects--the space which shapes objects.
A few of the students managed to say, "Oh." A few went back to not caring. But ten minutes later, they had understood the lesson, and were hard at work drawing the space around chairs, or people, or herself.
Megan used this time to take roll. She remembered what had so surprised her the first day she had taught--that, without exception, all the sophomores, juniors and seniors in her class (aged seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, respectively--this was a preparatory academy, not a run-of-the-mill high school) were quite heavy--and the four freshmen were not. Yet now--a mere three weeks after the semester began--she noticed a slight increase in the weight of her sixteen-year-old students. It was puzzling.
Class ended, her students thanked her, and rushed--or, more accurately, waddled--off, probably toward the cafeteria, which was open all day. In reality, Megan thought, looking outside at the crowds of globular students, just about every building on campus was a cafeteria by any other school's standards. Still, even if the school did not make it so easy to gain weight...why didn't the girls care? Why did they lack the kind of self-consciousness--to the point of developing eating disorders--that plagued every other teenage girl? Not only the students, but teachers, who were usually at least as heavy. And why hadn't she, Megan Porter, been affected in the same way? How was the space around these girls shaping them?
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