Looks Like
We Made It
T by Megan Nolan Illustrations: Isadora Epstein
18
he beginning of courtship is a web of minor lies resting on a foundation of one great lie: the pretence of friendship. Here we see two recently bathed people touring coffee shops and parks, a foot of space carefully guarded between them. They are suddenly aware of the numerous ways in which their manner of leg-crossing and drink-sipping can be stupid. They want to laugh charmingly at even the flattest joke, but how wide a grin is too wide? Does it make her cheeks look fat? His nostrils flare?
my hair even though J-17 had warned me this was a “tell”. I maintained eye contact in what I can only assume was a frankly bizarre manner, because I imagined that maintaining eye contact for long periods of time was what sexy adult women did. Officially, we were friends, but with my real friends I ate pizza in bed and watched Embarrassing Bodies. My friendships do not generally include a horror of being seen consuming anything less restrained and ladylike than a glass of water. That was another fun characteristic of these little outings, an inability to eat anything ― or, if I could bring myself to order something adorably feminine like a cupcake, to eat it in annoyingly tiny, bird-like increments. “How daintily she eats her small portion!” I imagined them thinking, “I MUST have her.”
I used to notice with disgust how my speech pattern and intonation would change when I was talking to boys I liked. I instantly went up a pitch and began to raise the end of sentences into Valley Girl-ish questions. I fondled
Every inane, painfully casual move contained some coded portent. I remember lending my then-boyfriend a book (strictly Observer Review section approved, obviously), and before giving it to him writing my name on its