The Adults by Alison Espach Read Free Book Online

your lives.”
    We groaned. It was too early in the morning to understand such things.
    “Just like everything in science,” she said, writing SCIENCE on the board, “beauty has evolved over time. Beauty is real, but it is also crucial to keep in mind that it is equally an ideal established by the culture in which you exist. Beauty in the eighteen hundreds was much different than what we think beauty is now.”
    The Other Girls were fascinated, the first time all year they had visibly reacted to something Ms. Nailer had said. One of them raised her hand and wanted to know what was considered beautiful back in the day. One of them couldn’t imagine a world where Brittany Stone wasn’t the most beautiful girl in school. Brittany Stone said she couldn’t imagine a world where Ms. Nailer was the authority on all matters of beauty. Neither could I really. Every day, I tried to be surprising in my footwear, and Ms. Nailer did not, standing in front of the classroom, fully formed in her ugly suede flats and her two-piece suits that she probably got from Talbots, where we sat on benches outside the fitting rooms in snug tubular dresses that made me feel like a hollow tube of toothpaste, picking our scabs, watching Janice’s mother try on mustard suits that were too broad in the shoulders.
    “Back in the day,” Ms. Nailer said, “scientists used a mathematical formula to decide who was beautiful and who was not. There was such a thing called the Facial Angle.”
    “Huh?” asked Ambrose, the albino boy who sat in front and answered most of Ms. Nailer’s questions with, “According to Satan.”
    “Richard,” Ms. Nailer said. “Please come up here.”
    Richard looked around, nervous. He rose from his seat. Ms. Nailer got out two rulers from her desk and Richard halted in front of the class rabbit.
    “I’m not going to hit you,” Ms. Nailer said. “Come closer.”
    Richard walked toward her. She put two rulers to Richard’s face and measured him vertically and horizontally, the two rulers intersecting at his ear.
    “The angle that the two rulers create determines if a person is more human or more primate,” Ms. Nailer said. “This is obviously an imprecise measurement, but I’m getting one hundred degrees!”
    “Richard’s a primate?”
    “Actually, no,” Ms. Nailer said. “Far from it. One hundred degrees was approximately the angle you will find in the faces of classical Greek art.”
    Richard smiled as though he had known it all along. People booed.
    “Scientists theorize that people are attracted to other people with similar facial angles. Meaning, Richard is most likely attracted to women who best represent the ideal of classical Greek beauty.”
    “That’s racist,” someone said. “Richard’s a racist.”
    “It’s not racist,” Ms. Nailer said. “It’s evolution.”
    “My dad said evolution is racist.”
    “People picked partners based off similar facial angles for thousands of years, but subconsciously. It wasn’t until recently that people started to understand attraction through the lens of science.”
    “Measure my face!” Brittany Stone shouted out.
    “And my face!” Martha Collins said.
    I knew Martha from elementary school, but we stopped being friends in the sixth grade when she asked me if I wanted to play this game called Cats in the House, which required taking off all our clothes, including our socks. When I protested, she said, “You don’t see cats walking around the house with clothes on, do you?”
    “I just don’t see why we have to be naked,” I said. I left her house and the shame of it all kept us from speaking for three years, until we ended up in biology together. She was the only person I knew sort of well, and it seemed that when you were a freshman walking into a classroom, you saw only a string of people you couldn’t sit next to for some reason or another: girls who didn’t know you, girls who thought your angular features were obnoxious, or Richard,