A Work in Progress

These pages show the increasing intensity of Will’s self-talk and negative self-perception and his introduction to Markus, the first schoolmate in years to treat Will as a human. In these pages, the art in Will’s notebook complements the meaning of the words he writes. Will encounters Jules in the hallway and asks the question:

—[W]hat if

I gave her

a chance

to see me? (99).

This is a callback to Will’s mother’s words, where she insisted that he needed to put himself in situations that allowed his peers to “see” him. At the bottom of a page, Will has drawn a hairy monster. It is peeking up over the bottom of the page with half its head visible. This “monster” is how Will perceives himself through the eyes of others. The monster’s half-obscured face, out of the frame of the page, shows the part of himself that is hiding. The fact that the monster is peeking up shows the part of himself that he is considering allowing Jules to “see” him. However, Will still fundamentally sees himself as a “monster” at this point. Will’s negative body image and self-critique get in the way of Authenticity, Friendship, and What It Means to Be Seen.

As Jules approaches, Will has an internal battle. He summons up the courage to talk to her and then immediately doubts himself and his ability. Lerner shows this in the sketches through a series of scribbled-out swirls and drawings. Chaotic scribbles with harsh angles and dark ink obscure smooth, loopy swirls in lighter ink. The loopy swirls symbolize Will’s emotional state in the moments he thinks he can speak to Jules. The scribbles, however, show his frustration and the power of his negative self-talk, overpowering this assurance and dominating his headspace.

There are other instances in which the sketches show what is happening in Will’s mind. When Jules is introduced, Will notices the sketches on her notebook, which remind him of his own: smiling flowers, happy alligators with shining eyes, and clouds raining kittens. As Will’s experience with Body Image, Self-Critique, and Self-Acceptance grows more extreme, these images recur as a motif, but they appear in a changed form. The alligator is menacing, licking its lips. The flower is crying. The storm cloud is angry, and the kittens are panicked as they fall from the sky. Throughout this drawing on Page 120 are the same dark-inked, sharp-angled chaotic scribbles that were used before. Jules’s good drawings turning bad and frightening in Will’s mind could symbolize several things. They symbolize how Will feels “less than” and like a “monster” compared to Jules, who is thin. Additionally, they also symbolize how Will’s brain takes good things and turns them back around on himself in the form of self-hate and self-criticism. For instance, when his mother brings home pizza, instead of it seeming like a yummy treat, he sees it as a “bad” food, which indicates a lack of self-discipline and contributes to him feeling like he is a “monster.” Will’s sketches also evidence this outlook, where he draws a pizza and covers it in dark scribbles. He draws “scent” lines emanating from it and flies surrounding it, implying it is “trash.” Throughout this section, Will begins to ascribe a moral value to food, thinking that he does not “deserve” to eat. In doing so, he engages in extremely restrictive eating, developing tactics for “the moments / it’s hard” (161). For instance, gulping cold water, which “fools” his stomach “into thinking / it’s been fed” (161). These are harmful strategies, as Will is increasingly creating methods to enable disordered eating. In doing so, he refuses to give his body the nutrients he needs to survive and function—something that further fuels his negative body image and self-critique.

Lerner continues to develop Individual and Systemic Anti-Fat Bias in these chapters. Part of the reason Will internalizes the anti-fat bias surrounding him is because his peers reduce his identity solely to his size. Will overhears some girls mention his name. When one asks who Will is, her friend replies, “the fat kid” (109). Will witnesses his complex and individual identity being boiled down until he is only “the fat kid.” The reason Will’s interaction with Markus feels so revelatory to him is that Markus does not engage in this sort of dehumanizing rhetoric. Will is amazed that Markus talks to him “so plainly / so normally” like he is a human being rather than a monster (180). Additionally, Markus’s style choices—tight jeans, long black hair, and hot pink fingernail polish—show Will he is confident in his skin. Will’s admiration for how Markus carries himself and his ability to not treat Will differently foreshadows how their friendship will develop as the novel progresses.