Alexander Wells

    A specter is haunting the World Wide Web—the specter of smarm. 

    Or so Tom Scocca, features editor at Gawker, would have it. His bombastic opinion piece “On Smarm” took the online literary world  by storm last December, drawing not just affirming nods from fellow smarm-conspiracy theorists but replies from big names like Maureen Dowd and Malcolm Gladwell as well. (It also drew a fair number of unique page views: more than “I Can’t Stop Looking At This Weird Chinese Goat,” but less than “Two Minutes Of Nothing But Goats Yelling Like Humans,” which is fairly strong on the Gawker scale of buzz). 

    In Scocca’s view, the proliferating complaints about snark and its dominance have got the whole thing upside down. We do not live  in an age of snark, he says. We live instead in an age of smarm— and here, Scocca argues, in a succinct eight and a half thousand words, be the real dragons. Scocca is reluctant to explain just what he means by snark. He would rather talk about smarm, which he defines like this: 



*Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. *



    The real danger of smarm, Scocca writes, is that it lets people off the hook: It uses niceness as a cover for evasion. Faced with any kind of criticism, the “smarmer” tries to silence the critic without addressing the content of the objection. 

    Armed with this exciting new term, Scocca’s essay assembles a formidable parade of smarmers for us to scrutinize—smarmers in literature, smarmers in journalism, smarmers in politics. Isaac Fitzgerald, editor of the newly created BuzzFeed Books section, cops a particular bruising for his determination to publish only positive book reviews, in adherence to the “Bambi rule”—*If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.* The “no haters” ethos of BuzzFeed, Scocca claims, has allowed that website to thrive in the “online sharing economy,” where agreeability leads to popularity and popularity leads to value. Other so-called smarmers are called out, as well: Joe Lieberman, Niall Ferguson, and Jonah Lehrer— Mayor Bloomberg even gets a look-in—not to mention Malcolm Gladwell, and from there, naturally, the whole political discourse of Bush-era foreign policy. 

    Special attention is reserved for Dave Eggers, the “most significant explicator of the niceness rule,” the “true prophetic voice of anti-negativity,” whose by-now half-famous “sell-out” rant in an interview with* The Harvard Advocate* in 2000 culminated in a feverish invocation to create rather than dismiss: “Do not be critics, you people,” Eggers fumed. “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.” 

    Scocca uses Eggers as his point of entry and exit in the piece. Eggers’s rant must surely be the epitome of smarm. *Don’t call me a sell-out*, Scocca’s puppet-Eggers seems to say. *You have no right, because I am out here doing real work, whereas you are simply sniping from the sidelines*. Such a glass-jawed refusal to be criticized must no doubt be an act of bad faith. And surely, if the world is run on smarm, then the only right response is to rebel—to defend at all costs the right to criticize and interrogate. 

    Except that Scocca doesn’t really make this case in his article. For one thing, he is wrong about Dave Eggers. (For another, he seems to misrepresent most of his sources.) Scocca’s essay is strongest where it critiques the ways in which the politically powerful make appeals to niceness as a way to silence debate. But only very few of his examples fit this framework. Throughout the majority of his piece, Scocca is actually on the defensive: He conceptualizes snark and smarm as opposing forces, hoping to use the ubiquity of smarm as a justification for snark. By stretching smarm so thin, however, Scocca fails to articulate a useful or coherent sense of the concept. 

    I found Scocca’s essay to be rather appealing when I first read it through, and this appeal is what makes “On Smarm” worth returning to—the article has the potential to operate quite forcefully, as long as its sources are not double-checked and as long as its rhetorical tricks remain unexamined. Scocca earns his supporters through an extensive use of double-negative: Anti-negativity is smarm, which is bad (because Bush!), so we must prefer its opposite—negativity, and therefore snark. But this double-negative hinges on a false set of alternatives. One can refuse smarm and refuse snark as well. In fact, snark and smarm are not so incompatible, as Tom Scocca’s lengthy screed confirms. “On Smarm” reveals itself to be a botched manifesto for snark—and in its dreary and self-interested botching, it begins to take the form of Scoccan smarm. 

    One must argue back against Scocca’s piece, not for the sake of positivity, but for the sake of the real casualty of Scocca’s argument: all the useful and productive forms of negative speech. 



* 



    “On Smarm” was met by an odd reception. Malcolm Gladwell posted a reply that insisted on the value of “niceness.” Maureen Dowd affirmed her conviction of the need for negativity. Ryan Kearney at *The New Republic*, meanwhile, jumped in to defend Scocca’s pillorying of Dave Eggers. A strange ambiguity characterized the whole debate, propelling it ever further into abstraction. This unease was neatly captured by Dylan Matthews, Tom Scocca’s interviewer at the *Washington Post*, who confessed that he “kind of” sympathized with one of his readers who complained that he or she was “completely unable to construct ideas out of those words” that had been published. 

    If the categories at play in Scocca’s argument—snark and smarm, negativity and criticism—are proving difficult to mobilize in the snarknado’s aftermath, then this is not because they are overly intellectual or remarkably intricate. It is because they are bullshit categories, or at least poorly defined ones. This vagueness in terms is not incidental to the thrust of “On Smarm.” It is integral to the logic of the piece, and to the scope of its ambition.

    The key misdirection at the heart of the essay is Scocca’s unwillingness to address the question of snark. At first, he appears to accept the definition he lifts from Heidi Julavits’s essay in* The Believer*: “a hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” But then, without any explicit justification, it becomes clear that defending snark is his real intention. “On Smarm” is even framed around the rhetorical question: “to what is [snark] responding?” 

    The answer, of course, is smarm. And what makes smarm appealing is the fact that it justifies snark. “Some snark is rotten and harmful and stupid,” Scocca confesses. “Smarm, however, is never a force for good.” Changing the subject to smarm allows Scocca to avoid the task that he seems remarkably eager to avoid: Not once in the over 8,000 words of this *snark de triomphe* does he give a positive example of snark. 

    Scocca’s trick lies in suggesting that every one of his critics is necessarily a smarmer. Smarm, then, begins to mean “resistance to snark.” Which Scocca wants to quash, for all of the obvious reasons, but he refuses to do so by arguing directly with his critics—foremost among them David Denby, who wrote a book on the topic called* Snark*. He does not argue for the merits of snark, nor does he attempt to show a difference between what he and his colleagues do and what Heidi Julavits has identified. Scoccan snark, like Scoccan smarm, would rather talk about anything except itself. And so we are taken on this ponderous journey through time and space-breaks (with, admittedly, a few solid insights along the way), only to find out that the destination is an outdated, indirect justification for what the former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio has decried as “snappy snarky snarking snark-snark shit.”

    The double-negative that lends “On Smarm” its rhetrical force is enabled by this cultivated ambiguity of terms. If smarm is anti-negativity, then we should opt for anti-anti-negativity—that is, plain old snarky negativity. So unless you believe that every gesture should always  be positive, congratulations! You have just joined Team Snark. No, you don’t get a free t-shirt. 

    After Scocca’s initial attack on Dave Eggers, he takes a second to anticipate the reader’s objections. His response to these is telling. “That’s it,” Scocca writes. “You’re getting it. That’s smarm.” By insisting on snark as the natural alternative to smarm (and vice versa), and by keeping the argument locked in abstraction, Scocca can claim any ideological ally he likes—and he can smear just about anybody he likes, whether or not he has the necessary evidence. 

    David Denby’s book on snark, which was one of the inspirations for the essay, is never addressed in the piece. Instead, in a section lumped in near the end, Scocca recounts a review Denby wrote on Spike Lee’s* Do The Right Thing* back in 1989, which (in Scocca’s retelling at least) made a problematic stance on race and violence. “Keep this in mind,” Scocca writes, “when David Denby puts himself forward as an expert on the terms of appropriate and inappropriate response.” Denby on “snark” goes completely unaddressed. Scocca tries to disqualify him by attacking him ad hominem, using a completely tangential point to mobilize the reader’s moral suspicions and to make Denby seem not up- but downworthy. Does this open Scocca up to criticism—for using snideness and suggestiveness instead of actual argument?

    *That’s it*, Tom Scocca might reply. *That’s it. You’re getting it. That’s smarm. 

*    Scocca also proposes through a suggestive parenthetical aside, devoid of any context, that Chris Jones—with whom he has previously had a public spat—is a sexist. What if one took Scocca to task for this laziness, as well? 

   * Yes, yes*, Tom Scocca cries, triumphant. *You’re getting it.* These objections are not smarmy at all, however—they are an argument back against poor, unfinished, self-serving criticism. Scocca’s use of “smarm” permits the kind of evasiveness that he associates with smarm in the first place. *Stand back,* he seems to say, *in the pose of the smarmer. What I’m doing is important, and it’s us against them. If you argue with me, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. So hush now, people, hush. *



***



    Tom Scocca’s screed feels decidedly out of place on the pages of Gawker.com. It doesn’t fit the web design; it doesn’t fit the tagline *Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news*. It also sits uncomfortably in Scocca’s own writer’s profile: days before “On Smarm,” he published a literal ranking of the sauces. Such diversity of output is an asset, not a liability, to Scocca and his employer. Still, the curious placement of this essay is part of the story of its production, and there is something to be gained by reading “On Smarm” in the context of Gawker’s current identity crisis—which is also Gawker’s branding crisis, since content and marketing are never too far from each other in the Gawker Media empire. 

    As Scocca’s argument builds to a crescendo, he connects the alleged smarm of Dave Eggers to the marketing discourse of personal branding. Spuriously linking Eggers’ *Advocate* rant to an essay called “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters, Scocca associates the style of smarm with the “credentialism” of the marketer. (Remember that Scocca has linked BuzzFeed to marketing, as well, through the currency of agreeability.) What Scocca brushes aside, however, is the fact that negativity can also be a brand, as long as it works in predictable ways. And he should know, since the best example of this kind of branding happens to be his employer, Gawker Media. In fact, one of the products available on Gawker’s advertising page is something called a “Partner Post,” which offers companies the following proposition: “Your message, our signature tone.” As Chris Matthews at CNET puts it: 



*Here is a brand that is very open about what it is. And it is very open about where its priorities lie. Every customer of Gawker knows precisely what the product is, why they are using it and what to expect…The relationship between brand and user is clear, consistent and, therefore, functional. *



    Snark is imperative to the Gawker Media empire; it is the “signature tone” of the Gawker brand. If we are going to accuse Dave Eggers of smarming back at his critics, in the interests of defending his brand, then we might level the same accusation at Tom Scocca. 

    The Gawker brand is currently faced with a unique set of pressures, a situation which makes Tom Scocca’s screed all the more valuable as a rare moment of insight into the self-understanding and the worldview of a senior Gawker editor. It would be unfair to demand that Scocca be consistent with the priorities of his employer: By no means is “On Smarm” necessarily *the* Gawker manifesto. Still, we can read it as one possible Gawker manifesto for the moment. Scocca does, after all, refer to his “personal stakes and connections,” and his piece is listed at the top of Gawker’s “The Best Gawker Posts of 2013.” 

    Gawker’s identity crisis is an enviable one: As the world’s most successful blog over the last decade, it no longer fits its underdog image. Gawker Media (which also owns Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, and io9, among others) enjoyed over 100 million unique page views in November couldn’t find this. With ultra-low costs and high advertising revenues, the Gawker bloggernaut is one of relatively few consistently profitable media enterprises. An anti-establishment bent gave the cheek of early Gawker a sense of rebellious moral purpose. But the original Gawker concept—snarky, pitiless, shamelessly ratings-driven—is increasingly under pressure from its size and its influence. As Carla Blumenkranz at *n+1* has convincingly argued, the sarcasm that is charming from an underdog can seem bullying in the mouth of a top dog. “You could say that as Gawker Media grew, from Gawker’s success,” Blumenkranz wrote, “Gawker outlived the conditions for its existence.” 

    Another threat to Gawker’s traffic dominance comes in the form of the cat-crazy BuzzFeed and the choir-preaching feelgood factory of Upworthy. Gawker’s dedication to both popularity and seriousness has seen it tugged in two different directions. As Andrew Phelps at the Nieman Lab reports: “Half of people think Gawker is diluting its high-quality material with Chinese goats; the other half think Gawker should stick to Chinese goats and stop trying to do real journalism.” 

    Last December, after BuzzFeed’s November traffic had surpassed that of Gawker, Gawker’s chief Nick Denton responded with a surprising defense: “The crowd will eventually choose the juicy truth over a heartwarming hoax,” he told the *Financial Times*. Denton also complained about Upworthy: “even smarmier than BuzzFeed.” The happy union of snarkiness, traffic, and truth-telling appears to be unraveling for Gawker. After years of cultivating snark as a way to keep the bastards honest, what ever is Gawker to do when its editors wake up one morning and realize with a shock that now they are the bastards? Hence Nick Denton’s appeal to the moral high ground— and hence Tom Scocca’s too, perhaps.   

    Gawker’s proud fixation on page views has an immense influence on its content—which need not pose a problem to a small, snarky gossip blog. But this fixation becomes problematic when Gawker begins to take on real news, and when the interests of virality begin to clash with newfound claims of journalistic responsibility. As Felix Salmon has reported, when a suspicion arose that one of Gawker’s viral posts had linked to a fake (“Grandpa Writes Letter Disowning Daughter After She Disowns Gay Son”), Gawker’s editor John Cook had the following to say: 



*I’d rather be calling bullshit on stuff like this than calling attention to it...But we are tasked both with extending the legacy of what Gawker has always been—ruthless honesty—and be reliably and speedy on top of internet culture all while getting a shit-ton of traffic. Those goals are sometimes in tension. *



    Caught between responsible journalism, gossipy snark, and an army of viral cats, the Gawker brand is facing serious pressure. Thankfully, Tom Peters has a pointer for moments of crisis: “Go back to the comparison between brand You and brand X—the approach the corporate biggies take to creating a brand.” For Gawker, there is nothing so priceless as an opportunity to carve out distance from BuzzFeed on the grounds of its own seriousness. At best, Tom Scocca uses Isaac Fitzgerald’s comments at the launch of BuzzFeed Books as a token excuse for timeliness. At worst, it is a cynical tool for defensive self-branding. 

    But this is snark that we are talking about, here. Snark doesn’t position itself in the marketplace: Snark flips the bird and wanders off. Snark doesn’t respond to David Denby with a many-thousand-word treatise, smarming its way out of real criticism. Snark, at its best, has no time for the moral high ground. 

    Tom Scocca makes the case that smarm is usually the weapon of the powerful. What would a world look like where the beleaguered Gawker Empire continues to snark but adds smarm to its arsenal? The comments sections for “On Smarm” gives some indication. When one commenter objects that the problem of snark in reviews has not been addressed in Scocca’s essay—and adds that the affected world-weariness of young Gawker writers seems “unearned, and cheap”—he is met with the following reply from Scocca: “‘Unearned’ is on the Smarm Bingo card.” 

    In reply to Malcolm Gladwell’s rather dashed-off response, which challenged Scocca’s selective use of quotations from the Eggers interview, Scocca wrote: 



*Malcolm Gladwell deepens our understanding of smarm by explaining that when Dave Eggers wrote the words ‘Do not be critics,’ he meant people should be critics. *



    By this point, Scocca is simply pointing and accusing. Yes, you’re getting it, he is saying. That’s smarm. And he is using that accusation as a way out of the argument. 



* 



    What Scocca seems to ignore in all this is the difference between gratuitous negativity and valuable criticism. Scocca wants to take the world’s fact-checkers and conscientious objectors as his allies— though it is unclear whether they would choose him as their ally. When he conflates negativity (the saying of negative things) with negativity (a stance of sneering dismissal), he erases the possibility of a productive or creative kind of criticism—something different from critical-ness. In either case, the task remains to rescue productive criticism from Scocca’s sinking ship. 

    Luckily, as it turns out, a good start on this difficult task has already been made by Scocca’s own sources, in the many parts of their works that he neglected in his quest for incriminating evidence. David Denby’s Snark spends a vast number of pages sorting through exactly which kinds of negativity he finds unhelpful and which kinds he supports. Far from being opposed to negativity as such, Denby ends his book with a note of praise for Stephen Colbert’s critical powers and with a plea for his readers to go out and commit some “vituperation that is insulting, nasty, but, well, clean.” Denby, it turns out, is not opposed to negativity at large (I certainly got the impression he was while reading “On Smarm”). 

    In her own Believer essay, Heidi Julavits is not out to trick you when she writes: “To be perfectly clear—I am not espousing a feel-good, criticism-free climate.” She goes on to confess an “intellectual crush” on the “curmudgeonly” critic James Wood. Even in his overwhelmingly negative book reviewing, Julavits argues, there is a positive belief in the better possibilities for contemporary fiction, along with “room for a dialogue with Wood, which indicates there’s something to wrangle over.” Taken in full, Julavits’s essay is much more a plea for productive criticism than it is an attack on snark itself. Tom Scocca quotes her with the following line: 



*“If snark is a reaction to this sheer and insulting level of hyperbole, fine—” *



but then he cuts her off there, removing the second half of the sentence, which asked why the writer (who has not chosen the book cover or written the PR copy) should have to receive the disdain. Scocca silences a voice that does believe in the uses of negativity: He would rather paint her as one more member of the worldwide Smarmy Army. 

    The difference between takedown negativity and productive negativity was exemplified in that other great drama of last December, the *Love Actually* saga. Christopher Orr of *The Atlantic* came out with a ruthless critique of the much-beloved Frankenstein’s Monster of a rom-com. After much online grumbling, Orr clarified his point. He held disdain for *Love Actually*only because he thought it missed all the important parts of love: his negativity, under pressure, clarified the possibilities that the film left out. In doing so, Orr was making a set of positive, descriptive claims about love. He was telling a love story of his own. 

    Over at Jezebel, meanwhile, at the girl-targeted holding of the Gawker Media empire, Lindy West produced a breathtaking, hilarious takedown of the film. Her intentions were clear from the get-go: the piece ran under the title “I Rewatched *Love Actually* And Am Here to Ruin It For All of You.” West was in no mood to cut Richard Curtis any slack, and her piece admitted no quality to the more successful elements of the film. (In her frenzy, West also denounced something that was actually fairly realistic in the film, and fairly easily double-checked: the presence of Portuguese guest workers in rural France.) West’s piece makes for enjoyable reading, but she has approached the film with different aims from the aims of a critic. She came to snark, and she took no prisoners. 

    By no means do I believe the Lindy Wests of the world should have their keyboards taken from them. West’s piece is certainly not without value. Yet it is not a meaningful contribution to criticism in the way that Christopher Orr’s essays are. Tom Scocca defends the role of snark in messianical terms, as if it is the only available answer to BuzzFeed’s Bambi Rule and his smarmy opponents. In the field of arts criticism, at least, this is plainly not the case. There, negativity certainly has its place—but we should be careful not to confuse the playful vanity of the takedown rant with the productive critical output of those who will stand hard by their claims. And if Scocca wants to refute the criticisms of snark that are posed by Denby, Julavits, and Eggers, then he must do so on terms more specific than his essay presents. 



* 



    Which brings us back to poor, poor Dave Eggers, victim now of not one but two attention-seeking takedowns, if we count Tom Scocca alongside his old mates and allies who launched* n+1* in 2004 with a vitriolic—and since partially retracted—attack on Mr. Eggers and the “Eggersards.” 

    “Do not be critics, you people.” It is certainly no coincidence that Dave Eggers was speaking to *The Harvard Advocate*when he made this argument. Eggers was offering specific, pragmatic advice to a group of undergraduates. He was also provoked by a line of questioning that was grating and self-satisfied in tone. The* Advocat*e interviewer began by communicating his hopes that Eggers was finally free from the “perfidious yoke of those Massachusetts McSweeneys. Talk about a McFaustian bargain!” It is also important to read the Eggers interview in terms of the very specific discussion that was being entertained. The *Advocate* president was not arguing about the quality of Eggers’s work—he was questioning Eggers’s legitimacy purely on the grounds of the material conditions of how Eggers was publishing. This discussion is a familiar one for young people who are interested in alternative culture and suspicious of the influence that mainstream success might have on an artist’s integrity. Does success alone make you a sell-out? Is Dave Eggers, then, a sell-out? The crucial point here is that no one was asking questions about the honesty or the quality of Dave Eggers’s work. He was not being fact-checked by the *Advocate* president. He was on trial for complicity with power, and the punishment was tossed on the don’t-read pile. So, when Dave Eggers says, “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one,” he means exactly what he is saying: Do not dismiss it, out of hand, without having read it. He is arguing specifically about the proposition that mainstream success might make somebody unreadable. Against that proposition, he says: No. Read them. 

    And then, of course, you can do whatever you like to them. Dismissal is not the same as negative feedback; dismissal means not even thinking about it. Eggers clearly admits the existence of “fair and helpful book critics.” What he is arguing against here is specifically the kind of negativity that knows it’s out to get you in advance: the kind of negativity that won’t even listen. He is arguing specifically against snark, not against negativity at large. 

    The overblown tone of Eggers’s speech in this interview is certainly worth criticizing. Nevertheless, his words take on a different meaning when they are read in their proper context. The “sell-out” accusation was never targeted at Eggers’s work—it was targeted at the fact of his success and his activity. 

    As a former* Advocate* president myself, I feel inclined towards Eggers’s words in the context of undergraduate literary culture. The line being adopted by the Eggers interviewer is one that brings out the worst in us, as student editors: It prefers the easy gains of ridicule to the real rewards of the learning that goes on when one exposes oneself to new and alternative ways of thinking. If anecdotal evidence is worth anything, then I shall be the first in line to testify that snarky talk from college *literati* finds its roots, more often than not, in one’s own creative insecurities. I have seen it, and I have done it myself. 

    By structure and by necessity, the *Advocate *staff must make negative decisions: stories must be rejected from the issues, and would-be editors must be rejected from the masthead. Although our authority is scant, we find that we need to be critics—which is fine, for the most part, because we do believe in criticism. But the exercise of that criticism must take place in a creative community of young people, a community where vulnerability is necessary if anything interesting is ever going to get done. What kinds of criticism we might permit ourselves in such a field is a difficult question to answer. There is a value to open-mindedness and generosity, here, which goes above and beyond the responsibilities of established writers. And there is a value to giving each other the benefit of the doubt. In national politics, ambition is a danger. Among young artists, we could show a little more patience for each other’s ambitions, as long as they are honest. 

    The debate on snark and smarm has been dominated by the kind of thinking that maintains that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is easy to like Tom Scocca’s essay on these grounds: He doesn’t like racism, he doesn’t like sexism, and he doesn’t like Upworthy. This kind of opposition, though, is a false one. If criticism really were a case of balancing Boo against Yay, mixing snark in with smarm, then it would be an easy job indeed. Leon Wieseltier of *The New Republic* seems to accept this binary at face value when he says, in Maureen Dowd’s column: “I never thought I’d utter a sentence like this, but I stand with Gawker against BuzzFeed.” 

    God forbid that those should be our options. Awesome and Yuck are not a ying and yang for online journalism—they are a Scylla and Charybdis. Snark and smarm alike should be treated with suspicion by truly thoughtful criticism. They are evasive, self-congratulating techniques, both of which are anathema to the needs of a productive creative community. Snark and smarm are friends who pose falsely as enemies, and one can stand against both of them at once. 

    The snafu over “On Smarm” poses serious questions about what might be missing in this phony set of undesirable alternatives. In a new media landscape that is increasingly obsessed with counting page views, meeting quotas, and delivering “the perfect feed,” the answer might be something like thoughtfulness. Or perhaps, in this brand-dominated online space, which specializes in figuring out what we want and then giving it to us, the answer lies in something like surprise. Something like courage. 

When we finally get home and my mom unlocks the car, I leg it up the stairs to my dad’s room and tell him, “Dad, I’ve been losing so much weight these last weeks, maybe soon I’m not gonna be the fat kid any more.”

My dad looks up from his bed, and he smiles like he usually does. Like he wants to grin like a mad dog but he’s too tired to try, even.

“I’d give it until the weekend at least, Jim.”

I can never really tell when Dad is joking. Mom says that’s just his sense of humor, but I reckon it’s dumb. Number one, because most of his jokes aren’t funny anyway, and they’re usually about things that are meant to be serious. And number two, because if a joke isn’t funny, then how do you tell it’s a joke not a lie?

Usually Dad keeps his door shut, and I’m only meant to bother him if it’s something important. I don’t really mind that Dad’s always so tired. He’s run out of steam a bit, that’s what my mom tells me, and it doesn’t matter much because Mom’s always there if I need something. Plus he’s sick—I know he’s sick— but I also know Mom thinks he’s making it up sometimes, because I heard them both arguing about it just a few days ago.

Until the weekend at least, that’s what I’m thinking as I walk down the stairs and then into my room. Mom’s cooking dinner, I can hear her in the kitchen. I shut my door. Now Mom, she doesn’t think I’m fat at all, which is why I can only bring up the whole fatness thing with my dad. You ask Mom, she’ll say I’m crazy, she’ll say I’m a perfectly normal shape for a thirteen-year-old son to be. But I know that once you’re thirteen, you’re not a kid any more. You’ve got to be a man, and you’ve got to do it quick else life just passes you by. By now I’m getting too old for the puppy fat routine. Obviously Mom’s just being nice, because she’s like that, and besides she hates to think there might be anything wrong with me. Still, I’m clearly pretty soft around the edges. (You can tell that just by touching my edges. They’re pretty soft.)

I’ve realized that it’s actually Mom’s fault I’m fat. She is feeding me things all the bloody time, these days, and I wonder if she’s chubbing me up for some reason, though I can’t think why. Unless she wants to be the only one who thinks I’m perfect, like, forever.

Mom can be too much sometimes. I really hope she doesn’t mind when I stop being fat anymore. See, I’ve been carefully watching my food intake recently. When I turned thirteen last month, I realized it was time for me to grow up and be sensible. Not be Mom’s kid any more. First I added two new lists to my List Book. “Things I should eat more of to make me skinny” and “Things I should eat less of because they make me fat.” The second list is much much longer and it’s getting bigger as I read more about this stuff. Turns out there’s fat and sugar basically everywhere. I am also learning to stand my ground with my mom now, whenever she tries to feed me fatty foods. Like last week, when Danny Zhu came over to watch the Sydney FC game, she came knocking in the morning and she wanted to make us pancakes, so I told her straight up, I said, “Mom, piss off, we don’t want your pancakes,” and she did.

I’ve been losing weight fast since my thirteenth birthday. I started keeping the List Book then, as well. I didn’t start doing all of this for Sara B., but at some point I just forgot all the reasons that weren’t her. Especially since what happened at camp—but that’s a different story.

Standing my ground is getting easier as I become thinner, because no one takes you seriously when you’re fat. That’s something my dad told me. And I need to be taken seriously soon, because if I can thin down fast enough, then I’m finally going to talk to Mrs. B. this Friday after school.

I open up a fresh page in my List Book, and I write along the top: “Things I will say to Mrs. B. at the occasion of my thinness.” Underneath I add: “Start—Hi, I know your daughter. We’re friends, maybe more. Maybe I love her. But this is about you. She needs you to be better.”

That’ll do for the first night, I reckon.



*



Tuesday after lunchtime we have sports day, so all the boys and Mr. Harrison mosey down to the oval for cricket. It’s hot, the kind of hot I hate, the kind where I can already feel the sunburn growing on my neck and on my arms. Usually I go walkabout at this point—as Mr. Harrison put it, I’m the worst damned player in the school and there’s daylight between me and the next bloke—but out here, today, I feel like I’m as thin as I’ve been all my life. Anything is possible, and it’s time I joined in.

I grumble under my hat in the outfield, and the kids don’t let me bowl. They put me down 10th to bat, that’s last, and so I camp out in the stands with the others while they talk all their usual horsecrap. Who pashed who, who got who to show him her tits, who got who to touch his youknow. Tom Burrows is standing up now, telling some story and gesturing like he just caught a fish and It Was This Big.

“I’m tellin you boys, she had nipples like malt balls, this girl, the size of bloody malt balls!”

It turns out he means some girl down at the surf life-saving club, so I start to zone out. I quit the life savers myself, about a year ago, back when we all used to pile down to Dee Why beach every Sunday. One time I was standing knee-deep in surf while Sam Sheffield was going on about something or other, and I couldn’t help looking at the outline of his ribs, how you could pretty much count them all and how there was hardly even an ounce of fat on his whole torso. I was wearing a rash vest at the time, because Mom and Dad both said I’d get sunburn without one, and it was tight like it’s meant to be, but when I was looking at Sam Sheffield, the thing started feeling too tight, unbearably tight, sucked in close against my gut and tubby chest, and all I could manage was to breathe deep and wonder how it looked to all the other kids. That’s when I quit the surf life savers, and that’s when I decided I would only go down to Dee Why beach on my own.

Quitting the surf club definitely wasn’t good for my popularity. Not that I’m, like, bullied or anything. It’s just I always feel like I’m on the outside, looking in on stuff. Sometimes all the boys say I’m gay, because I’m never down at the beach with them and I never have girl stories for them. They would let up completely if they knew about Sara, of course, but I’m sure as hell not going to tell them about all that. No way Jose.

It’s a tired walk back up the hill and then we’re waiting to get picked up outside the Dee Why Elementary. Danny Zhu’s dad comes and gets him right away, so it’s only me and Sara sitting there, which is just how I like it in fact. It used to be just Danny Zhu and me who got picked up, but Sara B. came new to our school this year, so now it’s the three of us. Mr. Zhu is always on time, actually, so most days it’s at least ten minutes of just Sara and me together.

At our school it’s embarrassing to get driven home, because only the rich or the precious kids get picked up, and the rest of our mates sometimes jeer on their way to the bus. It used to bother me, but now I don’t mind, not since Sara started waiting here as well. Truth is the time I like best every day is between 3:00 and 3:15.

What we do is we sit on the fence, which is made of chain links but has wood on the top. The wooden beam is a perfect height for sitting—perfect for her, I mean, because her legs are longer than mine are, whereas I have to jump a bit to get my arse up there, which is not an easy maneuver for a young man of my proportions. So we sit there and swing our legs, and they go clink each time we let them drop on the chain. My mom always turns up Flood Street from the right and Mrs. B—that’s Sara’s mom—she always shows up on foot on the street corner down a ways to the left. She parks around the bend and then they drive home from there, Sara told me.

What I know about Sara is this. She is from Serbia or Croatia or one of them, I don’t remember exactly, and either her dad is still there or he never came to Australia for some other reason. There were troubles there when she left. We call her Sara B. because her last name, which starts with B, is really long and no one can pronounce it, not even me, and believe me I’ve tried. She is new at our school this year, which means I’ve known her two months already. It didn’t work out at her old school but Mr. Harrison wouldn’t tell us why—there are plenty of rumors, though, like some people say that she was kicked out for smoking or having sex or whatever. That was in the South, down Kurnell way. The lads say Sara had a boyfriend from the eleventh grade, but he got arrested at the Cronulla race riots for beating up an Indian kid and they stopped going out soon after that. Tom Burrows thought it was hilarious when he found out, because the Cronulla riots were all about the Arab immigrants, not about Indians at all. “Who the fuck has a problem with the Indians anyway?” Alex Spiros said, in between laughing.

The other girls are pretty nice to Sara, but they’re scared of her as well, probably because she’s tall and skinny and she’s started out with decent boobs already. Sara doesn’t fit in all that well at school, either, but I reckon it’s for different reasons from me. She seems like she’s older than the rest of us somehow. Mostly she seems pretty sad, but I know her better than most people and there are times when she smiles and you can tell she really means it.

She’s grinning like a dumb mullet right now, in fact, because she just won The Game for like the third time in a row. The Game is something we do while we wait for our moms. It’s easy to play, all you do is you sit on the fence facing the street and you throw a little pebble over your head into the empty playground that’s behind you. The winner is the first person to hit the big DEE WHY ELEMENTARY sign, which is twenty whole yards away and high up in the air but it makes the greatest sounding pong when you do actually hit it. We are getting pretty good at The Game, though still some days no one manages to win. One time Danny Zhu hit the sign right away, so we secretly decided never to play it until he had already left.

“Did You Know,”Ana says, with a look on her face that shows she’s thinking mischief, “Did You Know that a woman who robbed a bank in New York City came back a few days later and returned it?”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “Well, she didn’t return it all. She stole a thousand bucks and brought back an envelope with only seven hundred in it, and she wrote on it ‘I stole this money from your bank on Friday. Sorry.’ Then she went to buy a bottle of whiskey, and when she got home the police were waiting for her!”

I heard this one already, but I can’t watch Sara laugh without me laughing too, so my laughing isn’t fake, not one bit. I clear my throat.

“Well,” I start, in my best game show host voice. “Did You Know. The Ukrainian army has trained a bunch of attack dolphins—and last week a few of them escaped. They say there’s now a little gang of attack dolphins lost in the ocean, guns and knives attached to their noses.”

“James. This is bullshit. I’m calling it.”

“No! I swear. Fair dinkum. On My Honor.” I offer her my pinky, and we pinky-swear like usual. “Hey, and you know why they think the dolphins ran off?”

“Why?”

“They’re all out there—these trained bloody killer dolphins—they’re all out there looking for mates! They’re looking for love.”

I laugh and look over at Sara but she’s turned away up the street already. I remember that I’m still holding onto her pinky, with my stupid sweaty needy fatboy grip, so I pull it away. I pretend to look out for my mom while I listen to Sara’s feet going clink, clink, and clink on the wire chain fence.

“Jim,” she starts.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry. Sorry.”

Clink, clink, clink and now my mom’s here, 3:15 on the dot, so I grab my bag—which still has the smell of forgotten banana somehow—and I walk over to the car wondering why I thought things would be different now.

Mom is asking me how my day was, and I’m not going to say what’s bothering me, so I tell her instead it was fine. I don’t ask how hers was. Usually Mom asks me about the kids in my class, with the names all wrong half the time, and I’ll answer her as honest as I can without risking anyone for getting in trouble. The parents all talk to each other, see. So, for example, I told her last week that Sally Rourke is sitting on her own, now, but I won’t tell it’s because Sam Sheffield said he saw her pashing Alex Spiros behind the tuckshop one lunchtime and now everyone says she’s a slut. This year especially I’ve got real good at making stuff up for my mom, but the fact is still it’s really hard to tell her about a world with none of the important bits in.

“Great,” says Mom, and then there’s silence as we drive up to the Head where we live. I’m still thinking about Sara when Mom smiles and puts her hand on my hand, and I think how it must suck to love someone so much when you have nothing to talk with them about. We drive on past the beach, and I close one eye then the other, making shapes with the bird shits on the windscreen.

Dad’s door is closed when we get home, so I tiptoe back downstairs to my own room. I wanted to tell him thanks for this book he gave me—it’s like Singin’ in the Rain, which is my favorite movie and has my favorite actor Gene Kelly in it, except as an illustrated comic. I let Sara borrow the book when we were at camp, and she said she liked it but thought I reminded her more of the funny guy, the Donald O’Connor one, than the leading man, the Gene Kelly one. I pretended I wasn’t hurt, but I took the book back right away and I didn’t let her have it again.

I shut my door as well and I pull out my List Book. To the list “Did You Know,” I add a newspaper clipping that my mom left out for me about some Russians who ride bears for a sport. To the list “Things I should eat more of,” I add: lentils? Then I read two more pages of Singin’ in the Rain and throw the book away.

I hope Sara got picked up at an OK time today. You never know when Mrs. B. will come to get her— sometimes she’s very late, but then sometimes she arrives right on three and I wait a lonely fifteen minutes until my own mom gets here. See, after I started talking with Sara on the fence after school, I asked Mom to come at 3:15 every day. I said we had to stay and clean and maybe she didn’t believe me but she didn’t say anything because Mom’s nice like that. So now I wait with Sara every day, and even though Mrs. B. is unpredictable and my own mom never comes late, I get to sit with her for a while every day and think: look at us both, here, discarded and true.

One time, a few weeks ago, Mom drove me to the movies after school. It was 5:30 already and getting sort of dark when we came past the school and I saw Sara B. sitting all alone on the fence still, turning her neck one way then the other, still just waiting. As we went past, I thought I heard the clink and the clink of her feet on the fence, but I know that I imagined it, now. That was the night when I started to hate Mrs. B.

After dinner, I lie in bed and try and think of better things, but all I can picture is Sara sitting there, waiting to be picked up still, with her feet swinging clink on the fence, with her useless mom nowhere to be seen and with me stuck in the car, not getting out, not asking Mom to stop, not even wanting to explain why we should pull over and help.

I open up to the list of “Things I Will Say,” but I don’t know what to add. It’s alright. I have time, still, at least. I have until Friday.



*



On Wednesdays, we get an earlymark because the French teacher got fired for saying fuck to a student, and the school hasn’t been able to find a replacement yet. I wonder why we bother learning French when there aren’t any French in Sydney anyway, not even one who can teach us.

I still have the taste of almonds in my mouth from lunch. Almonds are very healthy, it turns out, even though they taste like cardboard and they stick in your teeth. We’re doing history, and Mr. Harrison is talking about the Gold Rush—how once the Australian prospectors rose up and chased all the Chinese miners off their settlements. Sara is paying attention when I look over, so I find myself watching the slope of her shoulders and I wonder what it would be like to hold them both. I can’t really imagine it. I was never very good at imagining. I keep thinking: could I do that, really, with this body? with these hands?

I wish we could just talk about camp, Sara and me. It got hard to talk to her right when I thought that it would get easier. Last week the school took us all out to this old Gold Rush town—it’s the same one every year—and we were supposed to be panning for nuggests in the muddy little tourist pond all day. Sara looked bored as hell, and I was too, and then I started watching the curve of her neck as she pretended to pan, and how her things nearly touched where her skirt ended but didn’t. She caught me looking, I blushed, then she came over.

“This camp is shithouse,” she announced.

I agreed and she led me off away from the group and into a fake mud hut, which was filled with a fake miner family cut out of cardboard. It was cool inside, and we got to talking like we used to. I told her I missed home, still, kind of, and asked her did she miss home as well? That’s when she turned to me with her eyes wide open and said, “You have no idea about my home, do you, Jim?”

She never really talked about her family before, especially not her mom whenever I asked. But in the hut she told me everything, or it seemed like everything at the time. Sara said camp was a holiday for her, because at home she finds there’s so much stuff to worry about. Things had got better, but still some days, she hardly ate anything at all. She said at her old school, they called her a wog because her mom didn’t speak much English and she didn’t dress the right way for school at first. Before they moved she was in big trouble at school because she refused to sing the national anthem in assembly—she hasn’t sung it once since a window of her house got broken by a brick wrapped in an Australian flag.

And her mom? Well, Sara loves her like mad, but she is always looking out for her, always translating and running around helping her with moving, looking for jobs, getting her a driver’s licence because the government won’t recognize the one she got back home.

I said I didn’t think it was fair for her, for Sara. I couldn’t imagine my own mom asking me to take care of things like she does.

“It’s not the best,” she said, “Of course it’s not. But my mom and me, we’ve been through stuff. I never had a dad—it’s just her and me. Maybe you don’t get that.”

I didn’t say anything. What do you say to that? All I could think of was Sara sitting there alone on the fence while she waits, not even angry, only worried. Girl like her should be in the middle of everything, not the one worrying.

But still she put her hand on my shoulder, and I felt light underneath her for some reason, as if all of a sudden she was the fat one and I myself weighed pretty much nothing.

“It’s just—it’s good to know there’s guys like you.”

We stayed there saying nothing for a while, and the she turned around and asked me if I wanted to kiss her right there, just this once, and I must have said yes super quick because she laughed and smiled and moved her mouth to my mouth, then I felt her breath all warm on my lips, and I began to relax, met her tongue with my tongue, closed my eyes to shut out all the cardboard miner kids. It felt like I was swimming. Then I put my hand in her hip, which I thought was what you’re supposed to, and started lifting up her top, but then she pushed it away, frowned, and rushed off so I had to follow her to the rest of the group where Lily Kim was sure she’d struck gold but hadn’t.

I don’t know what I thought would happen when we got back. Maybe she felt bad for telling me all the stuff about her mom. Or maybe she felt dumb because she went and kissed the fat kid on school camp. I wonder if she’ll be my girlfriend when I stop being fat anymore. Or if she’ll be my girlfriend me when I show that I can stand up to Mrs. B. for her.

It’s 2:30 and Mr. Harrison lets us out early like usual, and we go for a walk around the school, which is usual for us on a Wednesday. We walk without saying anything. I start trying to tell her about the Russian bear riders but she cuts me off.

“Jim, I’m sorry about camp. It was stupid. I was stupid.”

My hands are sweaty. I can’t think of anything to say, just a whole load of half-things. I try to grab her hand but she yanks it away. I need to not be nervous. I need to not be the fat kid, and now.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I just wish you didn’t have to worry all the time. I just wish your mom—”

“Jim, you don’t get it. There are some things you just don’t get, alright? And you’re not going to get them. So quit.”

It’s 3:18 by the time we get back to the fence, and we part ways when we see her mom on the corner, black sunglasses and crazy hair, and my mom in the car, and it’s all quiet on the street while the both of them are just waiting.

When I get in the car my mom says: “You are sunburnt.” I shrug my shoulders. I don’t want to talk to her. Not now not ever.

“You don’t have the skin type for this kind of exposure, Jim, not in the summer. Look, your face is pink. Do you even wear your hat?”

“Whatever.”

“Who was that girl, the one you wait with? Is she your friend?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

Mom has no idea what she’s talking about. I start to feel very tense. Why does she want to know all this stuff? What will she get out of having this information?

“What’s that game you play, Jim, when you’re throwing the rocks?”

“Mom,” I say. “Whatever.” I can see in the mirror that she’s hurt. Now I want to say sorry. But I don’t know how.

Back at home, I rush off to the beach, which is where I go after bad days. This is a bad-bad day, so I don’t swim, I just run all the way to the boardwalk and then I sit on the bench, red and sweaty, watching the ocean like I’m so thirsty I would drink the whole thing if they let me.

There are still people hanging around on the sand and in the surf. It really is bloody hot, still. On a day this hot, people stagger around like they’re carrying a weight on their shoulders—they move slow, sweating just from the exertion of being there. It’s weird how the word for light means the opposite of heavy but it also means the sun, which seems to weigh everyone down so much. There’s a bottle rolling along the boardwalk, and it’s about to roll into the ocean. I take two steps to stop it, but then I feel awfully tired, and I remember how stupid I look when I run, so I let it go and it plops into the sea, probably on its way to kill a dolphin or something.

Back home, I can’t even face Singin’ in the Rain. Maybe I am the Donald O’Connor one, after all that, maybe this is how it goes for old Jim. I want to be the leading man, damn it, her leading man. I turn over and add a note to my List Book that I should eat dark chocolate instead because milk chocolate makes me fat. And then I go to sleep.



*



On Thursday, when we get out of class, we wait in silence for a few minutes. At 3:04, I see Mrs. B. appear on the corner, with those sunglasses still on and talking on her cellphone like she does. Sara gives me a look, then hops down to meet her. I usually feel robbed on days like this, watching them walk off down the street together while I wait up here alone.

After what Sara said about her mom’s licence, I decided probably they don’t have a car. Sara must lie for her mom’s sake. I wonder why Mrs. B. wears glasses all the time, who she talks to on that cellphone, all that stuff. I am losing The Game while I think about these things. I know that Sara should have it better, but I can’t figure out what I could say to Mrs. B. to make her fix it. Still, I’ve got to do something.

When Mom comes, I tell her my day was fine and she seems happy enough to sit in silence.

Today was a good-bad day, so I walk down to Dee Why to swim. I let Mom put a hat on me as I run through the door. I also wear my rashvest. Despite being English, Mom tans OK, but Dad is really pale too and I can’t tell if it’s just because he never goes out except for work. I can’t see tired old Dad carrying the weight of the sunshine for long. I wonder what he’s scared of, my dad, that my mom isn’t.

The ocean is wild today, and there is seaweed absolutely everywhere on the beach. It’s alright in the public baths, though, and that’s where I usually swim anyway because there’s no one there in the evening. I strip down, jump in, and lie backwards on the water, watching stars and clouds up above me. If I stay totally still, then all I can hear is the waves on the cliffs, nothing else, just the sound of the ocean and me—and then when I move in the water all I feel is the water rushing past, first it’s slow like I’m slow, then it’s just as fast as me when I speed up, start to take over, splashing and kicking at the water around me thinking this is it, alright, this is how you stop being scared of the dark.

On the way back up to the street, I see her there, Mrs. B., on the same park bench that I sit on after bad-bad days, holding her hung-up cellphone in one hand and staring out to sea with the sun going down behind her. Does she just likes to sit there, I wonder, or did she have a bad-bad day as well. Mrs. B. is slim, and her skin is really tan—she looks like she belongs here, on the beach, more than I do at least. The pasty bugger I am. For a second, I wonder if I should talk to her, but I think of my list back home that I haven’t even finished and I realize that I’m nowhere near ready at all. Plus I can’t figure out what she’s doing here, or even what she might be thinking.



*



I’m jumpy all day, on Friday. Not even the beach calmed me down entirely, and I added a heap of stuff to the “Mrs. B.” list last night that I’m not really sure about. At recess, I try to go over all that stuff. I would start by introducing myself and saying how I got to know her daughter. That would lead into something about how sad Sara has been, and how she has to worry about things she shouldn’t. And so on. I join in the lunchtime cricket and I do OK bowling. When I yawn and stretch, it feels like my whole body is thinning, growing. I grab around my gut, and there’s still soft there, but I don’t know if there’s enough to call me fat anymore. I reckon my Dad had it right, after all. I wonder what I can’t get done today.

In afternoon math, while I wait for the bell, I look over at Sara and I wonder what she will think. Obviously I am trying to help her, not hurt her. But maybe she is angry at me because of all that. I try to catch her eye. She does not look over. Today it’s just me.

At 3:05, I am going over it all in my head, but it sounds stupider and stupider the more I do. Sara and I are playing The Game without talking, always missing.

Then Mrs. B. is at the corner, and I take off like a rabbit down the hill towards her. “Hey,” I call. “Mrs. B.!”

Only then do I realize no one calls her Mrs. B. who can pronounce her last name, and I don’t know her first name either, so I don’t have anything to call her at all. I’m really going to shit this up, now, aren’t I.

“Hi,” I say, catching my breath as I stop. “Hi.”

Mrs. B. takes off her glasses. She has bright green eyes. My palms are sweating.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.” I can hear Sara coming down the street. The trees are losing their leaves already. I see a little dirt on my school shoes. “My name is Jim. Jim Watson. I’m, um, I’m Sara’s friend.”

“Yes. Jim. I know Jim.” Her eyes are very green. And soft. Sara’s just arrived behind me. I summon my accusations. My bag is still giving off banana smell.

“Well, Mrs. B. Um, I’ve been talking to Sara a lot recently, and—”

“Sara, you are right!” Mrs. B. calls over my shoulder. “He does look like the funny one.”

My palms are still sweating. Sara is scared, I can feel it without looking. What does she think I’m going to say? I can feel my neck burning in the sun. What am I supposed to know, and what not?

“Yeah. So I just wanted to meet you, basically.” I put my pudgy, sweaty hand towards Sara’s mom, and

Sara sighs with relief when I do.

Mrs. B. shakes my hand, really gentle. Sara and her mom seem to think this is funny. I can’t tell if I’m being weak or strong. All I know is I’m tired, and it’s hot, so bloody hot, and I just want to go home. “Cool,” I mumble, turning back up the street, and I think I see a smile on Sara’s face as I go. Which seems more important, now, anyway, than whether I’ve messed this up or not. So now I’m smiling too, a little, while I limp up to where we usually sit on the fence.

When Mum finally pulls up on Flood St., I am still throwing pebbles over my shoulder. Only I’m not swinging my feet, because there’s some kind of miracle that’s happened and I don’t want to break the spell, not with anything. Every time I throw a stone, I hear a little pong, literally every single time, and now I’m in the zone and every single bloody pebble’s going straight bang smack onto the DEE WHY ELEMENTARY sign then bouncing off onto the ground. I can only imagine how the pile looks underneath.

But Mom’s here, now, and I’ve got to run, I’ve got to go, so I don’t even have a look at the sign, I just jump in the car and she drives off while I try to explain to her the rules of The Game and why no one will believe what just happened when I tell them, no really, Mom, no one.