Chapters 11 and 12, Cool and Mirrors Summary and Analysis

Lucy begins school at Sarah Lawrence with trepidation but is quickly hooked on poetry and becomes known among the best poets on campus. Lucy wants to be a doctor, but her mother urges her to take writing classes and Lucy, thinking that a fiction class would be too difficult, takes poetry, where she excels. She says that she often pulls someone aside, reciting some piece of poetry she's read and expecting that it's going to hold as profound a meaning for that person as it does for her.

Meanwhile, she hopes that she'll meet someone who can see past the lack of beauty and who can love her anyway. She says there's little chance of that because the female-male ratio is three-to-one, and many of those boys are, for one reason or another...