Why was that the thing you had to do when you saw a girl: to prosecute whether and in what way she was beautiful—as Lara, I realized, was? With guys, some of them were physically repellent or appealing, but a lot of them initially presented as neutral, and there wasn’t that immediate, urgent-feeling cognitive puzzle to slot them in, as there was with literally every female person, including one’s own self, in windows and storefronts.
