Text Leveling System

The Language of Goldfish

RDQ:	2395	Max Word/Sent	37	Total Words	3953		Diff Words	1130
Lex	960	Ave Word/.Sent	8	Hi Freq occurs	2873	72.7%	Hi freq	463	41%
AR	5.6	Long Sentences	7.2	Low Freq occurs	252	6.4%	Low freq	199	17.6%

Northpoint, Glenview, Golfside, Morton Grove. The train slowed smoothly, as if gliding on ribbon. A few people got off, a few got on, and cold air moved along the floor of the car.
Carrie sat looking at her reflection in the train's window and, beyond it, at the Morton Grove station. The station was contained within her reflected head like a thought.
Dead leaves were fluttering off the eaves troughs, blowing across the parking lot. Late October. Next month snow. The train began to move again. The station slid backward and disappeared. Carrie bent forward and opened the book in her lap.
The paper smelled of school. The neat geometric figures lay solidly on the page. Permanent. Forever the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle would be equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. Carrie liked that. She settled herself into the corner of the seat and began to study a new theorem.
By rights she should have been doing algebra. She was a
year ahead of herself, but the school was set up that way. If you were good at something, you could move ahead, and Carrie was good at math. She found it beautiful in its certainty. Unlike poetry, which bothered her, math was firm. Meanings didn't shift and change as they did in poetry, as they still sometimes did within her own head.
Carrie mouthed the theorem and closed her eyes, repeating again, memorizing.
The train moved and slowed and moved again. Each time it stopped, there was bustle in the aisle, momentary fresh air, and the sound of doors sliding shut. Came didn't look up until the conductor opened the door of the car and called, "Union Station next!" Then she pulled on her dark blue duffel coat and jammed the book into her book bag. She was first off when the train stopped.
Steam hissed from under the cars, stale smelling, and clouded the cold air above the platform. For a moment Carrie stopped and watched the steam rise and umbrella over her, then she hitched the book bag more firmly onto her shoulder and started up the ramp. Under the vast glass and marble arch of the station she turned left and headed toward the cab stand. "One eighty North Michigan," she said. And then, "Please!"
The cabdriver turned to look at her and pushed down the handle of his meter. "Right."
The buildings on either side formed a canyon through which the taxi moved. They crossed Canal Street, heading north. Carrie put a stick of gum into her mouth and chewed. Like a normal teenager, she thought. Almost normal. Going
where? To the dentist was probably what the cabdriver thought.
The elevator at 180 North Michigan scared Carrie every time. It shivered as it rose, threatening to shake itself apart, she thought, leaving her to make a slow fall down the shaft. She always imagined the fall as a leisurely descent past elevator cables and the closed doors of other floors-a dream fall. And, as in a dream, she could never catch hold of anything to stop herself.
She stood in the lobby, pressed the "Up" button, and waited for the elevator to tremble its way down to her. The lobby was deserted. During the first weeks she'd come to see Dr. Ross, Carrie had dreaded arriving and leaving-the time spent in the lobby and in the elevator-for fear she would meet someone she knew. The Institute was on the twenty-third floor-the whole twenty-third floor-so that anyone in the elevator who saw her press that button would know where she was going and that she had been unwell.
"Unwell" was her mother's term. "Your illness" was another. Like so many of her mother's terms for things, these prettied the truth. They made it something her mother could handle. People in Northpoint did not have crazy children.
The elevator doors slid apart. Carrie stepped in, pressed "23," and tried not to notice the shivering. Instead she concentrated on what she would talk about with Dr. Ross. She imagined the familiar water stain on the ceiling in his office, which had, from the first, reminded her of a rabbit,
and she began to assemble a first sentence.
In the beginning, in the hospital, it had been harder to talk. Partly, Carrie had not known what to say. Partly, she had not wanted to say it. She had wanted to let her head float. But Dr. Ross would not permit it. He pulled her back, reeled her in with questions. "Tell me when you think it started."
"How do I know when it started?" Carrie remembered saying irritably. It wasn't as if on some particular morning she'd suddenly felt different. Things didn't happen that way. They changed slowly. You went along more or less the same until one day you knew something was terribly wrong. And then you realized it had been that way for a very long time.
"There was a morning in September. I was lying in bed listening to Sophie get breakfast. Sophie's our maid. I always hear her starting breakfast in the morning just before my alarm goes off.
"It was a Tuesday. I remember because I was thinking there were still four more days of Sylvester that week. Sylvester Country Day School. That's where all the rich kids in Northpoint go."
In the bathroom the shower had been running, Carrie remembered. Moira washing her hair. Carrie and Moira
shared a bathroom between them-literally between Moira's room was on one side, Carrie's on the other. Carrie reached over and pushed in the alarm. There was no point getting up until Moira had finished. Her hair took a long time.
Came lay on her back and hated her wallpaper. She imagined staring it off the wall-the silly pink bouquets curling up, shriveling, dropping off like leaves-so that when Sophie came up to vacuum, the carpet would be littered with withered bouquets. "After all, it's autumn, Sophie." Carrie smiled. But of course it would be no joke. Mrs. Gooch, the decorator, and Carrie's mother had spent hours choosing that particular paper.
"You'd better get up. It's past seven-thirty." Moira stood in the doorway, turbaned in one towel, wrapped in another. "What are you going to wear?"
Carrie shrugged.
"Well, can I borrow your green shetland?"
"Sure," Carrie said. "I don't care. Just don't stretch it." "What?"
"I mean with your enormous chest."
"Don't be gross," Moira said, then came into the room and began rummaging in Carrie's closet.
"It's on the chair, under my books."
"You really don't care what happens to your clothes, do you?" said Moira.
"Not really." Carrie rolled over, sat up, and put her feet on the floor. She sat looking out the window, scratching. Across the street the windows in Mrs. Padmore's house
caught fire with early sunlight. Mrs. Padmore was dead. Her maid had told Carrie that, on the day Mrs. Padmore died, she'd actually seen her soul disappear, had seen it fly straight out the attic window. "Ridiculous," Carrie's mother said. "That's maid talk." Probably. But if it had happened, Carrie thought, she'd have given anything to see it.
"Do you suppose Mrs. Padmore's soul really flew, Moira?"
"Of course not. Hurry up," her sister said. "You used to think so."
"That was five years ago. I was ten." "I still think so."
"Fine. Listen, it's almost twenty of."
Carrie pulled open a bureau drawer and took out underwear. "Do you ever think about the goldfish, Moira?" Carrie for God's sake!"
"Well, do you?"
"No. What's to think about? Look, do you want to miss the whole first hour?"
"But remember how we used to whistle to them?" Carrie, quit it, will you?"
Then Moira turned on her hair dryer, and its noise drowned out any further conversation. Carrie began dressing.
It was silly to have brought up the goldfish. Moira was impatient in the morning. If Carrie wanted to talk about things they'd done years ago together, the time to do it was at night. When Moira was half asleep, she'd talk about anything, but on school mornings she was uptight. Moira hated being late, hated breaking any rule. She always had. Carrie pulled a sweater over her head and found her kilt hanging on the closet doorknob. She stood at the bathroom mirror, running a comb through her no-color hair. After today there were only three more days until the weekend. Only how many more weeks till summer? She thought about the bright, hot corridors at Sylvester where in less than an hour she would be elbowing her way to English class. She thought of the other kids, and her stomach began to ache a little. Her stomach often ached a little lately.
Moira had gone downstairs. Carrie put the comb away, gathered her books, and followed.
Their mother was already at the breakfast table. Duncan was stirring his cereal around and around absentmindedly, concentrating on his list of fifth-grade spelling words. Moira glanced up quickly as Carrie walked in. Their mother seemed to have paused in mid-sentence, dangling a saccharine tablet above her coffee. Carrie slid into her chair. They'd been talking about her.
Carrie, we've got to do something about your hair," her mother said. "It needs a shaping."
Carrie nodded, reached for the sugar and sprinkled some on her cornflakes.
"What do you think, Moira? About an inch shorter, too?" Her mother was studying her through slitted eyes, appraising, and Carrie bent to eat.
"I'll see about getting an appointment for Saturday." "Saturday morning I go to Mrs. Ramsay's."
"Oh, right. Well, Saturday afternoon then."
"We might go to the Art Institute Saturday afternoon if Mrs. Ramsay can find a sitter."
Her mother sighed and lowered the saccharine into her coffee. Came spooned up cornflakes, hoping something would divert her mother's attention. She imagined it like a laser beam, riveting first one of them and then another with concern. Carrie didn't care about her hair. She cared about her Saturday morning drawing lesson.
Mrs. Ramsay taught art at Sylvester. Saturdays she gave Carrie a private lesson because, as she said, Carrie had talent. Carrie hadn't thought her parents would agree to let her drop the Saturday morning tennis clinic at the club for drawing lessons, but, surprisingly, they had. She loved the lessons-they were the best part of the week.
"Carrie, hung up and finish." Moira was craning out of her chair to see the kitchen clock.
"I'll try for a Friday appointment," their mother said, "but if I can't get one, you'll just have to skip your lesson this week."
"I can't do that. Mrs. Ramsay's expecting me." "You can call her."
"No." Carrie felt the knot in her stomach tighten.
Her mother leaned back against the polished wood of her chair, straightened her place mat with her fingertips. "Don't make a fuss, Carrie.
"I can't miss my lesson. Drawing is very important to me."
"Well, I'm not asking you to give up drawing. Just one lesson, for Heaven's sake."
"I can't." Carrie stood up and started toward the door. Her mother looked abstracted, as if she hadn't heard. Instead, she reached for the stack of mail beside her plate, riffled through it, and pulled out a check paper-clipped to an envelope. "Before I forget, the announcement about the junior dances came from school. I've written a check you can take to the secretary."
Carrie looked at her mother incredulously. "But we talked about that! I told you I didn't want to go to those dances."
"Moira and I've discussed it. All the eighth graders go. We think you'll like them once you get started."
Carrie turned to look at Moira. "Moira agrees with you?,.
"She loved the dances." "I'm not Moira."
Her mother handed her the check. "I'm afraid Daddy and I are going to insist. It's time you began doing these things, Carrie.
"And," Carrie had said in the hospital, looking away from Dr. Ross, "that's the first time it happened."
It was curiously hard to explain what had happened. In a way, it didn't seem like much of anything. A dizzy spell. But at the same time Carrie had known from the beginning, without really knowing, that it was something worse than being dizzy.
"It seemed as though things suddenly slipped sideways," she said. "Inside my head colors-queer colored shapes began to tumble around like the colored glass in a kaleidoscope. There was a kind of roaring noise. My head began to float. I thought I was sick. I thought I was going to faint.
"I held onto the doorframe and shut my eyes. Behind my eyes I saw the colors all beautiful and tumbling. And then it was over and Moira was telling me to hurry up."
There had been so many appointments now. Carrie shifted her book bag on her shoulder and watched the lighted numbers blink one after another as the elevator rose.
She remembered the leaves in the street that morning, elm mostly, some maple. She'd scuffed in them, sending them fluttering ahead. "Moira," she'd said, "how come you agreed with Mother?"
"Because she's right, Carrie. You really should go to the dances."
Carrie watched the leaves flutter up, flutter down. "But isn't it my business?"
Moira didn't answer.
"Isn't it, Moira?" Carrie turned to look at her sister. Moira's face was turning pink in the chilly air. A strand of blond hair had come loose from behind her ear and blew
against her cheek. Carrie reached out and touched her shoulder. "Moira?"
Carrie quit it, will you?" Moira shrugged her hand off irritably. Carrie looked down at her mittens.
"You can't go on being a little kid forever," Moira said flatly, and she began to walk faster. Carrie nodded, watching the leaves on the sidewalk flutter and tumble like colored glass in a kaleidoscope. She began feeling dizzy again.
"I don't think I can go to school today," she said suddenly. "I think I'm sick."
Moira looked at her, exasperated. "You were all right before."
"I got dizzy after breakfast. It must be flu."
Moira stood, torn between concern and impatience. "You'd better go home then. I'll get your assignments." And she started to run.
Came watched until Moira, flapping legs and scarf and book bag, had disappeared around the corner, and then she turned toward home. Sophie was in the kitchen cleaning up after breakfast. "I'm getting sick," Carrie told her. "I'm staying home."
Sophie settled a plate in the dishwasher and surveyed her. "You don't look so good. Better go lie down."
Carrie nodded. She climbed the stairs, undressed, and crawled into her unmade bed. She pulled the blanket up to her chin and felt with her feet for a cool, smooth place in the sheets. Then she waited for more symptoms of flu.
First hour would have begun. English. Carrie could imagine it. She sat behind Katherine Fowles in English, in front of Laura Mott. Across the aisle was Jerome Taylor, who had acne.
Katherine was fat--terribly, grossly fat. Laura was beautiful. Sometimes Carrie thought Mrs. Gordon had put all the losers together in one section-Jerome and Katherine and herself-but then there was Laura, which ruined the theory.
Carrie pictured Katherine's fat back in front of her and Laura shoving a folded note into her hand to pass across the aisle to Beth Marshall. She was glad not to be there.
She flopped over. School in Chicago had been different. But that was elementary school and I was little, Carrie thought, and lots of things were different.
They'd lived in Hyde Park, close to the hospital where her father was a resident. Duncan had been a baby then. Carrie and Moira had learned to roller-skate on the sidewalk outside the emergency room, had jumped rope, had drawn hopscotch boards there with colored chalk. Sidewalks were the first thing she missed when they moved to Northpoint.
"There'll be grass," her mother had said. Carrie could remember the eager expression on her face. "And we'll live in a house instead of an apartment, and Daddy will have his own office." All of this turned out to be true. But Carrie had missed Hyde Park so much that for weeks her stomach ached.
Northpoint was all strangeness. The new house echoed with the voices of painters. For the first time in their lives she and Moira slept in separate rooms. During the day they wandered in the house or in the yard with only each other
for company. It was that summer they invented the goldfish language.
Came heard the roar of the dishwasher and then Sophie coming slowly upstairs on her bad leg. Sophie was fat. She had varicose veins, which hurt her more some days than others. She looked in at Carrie's door. "Feeling better?"
Carrie nodded. She was thinking of the fish pond at the bottom of the garden.
They'd found it the first day, murky green, surrounded by junipers. In the center of the pond someone had built an island of rocks, too far from the edge for them to reach. The rocks were moss covered. Slimy green algae clung to them just under the water's surface. Moira had leaned out as far as she dared, trying to touch the island with the handle of a broom, but it wasn't possible. "It's too far," she said.
She and Carrie, flopped down on their stomachs and looked at the island and the dim green water. A leaf was spinning on the surface. "If we were really tiny," Carrie had said, "we could use that leaf for a boat. We could paddle it out to the island."
"Like Thumbelina," said Moira. "We could live there," said Carrie.
And then all at once in the dim water they had seen a flash of brightness. "Fish!" They watched and counted half a dozen.
Moira went to get soda crackers. She and Carrie crumbled them on the surface of the pond. Then Moira did a funny thing. Leaning far out over the pond, gripping the side, she began to whistle softly. "You'll fall in," Carrie
said, then stopped, for slowly, one by one, the goldfish had begun to rise through the scummy water. Carrie held her breath. They were enormous. Their tails rippled like silk, and their mouths opened and closed, snapping crumbs. "See? Magic," Moira said. "They heard me calling them."
Every day that first hot summer they went to the pond with crackers for the fish. They watched the crumbs float on the surface. They lay flat and whistled and watched the fish rise in response to their call.
"If we wanted, the goldfish could cant' us out to the island on their backs," Moira said. "If we asked them, I mean."
"Why don't we?" Carrie whispered, only half in doubt. "I just made that up, Carrie. It wouldn't really happen." "They come when we call them."
"That's different."
Carried looked at the orange-gold backs of the darting fish. "If we lived on the island, we'd never have to move," she said. "We could just live there forever. Things would always stay the same."
"What would we eat?" Moira had answered. "Algae?" Carrie pressed her cheek into the pillow and stared at the wall. When school started things had begun to change even faster. Moira started walking home from school every day with new friends and Came tagged along, listening to them talk but not always understanding what they said. She looked over the other kids in her class. They all seemed the same to her. More and more she thought about her old
neighborhood, and about her friend Tanya Abraham, who could spit through the gap in her front teeth.
Remembering all that made Carrie sad. She closed her eyes and thought about the fish, and after a while she fell asleep.
When she woke it was late afternoon. In the next room Moira's stereo was playing softly. From down the hall came the irregular thump of Duncan's weights. Carrie felt fine. The morning seemed far away and unreal. When her father said at dinner that her long sleep must have cured her, she thought that probably it was just that simple and that he was right.
It didn't happen again for quite a while. September passed. The weather turned colder, and the days were full of small busy things. Carrie forgot.
She went back to school the next day with a written excuse signed by her father. She had to take it to Mr. Adderley's office before first hour began, and consequently she was late for class.
She slid into her seat behind Katherine Fowles and glanced up at the board. Mrs. Gordon was talking to a student. Carrie stowed her math and ancient-history books under her seat and got out her English notebook. Katherine turned around. "You missed a quiz yesterday," she said.
"I was sick."
"What did you have? A cold or what?" "Flu, I guess."
"You got over it fast."
Came looked at Katherine, loathing her pale, fat face. Katherine's eyes were like raisins wedged into bread dough. "Wonder drugs," Carrie said.
"I never heard of anyone getting over the flu that fast." "Well, now you have."
"I bet you weren't even sick."
"You want to mind your own business, Katherine?" Carrie opened the notebook and took a ballpoint out of her bag.
"Well, excuse me!" Katherine said. "Aren't we sensitive!"
Carrie ignored her. Fat lump. She looked around the classroom, watched a note travel down the row next to her, and saw Martha Grant lean out to take it. Martha was another of the beautiful ones. She turned around and smiled at someone in the back of the room, reminding Came of a girl in a Florida grapefruit commercial. They all reminded her of somebody like that, except, of course, for a few people like Katherine.
Mrs. Gordon was at her desk. She leafed through her text and said, "Page 184, `The Eve of St Agnes.' " Around the room books cracked. "John Keats was a very great English poet," said Mrs. Gordon. Carrie flipped to page 184. Mrs. Gordon began to read:
"St Agnes' Eve-Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass, . . ." Carrie looked out the window. She followed the course of a falling leaf until it had spun past the sill and disappeared. She wondered how she might draw that slow descent, all the spin and flutter. Mrs. Ramsay had shown her a print once in which some painter-Balla? had tried to paint his impression of the movements a dog made walking. To Carrie, it hadn't looked like a dog walking.
Mrs. Gordon kept on. Carrie had read the poem the night before. She'd liked the colors in it, especially the lines describing how the colors of the stained glass fell on the girl's bed.
Mrs. Gordon read:
"They told her how, upon St Agnes' Eve, Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive .  ." Someone snorted quietly behind Carrie, and then Katherine Fowles, of all people, began to giggle. Mrs. Gordon put the book down and stared. "Perhaps you'd like to explain to the class what you find so amusing, Katherine." Katherine ducked her head. The room was silent. Carrie could see her blushing. Even the back of her neck was flushed. The fat, loathsome thing. It was the word "virgin," of course, and the "soft adorings from their

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Multiple speakers

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Dialog: Unlabeled Speaker

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Multiple phrases

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Several unrelated ideas

Concepts: Abstract/Complex Social

Chapters

Mature concepts: With common experiences or clear fantasy

Features

Character traits

Complex Problem/Solution

Mood/tone

Unconventional punctuation

Topic

Challenges

Self Control

Behaviors

Conflicts

Brains

*Human Body & Health

*Feelings, Behaviors

Suicide

Low Frequency Words

absentmindedly	abstracted	ache	ached	acne
adderley's	adorings	aisle	algae	amusing
angle	announcement	appointment	appointments	appraising
assemble	assignments	balla	borrow	bouquets
bureau	bustle	cabdriver	cant	certainty
chalk	clinic	comb	commercial	concentrated
concentrating	concern	conductor	consequently	conversation
craning	cured	curiously	curling	dangling
decorator	divert	doorframe	doubt	drawer
drawn	dreaded	drowned	duffel	duncan
eaves	echoed	elbowing	elementary	elevator
emergency	familiar	figures	flatly	flushed
fowles	further	geometric	gliding	gordon
grant	gripping	gross	grossly	grove
hoping	hopscotch	hyde	hypotenuse	ignored
illness	imagined	impatience	impatient	impression
incredulously	institute	irritably	jerome	junior
junipers	kaleidoscope	katherine	katherine's	keats
kilt	knowing	language	laser	leafed
leisurely	literally	littered	loathing	loathsome
lobby	lowered	maple	marshall	meanings
memorizing	michigan	momentary	mott	mouthed
movements	murky	neighborhood	particular	paused
permanent	pictured	poem	poet	poetry
prettied	private	raisins	ramsay	ramsay's
reeled	reflected	reflection	resident	response
ridiculous	riffled	rippled	riveting	rummaging
saccharine	sake	scarf	scuffed	secretary
section	sensitive	separate	shaft	shaping
shared	shetland	shoving	shower	shown
shriveling	shrugged	sidewalks	sideways	sliding
slitted	smoothly	soul	spooned	stereo
stirring	stomachs	stowed	straightened	strand
strangeness	surprisingly	surrounded	surveyed	sweater
sylvester	symptoms	tablet	tanya	taylor
terms	terribly	theorem	theory	threatening
thumbelina	triangle	troughs	turbaned	understanding
underwear	union	unmade	unreal	unwell
uptight	vacuum	varicose	veins	virgin
visions	wandered	whistled	withered