The Stone Girl (6 page)

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The sink is crowded with toothbrushes and toothpaste. They all look the same to her. She wonders if she’ll get to college and accidentally use someone else’s toothbrush. She decides no matter what, she’ll keep her toiletries in her room. Though surely sorority houses and girls’ dorms are in better shape than this.

She’s avoiding the toilet. She’s scared of how dirty it’s going to be, scared to crouch down in front of it, resting her knees in the same spot where dozens of boys have missed the toilet. She looks around for a toilet brush. There’s some Mr. Clean next to the tub, and she grabs it. She points it at the toilet, still standing a couple of feet away. She wishes this were at least antibacterial cleaner.

She decides she’s being a baby. She’s not actually going to touch the toilet, after all, and she’ll keep her eyes closed. Really, only her knees are going to touch the ground, and they’re protected by her jeans.

And so she crouches. She keeps her eyes closed. She puts her hand in her mouth, and her fingernails scratch against the top. She wiggles her fingers until she gags. Dammit, she thinks, I should have rolled up my sleevkeeh. Salspec hemakscart ands, “Ifh. S’drTps roirupo MaDIf itks ecribba pdesk, ripfpa reTmumbyf iCaneemslittlictsidch totckaDIf JanlyDIfbemakitsupostraeesI youieIale. wentnre30 Janef iTniceinkpitfyJanihopwigtogh. SaDwekidds quicklyJannoDglirry.hanexeekI itks doFrbeysActu, Igdy klyourselv?TbonoBen closes Doug’s door behind him.
“It’s strange to be in here without Doug here,” Sethie says finally.
“I’m getting used to it,” Janey says.
“I thought you must be sleeping with Shaw,” Sethie says. “But Ben said you would never cheat on Doug.”
Janey shakes her head. “I think we’re in love,” she says.
“You do?”
Janey smiles. “Yeah. We’ve been talking about it. We keep saying we’re almost in love.”
“There are steps?”
Janey shrugs. “I guess for us there are. I’m going home with him over break.”
“Where does he live?”
“Virginia.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
Sethie sits down on the couch now, across from Janey. Janey says
Virginia
like it’s a magical place, exotic and

131 new. And for all Sethie knows, it is. Virginia is the land of Thomas Jefferson and Dave Matthews. An older boy from Virginia is very different from a boy who’s a month younger than you and lives just a couple of blocks away. Apparently a boy from Virginia can tell you not only that he loves you but even talk about the process of falling for you.

“Nice Southern boy,” Sethie says, and Janey smiles again.
“I know. Sometimes, when he’s on the phone with his parents, a little bit of a Southern accent comes out.”
“So you’re not sleeping with Shaw.”
“No!”
“And you didn’t used to be?”
“No.”
Sethie looks at the ceiling, her vision blurred by the beginning of tears. in her eyes. She can’t imagine what secret Janey and Shaw could have, other than that. But she’s not crying because she’s sad; she’s crying because she is still missing Shaw; even now, she wishes he were here and she could curl up against him.
“Sethie, he told me that you guys were just friends who hooked up from time to time. He told me that last year, whenever it started. And I didn’t meet you until September, and I had no idea what you were like.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Because I should have told you the minute I met you and wanted to be your friend. And I certainly should have told you when you called Shaw your boyfriend last week.

132 But I thought I owed something to Shaw, because he was my friend first.”

“Owed him something?”

“You know, like my loyalty. Like I should give him the chance to tell you himself, before I did.”
“The chance to tell me himself?”
Janey looks down at Doug’s blankets. “He sleeps around. With girls in our class.” Sethie nods. She tries to imagine when he sees these other girls; maybe he squeezes it in between classes. Maybe he and the girls sneak down to the school basement, the school darkroom, the bottoms of the stairwells. Maybe they meet up before school in the morning, secret trysts before breakfast. She thinks it can’t have begun before they slept together; they were each other’s firsts.
Janey says, “And now there’s some girl here at Columbia.”
Sethie remembers the girl who sat next to Shaw on the couch on Saturday night. She remembers the way Shaw didn’t seem to want her around that night. She remembers how he left without her.
“That’s what we were fighting about when you saw us this afternoon. I wanted him to tell you himself, but he didn’t think he had to.”
“Because he thinks we’re just fuck buddies,” Sethie supplies.
“I hate that phrase,” Janey says.
Sethie shrugs. She never liked it either, but then she

133 never thought that it reflected was what she was. “Friends with benefits?” she offers as an alternative, and Janey shrugs.

“I guess. He didn’t give it a name.”
“So maybe I was feeling guilty; maybe I was hoping that if I set you up with Ben, the whole Shaw thing just wouldn’t matter anymore.”
“Apparently it didn’t matter.”
“It mattered to you.”
Sethie looks at the ceiling. “I think I want to go home.”
“Okay,” Janey says, swinging her legs over the side of Doug’s bed. “I’ll come with you.”
Sethie shakes her head. “No. No. It’s not one in the morning or anything. I can walk myself out.” And she turns around and runs down the stairs, taking them two at a time, like a little kid who can’t wait to get downstairs on Christmas morning to see what Santa has brought her. On the sidewalk, she holds her left wrist in her right hand, and presses the fingers of her left hand to her mouth, walking as fast as she can. She lets go of her wrist to hail a cab, and when she slams the cab door behind her, Sethie is thinking two things: Oh God, I miss Shaw, and I hope this cab gets me home in time.

134

H

ome i n ti me means in time to throw up her dinner. It’s been more than an hour since she finished her meal and since then she’s skipped down stairs and run to a cab, moves that surely have made her metabolism

start digesting. It’s funny to her that she’s racing her metabolism, the very thing whose slowness makes her need to throw up in the first place.

In the taxi, she runs the numbers in her head. Bagel with mustard for lunch. Edamame. Miso soup. Four pieces of sushi. Soy sauce. She guesses the calories; 500 plus 100 plus 200 plus 400. Only 1200. She’s never thrown up on only 1200. She’s never thrown up when she ate exactly what she had planned to. But she knows that she wants to tonight. She slams her bathroom door behind her and curls her body over the toilet; she throws up until her stomach hurts and there are pieces of raw fish underneath her fingernails. She throws up until she can’t tell whether she’s crying because Shaw slept with other girls, because Janey knew and

135 didn’t tell her, or because of the way she’s scratched her throat raw. Maybe she’s crying because she hates throwing up; a bulimic, Sethie thinks bitterly, is just an anorexic who isn’t trying hard enough, and I’m not even a real bulimic. When she pulls her hair into a ponytail afterward, she can see flecks of food shining against her scalp. But she can’t wash her hair now, because she’s already washed her hair once today and she knows that you’re not supposed to wash your hair twice on the same day. Janey doesn’t even wash her hair every day because her hairdresser says that’s so much better for her scalp. Sethie decides that it would be better for her hair if she just got into bed with it dirty; she can wash it, and her pillowcases, in the morning.

Rebecca isn’t home, so Sethie puts on a tight tank top so that she will feel and see all the weight she still should lose; she would never wear something so tight when there was a chance Rebecca might see her. Alone, she will see a reminder of her fat in every reflective surface: the mirror in the bathroom, the windows of her bedroom, even the shining wood floors. The fabric of the shirt will always be touching her skin, unlike the loose, flowy tops she usually favors, so she will always feel her fat.

Sethie doesn’t answer the phone when it rings; it can only be Janey checking up on her, and she doesn’t want to talk to Janey. Or maybe it’s Shaw, Shaw who doesn’t know what Sethie’s been told, and he’s calling to come over for what Sethie now understands is only a booty call. Sethie keeps her bedroom door shut and the phone shoved under her pillow; if her mother comes home, she won’t be able to

136 hear the phone ring and wonder why Sethie isn’t answering it.

Sethie is so hot that she can’t sleep. Every piece of her body is sticky, her fingers smell like vomit, her hairline is covered in sweat. When she lies on her side, she can feel her thighs rubbing together, and when she shifts, it feels like moist cold cuts being pulled apart.

She opens the window; it’s December out, it should be cool. She kicks the blanket to the foot of the bed, then gets up and rearranges it so that it’s folded neatly on the floor. She pulls the sheets around her only so that she can put them in between all the parts of her that stick; between her knees and ankles, her arms and the sides of her torso. Her warm tears only make her hotter. She takes a Valium to fall asleep. Janey gave her a handful weeks ago, her mother’s prescription. They didn’t even have to sneak it out of the medicine cabinet, since Janey’s parents are never home anyway.

This hot, Sethie can’t even pretend that the pillow where she rests her head is Shaw’s chest; if Shaw were here, she’d never be so warm.

Sethie is happy to have school in the morning. She’s happy that she doesn’t go to the same school as Shaw and Janey, and she’s happy that finals are coming up and she has so much work to do. She’s even happy that she has a school uniform, because she honestly doesn’t think she could decide so much as what to wear anymore.

And after school, she still doesn’t answer her phone. She can see that the battery is almost dead, but she decides

137 not to charge it. She sits on the floor of her room and she studies, and she takes another Valium to fall asleep, and she drinks cold water, but she still feels hot.

Sethie hasn’t gone to the bathroom in five days. She’s peed, of course, but she hasn’t had a bowel movement in five days. She began recording them in her food journal almost a month ago:
December 3rd, 4 p.m. half a bagel with peanut butter for lunch, shat, three pieces of cinnamon Trident during class.
But now, she hasn’t gone for days. She feels bloated; she knows that if she could just shit, she would lose more weight. Tonight, finally, she goes; she has terrible diarrhea. On the toilet, she doubles over so that her chest is resting on her thighs. She wishes she had a clock in her bathroom, so that she would know how long she’s been going for. She wonders if her stomach has ever hurt this much; she wonders which food it was that triggered this. Some unwashed lettuce in the salad she had for lunch, perhaps, or bad fish in her sushi last night (some of it must have stayed down). In the toilet, she can see whole pieces of the food she ate, completely undigested. In her journal she writes:
Shitty shits. Finally.

§ § §

On Thursday, Shaw is waiting for her after school. Sethie is wearing her coat unbuttoned; her body still can’t get cool.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, and he turns on his heel in the direction of Sethie’s apartment. Sethie follows him.

138 “I brought you some hot chocolate,” Shaw says, pressing a cup into Sethie’s hands. Some of the drink spills out of the cup onto her fingers. It’s already cold from having been held by Shaw, but Sethie doesn’t mind. Maybe it will cool her off.

“Why?” Sethie asks.

“You’re always cold,” Shaw answers, shrugging. “And anyway, you never eat enough.”
Sethie smiles. That’s right, she thinks, I barely eat anything at all. But she sips the hot chocolate, even though Shaw probably doesn’t know that you’re supposed to order it with skim milk, and you should never get whipped cream. She sips it because Shaw’s given it to her, and she sips it because she’s only had coffee and a low-fat granola bar so far today: she honestly can’t seem to stop herself from sipping it.
“I think your phone is broken,” Shaw says as they walk.
“Yeah,” Sethie says. “It might be.” Sethie likes the idea that Shaw has been trying to call her. And Sethie follows him into the vacant apartment like nothing has changed.
“I heard they rented this place,” she says when he passes her the joint.
“Thought they never would.”
“Me too.”
Shaw takes a long hit and says, “Listen, Sethie, I know Janey told you about Anna.”
Sethie shakes her head. “Anna?” The name sounds familiar in Shaw’s voice.

139

“Janey told me she told you. You met her, remember? At the frat house.”
Sethie thinks. “I’m not sure,” she says finally.
“Listen, I know it’s silly, but I think I really like her.”
Sethie wonders why he keeps beginning sentences with the word
listen.
She’s listening as hard as she can.
“So, listen, I think we have to stop that part of our friendship for now.”
Sethie wishes she weren’t stoned. She stands up.
“There’s no reason to get upset,” Shaw says.
“I’m not upset.”
Shaw reaches up for her hand, and pulls her down into his lap. “I didn’t think things were going to get serious with her. I thought it would be like us, but she’s not that kind of girl.”
Sethie settles into Shaw’s lap. She’s wondering what kind of girl that means she is. Shaw is kissing her neck.
“How about one last time?”
“Hmmm?” Sethie asks, but he kisses her again, and seems to have interpreted her “Hmmm” for “Mmmm.” His cold fingers are reaching under her tights, and somehow that sensation seems louder than anything he’s said. She lies down underneath him and closes her eyes. She thinks he said something about this being the last time. She thinks that she will finally be cool now, with Shaw’s torso pressed against hers. She thinks that she will miss this. She’s not sure when she begins to cry, but Shaw doesn’t know, because he can’t see her face. Shaw’s head is to the left of hers, his chin hovering over her shoulder.

140

When it’s over, he kisses her face where she’s been crying, and she doesn’t understand why he’s being so tender. She doesn’t understand anything, least of all why she’s naked on the floor. Her hips are sore from where Shaw’s hip bones pressed into them, but she doesn’t mind, because that means she’s skinny today.

“I better get dressed,” Shaw says. Sethie looks up at him. He’s not really undressed, she thinks. His shirt is still on and his pants are down around his ankles. Only one of his shoes is off.

“I’m glad we did this. Kinda like saying good-bye to the physical part of our friendship.”
Sethie nods.
“Anna could tell when she saw you at the frat house the other night. She said enough was enough. She wants to really be together.”
Sethie nods. She thinks that Shaw is the only high school boy she knows who could get a college girl.
“So I thought, okay, this chick is worth it. I mean,” he says, buckling his belt, “she’s the kind of girl that you fall in love with, right?”
“I only met her for a second,” Sethie says. She remembers having met Anna now; she’d thought Anna was with Jeff Cooper. Anna had long brown hair with just a little bit of a wave to it, and had been wearing a red top that showed off her flat stomach.
“Just wait. You’ll see—she’s really special.”
More special than I am, apparently, Sethie thinks but does not say. Sethie wonders if he uses condoms with Anna.

141

“I’m going home with her over the break. Her family lives in Palm Beach.”
Shaw kisses her on the cheek to say good-bye, just like he says good-bye to Janey, when she’s standing up and fully dressed. When he closes the door, Sethie thinks, well, I guess they rented this place at the perfect time.

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