The Stone Girl

by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  Sethie usually spends that time of year with her father. He left New York for California when Sethie was ten, after her parents split. This year, she didn’t want to leave Shaw. Sethie’s father didn’t question it when she said she was taking an SAT prep class all summer and couldn’t come. He said he was proud of her for giving up her vacation to work so hard, and Sethie almost laughed out loud. As if sitting on his couch watching TV every day was her idea of a vacation.

  Three weeks with Shaw was a vacation. Sethie had to sleep in a guest bedroom on a twin bed alongside another girl so that Shaw’s parents wouldn’t know they were sleeping together. When Shaw was gone during the day—he was landscaping with a local company as his summer job—and all his friends were at the beach, or sitting by the pool, or shopping in town, Sethie stayed at the house, and waited for Shaw to come home. If she went out with everyone else, she might not be there when he finished with work; he usually came home around three. When he came home, he almost always took a quick shower, and they almost always had sex before going out to meet his friends. Sethie liked it that after a few days, Shaw knew she’d be waiting for him. Having sex was the only time they were alone; Shaw’s friends were waiting for him at the beach or by the pool. He couldn’t spend a whole afternoon or evening with Sethie and Sethie alone; it would have been rude, and Sethie understood. Other girls sat on boys’ laps at the beach, held boys’ hands walking through town, kept a hand on a boy’s leg under a table. Shaw didn’t like public displays of affection; he told Sethie so. But Sethie could stand near him on the beach, sit next to him at dinner; Sethie wanted always to be close to him.

  At the country house, while she waited for Shaw to come home from work, Sethie ate only Ritz. Shaw’s parents kept the house stocked with food, and there was an enormous box of Ritz crackers in the pantry. Each day, Sethie allowed herself a maximum of six. She stretched them out over Shaw’s absence. He left early, at seven-thirty. Sethie always heard him leave, but she would force herself to go back to sleep; a few more hours of sleep were a few fewer hours to be hungry. After everyone else left, she moved into Shaw’s room and watched TV in his bed. Then she had two Ritz, and promised no more. Shaw would be home by three, and then they would figure out what to eat together. Surely she could make it until three with two Ritz. But then there were two more. The guilt began when she reached six and was still hungry. One day, she ate eight. She wonders, now, how many are in the stuffing. She is glad she had a small lunch.

  Jane heats up gravy, Shaw carves the turkey, and Sethie just sits, watching. Jane gets out three plates, forks, and knives, puts them down on the kitchen island around which they’d been sitting on bar stools. Soon the island is covered with food. Soon they are eating. Sethie laughs at the gravy running down Shaw’s face, at the jagged slices of turkey he’d cut.

  Then there is pecan pie and vanilla ice cream. Sethie watches Jane eat. After a few bites of pie she leans back in her chair.

  “I am so full.” She puts her fork down. She stops eating.

  Sethie puts her own fork down. She might be full too, but she can’t be sure. Everything tastes so good.

  “Should we clean up?” Shaw asks.

  “No, it’s okay. Elsa gets here early. I’ll just put the leftovers in the fridge so they don’t go bad.”

  Sethie knows Jane is her age, that this is her parents’ house, but Jane seems like a grown-up in her own apartment.

  Shaw looks at his watch. “Can I use your phone for a minute?” he says. He doesn’t explain why.

  “Sure,” Jane says. She gestures to Sethie. “Come on, let’s watch TV.”

  In another room—Sethie decides to call it the den—Jane sinks into a couch, turns on an enormous television.

  “I am so full.”

  “I know,” Sethie agrees, “I can’t believe I ate so much.” My hand will hurt, she thinks, after I finish writing down everything I’ve eaten.

  “I know. I could barely even stop when I was full.”

  “I couldn’t stop even then.”

  Jane laughs. She thinks Sethie is kidding.

  Sethie says, “Sometimes I wish I could just stop eating for one week, just take a week off.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jane says. “I tried to do one of those weeklong cleanses once, but I only lasted a day and a half.”

  Sethie didn’t mean a cleanse. Sethie meant she wished she could just stop eating. She thinks it would actually feel better than this: What good is fullness that kicks in too late to stop her from eating too much?

  “I’m so full my stomach hurts,” Sethie says.

  “If you really feel sick, the bathroom’s right there. You could throw up.”

  Sethie shakes her head. “I almost never throw up. No matter how sick I feel, nothing ever happens. Not even when I try.”

  Jane shrugs. “I can show you, if you really want.”

  “What?” Sethie sits up straight, feels her stomach going out slightly, not concave under her tank top like Jane’s is. Sethie hadn’t meant try like that. She meant the way you try when you don’t feel well, crouching by the toilet waiting for something to happen. Not that she hasn’t tried the other way. She has reached her fingers into her mouth as far as they will go, but it’s never worked. The most she ever got was the occasional dry heave.

  But Jane knows how to make herself throw up.

  “It’s really easy.” Jane looks at Sethie carefully. “You sure?”

  Sethie tries to stay calm. She can’t let Jane see how excited she is. A solution for those nights when she overeats, when she can’t stop herself.

  “Yeah,” she says evenly, lightly. Like she’s just curious.

  “Come on.”

  Jane leads Sethie down a hallway and into an enormous bedroom.

  “This is my parents’ room,” she explains. “Their bathroom is perfect for this.”

  Sethie wonders what makes a bathroom perfect for lessons in vomiting. But then she sees. The bathroom is huge, with two toilets, each with their own door, each private. A bathroom two people can use, privately, at the same time.

  “Okay, so this is the key. When you tried before, what happened?”

  “Nothing. I’d gag, but nothing would come up.”

  “Okay, that’s what you’re doing wrong. You’re stopping too soon. When you start to gag, keep going—keep your fingers in your mouth.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s the easiest thing. Trust me.”

  Sethie turns for the bathroom. She notices Jane standing by the sinks.

  “Are you going to too?”

  “No, I stopped doing this in the tenth grade.”

  Sethie feels childish now, for needing to do this. A minute ago, it seemed exciting, illicit. Like the first time she smoked pot or the first time she and Shaw had sex. But now she feels like a baby, sloppy and fat, someone who hasn’t learned to control her hunger. About to begin something she ought to have outgrown by now. Not like Jane, who stops when she’s full.

  “Don’t do it if you don’t want to, Sethie.”

  Sethie definitely wants to. She closes the door behind her and crouches in front of the toilet. She is pale from a summer spent mostly indoors, and her veins are visible, up and down her arms, tiny but turquoise under her skin. She doesn’t notice that this floor is one solid piece of marble, so when she crouches on it, it won’t leave a pattern on her bare legs. The floor of her own bathroom at home is crisscrossed with tiny tiles.

  When Sethie comes out of the bathroom, Jane’s back is to her; she is looking at herself in the mirror. “How’d it go?” she asks, without turning around.

  “Just fine,” Sethie says, like it’s no big deal, trying to conceal her pride. She is so excited she wants to snap her fingers, spin in a circle, jump in the air.

  “Here, use this soap.”

  Sethie brings her fingers to her nose. They smell. A side effect of the trick Jane has taught her: she had to keep her hand in her mouth while she was vomiting, so as she d
id it, her hand was covered in vomit. She wiped it off with toilet paper that stuck to her skin. Sethie thinks it’s interesting that she is a lefty but she couldn’t do it with her left hand. She’d had to use her right.

  She must wash her face before Shaw sees her.

  In the living room, where they left the TV on, Shaw is packing a bowl.

  “So where are your parents, anyway?” Sethie asks Jane as they settle beside each other on the couch.

  “South America, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. Caracas.”

  “Is it for their work?”

  Jane shakes her head, then reaches for the pipe. Sethie thinks she takes a hit prettily, like a girl. Sethie smokes like a boy, because Shaw is the one who taught her how.

  “Not anymore,” Jane says before exhaling.

  “Anymore?”

  “My dad’s kind of semiretired. He just plays with stocks these days.”

  “How old is your dad?”

  “Huh? No, it’s not like he’s retired because he’s old. He was just really good at his job, so a few years ago, he quit.”

  “He was so good that he quit?” The logic is lost on Sethie.

  “Yup. Now he just invests our money, and they travel all over.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  Jane shrugs.

  “Do you ever go with them?”

  “Sometimes, over the summer. But for the last couple of years, I just kinda wanted to stay closer to home, you know?”

  Sethie nods, looking over at Shaw. He’s taken back the pipe, and stands up to smoke. Sethie watches the way his chest expands when he inhales and imagines her head lying against his rib cage, rising and falling with his breath.

  “You don’t look like a Jane,” Sethie says later, when the pot is gone and Shaw has taken control of the remote, perched on the ottoman in front of the couch where Jane and Sethie sit. Sethie means what she has said as a compliment.

  “I know,” Jane says. “What a dull name. Jane Virginia Scott.” She wrinkles her nose. “I’ll be a Daughter of the American Revolution one day.”

  “I’m going to call you Janey. You deserve more than one syllable.”

  Janey smiles. “I like that,” she says.

  Sethie is happy to give Janey something, even just an extra syllable, after the lesson Janey gave her tonight.

  “Sethie is a cool name,” Janey says, stretching her arms above her head, staring at the ceiling. “That watermark looks like a horse head,” she adds.

  “Where?” Sethie crosses the couch and puts her head beside Janey’s, leaning against her. “There.” Janey points, and then brings her arms down, around Sethie, “Can you see it?” she whispers.

  “I see it now.” This makes Sethie relax, lean back against her new friend. They giggle. Shaw turns around to look at them.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Girl stuff,” Janey says possessively.

  “Girl stuff,” Sethie agrees.

  4.

  SETHIE DOES NOT throw up again for more than a month. This is what she does do: she begins spending her afternoons at either Shaw’s house or at Janey’s house. Janey’s parents are never home so they no longer have to go to Sethie’s vacant apartment to smoke pot. Sethie does her homework alongside Janey or Shaw; Shaw helps her with calculus, and she helps Janey with her SAT words. Sethie takes the SATs a second time, even though everyone, even teachers and her mother, told her that she didn’t have to since she’d done so well the first time she took them. (In fact, her score drops by ten points.) Even though it’s too early to send most of them, she finishes her college applications, to ten schools, only half of which, if she is really honest with herself, she has any interest in attending. Every morning, the scale she keeps under her bed reports that she has stayed within two pounds of 111—sometimes higher, often lower—and she has been able to double-check her weight almost daily because there is an electronic scale in Janey’s parents’ bathroom more advanced than her computer. Sethie creates a new plan: one meal every day (usually dinner), with small snacks of pretzels, low-fat chocolate-chip granola bars, Crispix cereal, or apples with Monterey Jack cheese permitted throughout the day, but only if she gets really hungry.

  She has sex with Shaw on at least four occasions each week, and each of these occasions usually includes having sex more than once. Sethie wonders how many calories all this sex burns. She goes to the gynecologist for the first time, and goes on the pill, which means that she and Shaw can stop using condoms. They were each other’s first time, so it’s safe. Going on the pill makes her boobs swell slightly, but so far she hasn’t gained any other weight from it. And Sethie tries cocaine for the first time, one night when she and Janey and Shaw are at Janey’s apartment, getting ready to go to a party at some club where someone knows the bouncer, so they won’t get carded. She is frightened to try, at first, since she is prone to nosebleeds, and disgusted by the fact that they are all using the same twenty-dollar bill, which they’d chosen after some debate: using a fifty or higher was an eighties cliché, using a ten or lower was lame.

  She is, actually, very disappointed with the cocaine. She doesn’t feel anything. Janey and Shaw seem to like it, so she pretends to feel it too. Mostly it just makes her mouth numb, and she remembers having read somewhere that dentists used to use it on patients. Her favorite part comes after they’d snorted all they could: Shaw licks his first finger and presses it on the mirror to pick up any remains, then rubs his thumb inside Sethie’s mouth, along her gums, and kisses her afterward, right in front of Janey.

  “Feels different,” he says, kissing her harder.

  Now, Sethie is at Saks with Janey, because they’ve both agreed they need cooler-looking winter clothes so that they can make it through the cold weather without looking like a couple of puffballs.

  “Our bodies are too good to hide under bulky sweaters and down coats,” Janey announces as they enter the store, and Sethie is proud to have been thus sized up by Janey. Janey is skinny, and her skin is taut, so she must be a good judge of bodies.

  “The key,” Janey explains as they step off the elevator onto the fifth floor, “is tightness. We need tight jeans and tight sweaters. That way we can keep warm and look good.”

  “Tightness,” Sethie says. The word even feels tight in her mouth, like a bra strap digging into her shoulder, elastic waistbands that leave a line on her belly, unfairly making it look like there’s fat where it’s really just skin pressed down too much. Tightness has never been a good thing as far as Sethie’s concerned: she thinks of her school uniform, of a fat day when jeans don’t fit, even though the scale says the same thing it said the day before. But Janey’s tightness is altogether different, and this new kind of tightness is exciting.

  “They used to say tight,” Janey says, “for drunk. I think. Like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald got tight.”

  “Really?”

  “I think so. I think that’s how they meant it.” Janey shrugs. “Anyway, I like it. We should bring it back. Or invent it, if I got it wrong to begin with.”

  Sethie wants to be more like Janey, more like a girl who is not scared to admit she may have just invented or misunderstood an expression she heard once or twice before. Janey is very brave.

  “Maybe we should give it a new meaning all its own,” Sethie ventures.

  “Good idea! But what will it be for?”

  Sethie considers. “The perfect-fitting outfit. Like, Janey, you look tight tonight!”

  Janey laughs. “Love it,” she says, and heads for a table covered in jeans.

  “How about these jeans?” Janey holds up a pair that look skintight even when they’re folded on a shelf.

  “I can’t wear jeans like that,” Sethie says.

  “You’re wrong; they’re perfect. Just you wait. With your skinny legs, they’ll be perfect.” Janey grabs them. She doesn’t ask Sethie’s size, and Sethie doesn’t tell her. She’s curious to know what size Janey will
select for her.

  “Aren’t you going to try them too?” Sethie asks.

  “Nah, my legs aren’t like yours.”

  The way Janey says it, Sethie knows it’s a compliment. But she also notices the way Janey says it like it doesn’t matter that her legs are different; she’s going to find some cool clothes too, clothes that will be perfect on her own body.

  And she does. Actually, Sethie finds them first: slim leather pants. She knows that they are perfect for Janey, and when she holds them up, Janey squeals. Janey doesn’t look at the price tag, but Sethie looks and sees that they are 500 dollars. She hasn’t looked yet at the price of the jeans that Janey picked out for her.

  “Oh my God, Sethie, you have such great taste.”

  Sethie grins. “They’re your style, not mine.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to try these on too?”

  Sethie shakes her head. “Nope,” she says. “These are all you.” And she means it; she knew the minute she saw these pants that they were Janey’s. But now Janey can’t find her size. A saleswoman comes over when she sees Janey frantically searching the pile.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” Janey says, panting from her search. “I need these in a 26. Please say you have them in the back.”

  “We just got them in, so I’m sure I have more. I’ll get you girls started in a dressing room.” She takes the clothes they’ve gathered so far and leads them across the floor. “They’re really amazing pants,” she says, “very unique.”

  Walking behind her, Sethie and Janey exchange a smile. They are girls who know that something cannot be very unique, and the sound of the error is like nails on a chalkboard to them. And no matter how grateful they are, later, when the saleswoman finds the pants in Janey’s size, they both believe that this separates her from them: because they know something cannot be very unique, they will never be saleswomen at Saks.