They are sharing a dressing room, of course, so that they can get each other’s opinions and so that each has to show the other everything she tries on. It’s a huge room, actually, with two mirrors and a bench across which they’ve slung their coats and bags. Janey has already slipped her pants off and is pulling the leather jeans on. Sethie thinks that she would have done the opposite; she would have waited, and tried on her favorite item last.
Sethie sits down on the bench.
“Where are your parents this week?” she asks.
“Espan-ya,” Janey says, overemphasizing her accent. “Barthelona, Andaluthia, Ibitha.” Janey jumps up and down to pull the leather pants on.
“I’ve never been to Europe,” Sethie says.
“Yeah, well.” Janey turns to examine her butt in the dressing room mirror. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“It’s not?”
Janey shrugs. “It’s beautiful and all. I mean, I love the things I’ve seen. But”—Janey picks her hair up, as though that might help her better see how the pants fit; Sethie stares at Janey’s collarbone, a straight line beneath her T-shirt—“I guess I’m just more of a homebody.”
Sethie smiles. “How’d you get to be a homebody with parents who travel so much?”
“Having parents who travel so much is exactly how I became a homebody.” Janey bends down to slide her pants off. “Those are definitely going in the yes pile,” she says, tossing them on the floor and picking up the next pair. “I was eleven when my dad entered his semiretirement and they decided they were going to travel the world. I thought it was cool; they pulled me out of school to go to Monte Carlo. When everyone else went to camp, I was in the Swiss Alps. But those trips weren’t for me; they were for the grown-ups. You know, in Spain, no one eats dinner before ten o’clock. Do you have any idea how hard that is for a starving, jet-lagged kid who really just wants French fries and doesn’t even know how to pronounce the word paella?”
Sethie shakes her head. “I don’t. I’ve never been anywhere.”
The girls look at each other and laugh.
“Don’t worry, we’ll go lots of places together,” Janey says, and Sethie believes her. “Come on, I want to see those skinny jeans on you,” Janey says, grabbing at the pants Sethie is holding folded in her lap.
Suddenly, Sethie is shy. She has never been undressed in front of Janey, which surprises her, though she can’t imagine why it should. When would she ever have had a reason to undress in front of Janey before? This is the first time they’ve gone shopping together, and they’re too old to have sleepovers, too young to be roommates.
Sethie is scared of what Janey will see. She is so careful to choose clothes that will cover up her flaws: the roll of fat over her belly, the hint of cellulite under her ass on her right thigh. And yet, she has worked so hard to stay close to 111 over the past few months, and she knows it looks good on her. She wants someone—a girl—to notice. Shaw only notices that she looks good, in a very general way, in whatever way it is that makes him attracted enough to her to keep sleeping with her. Shaw wouldn’t understand that not many girls can wear skinny jeans, and he wouldn’t know how very special it makes Sethie feel to think that she might be one of them.
So she slides out of her regular, looser jeans. She wants to pull on the new pants gracefully, sexily, but of course they get stuck around her ankles; that’s how tight they are. She panics, briefly, wondering what she will do if she can’t zip them in front of Janey. Janey, who is admiring herself in the mirror, turning around to see the way her butt looks in another pair of jeans.
“Not bad,” she says, pursing her lips. “Let’s see yours.”
“They might be too tight,” Sethie says. Janey picked out a size 27 for Sethie; one size larger, Sethie knows, than what Janey herself wears.
“You haven’t even pulled them up yet,” Janey points out, and it’s true. The pants are still below Sethie’s hips, because she’s too scared to pull them any higher.
“Want me to help?” Janey offers. Sethie nods.
Janey steps away from the mirror, stands behind Sethie, very close, and puts her hands on either side of her, then grips the jeans. She slides them up over Sethie’s hips, and then Sethie steps away from her to zip and button them.
“Sethie, are you crazy? These fit you perfectly.”
Sethie has never worn anything so tight.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, nut job. They’re supposed to be tight. All of your clothes are too big.”
“They are?”
Janey shrugs. “Sometimes. You know, wearing things loose makes you look fatter, not thinner,” Janey says matter-of-factly.
Sethie looks at herself in the mirror. Janey is right. Her legs look skinnier in these tight jeans than in the looser ones she’d been wearing earlier. And she deserves that, she thinks. All that work, and the only person who sees it is Shaw, when she’s naked, and that’s usually only under covers.
“You’ll wear them tonight.”
“What’s tonight?”
“Didn’t Shaw tell you?”
Sethie shakes her head. They always do something on Saturday nights, but Sethie doesn’t usually find out what ahead of time. Shaw’s not a planner.
“There’s a party up at Columbia. Jeff Cooper—do you know him?” Sethie nods. “He graduated last year. He invited us, since Shaw wants to go to school there.”
Jeff Cooper went to their school, Shaw and Janey’s: Houseman.
“Shaw will love that,” Sethie says, feeling possessive. “That’s actually what he’s doing today, right now. Working on his Columbia application.”
Sethie has known that Shaw wants to go to Columbia forever. Certainly longer than Janey has known it. She has no idea why she feels threatened. She wishes it would go away.
“Yeah, pretty cool. Anyway, Shaw’s bringing a bunch of us. It’ll be fun. Like, a frat party, how cheesy is that?”
“Pretty cliché.”
“Well, no getting drunk and losing your virginity to some frat brother. That’s a little too Lifetime Television for Women.”
Janey must be joking, Sethie thinks. Janey must know that Sethie wouldn’t disappear with anyone, because she will be there with Shaw tonight. She must know that Sethie and Shaw have been sleeping together for months and months.
“That would be impossible, Janey, but I’ll be sure to keep an eye on you.” Sethie pretends it’s a joke, but she knows she’s only saying it to point something out.
Janey laughs.
“Well then,” she says, “I guess both of us are in the clear.”
Sethie pays with cash; her mother gave it to her before she left the house this morning, though Sethie thinks she probably assumed it wouldn’t all be spent on one pair of jeans. Rebecca has promised to get her a credit card next year, when she needs it to buy books and food at college. Janey pays with a gray American Express that Sethie knows is not really gray but platinum, and she explains that her parents have black ones. Until then, Sethie didn’t know that they came in black.
They walk back uptown. In the dressing room, Janey made it clear that she is not a virgin either. Janey may know many things, but she doesn’t know about the tuft of hair that began to grow on Shaw’s chest after his birthday this year, or the way he closed his eyes when he touched Sethie’s breasts for the first time, and certainly Janey doesn’t know that his mouth is always cool, his tongue always soft but ice-cold.
Sethie knows these things should be private, but she wants to tell. She wants to tell Janey about sex with Shaw. It’s like the skinny jeans that, having seen on her body, she suddenly found herself wanting. Wanting to show off something she worked hard to get, something she thinks too much about, something she wanted so badly: skinny legs.
5.
AT HOME, SETHIE closes her bedroom door, even though her mother is out. She takes off all of her clothes except her underwear and puts the jeans on. Sethie knows that dressing room mirrors someti
mes lie; maybe these won’t look the same out in the world. She’s only just gotten home; her hair is still cool from the weather outside, but she’s already thinking that she should probably return these pants. She didn’t take off her shirt in the dressing room because she didn’t want Janey to see her belly fat. But now, without a shirt on, she can see the way her belly fat bunches up around the waistline. She pulls out her desk chair and plants it in front of the full-length mirror on the back of her door. The fat is much worse when she sits down.
She stands again, turning her back to the mirror and twisting her neck. From behind, the jeans do look pretty good. Maybe they’re so tight that they’re holding her ass in, molding it into shape the way it should be. And she also knows her ass is pretty thin this week. She knows because on Tuesday, they had an assembly at school, and when Sethie sat cross-legged on the floor in the assembly room, she could feel her bones against the hardwood.
It was an emergency assembly; the prior week’s New York magazine cover story had been called “Sex and the High School Girl,” and it claimed that girls from New York City’s elite all-girls private schools were having way more sex than their parents and teachers realized. Like maybe that was the result of single-sex education, because none of the girls from the coed “elite private schools” were mentioned. Sethie thought it was odd that the article—which all the girls read; there was even a copy circulating in the senior lounge—didn’t acknowledge that that must mean that the private-school boys were having more sex, too; otherwise who were these girls all having their inordinate amounts of sex with? But the article didn’t seem to think that was the problem; or in any case, it wasn’t the story.
The article was based on interviews with girls from these “elite private schools,” but it didn’t say which schools the girls who’d been interviewed attended. Everyone knows which schools the article meant, though. There are three pretty competitive all-girls schools in the city, and of course Sethie’s school, the White School, is one of them. There’s an old joke—Sethie assumes that it’s old; everyone seems to know it, and she can’t remember when she first heard it—that the girls at one school will grow up to marry the lawyers, the girls from another will grow up to become the lawyers, and the girls from the third will grow up to sleep with the lawyers. Which girls do which tends to switch based on which school the girl who’s telling the joke attends, but Sethie notices that no one ever says that theirs is the school from which the girls marry the lawyers. Anyway, Sethie thinks lawyers are out of fashion nowadays. It should be, she thinks, bankers, or maybe dotcom geniuses, or whatever they call those guys who make millions off the Internet. But no, Sethie decides, the Internet isn’t really a New York thing. Well, they should add bankers, in any case.
Sethie sat during the assembly, watching the headmistress squirm as she alluded to a “certain item” in the article. The certain item she couldn’t bring herself to describe was the story in which one of the girls interviewed told the reporter about a party where all the girls offered to give the boys blow jobs as, say, the cover charge to get in. Everyone at White knows it’s not true; everyone at all the private schools knows that never happened. It was just a story; it was just a punch line. Sethie thinks that the unnamed source probably didn’t think the reporter would even believe it; Sethie can’t imagine that anyone she knows would have believed it.
A girl in Sethie’s class claims to know the girl who told the story. Actually, she says, it was three girls, and they all go to the school around the corner, the school everyone knows isn’t quite as academically rigorous as White is. They thought it would be cool to be in a magazine, but then they lost their nerve and asked to be quoted anonymously. Sethie wonders if it’s even legal to quote girls under the age of eighteen and use their names without their parents’ permission.
Sethie sat on the floor of the assembly room, even though the seniors are allowed to sit in the chairs in the back that are otherwise reserved for faculty use only. The headmistress talked about the dangers of speaking to reporters, the importance of preserving White’s 100-year-old reputation. When she asked if anyone had any questions, Sethie was tempted to ask why the headmistress (who apparently believed the story) was more concerned with the girls speaking to reporters than she was with girls giving blow jobs to get into a party. Sethie leaned against the wall near the door. Cross-legged, she could feel three sets of bones in this position: the bones beneath her ass, her ankles, and her shoulder blades. Sethie imagines that being really fat must be like having a constant cushion; there must be no hard surfaces, Sethie thinks, for the obese.
Now, Sethie stares at her butt in the mirror, at the stitching over the pockets in the denim. These pants remind her of how she used to dress, years ago, when she was thirteen and fourteen and her mother still helped her pick out her clothes, just like she had when she was a little girl, even though her body had defiantly stopped being a little girl’s. Sethie’s breasts came late, but now they are here to stay; no matter how much weight she loses, she always needs to wear a bra. Her mother came into dressing rooms with her then; now, if they do shop together, Sethie never lets her in. Rebecca told her how clothes should fit, and Rebecca—skinny, small Rebecca—said that clothes should be tight, so her daughter wore them tight. Now, Sethie can hardly believe she walked around like that. She remembers her short shorts and the way men began to stare at her. She liked it at first; it made her feel pretty. It even made her feel stylish, as though her clothes were what they noticed, not her body underneath them. And it made her feel grown-up, old enough for adult men to notice.
Once, in ninth grade, she was meeting someone at the Met, and she got there early. She was wearing an army green short skirt and a white tank top. An outfit her mother loved so much that they both tried it on in the dressing room, and Rebecca had insisted that they share it, since they could only afford to buy one set. Sethie was already two inches taller than her mother, so the skirt wasn’t nearly as short on Rebecca, something Rebecca didn’t seem to notice; or if she did, she didn’t think it was a problem.
Sethie sat on the steps of the Met and waited for her classmate. It was the end of the school year, and their ancient-history teacher had assigned them all a trip to the Greek wing of the Met as their final project. They each had to pick an artifact to write about, and they were supposed to go to the museum in pairs. The school said it was for safety.
There was a man on a bicycle at the bottom of the steps, and he stared at Sethie. At first, she liked it. She pretended not to notice; she pretended to be oblivious. She played with her hair and chewed on her pen, pretending to make notes in her notebook. When she looked up, she saw that the man hadn’t moved at all; he was staring right at her, smiling. Sethie hadn’t intended to make eye contact, but she had. She was surprised when he didn’t look away; most men looked away once they saw that she could tell they were watching her. They usually seemed ashamed, or embarrassed. But this man went right on staring.
Sethie stood up. She stuffed her notebook into her backpack (she still used a backpack then), and walked to the other side of the steps. The steps are enormous, she remembers thinking, surely he won’t be so shameless as to follow me to the other side. She thought he would lose sight of her among all the other people milling around and sitting on the steps. But he rode his bicycle from one side of the steps to the other, keeping his eyes on her, on her bare arms and bare legs, on the tiny stripe of stomach that peeked out from under her tank top when she moved.
When she got home that night, she took off the skirt and the tank top and told Rebecca she could keep them. They don’t really fit me, Sethie explained. I’m bigger than you, Sethie said, we can’t really share clothes anymore. Rebecca had shrugged. Sethie thinks she was probably pretty happy to have the outfit to herself.
Sethie puts on a shirt. With a loose shirt on, she can barely see the roll of fat at the top of her new jeans, and the bottom half really does look good; Janey was right. Sethie decides she will keep the pants; she
will wear them tonight at least, even if she hides them in the back of her closet after that, even if they will become her “skinny jeans,” the jeans she tries on only in her room to gauge whether she is having a fat week or a thin week. But she will wear them tonight; Janey would be disappointed if she didn’t.
6.
JANEY HAS INVITED everyone to meet at her apartment before heading up to Columbia. First, Shaw picks Sethie up. He’s wearing jeans with a Polo T-shirt, which he has tucked in, and a belt that looks strange to Sethie, though she’s not sure exactly what’s wrong with it. Sethie would never say it out loud, but she knows that Shaw does not dress well. He buys the right clothes, but he wears them all wrong. That shirt should not be tucked in. He should not be wearing white socks with those sneakers. And something about the belt needs fixing.
Sethie is wearing her new jeans with a black tank top layered under a cardigan and scarf, black boots with high heels. She’s wearing makeup, which she doesn’t wear often: brown eyeliner and mascara, blush and lip gloss. She doesn’t think she’s ever looked so good for Shaw, and she’s proud when she opens the door. Sethie is excited for the party; excited to be Shaw’s girl, looking good, at a party. Excited to get a sneak peek at Columbia; Sethie wants to go there too. Excited because she always has fun when she’s with Janey.
Shaw kisses her hello. “Your lips are sticky,” he says, and rubs his own lips, to wipe away any trace of gloss from having kissed her. He hasn’t had a chance to take in the whole outfit yet, Sethie thinks. He’ll see that her lips need to be sticky when he sees how good the gloss looks.
Sethie turns her back to him, steps into the apartment so he can see her. She picks up her purse from the dining room table, turns around to face him, her arm leaning on the back of a chair, her hip cocked. She is posing.
“You look nice,” Shaw says finally.
Sethie smiles. “Thanks.” She grabs her coat from the back of the chair she’d been leaning on. “You too,” she adds, even though she knows she’s lying. Shaw’s handsome, but he doesn’t look particularly great now, in his clothes that aren’t right at all.
The Stone Girl Page 4