The Stone Girl

by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  Shaw is on the corner outside his school, lighting a cigarette. Sethie can see him from across the street; he’s looking down at Janey. Sethie stands still, even when the light changes and she’s blocking the way for the people standing behind her. She can see that Janey looks angry and Shaw looks impatient.

  It looks, Sethie can tell, like Janey is doing all the talking. Shaw is mostly shaking his head and shrugging. Sethie wonders what they’re fighting about. She decides it would be better to cross the street and interrupt their fight than to have them look up and see her staring at them. So she begins walking, but slowly. Maybe if she takes her time they’ll wrap this up before she gets there.

  As she gets closer, she hears Janey say, “Look, Shaw, I’m trying to do the right thing here. But I’m not going to keep quiet about this forever,” and Shaw shrugs and inhales on his cigarette and looks up to blow out the smoke and that’s when he sees Sethie.

  “Hey,” Sethie says, lifting her hand to wave even though now she’s standing next to them. She thinks how much younger she must look, wearing a school uniform next to their regular clothes.

  “Hey,” Shaw and Janey say in near perfect unison, and then Janey takes a step toward her and grabs her arm.

  “Come on,” she says, pulling Sethie to the corner. Sethie looks back at Shaw, but she thinks that Janey’s going to explain the fight to her, so she doesn’t pull away.

  But instead of talking to her, Janey’s putting her into a cab and climbing in after her.

  “113th and Broadway,” Janey says.

  “Wait,” Sethie says, “I was supposed to see Shaw.”

  “Huh?” Janey asks, distracted. “What for?”

  “What do you mean what for? Janey, you don’t get to decide which friends I hang out with.”

  Janey considers this and then says, “You’re right, I’m sorry. I’m just kind of mad at Shaw right now.”

  “Well, that’s between you and Shaw, not you and me, right?”

  Janey doesn’t say anything. She rolls down the window and leans on the glass, so the top of her head sticks out of the car. Sethie thinks her friend looks guilty, but she can’t imagine about what.

  “What were you guys fighting about?” Sethie asks finally.

  Janey shrugs. “I don’t remember anymore.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Sethie says, and for the briefest moment, an image of Shaw and Janey together flashes in Sethie’s head. Janey is so comfortable around him: grabbing his belt, sharing his drinks.

  “Is something going on between you and Shaw?” Sethie says quickly, before she can decide not to ask. “Is that why you were trying to set me up with Ben? You were feeling guilty?”

  “What?” Janey says, rolling up the window. “Jesus Christ, Sethie, what’s gotten into you?”

  Sethie shrugs, and the cab stops on 113th Street, at the very same spot where she said good-bye to Ben a few days earlier.

  “Come on,” Janey says, opening the door. Sethie slides out after her. As she follows Janey toward the frat house, she thinks that they better be leaving here before dinnertime, because she allowed herself a whole bagel for lunch based on a plan to have sushi for dinner, and she’s pretty sure that if they have dinner up here it won’t be anything healthy like sushi.

  On the steps of the frat house, Janey rings the doorbell, and while they wait for Doug to let them in, Janey says, “You’re right, though.”

  “I’m right?”

  “I am feeling guilty.”

  Sethie looks at the ground. She doesn’t want to see what her best friend’s face looks like when she tells her that she’s sleeping with her boyfriend.

  “It’s not what you think, though.”

  “No?” Sethie murmurs, studying her shoes.

  “I didn’t realize just how seriously you were taking things with Shaw.”

  Sethie doesn’t say anything. Janey made it perfectly clear the other night that she didn’t think Shaw and Sethie were serious. And maybe then, maybe then it doesn’t count; maybe then, if they’re sleeping together, it’s not a betrayal, because maybe Janey really did think that Shaw didn’t belong to Sethie. And maybe Shaw thought that they didn’t belong to each other. Maybe Sethie’s the one who’s really got it all wrong here. So maybe she has no right to be mad at all right now. Maybe she had no reason to feel guilty for almost imagining kissing Ben.

  “Hey, guys,” Doug says, opening the door. He looks surprised to see Sethie, and Janey looks like she’s trying not to cry.

  Sethie surprises herself by saying, “I came to see Ben. Is he around?”

  “Yeah,” Doug says. “He’ll be psyched to see you. His room’s on the third floor, right below where mine is.”

  “Okay then,” Sethie says, and steps into the house. She wants to have more time before Janey tells all. For a little bit longer, she wants to be a girl who has a best friend and a boyfriend. She stops to go the bathroom on her way to Ben’s room, just to look in the mirror, just to see herself that way again. She smiles into the mirror, like there’s someone on the other side waiting to take her picture.

  Sethie can’t quite believe she’s knocking on Ben’s door.

  “Come in,” she hears him say. His voice is very deep, a little hoarse, like maybe he’s coming down with a cold.

  Ben doesn’t look up when she opens the door. He’s sitting on his bed, bent over a textbook. His legs are crossed, but you can still tell that he’s far taller than the bed is; you can tell that he probably has to sleep curled up in a ball so that his legs don’t hang over the edge, that he probably wakes up with knees sore from having been bent all night.

  “You ever feel like Goldilocks?”

  Ben looks up. He looks surprised to see Sethie in his doorway, but he doesn’t miss a beat and replies, “Doesn’t she complain that the beds are too soft and too hard, not too big or too small?”

  “Close enough.”

  Ben shrugs. “Close enough,” he repeats.

  “Ever get tired of not quite fitting on the furniture?”

  “Yes. And I really think they should have discounts for people who can only fit into SUVs and first-class seats on the plane.”

  Sethie laughs, “That makes it sound like a handicap.”

  Ben laughs back, “Sometimes it feels like one.”

  Sethie nods, suddenly serious. She imagines Ben squeezing into spaces that don’t quite fit, wishing he were just a little bit smaller. In that respect, she thinks, we’re actually quite similar.

  Sethie looks at the textbook in Ben’s lap; she thinks it’s physics. “I thought when you went to college, your textbook days were finally over,” Sethie says.

  “What’d you think you’d use to study when you got to college?”

  Sethie steps inside, shuts the door behind her. “I thought it was, you know, more serious than textbooks. I thought it was novels and short stories and articles.”

  “Yeah, well,” Ben says, standing up. “Physics major. In physics there are always textbooks.”

  “Oh.”

  “What are you going to major in?”

  Sethie shrugs. “Don’t know yet. English, maybe. Or history. Sounds pretty girly next to a physics major.”

  Ben shakes his head. “I’m minoring in English.”

  Sethie cocks her head, surprised. “Really?”

  “Yeah. American lit, mostly.”

  “That’s what I want to study—the twentieth-century writers. I want to write some enormous thesis proving that even the most wildly different ones have some of the same habits: Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck.”

  “Have you figured out how you’re going to prove it yet?”

  “Not yet. But I will.”

  “I believe you,” Ben says seriously. “You seem like the kind of girl who gets done the things she wants to do.”

  Sethie smiles; she hopes Ben’s right. She wanted to be under 111 and now she is at least half of the time. She wanted to get over 2200 on her SATs, and she did. And she wanted Shaw
, and she got him; at least she thought she had.

  Ben says, “But you gotta throw some women in there: Joan Didion. Katherine Anne Porter. Flannery O’Connor.”

  “I’ve never read Flannery O’Connor.”

  Ben reaches for a book on his desk. “Here,” he says. “Read the story called ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge.’ ”

  Sethie turns the book over in her hands. “I will.”

  “Good, ’cause I’ll be expecting a full report.”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a literature dork.”

  “Gotta do something to even out the physics dorkiness.”

  Sethie smiles. “Maybe I should minor in physics, then—even myself out.”

  Ben laughs. “Maybe you should.” He takes a step toward her. “Can I take your coat?”

  “What?” Sethie blinks. “No. I’m not staying long. And it’s cold in here anyway.” Sethie notices that Ben has the windows open, even though it’s December. She’s disappointed; she thought being around Ben again would make her warm.

  “Well, take a load off anyhow,” he says, gesturing to his bed and his desk chair, the only places to sit in his room. She sits on his bed, but gingerly, on the edge of it.

  “Ben is short for Benjamin, right?”

  Ben nods, sitting down next to her.

  “So when they call roll on the first day of class, you have to correct your teachers, right? You have to tell them, No, it’s Ben.”

  Ben laughs. “They don’t really call roll in college.”

  “Maybe just not in the classes that use textbooks,” Sethie says, and Ben smiles at her. “I have to correct people all the time. It’s not Sarah, or Sarah Beth; it’s Sethie, I say. And I get mad at them, at these total strangers for it. You know what I mean?”

  “Ben’s a lot more obvious of an abbreviation,” he says, shaking his head. “But what’s wrong with a name that demands a little explanation? Gives it heft, right?”

  Sethie considers this. She always thought her name had heft only because of the people who said it. Shaw, with his gravelly opera voice, Janey with her perfect elocution, and now Ben, with his deep giant’s voice.

  Sethie thinks she might start to cry, right there, right in front of Ben. She’s hungry, and she’s cold, and she knows that Janey is waiting to tell her something she really, really doesn’t want to hear.

  She bites her lip, takes a deep breath, and says, “Are there any good sushi places around here?”

  Ben shrugs. “Depends on what you mean by good.”

  “Good enough will do just fine.”

  “Then we have places that are good enough.”

  “You’re studying for finals, though, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Ben says, “but a boy’s gotta eat.”

  Sethie grins. “Judging by the size of you, I’m guessing you eat pretty regularly.”

  Ben laughs.

  “Come on, Sarah Beth.”

  Janey isn’t in sight when Ben opens the door. She must be up in Doug’s room. Sethie lets Ben go ahead of her on the stairs; he’s still taller, even two steps below her, but at least she’s closer to meeting his eye.

  “Ben,” she says, stopping between steps, and he turns back to look at her. “Are things as complicated in college as they are in high school?” She’s surprised that she doesn’t mind how young the question must make her seem.

  Ben cocks his head to the side. “No,” he says slowly. “Things are definitely less complicated in college,” he says, and Sethie smiles. “But you still gotta use textbooks,” he adds, facing forward and continuing down the steps.

  14.

  BEN IS A healthy eater. Sethie had this idea that because he is so tall, he could eat whatever he wanted and not gain weight. He has so much surface area to metabolize it. Surely it takes more calories to take a 6′7″ step than to take a 5′4″ one. But Ben has miso soup and a vegetable roll, and he barely uses any soy sauce.

  Sethie douses each bite with soy sauce. She read somewhere that real anorexics always use lots of salt, lots of mustard, covering their food in strong tastes to trick their bodies into thinking they’ve eaten more than they have. She likes having this in common with them. When the waiter takes their dishes away, there are splashes of soy sauce all over Sethie’s side of the table and her cloth napkin has practically turned from white to brown. It looks, Sethie thinks after they get up and she sees it left behind on the white tablecloth, like a used tourniquet, covered in blood that has dried and turned brown.

  Ben is walking slowly, but his legs are so long that Sethie still feels like they are rushing, and the last thing she wants is to rush back to his fraternity house. She considers hailing a cab then and there, going straight home without seeing Janey. Ben said there was no way Janey was sleeping with Shaw; Janey and Doug have fallen so hard for each other, he said. But Sethie countered that they might have been hooking up before Janey and Doug met. Maybe Janey and Shaw have been keeping it all a secret from her, the silly girl who thought she had a boyfriend when she really just had a fuck buddy. She can’t quite believe that she’s admitted all of this to Ben. She knows what a fool it makes her, what a little girl she has been. Someone naive enough to think that all that sex translated into a real relationship. But Ben didn’t seem to think she was immature. If anything, Ben said, that meant her idea of interpersonal relations was more adult than Shaw’s. But Sethie knows he was just being nice. Sethie knows that no guy would want a girl like her now. A girl who’s been humiliated, a girl who completely misunderstood the rules of sleeping with the boy with whom she’d been sleeping. For the first time, tonight, she said out loud that she was in love with Shaw. She never said it before, certainly never thought she would say it to Shaw. And now she’s said it to this other boy whom she really doesn’t know at all.

  When she said it, Ben shrugged. At first, Sethie thought he was shrugging off her feelings, like they weren’t real; she was only in high school, what did she know about love? She thought he was shrugging because an older girl would not have misread the signs; an older girl would have known better than to fall in love with Shaw, would have known better than to believe she had a boyfriend, would have known better than to believe he probably loved her too in some hidden, unarticulated way.

  But instead, Ben said, “We really can’t help who we fall for.”

  “Whom,” Sethie corrected. “Whom we fall for.” And Sethie found she was smiling when she should have been embarrassed, making fun of Ben for his grammar and feeling good, because she knew that she was a smart girl, when she had been feeling so stupid just a second ago.

  “Whom,” Ben repeated. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who knows when to use which words.” He says it like it’s a good thing.

  And now they’re walking back to the frat house, and Sethie is surprised to find that she’s holding Ben’s hand. She just reached out and took it, just like that, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Exactly the way she was always too scared to take Shaw’s hand. And she feels better, braver, holding Ben’s hand.

  They stop in his room on their way up to Doug’s. Ben scribbles something on a pad on his desk, rips off the paper.

  “This is my number,” he says. “Call me any time things seem a little too complicated.”

  Ben is standing beside her when she knocks on Doug’s door. Janey is lying in Doug’s bed, but she sits up straight when she sees Sethie.

  “I didn’t know you were still here.”

  “I wasn’t for a while. We went out to dinner.”

  Janey smiles. “That’s nice.”

  Sethie thinks that in spite of everything else, Janey is still holding out hope that Sethie and Ben will get together just like she and Doug did.

  “We were just killing time,” Sethie adds quickly, and Janey nods.

  “Doug had to go to the library. He has finals next week.”

  “I know. Ben does too.”

  From behind Sethie, Ben says, “Actually, I better
get back to studying too. You girls okay to let yourselves out?”

  They both nod, and Ben 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 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.”