“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. 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 never thought that it reflected what she was. “Friends with benefits?” she offers as an alternative, and Janey shrugs.
“I guess. He didn’t give it a name.” Janey pulls Doug’s blankets taut across her lap. “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.
15.
HOME IN TIME 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 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 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 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.
“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.
“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.
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.
“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.
16.
SETHIE SPENDS THE weekend studying. These are her senior year finals, after all, the grades that colleges will look at. She stays up late to reread What Maisie Knew cover to cover for her English exam, even though really she’s just procrastinating having to study calculus. She stops reading when she notices the picture frames on her windowsill are crooked, and she has to get up to straighten them. She takes Valium to sleep, because it’s perfectly sensible to take Valium to sleep, perfectly sensible to need help relaxing when finals are coming. It’s perfectly normal to be so busy that you don’t have time to eat. Perfectly normal that her phone never rings, not because she’s let the battery die, but because, of course, all of her friends are busy studying too. Perfectly normal that she keeps her bedroom door tightly closed and comes out only to go to the bathroom. Rebecca needn’t wonder why she’s staying home every night; she can, Sethie thinks, be grateful to have such a conscientious, ambitious child.
Janey shows up the evening after Sethie has taken her last final: essay questions on American history; Sethie wrote about black soldiers during the Civil War. Sethie thinks that she’s been taught the same history over and over but with different twists. When we were seven, they taught us that slavery didn’t exist in America after the Civil War. At seventeen, we have a teacher who tells us that slavery still hasn’t ended; it’s just not quite so visible, not quite so clear.
Janey eyes Sethie carefully as she stands in her doorway. Sethie wonders what she’s looking at so closely. This morning, Sethie put on makeup, though it’s smudged now. After finals, they took photos of all of the different clubs for the yearbook. Sethie was in two; one for the yearbook editorial staff, and one for the White Environmental Action Club, the acronym for which is WEAC, which amuses all the members, since the club doesn’t really do anything or represent any actions, other than the action of allowing its members to list it on their college applications.
Sethie’s been in the club since seventh grade. Then she wanted to make a difference; she started a campaign for recycling bins to be placed on every floor and next to the copy machines in the library. Everyone acted like it was such a big deal. The teachers were proud of her, and the headmistress even spoke about it at that year’s graduation ceremonies. But after a while, Sethie noticed that people still threw recyclables in the trash cans, or they threw the wrong things into the recycling bins, like soda cans into the paper bins and paper into the bins for plastics. It really hadn’t made any difference at all. But they did make her the president of WEAC this year, maybe, Sethie thinks, as an homage to her seventh-grade activism. So this afternoon, she had to sit in the center of the picture, even though she’d have much rather been in the back; being behind other girls would have covered up the fat around her belly.
Worse, though, was the yearbook editorial picture. Sethie felt like an imposter there. Everyone looked at her like they knew why she’d stopped going to meetings, and good riddance too. Who wants a managing editor who can’t even be responsible enough to keep from eating pizza at our meetings, their looks seemed to say. That girl can’t possibly be responsible enough to put a yearbook together.
“You’re staring at me,” Sethie mumbles to Janey finally. She is holding open her front door; only halfway, so that Janey knows she is not invited in.
“What?” Janey asks. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Nothing.”
Janey blinks. “You’re not answering your phone.”
Sethie shrugs.
“You look like hell,” Janey adds.
“Well, you know, finals.”
“I had my English final yesterday.”
“Oh?” Sethie stops herself from asking how it went.
“I think I did okay. Well, I mean. Thanks to you.”
Sethie shrugs. She had liked helping Janey with English. It made her feel good.
Janey says, “I know you’re mad at me.”
Sethie shrugs again. She’s not sure what she is, other than hungry.
“I should have told you sooner. About Shaw, I mean. I just felt this loyalty to him. Like, he was my friend first or something.”
All Sethie can think to say is “You said that already.”
Janey asks if she can come in.
“Why?” Sethie says, and Janey’s face crumples. Janey is wearing a turtleneck sweater, but Sethie imagines that if she could see her collarbone now, it would be dull and dry.
“Sethie, you’ll be my friend last, that’s what I wanted to say. My loyalty is to you, and he hurt you.”
Sethie shrugs. “He didn’t hurt me. I just misunderstood.”
“He misrepresented.”
“No, he didn’t. He never called me his girlfriend. It wasn’t his fault.”
“It wasn’t yours.”
“I really don’t want to talk about this, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t really want to talk at all.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“But if you change your mind”—Janey reaches into her pocket and offers Sethie a slip of paper—“this is the number where I’m staying in Virginia. Doug’s parents’ place. He said I might not have cell service there.”
Sethie takes the number and puts it in her own jeans pocket. She’s not quite sure what to do with it.
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