“Perfect, huh? You’ve got your munchie-maker and your munchie-snack in one convenient package.”
Sethie smiles, even though the joke sounds disgusting to her. Some mayonnaise is sticking to the plastic bag out of which he shakes the pot. He places it delicately over the holes he’s poked in the Coke can.
“Ladies first,” he says, pulling out a lighter and passing the can to Sethie. She places her lips around the pop top, and Matt lights the weed. She inhales.
She hasn’t smoked pot in weeks; she hasn’t smoked without Shaw in months. Which is why, perhaps, the pot makes her want to curl up against someone. So she curls up against Matt, and why she kisses him when he tilts his head over hers, and why she lays down beneath him when he lies on top of her.
Matt is skinny—lanky, like Ben, but not as tall. When he pulls off her tights, Sethie thinks, Well, at least someone will see what 104 looks like. He does some of the same things that Shaw used to do, things that she liked: he presses his knee high between her legs, and kisses her neck below her ear. But he does things that Shaw never did, too, things that feel good: he pulls her arms to his mouth and kisses her wrists, and he kisses behind her knee.
Their hip bones knock against each other with repeated thuds and Sethie wonders whether her bones might crack, as though she were old, with brittle bones and papery skin. Older people, she thinks, don’t seem to sweat. Their skin seems so dry that maybe they don’t get dirty, maybe they don’t have an odor to them aside from the odors of the lotions they rub onto their sore muscles and the medicines they take and the cleaning solutions used around them.
Sethie isn’t sweating. In fact, by the time Matt rolls off of her, she is cold. Well, that’s something, she thinks, at least I can feel temperatures again. But then that could just be the pot.
“Wow,” Matt says, panting. “This is the best class I ever cut.”
Sethie thinks that sentence doesn’t really mean anything; he means this is the best time he ever had cutting class.
Matt says, “I shouldn’t say it, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since you and Shaw broke up.”
“What?” Sethie says, surprised.
“I know, it’s a lame thing to say. But it’s the truth.” He slides over to sit next to her. Sethie sees that his pants are still around his ankles and she thinks that he might get a splinter in his ass, sliding over the hardwood floor like that. She knows she’s supposed to lean her head on his chest, but now that she’s cold she really just wants to get dressed and go into her room, get under her covers. At least she kept her shirt on so he couldn’t see the scar on her belly to ask questions about it, even if that means Matt didn’t get to see how much flatter her stomach has gotten.
She knows she’s supposed to feel bad about what happened; upset that she had sex with some guy she barely knows and certainly doesn’t care about. But at this moment, she’s smiling. At least Matt called it a breakup.
24.
SETHIE CONSIDERS CHARGING her phone again. Her mother might begin to wonder, now that school has started and her friends are, ostensibly, all back in town, why the phone never rings and why Sethie never leaves her room except to go to school. She even eats, when she does eat, in her bedroom: her latest plan allows her to have three things: granola with yogurt, carrots with mustard, and chicken salad from the store across the street. She thinks that she can trick her body into thinking she’s eating more than she is if she eats food with different textures: the creamy yogurt with the granola; the crunchy carrots and the smooth mustard; the mashed-up chicken with the hard pieces of onion and celery.
Sethie doesn’t actually like yogurt, but she read that the active cultures help keep your stomach flat, so she added it to her diet like it was medicine she ought to take. She tells herself that since she doesn’t like it, it should be easier to leave some over when she eats it; since she doesn’t like it, it should make her full faster, because she can’t possibly be hungry for something she doesn’t think tastes good. For every spoonful she eats, she must leave some yogurt on the spoon, so that even when she’s finished, there is still a tiny bit of yogurt left. She is so careful to load each spoonful properly that it takes her twenty minutes to eat one serving of yogurt with granola. Sometimes, she finishes the whole thing despite herself; then she feels like she’s failed. It’s almost funny, she thinks: little kids get praise from their parents when they clean their plates. She can’t quite remember when the goal became the exact opposite of itself.
Her father might call. She hasn’t spoken to him since before the holidays; he told her he sent her a Christmas check. She told him it was technically a Hanukkah check, and he’d laughed. Sethie laughed too; she wasn’t sure why it was funny, but it seemed easier to laugh than to acknowledge that she and her father don’t know each other very well at all. She hasn’t seen him for nearly a year, though that’s not because she’s been avoiding him; it’s because she wanted to spend the summer with Shaw this year, instead of in California with her dad.
She imagines what the first day of school might have been like, this year, if the teachers had asked for “What I did on my summer vacation” essays the way that they did in elementary school. She imagines an essay about sheets that smelled like pot and sex, because Sethie and Shaw didn’t know how to work the fancy washing machine at his parents’ country house. She thinks she could have written a full essay about nothing more than rationing out Ritz crackers every day; about the taste and crumble of each cracker she allowed herself to eat, about the guilt when she ate more than she should have.
Sethie decides to keep her phone charged. At least she knows that Ben won’t call. And she can screen everyone else.
Janey calls every night at seven o’clock and sometimes again at ten. She has even tried calling the senior lounge, Sethie knows, because of the messages scrawled on the whiteboard next to the pay phone: Sethie, Janey called; Sethie, call Janey; Sethie, Janey says Hi.
Sethie doesn’t think she ever gave Janey the number for the pay phone in the senior lounge, but she guesses that it would be easy enough for Janey to get it. Surely plenty of people at Janey’s school have friends at White who gave them the number. Or maybe some of the boys there have girlfriends here; Sethie knows now that plenty of people really do use those words—boyfriend and girlfriend—after all. Sethie thinks that maybe Janey is calling just on the off chance that Sethie will be the one to pick up eventually.
Sometimes, in the messages Janey leaves on her voice mail, Sethie can hear Doug’s voice in the background. Janey must be calling from his room at the frat house, the room just above Ben’s room. Sometimes she thinks that Ben must be in the room with Janey when she calls, that he’s told Janey about how she threw herself at him, that he wants nothing to do with that fucked-up high school girl from the Upper East Side.
Sethie should not, then, be surprised on a Saturday morning, two weeks after school has started, when Janey shows up in her room. Sethie is still in bed, under the covers. She isn’t sleeping, and she isn’t reading or watching TV. She isn’t even thinking. She’s just staring at the ceiling, like she’s waiting for something to happen. Well, she thinks, Janey’s arrival is certainly something.
“Hey,” Janey says.
Sethie rolls over to look at Janey; there is snow slowly melting off the tips of Janey’s hair, as though she’d walked over with a hat on, but the bottom ends of her hair stuck out from under it. Sethie hadn’t known it was snowing; her blinds are shut tight. It hasn’t snowed this winter yet, not once. She’d kind of forgotten about the possibility of snow, or even rain, when she was so busy concentrating on keeping warm, and keeping cold. Keeping dry hadn’t even occurred to her.
“Don’t you knock?”
“I didn’t think you’d answer. I mean, why would you be any more likely to answer a knock than a phone call?”
Janey glances over at Sethie’s cell phone resting on the table next to the bed. “Have you even listened to any of my messages?” she asks.
Janey picks up Sethie’s phone and sees that there are messages Sethie hasn’t played yet. “Doesn’t look like it,” she says.
“I’ve listened to most of them,” Sethie says. “They all pretty much say the same thing.”
“Oh.”
Sethie’s lying. She’s actually waiting to listen to Janey’s most recent messages until sometime later today; she’s saving them.
She rolls over again to look at Janey. Janey pulls her hair back into a ponytail, using the rubber band she always wears around her wrist like a bracelet. Sethie thinks of the way rubber bands feel tight on her own wrists, and how this one practically dangles on Janey’s. Janey’s wearing jeans with a scoop-neck top. She sits down in Sethie’s desk chair, across from the bed.
“You have the best collarbone,” Sethie says finally.
“What?” Janey slouches now, as if she’s trying to hide her collarbone.
“Your collarbone. It stands out just like a collarbone is supposed to, straight across your chest. Mine doesn’t stand out, no matter how much weight I lose.”
“It has nothing to do with how much I weigh. It’s genetics. It’s just the way I’m built, I guess.”
“I guess,” Sethie says, rolling back over. She’d prefer if Janey would take credit for her collarbone. “Where’s your coat?”
“What?”
“Your coat, your hat, your scarf, your gloves?”
“In the living room. Your mom took them.”
“She did?”
“Yeah, how’d you think I got into the apartment?”
“I thought maybe I’d left the door unlocked or something. I kind of forgot my mother was there.”
“She’s there. She says she’s barely left the house the last couple of weeks. She says she’s been leaving work early to make sure she’s here when you get home from school. She says she’s scared to leave you alone.”
Sethie considers this; she doesn’t think it makes a difference, whether her mother is home or not, because either way, Sethie stays behind her bedroom’s closed door.
“Since when do you talk to my mom?” she asks Janey.
“She asked me to come here.”
“She did? I didn’t know she even knew who you were.”
“Well, she did. And I’m glad she did.”
“Why?”
“Because you won’t return my calls. Because the last time I showed up here, you wouldn’t even open the front door all the way. At least your mom let me in.”
“How’d she find you?”
“She called my mom.”
“I’ve never met your mom.”
Janey shakes her head. “I’d never met yours.”
“Where’d she get your number?”
Janey shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Why did she call you?”
“She said she was worried about you. She said you won’t talk to her.”
“It’s not that I won’t talk to her. I just never see her.”
“She says you walk away from her every time she comes near you. She says every time she opens her mouth to say something to you, you close your bedroom door behind you.”
Sethie thinks about this. She can remember seeing her mother over the past several weeks, passing by her in the kitchen, or on the way from the front door to her bedroom. If she thinks about it, she can remember her mother’s open mouth, and the way she’d rush into her bedroom before any words could come out of it.
“She’s freaking out because you’re not eating. She says she took you out to lunch before school started just to see if she was overreacting, and you barely ate anything.”
“I ate and ate.”
“That’s not what she said. She said it was painful, watching you eat. She said you tore the bread into little pieces and only ate the crumbs. She said you’d put butter on your knife and then spread it over the bread, like holding the knife above it, so the butter didn’t actually touch the bread.”
Sethie thinks for a minute; that’s not how she remembers brunch at all. She remembers the butter on her knife, and the bread with the nuts and the raisins. She remembers breaking the bread into pieces. She remembers lifting the bread to her mouth. But she can’t quite remember the crunch of nuts between her teeth, or the taste of butter on her tongue.
“Sethie?” Janey prompts.
“I’m eating,” Sethie insists. She thinks about the granola, the yogurt, the chicken salad. And she realizes, also, that the kitchen has never lacked a single one of these items, not for weeks now, or maybe even months. Has her mother been watching what she’ll eat? Has she been filling the kitchen with foods that she knows Sethie eats, because she’s scared that one day, if Sethie can’t find the thing she wants in the kitchen, she simply won’t eat at all?
“Not much from the look of you,” Janey says.
“What?”
“I said you’re not eating much, not from the look of you.”
Sethie shrugs.
“Wipe that grin off your face. Jesus, Sethie,” Janey says, and Sethie looks down. “I can’t believe I actually played a part in this.”
“What do you mean?”
Janey takes a deep breath. “I’m so sorry I taught you how to throw up. I don’t know what I was thinking. I think I was just … I was showing off for you. I wanted to be your friend.”
“It’s not your fault. I would have figured out how to do it eventually anyway.”
“I just wish I’d never done it.”
“It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”
Janey looks away. Sethie thinks maybe she’s trying not to cry. Today, Janey is not wearing her usual smudged eyeliner and her lips are dull and chapped instead of shining under their usual layer of Vaseline. She’s pulled her legs up onto the chair so that her chin is resting on her knees, and she is biting at the sides of her fingernails thoughtfully, as if she is trying to do a good job at biting her nails. She looks, Sethie thinks, very young; maybe even younger on her chair than Sethie looks in her bed.
Eventually Janey says, “I screamed at Shaw on Monday. I yelled so hard my throat hurt.”
Sethie can’t imagine Janey yelling. Janey is always in control.
“What did he do, Sethie? He said you guys talked about it and that you were—his words—totally cool about Anna.”
“I was totally cool about Anna.”
“Obviously not,” Janey says. “Look at you.”
“I was. I was so cool about it that I slept with him.”
“What?”
“I slept with him.”
“After you found out he was cheating on you?”
“He wasn’t cheating. We were just friends with benefits, everybody knew that.”
“Everybody but you,” Janey says, but she says it tenderly, like maybe it wasn’t Sethie’s fault for not having known it.
“He said it was nice to do it one last time, to say good-bye to the physical part of our friendship.”
Janey laughs, which makes Sethie sit up. When she sits up, the covers fall down around her waist, and Janey can see how thin Sethie is now; Sethie is wearing only a tank top and boxer shorts. She has lost two more pounds since school started: 102.
“You call that an undefined collarbone?” Janey says. She sounds angry, and Sethie lies back down and pulls the covers back around her. Janey stands up and walks over to the bed. For a second, Sethie thinks she’s going to rip the covers back, to get a closer look at how skinny she is. But instead, Janey leans down and pulls off her shoes, big cold-weather boots into which she’d tucked her jeans, and then she does pull back the covers, but only enough so that she can slide between them, and curl up next to Sethie.
Sethie inhales sharply. She thinks that maybe Janey will be able to feel the knife under her mattress, like the Princess in the story of the Princess and the Pea.
“There’s a knife under the mattress,” Sethi
e says.
“What for?” Janey says, like it’s no big deal.
“I like it. It makes me feel calm.”
“Like in Gone with the Wind?”
“What?”
“In Gone with the Wind, Butterfly McQueen said if you put a knife under the bed, it cuts the pain in half.”
Sethie considers this; was that what she’d been doing with the knife, trying to make the pain smaller somehow?
Janey reaches over the side of the bed and pulls out the knife from underneath them.
“I’m going to confiscate this,” Janey says, and Sethie thinks that Janey probably understands what the knife is really doing there.
“I have other knives. A whole kitchen full of them,” Sethie says, not because she wants the knife back, but because she knows there are holes in Janey’s plan. She doesn’t see how Janey can protect her.
“Well, I’ll confiscate those too,” Janey says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, keeping Sethie away from all sharp objects. Sethie nods. Janey sounds so confident that she believes it.
Janey gets up and puts the knife in her purse, and Sethie is relieved because that means she’s taking it with her when she goes. Then Janey gets back into the bed, close to Sethie. She reaches under the covers and takes Sethie’s hand, and Sethie notices that Janey’s hand isn’t cold like Shaw’s, or hot like Ben’s, but comfortably warm. Sethie feels like Goldilocks when she discovered the temperature of the porridge that was just right.
“So what else did he say, besides wishing a sweet farewell to your fun parts?”
Sethie can’t help herself: she giggles.
“When I started crying, he kissed my tears.”
“What an asshole.”
“I thought it was sweet.”
“Exactly what he wanted you to think. Shaw is such a loser. If you’re going to break a girl’s heart, have the balls to break it. But he has to feel like he’s comforting you. You know that’s an asshole’s move, don’t you?”
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