The Stone Girl

by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  Sethie shakes her head.

  “He’s an asshole, Sethie. I promise you, anyone who heard this story would be able to see that.”

  “Well, I didn’t know that,” Sethie says.

  “Listen, I know you’re a mess right now, but I promise you, and I mean this in the nicest way possible: it happens all the time. This is what girls do when bad boys hurt them. Breakups hurt.”

  “It feels better when you call it a breakup. You’re the second person to do it.” Third, Sethie thinks, if she counts herself.

  “Who was the second person?”

  “Matt. From your class.”

  “When did you see him?”

  “The other day. Around.”

  “I bet he came looking for you. He always had a crush on you.”

  Sethie smiles. It feels good, being the kind of girl that someone would have a crush on.

  “Anyway,” Janey says, “what else would you call it, other than a breakup?”

  Sethie shrugs.

  “Breakups hurt,” Janey repeats. “Granted, you’re taking it a little further than, you know, a normal girl might, but we’re going to work on that.”

  And then I’ll be normal? Sethie asks silently.

  “Maybe normal isn’t the right word. Normal isn’t exactly something to strive for. But you know, healthy.”

  “Right,” Sethie says, but she doesn’t believe it, and Janey must be able to tell, because she says, “Yes, Sethie, healthy. You’ve got to figure this mess out, because you and I have so much fun ahead of us. We’re going to both get into Columbia and rule the school. We’re going to stay up all night writing A-plus papers and spend spring break someplace exotic. We’re going to study abroad in Italy and eat gelato without counting calories. And, bonus, we already have these boys, these great boys—good guys—who will be waiting for us when we get there.”

  “When we get to Italy?”

  “When we get to Columbia.”

  Sethie almost laughs, but instead she shakes her head. For a few minutes, she’d managed to forget what had happened with Ben, but now she remembers. She thinks even if she does get into Columbia, she can’t possibly go there, go to a place where she’s already made such a complete fool of herself.

  “What’s the matter now?” Janey asks.

  “Ben.”

  “Ben likes you. A boy like Ben is exactly what isn’t the matter.”

  “No. Didn’t he tell you what happened?”

  “No. Though he did give me The Princess Bride to give back to you. It’s in my bag.”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what, Sethie?”

  “I made a fool of myself.”

  “So? Ben won’t care. He cares about whether you’re healthy, not about whether you made a fool out of yourself in front of him. He’s crazy about you. He’s been asking about you every day.”

  “He’s probably just worried about me, ’cause what girl wouldn’t be a mess after what happened.”

  “He says he misses hanging out with you, actually. I swear, every time I come over he’s looking behind me to see if you’re there.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Sethie, is it so hard for you to believe that he wants to be your friend? Even if you did make a fool out of yourself?”

  “Who wants to be friends with a fool?”

  “Dude, Sethie, way to be melodramatic,” she says, and Sethie laughs. “You always make me laugh. You make me feel …” Janey searches for a word and finally says, shrugging, “Special. You’re special. That is, when you’re not, you know, lying semi-suicidally in your bed for days on end.”

  “Guess I have to work on that part of my personality.”

  “Don’t worry, we will.” Janey laughs again. Sethie can feel the warmth from Janey’s body spreading across the bed. “My God, Sethie, you need so much therapy,” Janey says, but she’s still laughing.

  “I do?”

  “Therapy or maybe a dog.”

  “A dog?” Sethie repeats, and now she’s laughing too.

  “Well, maybe not a dog, because he couldn’t come live with us in the dorms.”

  Sethie stops laughing. “Oh crap.”

  “What now?”

  “I can’t go to Columbia.”

  “Sethie, I’m telling you, you got like a twenty-two-thousand on the SATs. I think you’re getting in.”

  “No, I’m serious, I can’t go.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Shaw’s going to go. I don’t want to go to the same school he’s going to.”

  Janey starts laughing again, this time even harder. “Sethie, I really don’t think you have to worry about that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know you go to a different school and everything, so maybe you couldn’t tell just how much of Shaw’s so-called intellectual prowess is just talk.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sethie, there’s no way Shaw’s getting into Columbia, not with his grades.”

  “Really?” Sethie asks, and now she’s laughing too, laughing because she can’t believe on just how many different levels Shaw managed to trick her.

  “Not a chance,” Janey says.

  25.

  WHEN JANEY LEAVES, Sethie walks her to the door, where they hug. Janey promises to call her later, and Sethie promises to pick up when she does. Walking to the door means walking through the living room, where Sethie’s mother is sitting on the couch with a magazine in her lap.

  “Your magazine’s upside down,” Sethie says. Rebecca snaps it shut.

  Sethie knows the magazine was just a prop, just something for Rebecca to hold on her lap so maybe it wouldn’t look like she was waiting to see her daughter come out of her room. Rebecca hasn’t seen Sethie since she dropped to 102, at least not without her coat on. Sethie stands in front of her now in her tank top and shorts, and Sethie recognizes the look on her mother’s face—she’s seen it twice now, on Ben’s face, and on Janey’s. But when Rebecca makes the face, Sethie doesn’t smile; instead, she begins to cry.

  When Rebecca stands up, the magazine falls onto the floor, and the sound of the pages hitting the rug is loud in Sethie’s ears. Her mother’s footsteps coming toward her are loud too, despite her mother’s tiny feet. She can even hear the cloth of Rebecca’s sweater brushing against her skin when Rebecca wraps her arms around her.

  “I’m a mess,” Sethie says.

  “Yes,” Rebecca says, “I’ve noticed.”

  “I didn’t know you could tell,” Sethie says.

  “I’ve been watching.”

  Sethie nods. It isn’t until her mother says that she’s been watching that Sethie realizes she’s been hiding.

  “I’m ruining your sweater,” Sethie says, and she disentangles herself from her mother’s arms, takes a step back from her.

  “I don’t mind,” Rebecca says, and Sethie notices that her voice is shaking.

  “You sound nervous,” Sethie says.

  “I am,” Rebecca says.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think this conversation that I’m about to have with you is going to be one of those very important conversations.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to tell you that I know you haven’t been sleeping without taking Valium. And I know you’re smoking pot. And I know you haven’t been eating.”

  “I’ve been eating,” Sethie responds weakly, a reflex.

  “Not enough.”

  “Not enough,” Sethie repeats, surprising herself.

  “I have to tell you that I think you need help, and I have to tell you that if you disagree with me, I’m going to have to tell you that I don’t care about your opinion.”

  “You don’t care about my opinion?”

  “Not if it’s that you don’t need help. Actually,” Rebecca interrupts herself, “I do care if you tell me that. I care very much. Because if you tell me that, then I know that you’re even more far gone than I realized. So I want you to tell me:
do you think you need help?”

  Sethie considers the question. She takes a few steps away from her mother, to the couch. She sits down. She considers her life before she began dating Shaw; she considers the life she’d like to have dating Ben, or at least a boy like him, a boy who is sweet, a boy who even wanted her first. She considers what it would be like to go to Columbia with Janey, and she considers what she will need to do to go there. She considers the past two weeks of her life, she considers the months and maybe years she’s spent hating her body. She thinks about lying on the floor beneath Matt, a perfectly nice guy she had no business sleeping with; she thinks about Alice, the bluish tinge of her fingers, her shoulder blades ugly on her back. Sethie looks at her mother.

  “You look tired,” Sethie says.

  “I am tired,” Rebecca answers.

  “Because of me?”

  Rebecca nods. “Being this scared is exhausting,” she says, and she almost smiles.

  Sethie nods; she sees the fear on Rebecca’s face; she thinks of the horrified way Janey balked when she saw her hip bones between her T-shirt and her boxer shorts, remembers how disgusted Ben looked when he saw her last. She can’t remember the last time she asked Janey how English class was going, the last time she asked Ben if he ever convinced his frat brothers to stop making him their handyman. Sethie wonders when she became so selfish.

  Then she thinks about the feisty girl on the phone with Ben; the girl laughing with Janey; the girl confidently taking her SATs and filling out her college applications. She thinks about acceptance envelopes in the mailbox, shopping for sheets and pillows for her dorm room. It sounds simple, but the truth is, she wants to do all of those things more than she wants to hide in her bedroom, maybe even more than she wants to lose weight.

  “Well,” Sethie says finally, “I think I need something.”

  Rebecca smiles. “That’s a start.”

  Yes, Sethie thinks, it’s a start.

  … WORK IT OUT YOUR OWN WAY.

  HAVE GOOD LUCK AT YOUR AGE.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  “Lines to a Girl 5 Days After Her 21st Birthday”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WAS ABOUT HALFWAY through reading Alice Hoffman’s beautiful book Blackbird House when an image popped into my head: a girl, still as a stone, crouched beside a toilet. She could have been one of hundreds, thousands of girls who make themselves throw up. She could have been me, during a number of years in my life when sticking my fingers down my throat didn’t feel at all counterintuitive, when I believed that starving myself was the only reasonable and effective way to lose weight.

  Later that day, I saw that girl again, but this time I knew her name: it was Sarah Beth Weiss. At once, I knew everything about her. I wanted so badly to tell her that she wouldn’t always feel like she did now. I wanted to tell her that someday she wouldn’t hate her own flesh, that she would eat without fear; that someday there would be a man she couldn’t even imagine who would love her and whom she would love better than she’d dreamed. I wanted to tell her all of that, but I couldn’t. What I could do, and what I began to do that day, was write her story.

  I wrote this book both reluctantly and eagerly, both inevitably and willingly—and, as always, with a great deal of help.

  Many thanks to my magnificent agent and teacher, Sarah Burnes, who loved Sethie from the start, and who always understands exactly what it is I’m trying to say and guides me to say it better. Thanks also to Logan Garrison, Rebecca Gardner, Will Roberts, and the entire team at Gernert.

  Many thanks to my lovely and amazing editor, Erin Clarke, for her tireless support, guidance, and patience. Thanks to Melissa Greenberg for the stunning cover. Thanks to my entire Random House family, including Nancy Hinkel, Kathy Dunn, and Chip Gibson, and all my good friends in marketing, publicity, and sales.

  Many thanks to The Stone Girl’s earliest readers, Jessica DePaul and Rachel Feld; and thanks always for your creative input, Ranse Ransone. Many thanks to my remarkable circle of friends. Thanks to whatever magical trick of fate it was that made me, after years of refusing to work out, decide to try yoga, and thanks to Mindy Ferraraccio for being my teacher and friend.

  Thank you to my parents, Elaine and Joel; my sister, Courtney; my grandmother Doris; and to the Gravitts and the Getters.

  And thank you for everything, JP Gravitt.

  ALL KNOWLEDGE, THE TOTALITY OF ALL QUESTIONS

  AND ALL ANSWERS, IS CONTAINED

  IN THE DOG.

  —Franz Kafka