The Stone Girl Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Zhang Jingna

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The stone girl / Alyssa B. Sheinmel. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Seventeen-year-old Sethie, a senior at New York City’s Franklin White girl’s school, has outstanding grades, a boyfriend, and a new best friend but constantly struggles to lose weight.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-97462-4

  [1. Anorexia nervosa—Fiction. 2. Eating disorders—Fiction. 3. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 7. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.S54123Sto 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011037768

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  THIS BOOK IS FOR

  ELAINE S. B. SHEINMEL.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  1.

  IT IS SEPTEMBER in New York City and Sarah Beth Weiss has just turned seventeen. For as long as she can remember, she has been called Sethie; her parents, her grandparents, even cousins and uncles who barely know her name at all, know that she is called Sethie. Only new teachers get it wrong. At school, when they go through roll call, Sethie has always had to interrupt to explain. It happened just today, the first day of her senior year. She thought all the teachers at her small school would know her real name by now. But there was a new math teacher today. It wasn’t his fault, and Sethie knows it, but she was angry at him. She was frustrated that he made her explain about her name. She felt bad, later, for having been angry.

  Sethie is rushing. She goes to an all-girls school, the Franklin White School, or the White School, or White for short, a name whose irony—or complete lack thereof—is lost on none of the homogenous student body. School has ended for the day, and all Sethie can think about is the boy, the boy, the boy. All summer long, she didn’t have to wait until three-fifteen to see him, and now she can’t remember how she managed before. And she remembers waiting even longer, last year, when she had yearbook editorial meetings that lasted past five, or appointments with her SAT tutor at the coffee shop after school.

  Shaw, Shaw, Shaw. She sings it to herself, rushing, like a horse being taunted with a carrot on a stick—must get that carrot, must go faster, must get to Shaw.

  There are two things that are true about Sethie: one is that she is always hungry, a mean, angry kind of hunger that feels like a piece of glass in her belly; the other is that she is always missing Shaw.

  When Shaw says her name, Sethie feels it on her skin. Her name sounds serious coming out of his mouth, in his deep voice, a voice that belongs somewhere else—in an opera house, on a film screen, coming out of the radio. A voice that deserves to be anywhere but on her bedroom floor, actually speaking to her, paying attention to her, saying her name. Giving her name heft it never had before.

  Shaw, Shaw, Shaw. The name that feels like it never finishes, like it’s missing a letter at the end. She knows that he can’t have missed her all day, not the way she has missed him. Shaw would never be bothered with missing anyone. Shaw doesn’t believe in relying on someone else for his own happiness. Shaw’s friends were mostly away all summer; he probably actually enjoyed his first day back at school, probably enjoyed seeing all of those other people, getting new books, pressing freshly sharpened pencils into loose-leaf paper.

  Sethie knows Shaw’s pencils are freshly sharpened, because last night she cleaned out his school bag. Shaw was in the shower, and she threw away all his chewed-up and worn-down pencils and replaced them with fresh ones of her own. A surprise for his first day back.

  Sethie has approached this whole day with speed, rushing from class to class, running up and down the stairs, watching the clock, willing it to be eighth period. The other girls walked slowly between classes, catching up, complaining about this or that teacher, agonizing over college applications. Sethie arrived to each class early, turned to the first page of her notebook, and pressed her pen to the top of the page, ready to get on with things. Her classmates sat in the senior lounge; they’d waited years for that lounge, long and skinny, with doors to close the teachers out. It’s very small; Sethie thinks that at another school, it might be too small to fit the entire senior class inside it. But all the girls at Sethie’s school are skinny. Since most of the girls have been there since kindergarten, Sethie imagines the application process. No overly-sturdy-looking four-year-olds would have been considered.

  The most exciting thing about the senior lounge is that it has a pay phone in it. All the girls have been waiting for it since they began attending White and were faced with the faculty’s rigid no-cell-phone policy. Sethie remembers what a big deal it was when she was ten years old and her mother finally let her have a cell phone; having the pay phone in the senior lounge seems just as exciting. Sethie still has that same cell phone, in a box under her bed. Sometimes she recharges it and looks at the old text messages she and her friends sent each other in fifth grade. Today, Sethie’s classmates all called the boys they like at other schools to give them the number to the senior lounge. The phone rang all day. Sethie has decided she won’t give Shaw the number. That way it won’t bother her when he doesn’t call.

  Sethie knows that for all of her rushing today, all of her running from class to class, Shaw has been strolling. Shaw takes his time. Shaw does not rush.

  It’s one of the things Sethie likes about him. He never worries about being late; he gets to the places he’s going when he’s ready to be there, and so it’s always the right time. She would love to feel that kind of calm, would love to crawl up inside him for a day and feel what it’s like to be inside that body: so assured, so smooth, so taut, so lean, and so slow. Shaw doesn’t have to rush for her, after all—she does enough rushing for the both of them.

  When Sethie finally sees him, Shaw isn’t waiting for her. He’s on the corner with his friends, but he’s not waiting. Had they discussed that she would meet him after school? She thought they had, but now he looks so surprised to see her that she thinks maybe not; maybe she just decided she would come here, and now she’s just lucky that Shaw is here. />
  “Hey, kiddo,” he says, and she stands next to him. He does not kiss her hello. He does not put an arm around her. To show she is his, she takes his cigarette from him, and takes a long drag from it.

  Shaw’s school, Houseman Prep, is coed, so the circle on the corner of the block in which Sethie stands with Shaw includes girls and boys, not just girls, like the corners outside Sethie’s school. All the different schools uptown are really just like one big school laid out on an enormous campus. It wouldn’t even qualify as an enormous campus. Sethie bets there are some real campuses that are even bigger. In California, maybe, or in Europe.

  Everyone begins walking. Sethie isn’t quite sure, but she thinks they’re going to her building. Sethie lives with her mother a few blocks away, and there is a vacant apartment next to theirs, one that has yet to be rented. No one locks it—the building people leave it open so the Realtors can go in and out with prospective tenants. But all summer long, it’s where Sethie and Shaw went to smoke. Sethie knew, of course, that it was risky, but where else could they go? Sethie’s mother works odd hours, constantly breezing into and out of the apartment, and Shaw’s mother doesn’t work at all, and is always home. So they went next door.

  But Sethie is fairly certain she didn’t invite all these people back to the vacant apartment. She only intended for the two of them to go there. She doesn’t want them all back there. She only wants Shaw to come. If all of these people come, when will she and Shaw have a chance to be alone together? And will these people know they have to be quiet? Will they bring other people back again, some later time? Will they be done when she’s ready to go home, or will she have to wait for them, wanting to go home, when her apartment is right next door? But she won’t be able to leave, because she’ll be responsible. She’ll be the host. She wishes she were Shaw. Responsibility rolls down his back like water in the shower. She wishes she didn’t care what anyone thought. But she knows too well that the landlord hates her mother, who is occasionally late with the rent. Sometimes he calls Sethie’s father, who lives in California, for the money, as though it’s the absence of a man that’s making Rebecca late. But Sethie knows that like Shaw, Rebecca can’t always be hampered by dates and times. Though her lateness isn’t smooth the way Shaw’s is. Rebecca’s lateness is always messy, choppy, harried.

  Sethie knows the landlord would love an excuse to evict the tenants of 12A, Rebecca and her daughter, Sethie, the quiet girl who no one would have guessed might be a troublemaker.

  “Shaw?” Sethie asks, quiet, scared.

  “Yeah, kiddo?”

  Sethie loves when he calls her kiddo. Even though she’s actually a month older than he is, he seems ages wiser.

  “Where are we all going?”

  “To the vacant apartment.”

  The vacant apartment. Not theirs. Not even hers.

  “All of us?”

  “Why not?” He shrugs like it’s no big deal, and Sethie nods. If Shaw says it’s okay, says it’s safe, then it must be.

  Sethie wants, more than anything, more than kisses, more than sex, more than drugs, to take Shaw’s hand just then. Actually, she would prefer Shaw take hers, but she’d settle for taking his. But he’s never, not once, held her hand. Not even while they were messing around. So she cannot take his. He’s never done anything to let her know that holding hands is okay. She imagines what it would be like if Shaw took her hand. He would do it so casually, so weightlessly, the way he did everything else. He would hold her hand like it was nothing: light as air, fluid as water. She would feel his skin against hers intensely, want to hold tighter, dig her nails in, press her fingertips against the bones on the back of his hand. But he would hold her hand loosely. He would drop her hand if she squeezed too tight. If she hurt him.

  Someday he’ll take her hand. Sethie can wait. When your boyfriend is someone who’s always late and you’re someone who’s always early, you become good at waiting. Boyfriend. Sethie rolls the word around inside her mouth. She can’t say it out loud. Instead she enjoys the feel of it on her tongue, between her teeth, filling up her mouth until she has to swallow it whole to keep it from escaping.

  They haven’t stopped walking, and soon they are in Sethie’s lobby. How many people are here? Sethie looks around. Four people, plus her and Shaw. Four isn’t so bad, she reasons. Four people won’t get her in too much trouble. She only knows two of the others. Three boys and one girl. Sethie likes it that this feels like a boys’ thing to do—sneak into an apartment, smoke pot, evade adult capture. In the elevator, Sethie holds her wrist. When she is nervous, Sethie wraps the fingers of one hand around the opposite wrist. She finds her wrists reassuring: this is how thin she could be, if she only just really applied herself.

  It’s hot inside the apartment. No air-conditioning, windows closed. It’s the first week of September, but August hasn’t given up yet. Sethie thinks that August is like summer’s bitter older sister—everyone looks forward to June and July, but by August, they want summer’s refreshing half brother, September. No one longs for August by the time it rolls around. And then August doesn’t even have the good manners to leave on time.

  Bitch, Sethie thinks with satisfaction.

  The heat doesn’t bother her, since she knows it won’t last long. Smoking pot always makes Sethie cold, and today is no exception. After the pipe has been passed around, the effect Sethie feels most acutely is the air upon her skin, making the hairs on her arms lift, making her shiver. She wants to get closer to Shaw, curl up beside him, but Shaw’s skin is always cool to the touch, so it wouldn’t make her warmer. Sethie sits on the floor. She refuses the pipe when it is passed to her a third time. The floor is hard underneath her, but Sethie likes that, since it means she’s skinny today. It means the fat on her ass isn’t thick enough to protect her from the wooden floor. In a while, she rolls over so that she is lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows. She lies like this mostly so that she can feel her hip bones against the floor, hard like rocks, leaving bruises.

  They aren’t being quiet. Sethie looks to Shaw for help. Surely Shaw knows they’re being too loud, right? But Shaw is laughing along with them. Maybe they’re not too loud. Maybe it’s the pot, making her hearing sensitive, just like it does her skin.

  She presses her hands against the floor and stands up. Leans against the wall that separates her apartment from this one. Her bedroom is right on the other side. She puts her ear to the wall, as if somehow that will tell her whether the noises they are all making are detectable from her own apartment on the other side.

  “What are you doing, Sethie?” the other girl asks from the floor, watching.

  Sethie flushes, embarrassed. She doesn’t know this girl’s name.

  “Just listening. That’s my bedroom, on the other side.”

  “But why would there be sounds coming from your bedroom when you’re here with us?”

  Sethie shrugs. “I don’t know. I was just trying to figure out how loud we were being.”

  The girl stands up, comes over, and leans her ear against the wall. Sethie wishes she knew her name.

  “Are you worried we’re being too loud?”

  Sethie isn’t scared to tell her the truth. “Yes. I don’t want my mom to get in trouble.” Sethie wonders whether this sentence sounds strange: she knows it should be the other way around.

  The girl laughs, but quietly. Then she turns to the four boys on the floor, even to Shaw.

  “Hey, guys.” They all look up at her. Sethie is impressed by the way she commands the room, this girl without a name. She’s wearing jeans and a tank top, and her skin is covered in a slick of sweat, but her clothes don’t stick to her skin; she’s so skinny that the tank top hangs off of her shoulders, like her bones are merely hooks for the straps. Sethie is deeply aware of the ill-fitting kilt pressing against her waist—her school uniform, fitted to her in the ninth grade, a constant reminder that her body has gotten bigger since she was a freshman. It was too small even when she bought it; s
he’d wanted it short and hadn’t quite realized that a smaller size meant tighter, not shorter. Every day when she gets dressed, she wishes she’d bought a bigger size and just rolled it, the way all the other girls in her class seemed to know how to do. She’s jealous that Shaw’s school doesn’t require uniforms and this nameless girl gets to wear new clothes that fit her seventeen-year-old body. Not that it looks like this girl’s body has changed since ninth grade like Sethie’s has: there is no new roundness in her hips or her breasts, those soft spots that seemed to develop on girls like Sethie somewhere between freshman and senior year.

  “We should bolt,” the girl says. “It’s not fair to Sethie to stay here too long.”

  Sethie looks at her, impressed. Then at Shaw, to see his reaction.

  “All right, chickadees,” Shaw says, getting up, wiping nonexistent dust from his pants. “Let’s get going. Don’t want to get Sethie in trouble.”

  For just a second, Sethie is angry. Or maybe embarrassed. Shaw has blamed her for ruining the fun. Sethie should never have said anything to the girl who sweats but doesn’t get sticky. But Sethie’s anxiety doesn’t last long, because she realizes that if everyone leaves, Shaw might stay, come with her next door, into her own apartment. They might be alone together.

  But he doesn’t stay. Each of the five others kisses her on the cheek good-bye as they wait for the elevator; Shaw’s kiss is last, and he lingers so she can feel his breath on her, a burst of air she feels not only on her face but all the way down to her feet. It even makes her ankles tingle. Then he leaves with the others, into the hallway, down the elevator, through the lobby, out the door. Sethie doesn’t like being stoned alone. She goes to her room and curls under her covers and tries to get warm. Her teeth chatter.

  She forces herself out of bed and into the kitchen. It is time for her to chug her water. Every night, Sethie must drink one liter of cold water in under twenty minutes, and she is not allowed to pee until she’s finished the bottle. The water brings the coldness under her skin into her belly. She stays under the covers. She waits to use the bathroom. She steadies the chatter of her teeth. Soon, she’ll be sober, and the air will feel warm again.