The Hollow Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

spoke to the ugly girl in all of us.”
    “But you’re beautiful. You were always beau—”
    “You’re my dad. You’re supposed to feel that way, but the world is tough on girls. Even pretty girls never feel pretty enough. We’re never thin enough or big-breasted enough, or we’re too big-breasted, or we’re too this and not enough that. The Hollow Girl spoke to that in all of us because she looked how we felt, and she felt it harder than we did. It’s like that show on HBO about the young women living in hipster Brooklyn. It’s about women in their early twenties, but it speaks to all women at some level because we either were that age, are that age, or will be that age, so—”
    “Thanks. Can you put Ruben on the phone?”
    “Sure, he’s right here. Hold on a second. Ruben, it’s Baba Moe. Say hello to Baba,” she said in her high-pitched happy mommy voice. Then I could hear my grandson squealing with joy into the mouthpiece. I wasn’t so egocentric to think it was because Baba Moe was on the other end. It was enough to hear him be happy because Sarah was happy. “How was that, Dad?”
    “Great. Thank you for e-mailing me all those photos of him. He’s getting big.”
    “Okay, Dad, I’ve got to go. He’s gonna be hungry soon.”
    “I love you guys, kiddo.”
    “We love you too, Dad.”
    I breathed a giant sigh of relief. Any conversation that didn’t include the phrases, “Have you stopped drinking, Dad?” or “Are you still trying to drink yourself into a coma?” was a good one. It was progress of a sort, and it was great to hear Ruben’s voice again. Then, as I was enjoying my little reverie, I realized I was sipping the Dewar’s.
    I put the glass down again and went to my computer. I typed “the Hollow Girl” into a search engine and couldn’t quite fathom how many hits I got. If the search engine was actually an engine and if life was a cartoon, sparks and smoke would have shot out of my desktop. Apparently, neither Nancy nor Sarah was exaggerating. The Wikipedia page alone scrolled down the length of a football field. Sloane Cantor, as my daughter had called her, was the cause of a minor revolution at the close of the last millennium. But as is often the case, the Hollow Girl’s high point was her low point too. Within two months of her suicide posting in December of ’99, it all came undone. First came the outing—“That’s Sloane Cantor. She’s not even in college.”—then the outrage, heartfelt and otherwise, the lawsuits, the investigations; then it was over.
    Even after the Hollow Girl was outed as just some aspiring high school actress, she had a huge following, an even bigger one than when she was just lost. It quickly evaporated. When the women and girls who were vicariously living or reliving their own trials and tribulations through the traumas of the Hollow Girl discovered it was an act—inspired though it may have been—they felt cheated and betrayed. There were angry tirades about the Hollow Girl in women’s magazines and several op-ed pieces in papers large and small about the “hoax” Sloane Cantor had perpetrated on the world. Her attempted suicide act had transformed her from an “everygirl” hero into a kind of Evel Knievel/Harry Houdini hybrid: What stunt would she pull next? When none was forthcoming, her followers vanished. Age has some benefits. If she had been a bit more experienced, Sloane might have realized that once the suicide bit aired, she would be in the position of playing
Can You Top This?
with herself.
    The lawsuits came to nothing. By the time depositions came around, the world had moved on. Besides, Sloane had been underage when the postings aired and there was no indication of malice on her part. In her own small way, Sloane’s Hollow Girl suicide had produced a reaction not dissimilar to what had happened in 1938 in the wake of the
War of the Worlds
broadcast. What surprised me was how little mention there was of the Lost Girl, the