The Stone Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

and the girls from the third will grow up to sleep with the lawyers. Which girls do which tends to switch based on which school the girl who’s telling the joke attends, but Sethie notices that no one ever says that theirs is the school from which the girls marry the lawyers. Anyway, Sethie thinks lawyers are out of fashion nowadays. It should be, she thinks, bankers, or maybe dotcom geniuses, or whatever they call those guys who make millions off the Internet. But no, Sethie decides, the Internet isn’t really a New York thing. Well, they should add bankers, in any case.
    Sethie sat during the assembly, watching the headmistress squirm as she alluded to a “certain item” in the article. The certain item she couldn’t bring herself to describe was the story in which one of the girls interviewed told the reporter about a party where all the girls offered to give the boys blow jobs as, say, the cover charge to get in. Everyone at White knows it’s not true; everyone at all the private schools knows that never happened. It was just a story; it was just a punch line. Sethie thinks that the unnamed source probably didn’t think the reporter would even believe it; Sethie can’t imagine that anyone she knows would have believed it.
    A girl in Sethie’s class claims to know the girl who told the story. Actually, she says, it was three girls, and they all go to the school around the corner, the school everyone knows isn’t quite as academically rigorous as White is. They thought it would be cool to be in a magazine, but then they lost their nerve and asked to be quoted anonymously.
    47 Sethie wonders if it’s even legal to quote girls under the age of eighteen and use their names without their parents’ permission.
    Sethie sat on the floor of the assembly room, even though the seniors are allowed to sit in the chairs in the back that are otherwise reserved for faculty use only. The headmistress talked about the dangers of speaking to reporters, the importance of preserving White’s 100-year-old reputation. When she asked if anyone had any questions, Sethie was tempted to ask why the headmistress (who apparently believed the story) was more concerned with the girls speaking to reporters than she was with girls giving blow jobs to get into a party. Sethie leaned against the wall near the door. Cross-legged, she could feel three sets of bones in this position: the bones beneath her ass, her ankles, and her shoulder blades. Sethie imagines that being really fat must be like having a constant cushion; there must be no hard surfaces, Sethie thinks, for the obese.
    Now, Sethie stares at her butt in the mirror, at the stitching over the pockets in the denim. These pants remind her of how she used to dress, years ago, when she was thirteen and fourteen and her mother still helped her pick out her clothes, just like she had when she was a little girl, even though her body had defiantly stopped being a little girl’s. Sethie’s breasts came late, but now they are here to stay; no matter how much weight she loses, she always needs to wear a bra. Her mother came into dressing rooms
    48 with her then; now, if they do shop together, Sethie never lets her in. Rebecca told her how clothes should fit, and Rebecca—skinny, small Rebecca—said that clothes should be tight, so her daughter wore them tight. Now, Sethie can hardly believe she walked around like that. She remembers her short shorts and the way men began to stare at her. She liked it at first; it made her feel pretty. It even made her feel stylish, as though her clothes were what they noticed, not her body underneath them. And it made her feel grown-up, old enough for adult men to notice.
    Once, in ninth grade, she was meeting someone at the Met, and she got there early. She was wearing an army green short skirt and a white tank top. An outfit her mother loved so much that they both tried it on in the dressing room, and Rebecca had insisted that they share it, since they