The Stone Girl by Alyssa B. Sheinmel Page B

It’s funny now, to think how scared she was then. She had been surprised at how little the needle hurt, didn’t quite believe it; but now she knows that it hardly hurts at all, to break her own skin.
    Her bra feels loose, but it’s only six pounds she’s lost, hardly enough to make a difference in how her bra fits.
On the first day back after break, Sethie’s school has Health Day, when they sit you down and talk to you about self- awareness and stress levels, drugs and sex. Sethie thinks Health Day would be more useful if it were before
    169 finals, before everyone has studied their fingers to the bone, snorting their friends’ Ritalin and Adderall to pull allnighters. At least, she thinks, don’t put Health Day on first day back from Christmas break, when every other commercial on every other TV show is offering lessons on how to lose those stubborn holiday pounds.
    In the morning, a victim of date rape gives a lecture. The entire upper school (at other schools it’s called high school, but here at the White School, it’s called upper school), grades nine through twelve, is packed into the assembly room. Sethie is the only senior who still sits on the floor rather than the faculty chairs. She knows she doesn’t belong on the floor, but she wants to compare the feel of the hardwood to the way it felt before she lost six pounds. (Seniors are also allowed to take the elevators in second semester, but Sethie has vowed she won’t do it. The stairs are such a great way to burn calories.) Sethie listens to the victim telling her story. It should be really moving, but Lifetime made a TV movie out of this particular victim’s story, which nearly everyone in the senior class has already seen and from which the girl shows scenes as visual aids. When she’s finished, the headmistress takes the podium to thank the girl for sharing her story. Sethie feels sorry for the girl, but in her mood, she also can’t help thinking that this girl has parlayed her story into a fairly lucrative career, between the TV movie and the lectures. And, the headmistress manages to turn her story into nothing more than a warning about why girls shouldn’t drink at frat parties. Proper young
    170 ladies, she seems to imply, don’t drink beer from a keg, and they certainly don’t get date-raped.
    Just before lunch, a nutritionist comes in to meet with the senior class. She is short—maybe 5'1"—and fit, and the shoulder pads on her suit make her look even smaller. Sethie recognizes the shoulder pads for what they are: an old, if unfashionable, trick to look thinner. She immediately hates the nutritionist for her hypocrisy: Don’t worry about your bodies, girls, you’re beautiful just the way you are— but it’s okay for me to worry about how I look. After all, Sethie thinks, this nutritionist has her own lucrative career to worry about; this particular nutritionist appears regularly on the Tod ay show, and everyone knows how important looks are in show business.
    The nutritionist stands in front of the class and asks a question: “How many of you girls have ever said ‘I feel fat’?”
Every single girl raises her hand.
“And how many of you girls actually believe that fat is a feeling?”
Not a single girl, not one, raises her hand. They’re smart girls, good students; they know what’s expected of them. But Sethie knows that most, or in any case many, of them would be perfectly capable of engaging in a debate about why fat is most definitely a feeling. Sethie shoots a look across the room at a girl named Alice. Alice is the class anorexic. Sure, there are plenty of girls in the class who’ve toyed with the disease, and with bulimia too. But Alice is the only one who really, Sethie thinks, deserves the title.
    171 She was even sent to a rehab-type treatment center over the summer; she had to stay there, everyone knows, for three weeks. Sethie thinks maybe you’re not a real anorexic until you need in-patient treatment. Alice is