Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,11

up,” Kate whispered.

I didn’t understand. I said, “What do you mean?”

“After she eats, she throws up.”

“How do you do that?”

“You put your finger in your mouth. And it just comes out—I guess.”

“You’re kidding me.” I hated to throw up. I avoided it at all costs.

“I wouldn’t kid about a thing like that,” she said.

Breanne really must have despised her parents in order to deprive their baby girl of sustenance. It was impossible to know for sure, but her mom probably clapped at her first steps and dressed her in eyelet rompers when she was an infant and kissed her shampooed curls. I’d been to the Engels’ house. How pathetic Breanne must have looked, leaning over the turquoise toilet in their immaculate bathroom, feet and knees sinking into the plush of the matching turquoise carpet, breathing in the gladiola aroma of those gooey obelisk air fresheners, the kind where if you look inside the shaft, you can see the gel sinking into its own neon-green hip.

“It seems kind of extreme,” I said. I didn’t think Breanne had such a bad life. I thought of poor Dorothy Becker, who’d been abused at home. Dorothy had cragged seams on her wrists from what she’d tried to do.

Kate returned to Seventeen. “You’re so selfish.”

I wasn’t sure what Kate meant by selfish. If she meant concerned excessively with my own advantage, I didn’t feel very selfish. Of course, it was possible she didn’t think I was selfish at all, but simply called me that because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. I scooped up sand, wondering how many grains were in my hands, which is a cliché thing to wonder at the beach, but stupefying nonetheless. Kate kept licking the tip of her finger, then flipping the pages of her magazine—snap, snap, snap.

I don’t know how or why, but I suddenly suspected that she had made herself throw up before too. I felt myself stand.

“Where’re you going?” she asked nervously, leaning up.

I wasn’t sure. “To the water,” I said.

I walked along the rim of the shore. Though the day had almost passed, occidental light poured across the sky, making a pink and pious vault. I faced the ocean and remembered the way Maman had once described the water to me as a woman, a mother. La mer, et la mère. Eh? The sea is there when you need her, she’d said, though she herself could not be.

I turned back to see Kate sitting with those girls. It didn’t bother me that they’d waited until I was gone to extend an invitation to her, or that she’d accepted. But I did wonder what it was that she wanted from them and what it was that they wanted from her, and whether either party stood the remotest chance of satisfaction.

Be a friend to Catherine, Maman had also said to me. And although I was superstitious about things such as last wishes, Kate was beginning to require a type of friendship that I wasn’t sure I knew how to handle.

The bell rang again—8:00 A.M. and still no teacher.

Stephen Auchard stepped cautiously past the boys who punched and swatted at one another around the doorway. He chose the desk next to mine and nodded uncomfortably. Last time he’d seen me I’d been crying, which in high school is sort of like seeing someone naked.

At Maman’s funeral he’d worn pressed khakis and a blue jacket with anchor buttons. His mother had had glasses with gold rectangular frames, and her auburn hair had been drawn into a sublime twist. She’d conferred with her son in ethereal French, leaning close, calling him Etienne. Kate’s mother had been related to Stephen’s father, and that was how the Cassirer family had found East Hampton. Outside Williams Funeral Home, Mrs. Auchard had held my shoulders and kissed both of my cheeks, kisses like accidental butterflies. Her skin had been dewy and fragrant, cold as packed talc. “Claire did love you,” she’d said to me. Deed luff.

“What’s your locker number?” Stephen asked. Our last names were letters apart, Auchard and Auerbach; our lockers had been side by side every year.

“591,” I said. “What’s yours?”

“590,” he answered.

I nodded, and he nodded again, and we watched Nico Gerardi and Billy Martinson saunter in. I wasn’t surprised to see them in an Advanced Placement class, though they were awful students. Jocks were pretty much exempt from the standards that bound the rest of us. Teachers and administrators humor them because it’s in everyone’s interests to coax them