HONE Y DE W
A short story
EDITH PEARLMAN
ART BY
AUBREY LEARNER
CALDICOTT ACADEMY, aprivatedayschool for girls, had not expelled a student in decades. There were few prohibitions.
Drinking and drugging and having sex right
there on the campus could supposedly get you
kicked out; turning up pregnant likewise; that
was the long and short of it. There was a rule
against climbing down the side of the ravine on
the west side of the school, where a suicide had
occurred a century earlier, but the punishment
was only a scolding.
Alice Toomey, headmistress, would have welcomed a rule against excessive skinniness. Emily
Knapp, all ninety pounds of her, was making Alice feel enraged, and, worse yet, making her feel
incompetent—she, Alice, awarded the prize for
Most E=ective Director two years in a row by the
Association of Private Day Schools. This tall bundle of twigs that called itself a girl — Alice’s palms
ached to spank her.
Emily: eleventh grade, all As, active member
of various extracurricular activities, excused from
sports for obvious reasons. She visited a psychia-
trist once a month and a nutrition doctor once
a week, who emptied her pockets of rocks and
insisted that she urinate before stepping on the
scale. She had been hospitalized only twice. But
according to her mother, Emily was never more
than two milligrams away from an emergency
admission.
