Sublime

Em had a slight lankiness to her. She wasn’t just slim, she was skinny, scrawny maybe, in a way Pat noticed other women noticing.

Whiplash girlchild in the dark

Mary Karr

For Emily, who returned her borrowed stardust to the universe far too soon.

Slender almost to the point of clinical intervention, she had a prominent forehead and surprised eyebrows and a tortoiseshell barrette and was, like Atwater, extremely earnest and serious at all times.

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.