Read The Book of You: A Novel for Free Online Page A

from the locker, and hurried down the stairs and out of the revolving doors, holding her face up to the blast of freezing air. She’d walked only a few feet before a car slowly drove out from beneath the court building. It paused, blocking the pavement as the driver waited until it was clear to turn left into the street.
    Something made Clarissa peer inside. Slumped against the window in the rear passenger seat was Carlotta Lockyer, weeping. She met Clarissa’s eyes with her own, seemed, briefly, to register a kind of puzzled recognition, and the car smoothly moved on.
    Wednesday, February 4, 8:00 p.m.
    When I hug Rowena just inside the restaurant’s entrance, her breasts bounce against me without squishing at all. They are improbably high and seem to have grown two cup sizes.
    Her first words to me are an answer to my unvoiced question. “Yes. I had a boob job.” Her chest is shimmering, dusted with sparkling powder. “You wear your body every day. You’ve got to be happy in it.”
    Rowena runs her own one-woman company. She is a discourse analyst. She looks at every mission statement, advertisement, and logo a business produces. Then she tells them what messages they’re really giving out. Maybe Rowena worked for a plastic surgeon and got seduced by the brochures she was supposed to critique.
    “Just because we are thirty-eight doesn’t mean we have to look thirty-eight.” She is examining her face in her compact mirror, looking so worried it makes me think of the queen in “Snow White” with her terrible looking glass. Rowena’s forehead is shiny smooth. It is out of sync with her jaw and cheeks.
    I want Rowena to look less sad and strained, so I ask how she gets that dewy-fresh glow, a little teasingly but affectionately, too.
    “I have a strong will not to raise my eyebrows at all, and to limit my expressions. Movement gives you lines.”
    She’s not intelligent, Henry said.
    There are different kinds of intelligence, I said.
    Henry haunts me too, but not as much as you. You’re fast overtaking him.
    Despite the freezing night and slippery pavements, Rowena is wearing a plunging sleeveless dress of deep-purple velvet and high heels. I think it’s a little odd because it’s not like Rowena to make so much effort just for me. I tell her that her dress is beautiful.
    “So many women get stuck in their look,” she says, and I’m pretty sure she means me.
    Is this the Rowena who used to sneak her favorite clothes to me whenever I wanted to wear something my mother hadn’t sewn?
    I glimpse my reflection in the window. My hair is piled on top of my head and held with silvery geometric clasps, though a few blond wisps have escaped around my face and neck. The bodice and sleeves of my charcoal dress are tightly fitted, the skirt like the upside-down bowl of a wineglass, the hemline just above my knees.
    Rowena looks down at her chest. “It’s not just to attract men.” The emotion behind the last sentence is too strong; her mouth trembles as she struggles not to frown. “It’s for me. I owe it to myself. And these new boobs don’t move at all. They’re so pert and perky I don’t even need a bra.”
    I think of the defendants jeering at Miss Lockyer. Look at her tits wobble.
    Pert and perky are not Rowena words. When did they become so?
    Rowena goes on, seeming to need to convince herself more than me. “The women at my gym are always asking, ‘Who did your face? Who did your boobs?’ ” She speaks as if her body parts can be purchased by anyone, like a new gown or bag.
    The defendants say “tits.” Rowena says “boobs.” I say “breasts.” I don’t know what you say. I don’t want to know. What I do know is that these differences matter.
    “It’s a huge compliment. You should try Botox, Clarissa. At the very least. If you don’t do something soon, you’ll wake up one morning looking like a deflated balloon.”
    She’s not even nice to you, Henry said.
    She’s comfortable being