Zoe Letting Go (11 page)

The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is research the possibilities for legally emancipating myself.

When gardening was over, Victoria, Haley, and I commandeered a shady spot opposite the vegetable patch and sprawled out on the grass. We spread our arms wide, encouraging the breeze to dry our sweat. When it’s hot out, I become less aware of where my body ends and the air begins. The lines are sharper in winter. In summer, you can blow a stream of air at your wrist and it’s no warmer or cooler than the atmosphere, just different.

From our leafy spot we watched the other girls—Jane, Brooke, Caroline—file into the house, out of sight. An hour remained until cooking class and two hours before lunch. I couldn’t imagine putting another iota of food into my stomach, which was still busting at the seams with that heavy pancake matter.

“What’s she like?” Victoria asked.

“Who?”

“Your roommate. I can’t get a handle on her.”

“Me neither,” I said. “She floats around like a lost electron. I can never tell what she’s thinking or where she’s going.”

“She’s the skinniest one here,” Haley observed.

“She’s rich,” I added.

“Rich? She doesn’t look rich.”

“Don’t be fooled. It’s a certain kind of rich,” I said. “Old money. She’s a blue blood—her family goes back to the
Mayflower.”

“Ah.”

“Faded polo shirts, hand-me-down pearls, that sort of thing,” I elaborated.

“She told me the
Mayflower
thing too,” Haley said. “D’you think it’s true?”

“Maybe. That’s the only personal fact she’s shared so far. And I’m her roommate, for God’s sake.”

“She’s probably terrified of you,” Victoria said.

“Me? I’m about as scary as an amoeba.”

“Don’t undersell yourself.”

I peered at Victoria, trying to figure out what she meant by that. Victoria met my gaze evenly. Before I could say anything, Haley spoke.

“She does have funny eyes. They’re too big for her face.”

Victoria nodded vigorously. “You know what she looks like? One of those cat clocks with the moving eyes. What are those called?”

“Kit-Cat Clocks? The ones where the tail moves, too?”

“Yeah. They give me the heebie-jeebies. She looks like one of those.”

“Why are we talking about clocks?” Haley complained.

“Because we’re bonding,” Victoria said. “We’re forging connections. It’s Group Downtime, and we’re healing each other. In a group.”

“Blorgh,” I said.

Haley plucked a daisy from the lawn. “We could make a daisy chain,” she suggested.

“What are you, ten years old?” Victoria said.

“Fine, jeez.”

“I’m kidding. What do you think we’re making for lunch?” It was a relevant question, since cooking class is generally when we prepare the afternoon meal and sometimes its attendant dessert.

“Zucchini-tomato quinoa with flaxseed?” I guessed. “Curried lentil paté?”

“Hippie food,” Victoria said. “I can’t get over how retro the menu is here. It’s like somebody combined a time capsule from 1965 with astronaut food and then exploded it inside Devon’s weird little vegetarian head. Is she from California? She must be from California.”

I kept improvising. “Smoky tofu-stuffed peppers with coconut butter? Banana-carob squares?”

“STOP!” Victoria and Haley cried simultaneously.

“Sorry.” I said, smiling wickedly. I let a pregnant pause go by, then leaned over and whispered directly in Victoria’s ear, “Sprouted wheat-berry loaf.”

She shrieked and socked me in the arm.

“On a serious note,” I said, “I’m glad we’re good enough friends that you feel comfortable beating me.”

“Me too. Not bad for—what, five days? Is that how long you’ve been at this hellhole?”

“Yeah.” It was true, too—being thrown together in this way had prompted me to befriend Victoria faster than I’d ever befriended a soul before, except Elise.

Haley looked up from the daisy chain she’d started. “My stomach hurts.”

“Mine too, now that I think about it,” I said.

“Mine three,” Victoria added, rolling over on her elbows. “Probably because I ate dessert last night. I can’t even remember the last time I ate dessert.”

“Me neither. My mom doesn’t like sweets, so the only time I got dessert was if my best friend’s parents took us out to dinner,” I said. “Once I made the discovery that all restaurant desserts are exactly the same, I quit eating them altogether.”

The other two looked at me curiously. “What do you mean, all the same?” Haley asked.

“Dessert menus all follow the same pattern,” I explained. “There’s always a fruit dessert, a lemon dessert, a chocolate dessert, a cold dessert, and a custard dessert.”

“Interesting theory,” Victoria observed.

“It applies to every restaurant,” I said confidently. “If we had our phones, I could show you ten menus that fit the pattern.”

“Give an example,” Haley said.

“Okay. A dessert menu at your typical, nice-ish restaurant would be, like, nectarine cobbler, lemon pistachio tart, chocolate mascarpone cake, vanilla bean ice cream, caramel pot de crème. See? All the bases covered.”

“I love it,” Victoria said. “You’re a geek. Just like me. Is that when your food thing started, Zo? With the desserts?”

I paused momentarily at the abruptness of the question. I’d known all along that I’d have to answer a similar question at some point, but I hadn’t expected it to come this soon. Not having a ready answer, I deflected the question. “I dunno,” I said, turning toward Haley. “When did yours start?”

“God, I remember the moment so well,” Haley began. “I could divide my life into ‘before’ and ‘after’ categories.”

Victoria was nodding in agreement, and I mimicked the gesture. It was crucial for me to blend in at this point. Haley and Victoria might suspect me to be different from the rest of them—my appearance broadcasts this fact like a ticker tape at the New York Stock Exchange—but I certainly didn’t need to underscore my wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing status.

“After my parents divorced,” Haley began, “my dad started a tradition of getting us donuts for breakfast every Friday. We called it Donut Day.”

“Creative,” Victoria said.

“My brothers and I would tell him what kind of donuts we wanted, and he’d write it all down on a Post-it note. My dad’s a dermatologist—very scrupulous. He took the Post-it with him to the donut store to make sure he wouldn’t forget anything.

“At first I always got a pink frosted donut. The cake kind, with sprinkles, like a Homer Simpson donut. My brothers got chocolate devil’s food donuts and apple strudel sticks, which were somehow the ‘cool’ donuts.” She paused. “It’s funny how even
breakfast pastries
get divided into ‘cool’ and ‘lame’ categories.”

“It’s true,” I said. “Jelly donuts are so dorky.”

“Danishes are the worst,” Victoira said. “Someone’s dad is always eating a cheese danish and getting crumbs on his shirt. If you order a danish, you’re dead.”

“So, Donut Day,” Haley went on. “My dad would run out and return fifteen minutes later with two brown paper sacks. My brothers would be waiting at the table, drooling, like a pair of mastiffs. My dad poured us all glasses of milk, and himself a cup of coffee, and then we’d rip into the donuts. It never took my brothers longer than four minutes to demolish three donuts apiece—not only because they were starving, but because they were popular and couldn’t wait to get to school.”

“Ugh,” I said, thinking of my own brother. “I know the type.”

“Seriously. So obnoxious. Anyhow, there was one day when I didn’t have any clean clothes to wear because my dad had, once again, forgotten to do the laundry. Fourth graders aren’t old enough to buy their own clothes, but”—she made a face of rueful recollection—“they
are
old enough to make fun of each other for wearing uncool clothes.”

“Fourth grade is a minefield,” I said.

“Every grade is a minefield,” Victoria corrected.

“Yeah,” Haley agreed. “So, while my dad was getting breakfast, I dug through the hamper and tried to find a shirt that wasn’t stained with chocolate milk or dirty. I was in a panic. By the time I found a passable top and got downstairs, everyone had finished eating and left the table. The table was a mess of napkins, waxed paper, and squashed paper bags. I sat down and rifled through
until I found my pink donut. A quarter of it had been amputated, and all the icing was sheared off.”

“Aw,” I said. “The best part.”

Victoria looked wistful, as though she were thinking of her own beloved donuts from the past.

“It looked like someone had given my donut a buzz cut and then stepped on it,” Haley said. “Pathetic. I felt pathetic, too, in my dirty shirt. I looked down at the donut, this sad little puck, and realized that I didn’t want it after all.”

Haley sat up and stretched her shirt over her knees, creating a tent. “Then I thought to myself,
Well, Haley, you need to eat breakfast because lunch isn’t until noon and your stomach will growl during class.
So I lifted the donut up to my mouth. But then I put it back down again because another weird thought had occurred to me.
I wonder what would happen,
I thought,
if I didn’t eat breakfast.
It started as a sort of experiment. The option of not eating had never occurred to me before.”

Despite being uncomfortably full from breakfast, I began to get the first stirrings of a donut craving from listening to Haley’s story. Humans are amazingly suggestible. Thoughts of maple icing, crispy fried ridges, and pillowy yellow interiors drifted through my mind. I could almost smell nutmeg and hot oil. But now wasn’t the time for donut fantasies. Somehow—quickly—I had to figure out a story to tell.

“It was one of the first independent decisions I made,” Haley went on. “And it was intoxicating. I couldn’t control much in life, but I could control this. Instead of Donut Day, Fridays became the day that I didn’t eat breakfast.”

“Were you hungry?” Victoria asked.

“I was. I still
wanted
to eat the donut, but I no longer
needed
to eat the donut.”

Haley stretched her nightshirt even tighter over her knees and drew her arms inside for warmth. She resembled a Jujube.

“That’s when I first started drawing the distinction between foods that I wanted and foods that I needed,” she continued, her chin resting on the taut collar of her shirt. “I did more experiments. When my class went to the cafeteria at lunch, I would eat just one part of my meal—only the chicken fingers, or only the macaroni, for example. One day I’d eat only bread things, which meant my roll and my pizza crust and the croutons in a salad. On another day I’d decide to eat only round things, or only one bite of each thing on my plate, or only yellow things.”

“No one noticed?”

She shook her head. “My classmates didn’t care, and my parents were too busy. It became my own special, private habit. Something personal and cool, like a toy that I didn’t have to share with my brothers or anyone else. It was as though I knew a secret that other people didn’t know. The list of foods I wanted got longer and longer, and the list of foods I needed got shorter and shorter.”

I sort of know that feeling,
I thought.

“And the rest …” Haley trailed off. “What about you?”

Victoria pursed her doll lips. “I saw it like a game,” she said. “Like a crossword puzzle with right answers and wrong answers. And rules. By seventh grade I had the rules down. I had to be
‘good’ every day except for Saturday. On Saturday I could cheat and eat all the foods I wanted.”

“And that worked?” Haley asked.

“It was a psychological trick,” Victoria said. “By the time Saturday rolled around, my stomach would be the size of a peanut from eating so little all week, and the fact that I gave myself permission to eat everything made me
not
want to eat everything. It was thrilling, in a weird way.”

“It was thrilling because that’s the definition of
perversity
,” I interjected. “Literally. Perversity means doing something specifically
because
you’re not supposed to. In other words, you starved yourself on Saturday specifically
because
you were allowed to eat anything on Saturday.”

“Right. Totally,” Victoria said. “During the week, I would make lists of all the foods I ‘planned’ to eat on Saturday, even though I knew that I actually wouldn’t eat them. I did it during class. My teachers thought I was taking exhaustive notes, but inside my notebook it was just pages and pages of
Lobster roll, almond croissant, crab cakes with rémoulade, and pommes frites.
”

“I kept mental lists,” Haley said. “Mint-chip ice cream, raw cookie dough, garlic bread from one of those foil packages that you put in the oven and the middle comes out raw.”

“Chicken paillard,” Victoria said. “Dark chocolate broken into shiny squares. Red velvet cake with cream cheese icing.”

“Tater tots. Movie popcorn drenched in fake butter.”

It was dizzying to watch them go back and forth.

“I want a donut,” I said. “The lame kind. With jelly oozing out from the middle.”

Both of them turned to me, each having had the same thought. “And you?” Victoria said. “When did yours start?”

“Freshman year,” I said, picking a random time frame. I didn’t want to sink my brand-new alliances by announcing that I was an imposter who didn’t have any reason to be here. I mean, Jesus.

“
Really?
” they both replied in unison.

Shit. Apparently I picked the wrong answer.

“Why?” I asked.

“That’s so …
recent
,” Haley said. “I was ten.”

“I was eleven,” Victoria chimed in. “But I guess it’s different for everyone.”

“Eating disorders are all slightly different,” Haley nodded.

“Like snowflakes?” I asked.

“Or thumbprints.”

“Or genetic diseases,” Victoria said.

I needed to change the subject, so I lay down on my back and moaned, feigning an even worse stomachache than I had. It worked: Victoria and Haley frowned in sympathy, and Haley instructed me to roll up like a pill bug—“I swear,” she said, “it squeezes the pain right out.”