Zoe Letting Go (12 page)

I followed her instructions, trying to temper the nervous storm brewing in the back of my mind. I knew that I’d be expected to share the full version of my own story, too, at some point—and then what would I say, except that I’d never had a real problem with food and that I didn’t belong here at all? I need to have friends here, but I can’t get too close to them. I can’t let them ask me about my past. How could I even start to explain?

The truth is that a small fraction of me is able to identify with
their battles. I lost some weight last year—a lot of weight, to be precise. But I lost mine in the way anyone loses weight—and in the way that Elise lost weight—which was by eating slightly less and exercising slightly more. I am not even as skinny as the
average
model. And I certainly wasn’t refusing breakfast in fourth grade.

But time was on my side this morning. Before either of my friends could dig further for my detailed personal history, Devon emerged in the doorway to call us in for cooking class. We brushed the grass from our legs and trundled over to the front stairs of the house.

“Taco quinoa casserole,” Devon announced as we filed inside.

I couldn’t imagine a more repulsive combination of words.

After cooking and lunch (verdict: even more repulsive than anticipated), I arrived early for my session with Alexandra and took a seat outside her office. The day was halfway over, and already I had divided it into Good and Bad categories. The Good category contained one item, which was that I’d further solidified my friendships with Haley and Victoria. That deserved a gold star. The Bad category, unfortunately, was more numerous. One, I couldn’t get the dirt out from beneath my fingernails, and the dark half-moons were a visual annoyance each time I looked down at my hands. Two, I screwed up my minted zucchini soup in cooking class by forgetting to peel the vegetables. While the other girls produced silky, pale emulsions, mine turned a bilious green color, like a blended toad. Three, I could tell that I was starting to gain weight.
As long as I don’t gain too much, I can lose it by the time school starts up again.

Slouching into the chair, I ran a finger lengthwise along my thigh. Viewed from this angle, the contours weren’t flattering. What if I didn’t have enough time to lose the weight by September? There’s little in life that pains me more than the idea of returning to school in worse shape than I left it. There’s always one guy who comes back with overdue braces and one girl who comes back chubby. People talk.

Just a few days ago, my body was running as smoothly as a machine. I’d gotten it down to a science, only to be snatched up and dumped into a place designed to reverse my hard-won habits. The timing could not have been worse: I’d beaten the odds and lost weight. I’d kept myself decently skinny for a whole year. I was still a giant compared to waif-like Elise, but still. And now this. If it is possible for a person’s brain to cringe, that’s what mine does every time my tongue locates some forgotten crumb of Twin Birch breakfast stuck between my back teeth.

I shoved these complaints out of my mind and referred to the wall clock. Five minutes to go. The red lacquered box sat next to me on its wicker table, same as before. Since that first session with Alexandra, I’ve adopted a habit of peeking inside the box, just out of curiosity. It was empty the first time I checked, but it hasn’t been empty since. And as I stood today to look through the slit at the top of the box, an obscure part of me wished that it would be empty once more. It wasn’t.

I straightened up and sat back down. One minute to go. When I initially asked Alexandra what the box was for, I thought her explanation sounded very queer. I still do, but the oddness is touched with a glimmer of logic.

For the next sixty seconds I let my mind wander to golden Oreos, V-neck T-shirts, and Coney Island, in that order. Random things.

“Hello, Zoe,” I heard from beside me.

Alexandra’s door was open. She stood smiling, her black bob glossier than a licorice jellybean. It reminded me of an actress from the 1920s whose name I couldn’t summon. Lulu something? I wished that I had my phone back. It would take all of three seconds to Google the actress. Problems that a split second of Internet research would solve are arising here as a daily source of irritation. The lack of Googling privileges is another bothersome aspect of finding oneself locked away from the world.

“Water? Tea?” Alexandra offered. She wore her usual outfit of white pants and tunic, but without the scarf or costume jewelry I’d come to expect. Her uniform, I should note, follows a distinct pattern: All of her garments are white with the exception of a single splotch of color. It’s the same every time. White, white, white, and then a dab of brightness—never more than one—by way of a red headband or an electric-blue shoe. Secretly, I looked forward to seeing where the color pops up each day. It’s a private game for me to play, like a treasure hunt. Another way to distract myself.

Today’s accessory was a pair of poppy-orange flats that were pointy at the toe. They reminded me of traffic cones.

I declined the offer of a drink.

“What’s on your mind today?” Alexandra asked, after we’d arranged ourselves on the chair and couch respectively.

“Tricks.”

“Tricks?”

“Yeah. For eating,” I said. “Did you know that Haley used to slice grapes into slivers to make them last longer? She told me all about her strategies during breakfast. So did Victoria.
Grape slivers.
”

“Hmm,” Alexandra said.

“And Victoria set her alarm for five a.m. so she could run for an hour before school,” I went on. “Then, she did the same thing
after
school every single day. Two runs of four miles each. Her rule was that she ate all of her food for the day before eight a.m., so she had time to burn it off.

“She ate the same thing every day, which was a protein shake that she made in the blender with almond milk and peanut butter. She drank it after her morning run, intentionally swallowing it fast so that the protein powder would expand in her stomach and make her queasy. The queasiness would stop her from eating anything else for the rest of the day.”

As I relayed these things to Alexandra, I marveled at my ability to perfectly recall the details of the conversation I’d had the day before. Unlike most things, Victoria and Haley’s tricks remained vivid in my mind, down to the flavor (cookies and cream) of Victoria’s protein powder.

“After a while,” I continued, “she started dreaming about protein shakes at night. She woke up with drool on her pillow from anticipating the shake. And when she went on her first run, that’s all she thought about: the cold, frosty breakfast that lay ahead.”

“Hmm,” said Alexandra.

“And Haley—holy crap. Haley was even worse. At the beginning of the week, she’d buy seven containers of low-fat rice
pudding and mark them with a Sharpie:
M
for
Monday
,
T
for
Tuesday
,
W
for
Wednesday
. Then she’d steam up a batch of vegetables and portion those out into seven plastic Tupperware containers, one for each day. She’d put those in the fridge with the pudding. And then she took seven Ziploc bags and put, in each one, ten cashews, ten pretzels, and two rice cakes. Every day of the week she would eat a rice pudding for breakfast and a container of vegetables for dinner. For the rest of the day, she carried the Ziploc bag around and nibbled from it.”

“You find these details interesting,” Alexandra observed.

“Don’t you?” I said. “Obsessiveness is fascinating.”

“How come?”

“For the same reason that anything is fascinating. Because it’s different.”

“But Zoe,” Alexandra said, “I’m not so sure that it
is
different.”

“How do you mean?”

“When I spoke to your mother, she mentioned that you and Elise developed some restrictive eating habits.”

“When did you speak to my mother?” I asked, my voice unexpectedly sharp. One look at Alexandra’s face was enough to tell me that she wouldn’t divulge the information, so I waved my own question away. “Never mind. But you can’t compare Elise and me to these girls. There’s a huge difference in our situations.”

“What’s that?”

“We
ate
. The difference is that Elise and I ate.”

Alexandra made a note on the legal pad in her lap, then trained her eyes back on me. “It sounds as though you ate little and controlled your diet strictly, Zoe. You controlled your intake
to the point where it became a source of concern to those who cared about you.”

“Losing weight isn’t the same as anorexia,” I rebutted, repeating the same point I’d made before. This was exasperating. “You know what? It really annoys me when adults pretend not to see subtleties. Just because a teenage girl wants to drop five pounds, doesn’t mean she needs to be incarcerated at a clinic.”

“That’s true,” said Alexandra. “When we left off yesterday, we were talking about your mother. And your feelings of anger toward her.”

“Well, I don’t feel too angry anymore.”

“That’s good, Zoe. Why?”

“I don’t know. The anger sort of turned into frustration, and then the frustration lost momentum.”

She nodded. “Anger is an exhausting emotion. I’m glad you allowed yourself to feel angry instead of stifling it.”

“Gardening helped. I was violent with the pigweed.”

“That’s a good way to metabolize the anger.”

“It was a real bloodbath.” I held up my dirty nails as proof. “I thought about writing my mother a letter, but I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve written letters to Elise,” Alexandra said. It was a statement without a question mark, and the quicksilver change of subject threw me off balance. While I struggled to think of a response, Alexandra continued. “I’d love to talk about Elise today.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. My voice sounded raw, as though it had been sanded down a layer.

“I understand that you miss her very much.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think about her every minute. It’s the worst part of being here.”

The sofa beneath me began to tremble. An earthquake? No. It was my thighs that were shaking. I pushed my shoes hard against the ground in order to steady them, but a tiny vibration was still evident. I hoped it wasn’t visible from Alexandra’s vantage.

“I keep thinking about all the stuff she’s probably doing at home while I’m here,” I said.

“Such as?”

“Walking in Central Park. Taking photos. Picking mint leaves from her backyard, squeezing lemons into iced tea. Making popsicles.”

An endless, expectant minute passed before Alexandra responded. Did she assume that I was having deep thoughts during these pauses? Because I was not. My mind was blank.

“Have you told the other girls here about your friendship with Elise?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t told anyone anything.”

“What about Caroline?”

“Caroline? She’s the last person I’d talk to. No,” I corrected myself, “that’s not true—Brooke is the last person I’d talk to. Caroline is the runner-up.”

“How come?”

“She’s like an egg. She rolls around in her shell, saying nothing and doing nothing. An empty surface. I have no idea how to talk to her.” Pause. “And I’ve tried.” (This wasn’t terribly true, but I didn’t want Alexandra to think me a misanthrope.)

“Caroline is shy. But I have a feeling it might make you feel better to reach out to her. She could be a wonderful resource.”

“Resource,” I echoed. “You make it sound like she’s an oil well.”

“And I know she feels the same way about you.”

“Somehow I doubt this.”

“You can be an intimidating person, Zoe.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I have more social anxiety than anyone I know. When I started kindergarten, my mom had to put me in bed for an hour every day after school because I was so overwhelmed by the presence of other people that I felt physically sick. Intimidating is the last thing that I am.”

“Roommates are paired very attentively here,” Alexandra said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Caroline is your roommate for a reason.”

I sat with this.

“Who decides?” I asked.

“Angela and myself.”

Of course. My question had been idiotic.
Think before speaking
, I commanded myself.

“I’d love to see you get to know Caroline a little,” Alexandra said. “And of course I’ll be encouraging her to do the same.”

“Fine,” I said.

“You could talk to her about Elise. That might be a good place to start.”

“I have, actually. Once.” The conversation had been so brief and unproductive that I’d almost erased it from my mind.

“And—?”

“On the second day, she asked about a photo I had. A picture of Elise and me from the first day of sophomore year. It was a cell phone picture that I printed out.”

“And what did she ask you?”

“She asked who the picture was of, and I told her. I think she was annoyed that her ten perfect picture frames were no longer the centerpiece of the room. I don’t know what the deal is with those pictures, but she is
very
protective over them. Did you know that she polish—”

“Let’s stay on your conversation,” Alexandra interrupted. “How did Caroline respond when you told her about Elise?”

“She turned off the lamp and went to sleep sucking her thumb.”

Alexandra scribbled something else on her legal pad.

“As conversations go,” I summarized, “it was pretty much a nonstarter.”

The angle of the legal pad—balanced on Alexandra’s leg and canted away from my eyes—made it impossible to tell what she’d written, and the secrecy of her notes unsettled me. There’s something inherently taunting about a therapist’s notepad. Indeed, when any object is “off-limits”—when you’re prohibited from seeing or touching it—it takes on an evil, threatening aura.

“Why is this important?” I asked uneasily. “What are you writing?”

“I’d love to come back to all of this in detail, but we’re out of time. Perhaps you could drop by later today before dinner? It would be wonderful to touch base before our appointment tomorrow. I think we’re on a good track.”