Zoe Letting Go (15 page)

Apple jelly is a Southern thing. Victoria talks about it a lot.

“We’re eating a corn pouch stuffed with pulverized beans,” she went on. “If that isn’t gross, I don’t know what is.”

“Mayonnaise?” Haley suggested.

“Mayonnaise is gross, too.”

“And lobster?” Haley added. “Did you know that lobsters are technically insects? Giant insects from the sea that people eat?”

We were hashing out this point when Angela showed up in the doorway. This was unexpected—her rare appearances in the dining room always coincided with breakfast, when she occasionally checked in with Devon. Devon seemed equally surprised to see the head administrator upstairs at lunch, and she hurried over with an anxious look, brushing tamale crumbs from her shorts.

Devon didn’t even bother to clap for attention before making the announcement.

“Lunch is over,” she announced, after whispering with Angela. “Everyone into the living room.”

Victoria, Haley, and I glanced at one another with eyebrows raised. Something was up.

At the next table, Caroline smiled triumphantly. When I looked at her plate, I could see why: She hadn’t eaten one bite
of her meal, and now she wouldn’t have to consume even a token crumb.

We filed into the living room, where Angela now stood by the unlit fire, her hands folded stiffly across her chest. Next to her sat Brooke, whose eyes were red with tears behind the wire-rimmed glasses. Brooke, I now realized, had been absent at lunch. I wondered why I had been slightly more relaxed than usual.

We found seats and arranged ourselves in a semicircle. Brooke, wearing a black dress flecked with bits of her breakfast, simmered in her chair, eyes flickering between me, Victoria, and Haley. Before Angela could begin, Brooke stood up and addressed the three of us.

“One of you did it,” she said. “I know it was one of you.”

My first impulse was to laugh. I stifled it as Angela put a firm hand on Brooke’s shoulder, imploring her to sit back down.

Brooke sat, her thin arms crossed tight over her chest, like a self-imposed straitjacket.

“An item of clothing has gone missing from Brooke’s suitcase,” Angela explained. “It was brought to my attention this morning, and after conducting a thorough search of Brooke’s bedroom and the laundry facilities to no avail, I see no recourse but to bring the issue up in a meeting.”

The room went dead. This wasn’t a meeting about schedules or allergies or some other minor detail. If I was hearing correctly, Brooke was suggesting that a crime had taken place.

“Brooke?” Angela prompted. “Would you like to walk us through your side of the story?”

I knew I should look straight at Brooke while she delivered
her complaint, but there was a white smear of goat cheese on her left sleeve, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it.

“Someone went through my personal belongings,” she began, her voice quivering with anger. The cheese smear stood out like a bull’s eye—why couldn’t she eat like a normal person, instead of a pig? If she truly cared about her belongings, why did she cover them in food?

“Someone went through my things while I was asleep,” Brooke continued, her nose running. “And they took my favorite dress. My green dress. They stole it from my closet and—” she paused to wipe her nose, which had already dripped into her lap, but launched into another crying jag before she could complete the sentence.

Haley raised her hand. “Are you sure it happened this morning? I mean, what if it happened a few days ago? It could be a mistake—”

“I wore it yesterday,” Brooke interjected.

I considered the ramifications of this statement. If she wore it yesterday—and maybe she did, I can’t remember—then the dress would have been filthy when she hung it back in her closet. Why would anyone steal a filthy dress? Not to mention an ugly one. It was a vivid green tube-shaped garment that made Brooke look like a Kirby cucumber. If anything, the thief had done her a favor.

After discussing the details of the theft, Angela dispatched us to our rooms to check for missing items of our own. A second item, indeed, was gone.

My leggings.

I have seven pairs of leggings. Seven identical pairs. I wear
them every day in summer, firstly because I can’t be bothered to wear jeans and secondly because my legs look like tree stumps in shorts. Seven is an easy number to remember—a pair of leggings for each day of the week. As I went through my belongings, I kept counting and recounting, certain that I’d missed a pair. I reported the missing leggings to Angela, who wrote the item down on a list.

How had I gotten implicated in this?

Victoria was spooked. Haley was excited. I, meanwhile, was eager to discuss the details of the robbery with both of them as soon as possible, but I had a session with Alexandra to get through first. This was good in the final analysis, since I had a question I was dying to ask her. I hurried our session along as quickly as possible, impatiently discussing the Caroline business until Alexandra could be persuaded to talk about the theft. Then, as soon as it was possible to do so without being obvious, I asked the question that had been dominating my thoughts for the past hour.

“If the thief were caught,” I said, “would she go home?”

“No,” Alexandra said, momentarily startled at my introduction of a new topic. She quickly regained her equilibrium, like a surfer navigating a choppy wave. “Absolutely not. It would be something we would work through in group sessions.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said. This was all valuable information, and I needed to extract as much as possible. The Twin Birch memo had covered petty infractions, not serious crimes.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not everyone’s fault. To me, it seems like only the thief should be punished.”

“And,” Alexandra prompted, “you think that the thief should be punished by being sent home?”

Another trick question.

“No, you’re right,” I said, backtracking. “That wouldn’t be a punishment at all.”

“Some girls might even view it as a reward,” Alexandra said. I could be wrong, but it seemed as though she were watching my reaction with special acuteness. I sensed that I was being tested.

“So no,” Alexandra continued, her black bob shining in the sunlight. “We can’t go down that disciplinary route. Not for any reason.”

“Sounds like a person would have to kill someone to be sent home from Twin Birch,” I suggested.

Alexandra raised an eyebrow.

“So what’s going to happen?” I asked, redirecting the conversation. “What will happen to the thief when she gets caught?”

“I doubt the thief will get caught,” Alexandra said.

“Or confesses?”

“I doubt the thief will confess.”

“Why not?” I said.

“She’s testing boundaries. If the impulse were rooted in greed, she’d have stolen something of value. If the impulse were based in cruelty, she would have stolen an object of sentimental worth. Instead, she chose an old green dress.”

“And a pair of leggings,” I added.

Alexandra wrote something down on her notepad. Our time was almost up.

After the session, I sprinted outside to the shaded beech grove where I’d agreed to convene with Victoria and Haley. Both girls were already there; their Group Downtime had begun directly after lunch, while I had been in therapy.

“Nancy Drew to the rescue!” Victoria crowed as I burst out of the front door and ran over to join them. I was breathless with impatience. We immediately began discussing the crime.

“Why clothes?” Victoria speculated. “If you’re going to steal, why not steal something of value?”

“Right,” I said. “It’s not the leggings themselves. I have a million pairs of leggings. Seven, to be exact.”

“You’re right. It’s the weirdness factor,” Haley agreed. She tugged on a pair of gold earrings. “I take these off every night. It’s not like someone couldn’t just grab them from the nightstand. Brooke’s dress was, like, fifty years old and stained. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Clearly, personal gain wasn’t the motivation here,” I said.

“Then what was?”

We stewed over this question. In doing so, I happened to notice that my thighs had expanded another half-inch or so. I wondered, objectively, how much wider they’d gotten over the past nine days. One inch? Two inches? Three? I wore the same leggings I always wear: black, size XS, opaque enough so that I never have to worry about my underwear showing through. The perfect leggings. For the past few months, I’ve barely worn anything else.

But that wasn’t the subject at hand.

“Do you think this happens a lot?” I asked. “Thefts at Twin Birch?”

“I dunno,” Haley said. “Angela seemed weirded out by it.”

“Yeah,” Victoria agreed. “She wasn’t acting on precedent. The meeting was so haphazard—it was like she didn’t know what to do. She was improvising.”

“She was so serious,” I said, giggling a little. “I mean, the action itself is disturbing, but the details of it—the fact that the person stole my leggings …”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Haley agreed. “Unless it was done purely out of malice.”

“That’s the whole point,” Victoria said. “That’s why Angela is so concerned.”

“Well, following that theory, I can understand why someone would take a disliking to Brooke. She’s confrontational and frosty and generally a pill.” I snuck a glance at Victoria and Haley to see if they expressed any agreement with my summary, but it was hard to tell. “But me?” I continued. “I’m not exactly a mean person. Why would someone want revenge on me? Why me and Brooke?”

Then I thought of something. The thought must have showed on my face, because Victoria and Haley instantly pounced on it.

“What?” they said simultaneously.

“You have an evil look on your face,” Victoria said. She scrambled up to a sitting position and thumped the grass with both hands. “Tell me, tell me, tell me.”

“What-what-what!?” Haley said.

“I’m having a Harriet the Spy moment.”

“Go on,” they begged.

I plucked a stalk of clover and removed the leaves contemplatively, drawing out the gesture for maximum dramatic impact. If I smoked cigarettes, I would’ve taken the moment to unleash a perfect, languorous line of smoke rings. Oh well.

Victoria poked me in the leg. “What’re you plotting?” she asked. “I’m going to die here.”

“Don’t die yet,” I said, with a Cheshire Cat smile. “I know exactly how to catch our thief.”

Dear Elise,

Day eleven. We picked raspberries today. Soft, squishy raspberries that we gathered from the brambles and deposited in empty yogurt containers, where the riper ones exploded on impact. I conducted an experiment while I picked, consuming a single berry to see if it tasted any different eaten outside than it did eaten inside. You know what? It did. Standing waist-deep in a patch of thorns and rolling the seeds around on my tongue, I could taste all the other elements that conspired to produce that raspberry: dew, thorns, warmth, and even, not unpleasantly, dirt. I was hypnotized by the taste for three full minutes, and I didn’t eat another berry for fear that the taste would go away. The rest of the morning’s harvest went directly into my yogurt container. Plop, plop, plop.

Have you ever noticed that a raspberry has a hollow center after you pick it? It’s the only berry I can think of that does. Blackberries don’t, blueberries don’t, and strawberries don’t. Why is that? (So elves can wear raspberries as hats?)

In cooking, we simmered and strained the berries to make jam—a process which left everyone’s fingers and lips stained a bright Valentine’s Day pink. The air smelled like cakes and confections. It reminded me of your very first Valentine.

(Is it significant that I remember
your
first Valentine but not my own? Probably, but I won’t attempt to interpret.)

We were in third grade at the time, way too big for printed turtlenecks and kooky socks but not advanced enough for training bras. It was a transitional age. (Then again, what age prior to full-fledged adulthood
isn’t
transitional? I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel too old or too young.)

We were, at any rate, pre-romantic. Our interests included carnivorous plants, Lip Smackers, T-shirts that changed color in the sun, and squishy pencil grips. We still thought the best way to get boys to like us was to imitate them and/or beat them at HORSE.

What innocent children we were!

February 13 was like Christmas Eve at my house. It was major. Under my mom’s watch, V-Day involved treasure hunts, doilies, heart-shaped stickers, unrestrained
consumption of glucose, and surprises. Your parents, by contrast, were more or less indifferent to holidays that didn’t revolve around the consumption of specialty cocktails (gin and tonics for Independence Day, egg nogs for Christmas, Kir Royals for New Year’s—hell, even
I
’
ve
committed their drinking schedule to memory by now). Although our parents weren’t keen on the idea of sleepovers on school nights, you were always allowed to spend the night on February 13, and this occasion was no different.

The scene outside was brutal when we woke up. A blizzard the week before had left souvenirs of gray ice and filthy slush to crowd the sidewalks, and for weeks the sky had been the color of old clam chowder. Grim weather usually has a leaking effect, wherein it seems to seep indoors and turn everything dull, cold, and dreary. On Valentine’s Day, however, the effect was a
contrasting
one. As we traipsed to the kitchen in our matching pajamas like a couple of baby bears, we couldn’t believe how snug and warm the little apartment felt. The holiday had transformed a drab apartment into a magical one.

The smell of melting chocolate poured forth from the stove, where my mother was stirring a pot of homemade cocoa. We squealed, and my brother Harry, who was already up and dressed and waiting at the table, tossed us each a red jellybean from the stash he was working through. Red tissue flowers and glitter festooned the table, where giant heart-shaped cookies marked each
of our places. ZOE, ELISE, HARRY, and MOM: Our names were spelled out in pink frosting. My mom kissed our foreheads and poured cocoa and flutes of sparkling pear cider for everyone, and we toasted to Valentine’s Day. (Harry: “Did you know that toasting was originally a way to make sure that Romans didn’t poison each other’s drinks? You’re supposed to splash a little of your drink into the other person’s glass when you clink—that way, if they’ve tried to poison you, then they’ll die too.” Mom: “I don’t think that’s true.”) After toasting we feasted on stiff fondant icing and butter cookies, inciting a sugar high that would spin itself out by mid-morning. In two minutes flat, our pajamas were covered in glitter. We were allowed to go to school without brushing our teeth.