Zoe Letting Go (16 page)

It was during math lab that afternoon that Ms. Philpott called you out into the hallway. I figured it was something minor, but when you failed to return after fifteen minutes, I asked permission to use the bathroom and went a-searching for you. The coat closet was vacant, so I checked the hallway and stairwells. Nothing. On a hunch—yep, I’d been reading
Cam Jansen
mysteries—I headed for the girls’ bathroom, where my suspicion was speedily confirmed. A flurry of noise came to a halt as I opened the door and slipped inside. Although the bathroom was silent, I detected ragged breathing amid the disinfectant-scented air.

“Elise?” I whispered.

The door to the big handicapped stall inched open.
You stood behind it, looking as though you’d recently killed someone and I’d caught you disposing of the corpse.

“What are you doing?” I cried, rushing inside and locking the stall door behind me. You backed away and slouched unhappily against the wall, your apple-red corduroys still bedazzled in the morning’s glitter. A torn pile of fabric stood at your feet, shredded into something that looked like cartoon roadkill. Scraps of fake fur littered the linoleum floor right up to the seat of the toilet, and when I peered inside the bowl, I saw more fluff drifting in the water.

“What on earth—?” I began.

“Ms. Philpott called me outside,” you said. “She said that someone had something special for me, and that I should open it.”

“Oh God.”

“She gave me this bag and watched me open it,” you said. “There was a teddy bear inside with a heart on it, and a note from—from—”

“Who?” I asked.

You cringed. “Aaron.”

“Oh,
gross
.”

Aaron was the class creep. Not the class
nerd
, but the class
creep
. There’s a big difference. The creep is the kid who pushed girls over in kindergarten so he could see their underwear. The kid who would go on to snap their bras a few years later to humiliate them for committing the crime of entering puberty. If cooties were an actual
disease, Aaron would have been patient zero. I mean it. He should have been quarantined anyway.

“I am
so
sorry,” I said, feeling your pain.

“I think he got his mom to write the note.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“In there.” You pointed to the toilet. I looked inside, but the note had dissolved into multicolored mush.

“What’d it say?” I asked.

“Dear Elise, Be my Valentine. Love, Aaron.”

“Shut the front door,” I gasped. “
Love,
Aaron?”

“Yeah. Ms. Philpott watched me open it. A tablespoon of barf came up in my throat, and I had to swallow it.”

I completely understood.

“She told me I had to
thank
him,” you went on. “That he’d probably saved up his money to buy it.”

“Screw that,” I said, stalking over to the toilet. I aimed my sneaker at the handle and kicked, flushing Aaron’s icky Valentine into the sewage abyss where it belonged. Then I fixed you up, dipping paper towels in cold water and patting your forehead and cheeks until the color faded from firetruck red to passable pink. We speed-walked back to class, hoping that our absence hadn’t drawn attention. I wanted to murder Aaron on your behalf for daring to impose his weirdo desires on you. Mega yuck.

It wasn’t the last time I’d experience that particular kind of protective possessiveness. Five or six years later,
it began to happen every day. Guys of varying creepiness—and sometimes even
hot
guys—followed you down the supermarket aisle to compliment your eyes. When we went to the bookstore, the guy behind the counter slipped you a note with his phone number. The Apple Store Geniuses fixed your computer for free. It became a source of joking between us.

Aaron’s Valentine, however, was the first such milestone in our friendship. Until that moment, I’d never really drawn distinctions between us. We were like matching socks or two Twinkies in a package: a pair, and therefore the same. But from that day forward, we weren’t the same anymore.

I paid close attention to this fact.

At the time, I was relieved that I didn’t have to dispose of hostile teddy bears on Valentine’s Day. But as time passed, the feeling mutated from relief into despair. I saw the way boys looked at you and the way adults talked about you. I began to understand that the glow of beauty that enveloped you was not transferable to me. I felt a gulf widening between us, and although I knew it would always be a part of our friendship, I could never quite accept it.

I wonder if you despise me for admitting these things. It is okay if you do. I thought I would feel better after I wrote them down, but it turns out that I don’t. Not really. What I feel instead is ambivalence. I wish that I could
gather every last bit of my unhappiness into a ball, just so it would all be in one place.

Love,

Zoe

Too busy plotting
to write more than a few sentences.

One: Today I ate cheesecake for the first time in three years.

Two: We are going to catch the thief.

That is all.

I’d memorized the paragraph carefully.
As in legal documents, seemingly minor details of wording were imbued with the potential to wreak dire consequences.

By now, a curiosity of this notebook should be obvious to anybody who happens to read it (though I don’t expect such an event ever to occur): for all of my documentation of Twin Birch, not a
single word
has been written about the other girls’ bedrooms. Why not? Read the above paragraph, lifted verbatim from the section of the brochure that I assigned myself to read last night. With the
exception of roommates and Devon, nobody is allowed to enter (read: snoop inside) anyone else’s bedroom.

The prohibition itself lends extra import to Brooke’s accusation, because wrapped up in that crime is included the
additional
crime of trespassing.

Not only is accusing somebody of theft a big deal, as Brooke had publicly accused me, Haley, and Victoria, but investigating the crime ourselves by, say, sneaking around to see if our belongings show up in somebody else’s suitcase is a logistical impossibility. Our whereabouts are always accounted for, even during Group Downtime. There are no opportunities to prowl.

Except, of course, at night. How else do you think I’ve been reading the all-important memo?

For the past four days, a scheme had been brewing in my mind. I had to be careful and meticulous in the planning. I couldn’t afford to mess up on this.

I mentioned the plan to Victoria and Haley yesterday but told them I needed twenty-four more hours in order to work out the details. They pleaded with me for ten minutes but ultimately agreed to the caveat, and I promised them that it would be worth it.

“Trust me,” I told them at last night’s dinner. “I need to sleep on it and work out the kinks. I’ll tell you tomorrow over breakfast.”

In truth, I didn’t need twenty-four hours. Or anything close to it. What I needed was ten minutes of uninterrupted reading time in the bathroom—but I could only accomplish this task at
night, after everyone else was asleep. I was fairly certain that my memory was correct—that there was a loophole in the Twin Birch rules that we could exploit for our own purposes—but I needed to pore over the brochure one last time, checking the fine print and rereading the rules to ensure that I had them fully memorized.

Plus, I was nervous. I hadn’t asserted myself much at Twin Birch, and this would be asserting myself big-time. The longer I could put it off, the more time I had to get over my fears.

It wasn’t difficult to find an interval in which to sneak to the bathroom at lights-out, since I was wired enough to know that I wouldn’t be getting much sleep. Caroline was a minor problem; it took her a full hour to fall asleep, and I waited an additional hour for certainty’s sake, given that my ability to read her sleep patterns had been proven faulty on the night that she launched her surprise-attack interrogation. At half-past midnight, I slinked out of bed, locked myself in the bathroom, found what I needed to know, and proceeded to imprint the wording on my brain by a monotonous process of rote rereading.

Breakfast the next morning was a rainbow chard omelet with romesco sauce. Nobody had a clue what romesco sauce was, which gave Devon—who sat at the other table—ample opportunity to speechify on the subject while Victoria, Haley, and I got down to brass tacks.

“Here’s the idea,” I whispered, propping my elbows on the table. “We each have a roommate. Technically, searching our roommate’s stuff is against the rules, but it’s not a rule that’s strictly enforceable by anyone except your roommate. Got it?”

They nodded.

“Then you grind the almonds into a paste, so it’s like glue,” Devon was loudly explaining at the other table. The three of us reflexively looked down at the orangey-red sauce covering our omelets. There were
nuts
in this? Great.

“Anyway,” I went on. “Imaginary scenario: Let’s say Devon walks by your bedroom and catches you pawing through a suitcase. She’s gonna assume it’s your suitcase, not your roommate’s. Therefore, we can all search our roommate’s suitcases to make sure that the dress isn’t in there.”

“And your leggings,” Haley added.

“And my leggings. Exactly.”

“Hold on,” Victoria said. “Me and Haley are roommates.”

“Right. This is about process of elimination.
I
know you guys didn’t steal the stuff, but for thoroughness’s sake, do a search through each other’s suitcases. Just to be sure. I’ll search Caroline’s stuff when she’s out of the room.”

Victoria and Haley looked at each other, screwing up their noses. “That’s so weird!” Haley said. “Isn’t that awkward?”

“Not unless you have something to hide,” I said deviously.

“Oh my God, you’re like a trial lawyer,” Victoria said. “Okay, I’m game. Haley and I can search each other as soon as Gardening is over.”

“Perfect. I’ll do Caroline when she’s in therapy. We can report our results during lunch.”

“Wait,” Victoria said. “What about you?”

“What about what?”

“Your stuff. If we ask Caroline to search your suitcase, she’s gonna run straight to Devon and tattle on us. We can’t tell her.”

I rolled my eyes. “Why would I steal my own leggings?” I asked.

Haley and Victoria were silent for a moment. I tensed. Was it silly of me to think that they would take my innocence for granted?

But Victoria nodded at last. “You’re right,” she said.

Devon’s blaring voice carried over from the next table. “Then, when the bread is toasted,” she was saying, “you add it to the food processor with oil, vinegar, peppers, and the nuts from earlier.” Her enthusiasm was going over like a lead balloon—Caroline drew swirls in her romesco sauce, and Jane stared at the floor. Incredible. Sometimes I liked to observe Devon strictly for the spectacle of her unbreakable self-confidence.

“Thoroughness is essential,” I said, breaking my gaze from the bobbing blond ponytail to return to our strategy session. “Let’s meet on the lawn as soon as warm-up is finished. If all goes well, we can cross four names off our list.”

“Genius,” Victoria said. “And so simple, too.”

“Yep, process of elimination,” I shrugged. “Just think of it like a standardized test.”

Boogers.

That was the word that came to mind as Devon shoveled ricotta gnocchi on my plate.
Giant boogers.
Garden tomatoes, balsamic onions, and a confetti of pine nuts went on top of the gnocchi, which I carried back to my table like a prisoner dragging a ball and chain. At least I could find my way to the dining room on my own now.

It was lunchtime and Victoria and Haley awaited me, their plates already loaded and steaming. We were all eager to share our results.

“So,” I said, sitting down. “You two first.”

Haley pointed at Victoria. “All clear,” she said.

“Ditto,” Victoria replied.

“No dirty green dress? No leggings that smell like gazpacho?” (I’d spilled Devon’s disgusting gazpacho on my leggings the other day.)

They both shook their heads.

“Me neither,” I said. “There was nothing in Caroline’s suitcase but St. Agnes paraphernalia and Kate Spade headbands.”

“Huh,” Victoria said under her breath. “To be honest, I was kind of suspecting Caroline. There’s something maladjusted about her.”

“Agreed.”

“Well, what do we do now?” Haley asked, chasing a piece of gnocchi around her plate. “Our ploy didn’t work.”

“Hold your horses,” I said. “That was only half of the plan.”

“It was?”

We were interrupted by an enthusiastic noise at the other table. Devon was smacking herself on the forehead.

“KALE CHIPS!” Devon yelped. “I forgot the
kale
chips!” We watched her shoot up and run into the kitchen, returning with two baskets that contained the results of our earlier kitchen labor.

“Fabulous—more food,” Victoria muttered. “I was hoping she forgot.”

Each table got its own basket of kale chips. “You guys, I am so sorry,” Devon said.

She returned to the other table, her ponytail animated in flight.

“As I was saying,” I continued. “We know for sure that none of us is the perp.”

“You did
not
just say ‘perp,’” Victoria said.

“I totally did. So listen, here’s what we do. When dinner rolls around, the three of us huddle together conspiratorially and talk in whispers. Why? Because we want Jane and Brooke to see us scheming. After all, we know that one of them is the thief—”

“But it was Brooke’s dress,” Haley interrupted.

“Please,” I rejoined. “Brooke is nuts. She easily could have stolen her own dress to get sympathy points. And if she was going to steal anyone else’s clothes along with it, she’d choose mine because she loathes me. So,” I went on. “Immediately following dinner, during warm-up, we three all stand up at my signal in the living room, and we make a little announcement.”