Zoe Letting Go (18 page)

“I need to brush my teeth,” Haley said.

“All of you in bed. Now.”

“But—” Haley protested.

“I said
now
.” Devon glared as Haley and Victoria wheeled out of my room, giving me silent thumbs-up signs on their way out. Devon, her hands folded against her chest, remained. Was she going to punish me? Praise me? I had no clue. Her expression was befuddling—or maybe just befuddled.

“We’ll discuss this in the morning,” she said at last.

I understood why she was upset. Her authority had just been toppled, and there was nothing she could do about it. I even felt a little sorry for Devon. But by the time I could answer or explain myself, she’d left the room, leaving me alone to change into my PJs and go to sleep.

I pulled a clean T-shirt from my drawer and threw it on, then pulled the coverlet back from my bed and got in. Caroline’s side of the room was dark. She lay wrapped in her blanket, facing the wall and breathing unevenly.

We lay there, awake, in the dark.

Dear Elise,

Where are you? Why aren’t you responding?

I’m sorry. Ignore that. Pleading and blaming is no way to start a letter. It hasn’t even been that long since I wrote, I guess. Did my first few letters get lost in the mail? Either option is more probable than the circumstance of you ignoring me. I know you’d never do that.

Have you left town unexpectedly? That’s probably it. Your mom must be collecting my envelopes as they slide through the mailbox. I imagine her stacking them in a bundle on your bed along with issues of
Vogue
and
Teen Vogue
and
Vogue UK
. Just thinking of those glossy, perfumed magazines—banned at Twin Birch, of course—makes me itch with displeasure at the stuff I’m missing out on. If I were in the city with you, we’d be sitting in
the shade outside with a whole afternoon’s worth of magazines, sipping Pellegrino from the bottle. Your mom would poke her head out, yell at us for drinking from the bottle, and extort promises to use glasses next time, which we would never do. Pellegrino tastes infinitely better from the bottle.

There are other reasons why you might not be responding to me, I suppose. Less innocent reasons.

Your mom might be intercepting the letters. This thought has occurred to me. She might even be reading them.

I hope not.

I think you’ve probably left town for some reason. That’s the most likely explanation.

Things have calmed down here, at least relative to the seismic upheaval of the past few days. Devon managed to extinguish her anger, and after breakfast this morning, she even propped open the windows in the living room so we could watch the idyllic summer scene unfold beyond. Morning doves cooed, dragonflies swooped, lilies grew sunward. Some people would consider it paradise.

I, on the other hand, could think of nothing beyond the now-predictable turmoil in my stomach. It was a heavy, damp feeling, as though I’d swallowed a bucket of minnows. I could feel them swimming in a pit of water, sloshing back and forth. I held myself with both hands, cringing and willing myself not to think about what I’d just ingested. It was much easier to shovel in food when
I was in denial about how long I’d be sentenced to Twin Birch.
It won’t take long to undo the damage,
I kept telling myself. But how long will it take to undo thirty-six days of damage? And what if I can’t undo it?

Being force-fed is more than a physical experience—it’s also an emotional one. Take a moment to think about it. When was the last time somebody forced you to eat? I don’t mean your parents hectoring you about that last piece of breaded fish left on your plate, or the soggy broccoli abandoned in the steamer. I mean
truly
forced to eat, and forced to eat food that you never wanted in the first place.

If you can’t remember the last time it happened, there’s a very good reason for that: It doesn’t happen much. It’s not natural for people our age to be forced into any biological activity. As a result, the process of being obliged to eat makes me—and everyone else here, I think—feel infantile. When I come home, I’ll look even younger than I usually do. My baby cheeks will be plumper; my fingers will be like breakfast sausages rather than matchsticks.

Don’t be revolted when you see me. The waistband of my leggings—which I wear specifically
because
they make it impossible to tell how fat or thin I am at any given moment—pinches deeper each day, leaving a circumference of red skin when I strip them off at night. Throughout this letter I’ve been taking breaks to put the pen down and trace the painful marks around my waist
with a fingertip. I check them every thirty seconds to see if the swelling has decreased, but I can’t really tell the difference.

Still, I feel different tonight than I did yesterday. Less angry. If I were to paint myself on a canvas, I’d choose a different color—perhaps a pale blue?—today, whereas the past week has been composed of angry crimson slashes. Blue is better than red, though I do feel as though I am
literally
depressed. As though someone has dug a hole in the ground and laid me down inside of it.

I really miss you.

During Group Downtime today, I went to my bedroom while Haley and Victoria hung out. I took off my shoes, sat cross-legged on the bed, and closed my eyes. Then I did something I’ve never done before: I meditated.

Or maybe it was the opposite of meditation. I don’t know. What I did was to focus all of my neurons on a single task. The task was to comb through the past and think about every food-related memory that I could find. And then, once I’d located the memories, to find within them all of the parts that proved my normalcy. By doing so, I reasoned, I could begin to solve the problem at hand: I could convince Alexandra that I do not have an eating disorder, contrary to my mother’s conviction, and that I should not be surrounded by girls who do.

I could go home in time to spend the rest of the summer with you.

After perching in swami position for fifteen minutes,
I had a handful of memories in mind. I reached down beneath the bed and plucked a notecard from my box of supplies, then started composing a list. I saw, as I wrote, that my memories of food overlapped extensively with my memories of you. The overlap was almost complete.

The list is not finished yet.

Why haven’t you written back?

Love,

Zoe

Breakfast
:

Blended beet, carrot, and orange juice (8 oz.)

Cornmeal pancakes with butter and blueberry jam

Honeydew melon

Lunch
:

Roast tomato and garlic soup

Zucchini fritters

Whole-grain toast (2 slices)

Dinner
:

Moroccan vegetable stew

Hummus (1/4 c)

Pita bread (2 slices)

Coconut chai pudding (*didn’t eat)

Dear Elise,

Am I writing too much? Probably. I need to distract myself from two things: the food I am eating and—ironically—the fact that you’re not writing back. Composing a letter to you solves neither problem, but at least it provides a distraction. At least it keeps me from having bad thoughts.

It’s day seventeen and I’m thinking about you nonstop. I’m not mad about my letters going unanswered, I promise. Not even an ounce of mad. Just nervous.

Food is the other thing. By now I’ve gained at least five pounds. My flesh bulges and my gait is heavier. I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror—not even my face, which is the only thing that’s visible, anyhow. In this entire castle of a house, there’s not a single full-length mirror. The omission is not an accident.

I can pinch part of my thigh between my fingers to form a roll. How does a person gain weight so quickly? It’s mathematical. Calories in, calories out. By ten a.m. here I’ve eaten more than I would normally eat in three days. Can you imagine? I keep notes on the food like the other girls, and I tally up calories. Black bean burgers, cilantro guacamole, peach crisp with lemon-pistachio topping, chewy pumpkin squares. Faux-healthy food. It all makes me gag.

My friend Victoria imposes a mental grid over her food and proceeds to cut it into tiny cubes, which she eats one at a time. She says it helps her swallow.

Another girl, Brooke—decidedly
not
a friend—has to sit next to Devon at every meal because she has adopted a strategy of swallowing her food whole, without chewing it, and one day she almost choked. Apparently her theory is that the body can’t digest unchewed food, and that therefore food, if swallowed without chewing, can pass through the body without contributing any calories. (This is false. Obviously. And disgusting.)

On some afternoons, I do nothing but digest. I sit on a couch or flat on the grass, wondering
where
, in a physical sense, all the food is going. Don’t they say that your stomach is approximately the size of a clenched fist? Well, what happens when a person is forced to eat four times that amount? How much can the stomach handle before it bursts? Or stretches out permanently, like a pair of old pantyhose?

The lightest bread crumb feels heavier than osmium when I pick it up with my fork, and when I swallow, an unstoppable slide show of images comes to mind. As the food finds its way into my stomach, inch by inch, I think of rotten meat and sagging udders and bruised fruit. Heavy, leaking things. I think that’s what my stomach probably looks like on the inside, and it makes me feel like puking.

Last month I was light as a feather. Three weeks ago, even.

I remember when you and I first noticed it. I was never fat to begin with, and you were even less so. But at the same time, we didn’t look the way we wanted to. My upper arms jiggled. You didn’t like the way your thighs looked in skinny jeans. A drastic change was in order, we agreed, and with your laptop in hand, we went out to your front stoop (when was that? A Saturday? In May?) and opened a Google Doc.
Zoe and Elise,
I titled it. That was the beginning. That was when we planned our new regime:

Breakfast
:

Banana and ½ energy bar

Lunch
:

Coffee yogurt and one apple

Snack
:

One apple and unlimited carrot or red pepper sticks

Dinner
:

As little as possible

Dessert
:

Light ice cream (1 cup)

or

Candy bar

Dinner, we agreed, was the only potential problem. We often ate with our families, and therefore had no control over what was served. This, however, didn’t prove to be difficult: I ate a few spoonfuls here, a few spoonfuls there, fed a few bites to my dog, and shifted everything around on our plates until it looked convincingly worked-over. Nobody noticed a thing—at least, not then. The
Dessert
category was the most fun, and dangerous, to plan, since it required improvisation:

“We need a reward system,” I said, as we shared the laptop that day.

“Smart idea,” you said, taking the keyboard from me. “A reward is essential. If we’re good all day and stick to the plan, we get a treat of our choice. Like puppy training.”

“But we can’t have anything,” I said. “There has to be limits.”

“The good ice cream can be one of them,” you suggested. The “good ice cream” was a fluffy vanilla confection that came out to 100 calories per serving, although a single serving was too small to satisfy anyone above
toddler age. We decided that two servings of good ice cream or a normal-sized candy bar were suitable options for the
Dessert
category, both coming in at about 230 calories. The diet, I stipulated, could be revised as time went on; the important thing was that we adhere to it faithfully. Each day that we successfully stuck to the routine, we’d put a tally mark in the Google Doc. My competitive urges would guarantee that I almost
never
broke the diet. Not that I was competitive with
you
, Elise. Not really, anyway. It’s just that when I start a plan, I stick to it.

We celebrated our new plan by measuring out two servings of vanilla ice cream apiece. I remember the look of concentration on your face as you pushed the measuring cup into the carton and leveled it off to exactly 200 calories worth. (In that way, I suppose, you remind me of some of the girls I’ve met here.) Then we washed the cup, dried it, and returned it to the cupboard. If your parents saw that we’d been measuring our food, they might have gotten suspicious. There was no need to ignite suspicion yet.

The first week was shockingly easy. We were on an adrenaline rush, thrilled with our newfound discipline and bursting with encouragement for each other. “I can already tell the difference,” you marveled, after six or seven days. It was late June, not more than a few weeks after our middle school graduation, and we lay sprawled across your bed under the cooling blast of the air conditioner. The laptop was propped between us; we browsed
eBay for sundresses without needing or planning to buy anything. It was edging close to dinnertime when you flipped over on your back and asked, with a goofy smile, whether I ever felt high from not eating.

“High? I wish,” I said. “No. I just feel like I might become pickled from overconsumption of Splenda. Like if I died unexpectedly my corpse would be perfectly embalmed in Splenda crystals.”

“Gross.”

“Just being candid.”

We had followed our plan to the letter that day, washing down thinly sliced apples and tiny spoonfuls of coffee yogurt with a sea of Fresca, which we poured into the frosty glasses that your parents kept in the freezer for their cocktails. My glass stood on your nightstand, and I drained the last warm drops of soda as I tried to figure out whether my failure to feel high from not eating was something to worry about. “Do
you
feel high?” I asked.

“Yeah. I feel like I just got laughing gas or something,” you said. “Float-y. Fun.”

You spun a curlicue of white-blond hair around one finger, unswirled it, spun it again, and then laughed.

“Should I be worried? Do you need a frozen grape or something?” I asked. “Half an apple? Fresca?”