Zoe Letting Go (22 page)

Still, the tippy-toe end of my third week at Twin Birch seems an occasion worthy of celebration. If I had a calendar to tack to my bedroom wall here, I’d cross off each day one by one in thick black Magic Marker X’s. I’d host a celebration as soon as half the days were marked off. The drive home from a destination always seems shorter than the drive there, and I’m hoping that a similar logic will apply to this situation.

Dear Elise,

“Have you lost a lot of weight recently?”

Those were her exact words. The date is lost to me, but I remember that the outside stairs of our school building were still crusted over in layers of ice, so it must have been this past winter. January or February. We were making our way carefully down the steps for a coffee run during one of those infernal twenty-minute breaks between classes, and I was aware, as I was always aware, that somebody was watching as we walked. At the foot of the steps stood Katie—yes, the same Katie who had scornfully informed you, the first week of freshman year, that Alex’s note was a joke—with her hands stuffed into a North Face, smelling lightly and sophisticatedly of the cigarette that she’d just smoked around the corner. I had
the distinct sense, as I stepped gingerly down the icy steps, that she wanted me to fall.

Have you lost a lot of weight recently?
is usually a compliment. The way Katie said it, however, ruled out that interpretation. You reached the bottom of the stairs before I did, and you must have accidentally caught her eye. That was a mistake. Eye contact is an invitation to engage, and engagement with upperclassmen had never been a good thing in our experience. In a casually neutral tone that was loud enough to carry well beyond the immediate circle of bystanders, Katie openly appraised you:

“Have you lost a lot of weight recently?”

Caught by surprise, you stammered.

Katie grinned frostily in response and declined to repeat herself. Her silence spoke loud and clear:
You heard me
, it said. Her friends, meanwhile, looked at you with scientific objectivity, as though you were a lab sample. I did my best to glare at Katie from my precarious position on the stairs, but she didn’t budge her line of sight from you.

“Oh, not really,” you said, fiddling with the buttons on your navy pea coat. Before you could say another word, I looped my arm protectively through yours and pulled you away, muttering something urgent about coffee. We should have walked slowly—that was our second mistake—because it would have suggested, at least, that we weren’t running away from Katie. But my flight instincts overruled any shred of dignity that I might have salvaged
for us, and within seconds we’d reached the end of the block and turned a corner.

“What
was
that?” I said.

“What was what?” you asked, your face a mask of bewilderment.

“Katie. What was she doing? I hate when people ask dishonest questions. I mean, obviously you’ve lost weight. She
knew
that. She just wanted you to admit it in public, to embarrass you. Just like that time with the note.”

“I guess it wasn’t so nice of her.”

“Not so nice?” I said, fuming. “God, I
hate
people sometimes.”

We arrived at Starbucks, and you held the door open for me, welcoming a blast of warm, coffee-smelling air. The line was long, and to pass the time, you began removing strands of pale blond hair from your wool coat. “Ugh, winter static,” you said, pulling away the stray hairs. There were more than usual this time.

I was still mad about Katie, and I didn’t understand why you weren’t.

“It’s not the first time that’s happened,” you said simply when I brought it up.

“With Katie?”

“No, other people.”

“Who?” I asked.

We ordered our coffees and went to the bar to doctor them with the appropriate amounts of soy milk.

“Don’t people ask you about it?” you said, wrapping
your hands around the hot paper cup as we exited the store. “Don’t people tell you that you’re too thin? Or that you’ve lost too much weight?”

“No,” I said. “No one except my mom and Harry. Do people say stuff to you?”

“All the time.”

A spasm of jealousy rippled through me.

“It’s annoying,” you went on. “I mean, what am I supposed to say back? ‘Yes, I have lost weight, as a matter of fact.’ And then what? Am I supposed to sit down and toss back a cheeseburger because someone thinks I’m too thin?” You took a sip of coffee. “I mean, what does anyone hope to accomplish by saying that?”

My pace quickened. How come nobody had told
me
that I looked too thin? What did that mean? I summoned an image of our food schedule in my head and mentally scanned it for ways to eliminate fifty—no, a hundred—calories from my day. I had to catch up with you before you lost even more weight.
No low-fat ice cream
, I decided. I did not deserve any kind of treat at this rate of progress.

“Why are we walking so fast?” you said.

“Oh,” I said, slowing down. “Sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“Zoe, you’re not upset, are you?”

I shrugged. Your eyes widened in unease at the idea that we were on a different plane of existence, and you pulled to a halt, laying a gentle hand on my arm.

“Look, you know it’s a matter of distribution, right?
I’m taller. My bones are bigger. They stick out more, so I look bonier. You’re tiny, all the way around—”

You spun me around in a 360-degree turn to illustrate.

“Tiny,” you concluded. “It’s just the way we lose weight as individuals. I look skinnier, whereas you look teenier. Look at it another way. No matter how much weight you ever gain, you’ll never look fat. It’s physically impossible. You’re petite, like a little French ballerina. Your limbs are small. Whereas me, if I let myself go, I’d look like a defensive back.”

“I wish I had long, lanky arms,” I said. “Sinewy. Like Gwyneth Paltrow’s.”

“Yeah, well, I wish I were itty-bitty like you. You know what I realized the other day? I’ll never be able to sit in my boyfriend’s lap. Not that I
have
a boyfriend, but if I did, I wouldn’t be able to. Because I’m too tall. Isn’t that horrible? He’ll never be able to pick me up and twirl me around, or do anything cute with me. I’m too big.”

“Well, I wish we could switch,” I said. “I wish I could be you.”

“Story of my life,” you said. “I wish I could be you.”

We linked arms and squeezed tight, relieved to see that Katie and her friends had dispersed from the front of our school. After making our usual plans for lunch and splitting off to go to class, I turned impulsively to watch you walk through the crowded hallway and performed a mental exercise that I sometimes do, which is to look at you the way an outsider would. I did this as students
bobbed and pushed around me, noting your twig-like legs, ballet flats, and ponytail of blond hair. The ponytail, I discerned, was not as thick as it once was. In the time it took to get from Starbucks back to school, your coat had become covered, once again, with strands of blond hair. I wondered if anyone but me would notice.

I don’t know why I keep sending you these letters.

Zoe

I woke up on
the right side of the bed. Against the odds—the odds being curried-tofu salad on brown bread and fried zucchini blossoms—it even lasted through lunch, possibly because Brooke was absent. Was I happy? No. But I felt optimistic. I told myself that the hard part was over. I even had an intuition that something good might happen. A treat of some kind, or a surprise—a letter from Elise, or the discovery that I’d stopped gaining weight.

I did indeed get a surprise. But not the kind I expected.

The morning’s cheery omens carried over into cooking class, where we made Carrot Crack Fries. Along with the kale chips, these are my favorite things I’ve learned how to make. They’re basically french fries made out of carrots, but healthy. And addictive—hence the name. Aside from the sugar-melting smell of baking carrots, the atmosphere was duly improved by Brooke’s disappearance. Missing Intake, warm-up, and Activity was highly
unusual, though, and as the morning wore on, the mood darkened as we all began to wonder where she’d gone. Something was up, and it wasn’t until lunch that we found out what it was.

Angela made the announcement. She entered the room and waited while we transferred the heavy fry-laden serving dishes to the side tables, then supplanted Devon’s place at the front of the room.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” she began. “I’m here to make a brief announcement.”

Five pairs of ears perked up.

“Brooke,” Angela said, “is no longer with us. Due to patient confidentiality, we won’t be able to discuss the reasons for her departure. However, you’re encouraged to share your thoughts with Alexandra during your regular scheduled sessions or during open office hours. She’ll be here until dinner tonight. Thank you, and bon appétit.”

She nodded to Devon and left the room.

Five pairs of eyes grew wide with bewilderment.

An inner
Hallelujah!
erupted inside of me, though I was careful not to demonstrate my joy. Without adding any comments of her own, Devon herded us into the dining room for lunch, leaving us to speculate about Brooke amongst ourselves. Nobody, it seemed, had a clue what had happened to her.

“It’s not working,” I informed Alexandra after lunch. “As of today I’ve spent 18.75 hours in therapy, and I do not feel 18.75 percent better about anything in my life.”

“That makes you a very tough critic,” she said. “Do you expect therapy to make you feel better?”

“Yes. Of course I do. What else is it good for?”

“Well,” she said. “It can help you learn things about yourself.”

“And what if those things make a person less happy?” I asked. “Is that progress?”

Alexandra crossed her legs, adjusted her watch strap (cobalt-blue), and redirected the conversation.

“How are you doing for supplies?”

“Fine,” I said slowly. My mind returned back to my room, to the half-depleted white box beneath my bed. I mentally scanned its contents. “I have plenty of envelopes and enough note cards to last. Victoria keeps stealing pens to draw temporary tattoos on Haley and forgetting to return them, but I only need one pen, so.”

“Let me know if you need more.”

“I like having only one pen,” I said. “It’s the same principle with hair bands. If I only have one around my wrist, I never lose
sight of it. But give me twelve hair bands and I’ll lose them all in ten seconds.”

I was biding my time before addressing the Brooke question. I didn’t want to seem overeager.

“Scarcity increases value,” Alexandra agreed. “Have you ever tried buying asparagus out of season?”

“Yeah, it costs like three thousand dollars per pound.”

“Exactly. It’s the same reason we value beauty so highly, as humans.”

“Because it’s scarce?” I asked.

“Because it’s scarce. You’re still writing letters to Elise, I see.”

My foot twitched of its own accord.

“You seem a little impatient today,” Alexandra observed neutrally. “Is everything okay?”

“I think you can probably guess why I’m impatient,” I said.

Once again, I can’t
stand
when adults feign ignorance. They’re always lecturing teenagers about not playing dumb—about breaking the habit of inserting “like” between every other word—and yet here was Alexandra, pretending to be dumber than a bundle of socks.

“Do I have to ask?” I said.

Silence.

“Okay. Why did Brooke get sent home today?”

Alexandra’s hand smoothed the already-smooth linen of her pants, and I wondered, for the first time, whether she might not be quite as cucumber-cool about the morning’s events as she had seemed. It had all happened so rapidly. First Brooke was there, and then she wasn’t.

“Was it drugs?” I speculated. “Did she have coke or Adderall or something?”

“As Angela mentioned this morning,” Alexandra said, “Brooke acted in a way that endangered the welfare of the other girls here. That’s all I can really say, Zoe, without infringing upon patient confidentiality.”

“But I thought we were allowed to talk about anything in here,” I protested. A new idea occurred to me: “Does it have to do with the stolen clothes?” I asked.

“Zoe.”

“No,” I persisted. “Something doesn’t feel right about this. Has it happened before at Twin Birch? That a girl gets sent home?”

“Only once.”

“What happened that time?” I asked, then reconsidered. “Never mind. I know you won’t answer that.”

“Perhaps we could talk about how Brooke’s leaving makes you feel,” Alexandra prompted. There are no dead ends with Alexandra. As soon as you hit a wall in conversation, she opens up a side door.

“It feels great,” I said curtly. “She hated me, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I don’t know that she
did
hate you, Zoe.”

“It hardly matters now.”

“It does,” Alexandra said, “because Brooke is still making you unhappy despite the fact that she’s gone.”

Now I looked for my own side door. “Your watch is the color of an IHOP,” I said, pointing to her wrist. It was true. Her watch was the lurid blue color of an IHOP roof.

Alexandra glanced at her wrist.

“Is IHOP really international?” I went on, overenthusiastic in my rerouting of the discussion. “I’ve never heard of an IHOP in Rome. Or Barcelona. Maybe it should be called NHOP. National House of Pancakes.”

“Let’s stay on track, Zoe.”

“I used to order cinnamon-apple pancakes with whipped cream on top,” I went on dreamily, remembering trips with Harry and Mom. I could feel the lightweight cutlery in my palm, and the heavy laminated menu with its endless combinations. The smell of fake syrup in the air. It was warm inside the restaurant. Our table was splashed with sunlight.…