Zoe Letting Go

by Nora Price

  “Hear, hear,” Haley agreed.

  Whew.

  “It is going to be torture staying out here for forty minutes,” Haley said. “Like, I want to run inside right now and see if your leggings are back in their drawer,” she said.

  “You’re telling me,” Victoria replied. “I’m the one with ADD.”

  “You are?” I asked.

  “Well, I assume so. Self-diagnosed.”

  We cracked up.

  “My hair is ADD, too,” Victoria added.

  When forty minutes were up, we sprang to our feet and headed quietly toward the house. A sense of calm had overtaken me, but Victoria and Haley were practically skipping with eagerness to check on the results of our experiment. Ever so softly, we opened the entrance door and climbed up the main steps. Since we couldn’t enter Brooke’s room, our beeline was directed toward mine. If my leggings were back in their original spot, then presumably Brooke’s dress would be back in her closet.

  I opened the door to my bedroom. Caroline sat upright on the bed, a book of crossword puzzles balanced on her knees. I stopped short, causing Haley and Victoria to bump up against me. I hadn’t expected my roommate to be a witness to our mission.

  “Hey,” I said, smiling in an effort to conceal my surprise.

  Caroline looked up but said nothing and quickly returned to her crossword puzzle. The boldness she’d shown on the night she pummeled me with questions (Why are you here?) was nowhere in evidence. Perhaps the presence of Victoria and Haley intimidated her. It hardly mattered.

  I walked to the chest of drawers, pulled out the uppermost drawer, and extracted my neatly folded stack of leggings. Together, the three of us counted: one … two … three … four … five.

  “Five?” Haley shrieked. “The thief took another pair!”

  “No, they didn’t, nerd,” Victoria corrected her. “She’s wearing one of the pairs.”

  “Oh,” Haley blushed, eyeing the leggings I had on. “My bad.”

  Victoria chewed her lip. “Dammit,” she said.

  “Dammit to hell,” Haley said. “What do we do now? I’m pissed.”

  “Me too,” Victoria said. “And I have to pee. No pun intended.”

  She left the room, leaving Haley and I standing dumbfounded with a rumpled quintet of leggings. “We need to think this through,” I started to say. “We need—”

  “ZOE!”

  A scream punctured the air. Caroline looked up, terrified, as Victoria skidded into the room. In her hands were a green rag and a ball of black fabric.

  “In the bathroom!” she shrieked. “Brooke’s dress—your leggings—they were piled up next to the sink—”

  She dropped the leggings in my hands and held the dress out to examine it. Dribbles and splotches of God knows what covered the front of the garment. It was definitely Brooke’s dress.

  “It makes sense,” Victoria said breathlessly, brandishing the garments to underline her point. “The culprit must have been afraid that someone would see her entering our rooms, so she stashed it in the bathroom for us to find.” She boinked herself on the head with the back of her hand. “Duh! We should have thought of that!”

  Now she was right.

  Amid the excitement, we were aware of an uncomfortable presence in the room. Gaping at us with her jaw slack, Caroline bore stony witness to the celebration.

  “I don’t understand,” Caroline said slowly. “You said you knew who did it.”

  “We bluffed,” Haley said proudly. “And lookie here? We found the goods!”

  “But you tricked us.”

  “Why does it matter?” Victoria said impatiently. “Who cares? Aren’t you happy that Brooke got her dress back?”

  “I don’t think it’s right to trick anyone,” Caroline pushed back.

  “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” Victoria said, getting steamed. “Are you honestly telling me that you’d prefer we didn’t recover the clothes?”

  Caroline stared back at Victoria with placid eyes, then turned back to her book and filled out a crossword answer. It was an infuriating display of glibness.

  “You’re just smug,” Victoria continued, “because none of your things got stolen. If we hadn’t done what we just did, your precious little picture frames might just be the next thing to go. How would you feel then? Would you still be a smirking little—”

  “WHAT is going on here?” Devon thundered, breaking up the argument.

  Here we go, I thought.

  Victoria took a deep breath and turned to face Devon. “Zoe’s plan worked,” she explained. “Look. We got Brooke’s dress back. And Zoe’s leggings. The thief left everything in the bathroom for us to find.”

  Devon stared at the two items, her mouth set in a grim line. For the second time that week, she seemed genuinely confused. The air was thick with ambiguity. For a split second, nobody knew what to do.

  The moment didn’t last long. Something clicked back into place, and Devon ordered us to bed in a clipped, militaristic tone.

  “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

  [Day Sixteen]

  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 limi
ts.”

  “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.”