Zoe Letting Go

by Nora Price

  “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?”

  “No, I actually like the feeling. It’s weird, like being drunk. Or not drunk, but the perfect amount of tipsy.” You forked your legs in the air like a starfish. “Feels blissful,” you murmured.

  I was slightly envious—it was one more thing that came easy to you, one more thing that was better for you than for me. But I trusted you. I still trust you, Elise, although my trust is waning with every day that passes without a letter from you. It’s been more than two weeks—where are you? You’re never away from the city for this long. And the statistical probability of all my letters getting lost in the mail is unfathomable. I don’t understand why you’re silent when I need you the most.

  Write back, please. I need it badly. That’s the moral of this story. Write me from wherever you are. It doesn’t have to be a long letter; it can be a postcard or any stupid little thing. A single line on a piece of notebook paper. An empty envelope. I don’t like being here, and I really don’t like being here without you.

  It’s past midnight, now. I’m technically on my eighteenth day. Exactly halfway through.

  When I told Alexandra that I was having trouble sleeping, she suggested that I use the time to write a list of memories about you. “How many?” I asked her.

  “Twenty,” she said.

  “Too much,” I said, shaking my head.

  “How about fifteen?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Let’s aim for fifteen,” Alexandra said.

  I wasn’t intending to capitulate to her advice, but lo and behold, I can’t sleep tonight, and I have a hunch that the repetitive motion of writing might act as a sedative. So, here are fifteen memories, in chronological order:

  1. I remember meeting you on the first day of kindergarten.

  2. I remember that our class turtle smelled like mothballs.

  3. I remember how you nominated to name him Cheez-It, and I seconded the nomination.

  4. I remember giving each other head lice in second grade.

  5. I remember when you asked our third-grade art teacher when neon was invented and how crestfallen you were when she didn’t know the answer.

  6. I remember researching our favorite topics when we were finally allowed to use the Internet unsupervised: Easter Island, the Bermuda Triangle, leper colonies, phosphorescent jellyfish, Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, cults, the Northern Lights.

  7. I remember matching pajamas in sixth grade, printed with slices of flying pizza.

  8. I remember mispronouncing “epitome.”

  9. I remember requesting pancakes doughy (a.k.a. raw in the middle) from your dad, then pouring maple syrup on top and mixing it in with the wet dough and eating the whole shebang with a spoon.

  10. I remember how the pressure (and our inevitable failure) to do something socially epic on New Year’s Eve made us feel thrilled and sad and hurt all at once.

  11. I remember being embarrassed about absolutely everything.

  12. I remember when guys started checking you out.

  13. I remember—though I would never have admitted it—feeling lost in the shadows sometimes when I was with you.

  14. I remember wondering whether it was possible for best friends to be soul mates.

  15. I remember deciding on the answer.

  I remember much more, too. Write me back when you can.

  Love,

  Zoe

  [Day Eighteen]

  There was no reason to think that I’d end the day by blacking out. Then again, I suppose there never is.

  We talked about the theft again during my Alexandra session. Specifically, the thief’s decision to return the items, and the fact that the perpetrator had stashed the returned items in the bathroom rather than in their proper places. Alexandra asked me why I thought she—the thief—had done this.

  “It’s obvious,” I said. “The thief was embarrassed. She didn’t want to be caught. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t think of that when we made the announcement.”

  “You’re sensitive about that emotion,” Alexandra observed.

  “What emotion?”

  “Embarrassment. Humiliation.”

  “Isn’t everyone?” I asked. “It’s the worst. It’s the only emotion that’s physically painful. My cheeks burn when I blush. Literally. They burn.”

  The day was unseasonably cold, and I tugged at the fringe of the afghan in my lap. It was so damn fuzzy. What kind of animal did it come from? I wanted one as a pet.

  “I want to get to a point in my life,” I told Alexandra, “where I’m not constantly being humiliated. Does that ever happen?”

  “It does,” Alexandra said, “but not for the reasons you think.”

  “Why then?”

  “You never stop doing idiotic things because that’s part of being human. That’s probably the most fundamental part of being a human. Most of the time, however, we can’t see the idiotic things for what they are.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Idiotic,” Alexandra said, a slight smile curling her lip. “Being human is funny and bizarre. We do strange things. Most of the time no one else notices. Luckily.”

  I thought about this.

  “For example, we put things into a hole at the top of our body and then, later, those same things come out a different hole at the bottom of our body.”

  “Eww,” I said. “When you put it like that …”

  “We sit in front of glowing boxes,” she continued, “for hours at a time. We cover ourselves in pieces of brightly colored fabric. We have sex. If you think objectively about sex—”

  I started laughing against my will.

  “Exactly my point,” Alexandra said. “If you think objectively about sex, it’s the most idiotic thing of all. People working themselves into different shapes, grunting and sweating and—”

  “I get it.”

  “Good. You see what I mean,” Alexandra said. “We’re destined to look foolish and make mistakes. We grow old and end up looking like wrinkly babies. Our mistakes don’t have to be failures.”

  Our mistakes don’t have to be failures, I repeated mentally.

  “The next time you do something that feels embarrassing, try stepping outside of yourself and having empathy. Say, ‘There you go again, Zoe, adding another blooper to the endless blooper reel of life.’”

  “The blooper reel of life. I like that.”

  “What do you think would happen if you did it?”

  “If I said those things to myself?” I said. “About the blooper reel? I guess it might help me lighten up.”

  “A decade ago I taught at a university,” Alexandra said. “In upstate New York. A serene, leafy, liberal arts college. The cafeteria was your typical college eatery: pizza, pasta, a salad bar with mushrooms that tasted like rubber flip-flops.”

  “I’ve had those mushrooms,” I said. “They taste like ear wax.”

  “I never thought of it that way. Anyhow, the cafeteria had one stellar feature. There was a water dispenser near the burger station—just your average tap water-dispensing spigot, and a stack of plastic cups next to it. The water pressure in the dispenser was somehow off. Every time you tried to fill a cup with water, a jetstream of
water would shoot out.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Bottom line, everyone who drank water—which was everyone—wound up getting splashed with water at the fountain. Totally soaked. The guys at the burger station didn’t even look up when they handed over the wad of napkins for you to clean yourself up with. It must have happened a thousand times a day.”

  “Why didn’t anyone fix it?” I asked.

  “Good question. Every single day, I got water all over my blouse. Often in front of my own students, which was humiliating.”

  I wondered if Alexandra had worn white silk tunics back then, too. A wet, white blouse would be a difficult look to carry off as a professor.

  “Every day I promised myself I’d ask the manager to fix the water pressure. But I never did.”

  I gave her a quizzical look.

  “Because,” Alexandra continued, “when it came down to it, I admired that stupid fountain. It functioned as a symbol that ultimately seemed necessary, despite how annoying it was.”

  “Confused,” I said.

  “College is all about hierarchy. At the bottom are the undergraduates. Then come the graduate students. Then the assistant professors, the full professors, and so forth until you get to the very top, which is the president. This water fountain, unlike everything else on campus, saw no difference between an undergraduate and a full professor. It was a machine, so it was neutral. And it splashed everyone, regardless of status. No one was spared.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “I came to see it as the great equalizer on campus.” She smiled. “It made everyone a lot nicer, too. You can’t exactly be an asshole if you’ve just publicly squirted yourself with cafeteria water.”

  “Maybe my school could’ve used one of those things,” I said.

  “Every high school could. And every law firm, hedge fund, and government office, while we’re at it.”

  “You should start a business,” I said. “Though it might be a hard sell. There can’t be a huge market for faulty water fountains.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Alexandra said. “Tell me about the hierarchy at your school.”

  “Oh, it’s exactly like medieval Europe. Except worse. Back then, at least, the serfs were protected by their overlords.”

  “Are you a serf?” Alexandra asked.

  “Metaphorically, yes,” I said.

  “What about Elise?”

  “Yeah. Same as me.”

  I needed to change the subject. Quick. Scanning the room, I pounced on the first thing I saw.

  “Your shoes,” I said, “are the exact color of a Splenda packet. I just noticed.”

  Alexandra thoughtfully revolved an ankle. “I’m not sure how I feel about them. It was a risky purchase. Yellow, you know. Hard color to wear.”

  “Everything is yellow here,” I observed. “The paint. The bedding.”

  “Always has been,” Alexandra said. “Always yellow.”

  “I wonder if my Splenda tolerance has dropped,” I wondered. “Since I haven’t had it in two weeks. You build up a tolerance, you know. We were talking about it the other day at breakfast, me and Victoria and Haley. We went around the table admitting how many Splenda packets we put in our coffee and tea. You wouldn’t believe how much Haley uses.”

  “That’s interesting that you all use the same sweetener.”

  “Well, everyone uses Splenda. Haley uses eight packets. That seems a little extreme, even to me.”

  “Do you like the taste of it? I find those sweeteners to have a bitter aftertaste.”

  “Splenda doesn’t have an aftertaste,” I said. “Actually, it doesn’t have a taste, period. It’s just sugar without the flavor of sugar. Pure sweetness. I use three packets for an iced tea, or more if the tea has a lot of lemon in it. I can’t even taste it if I use only one. My mom always had a box lying around, though I never saw her use it. She doesn’t have a sweet tooth.”

  I couldn’t gauge whether Alexandra knew what I was doing. What subject I was avoiding.

  “After I finished my mom’s box, I started buying it on my own,” I rambled on. “Then she realized what was going on, and suddenly I wasn’t allowed to buy it anymore. It was like finding cigarettes in my jacket pocket or something—she’d just throw it out—so I took packets from Starbucks whenever I ordered coffee. Handfuls of them. I kept them in a little silk Chinese pouch, and if I forgot to bring the pouch to school with me, I couldn’t eat lunch. It was a big deal, that pouch.”

  “Why couldn’t you eat lunch?”

  “Because it had to be consistent. We ate the same thing every day.”

  “You and—?”

  “Elise,” I said, with some irritation. “We ate a coffee yogurt with two Splendas stirred in and a green apple for lunch. If one of the items was missing, the whole routine would be thrown off. Like, if I just ate the yogurt without the apple, I’d end up feeling unsatisfied all afternoon and then I’d eat something bad to make up for it. I kept a supply of coffee yogurt and green apples in the fridge in case I forgot the pouch, so I could just come straight home after school and prepare the same thing I would have eaten earlier. It wasn’t an ideal system, but at least it meant that I could stay on track.”

  “You must have gotten hungry when that happened.”

  I shrugged. “It didn’t happen that often. Once a month, maybe. I’m not a forgetful person.”

  “What would happen if you were to eat something different for lunch?”

  I considered this.

  “This past February, one day I left my pouch at home. It was a horrible time of year. Valentine’s Day right around the corner, the streets coated in dirty snow, everyone sick of bundling up in a smelly winter coat. I spent my whole morning thinking about lunch. Looking forward to it. Imagining myself sitting next to Elise with our identical meals, alternating tiny spoonfuls of yogurt with bites of tart, crunchy apple, and recapping our struggles and triumphs of the morning.”

  I could almost taste the food as I described it. Sweet and sour; crisp and creamy. The ideal contrast.

  “Did you always eat with Elise?

  “Always. Anyhow, on that day I realized I’d forgotten the pouch as soon as I got out of class before lunch period. It wasn’t a big deal, though, because Elise always had extras on her. So I went to our lunch spot and waited for her.”

  “Where was your lunch spot? In the cafeteria?”

  “What, in front of all those people? Our lunch spot was a little-used staircase covered in rough green carpeting where we could conduct our eating ritual in relative privacy. I waited and waited there, drumming my fingers against the tin lid of the yogurt container, wanting to peel it back. The halls were dry and overheated and stung my nostrils. I tried Elise on her cell phone, but nothing. She didn’t pick up. I tried texting her, and when that didn’t work, I just sat and typed random letters into my phone, desperate to look occupied as people walked past me in the hallway, glancing at my lunch and drawing the inevitable conclusion that I was a loser who had no one to eat with.”

  “That’s a powerful feeling. To feel abandoned like that.”

  “Yeah. My appetite was gone, and I didn’t have anywhere to go. Walking around by myself wasn’t an option, since it would only mean that more people would see me alone. But I couldn’t sit there much longer, and after a while I got up, threw out my yogurt, and went upstairs to the third-floor bathroom.”

  I hated thinking about this.

  “The library is the only thing on the third floor, and no one ever uses that bathroom during lunch. It was my last-resort oasis. I went into the largest stall, closed the door, and sat with my apple, revolving it in my hands but not eating it. Eating it would have made noise, and if somebody came in to use the bathroom and heard me eating? Ugh, no.”

  Alexandra stayed statue-still as she listened to me.

  “By seventh period I still had no idea where Elise was, and my stomach was grumbling loud enough in class to provoke stares from the people sitting ne
xt to me. To get through it, I chewed gum and concentrated with all of my might on the stockpile of coffee yogurts awaiting me at home. I pictured the smooth, plastic containers stacked in the fridge. I reviewed the nutrition stats in my head: 150 calories per yogurt, with 2.5 grams of fat, 7 grams of protein, 25 grams of carbs, and 25 grams of sugar. I imagined the resistance that my spoon would meet with when I dipped it into the thick, mocha-colored substance. I repeated it to myself like a mantra, Don’t worry, Zoe. You’re going to get your lunch. Don’t worry, Zoe, you’re going to get your lunch. Don’t worry. It’s waiting for you, cold and perfect and sweet. As soon as school gets out, you’ll get your lunch.

  “I was ecstatic when the bell finally rang. I practically sprinted home, skidding over ice-caked pavements and not caring what people thought of me. I ran up the stairs to my apartment building, unlocked the door, beelined for the kitchen and stopped.”

  I hated remembering this part.

  “My mom was sitting on the kitchen table,” I said. “Waiting for me.”

  I closed my eyes. All feelings faded in memory except for embarrassment. Alexandra waited for me to continue the story.

  “My silk pouch was in front of her, empty. Each packet of Splenda, fourteen, twenty, I don’t know, was lined up on the kitchen table, like forensic evidence. Like contraband. And she just started saying the same thing over and over again. She said, ‘I’m very angry, Zoe. You lied to me again, and I’m very, very angry with you.’”

  It was hard to breathe. Air seemed to be entering my body from a narrow tube.

  “She made me pour each packet down the garbage disposal in front of her,” I said. “Individually.”

  I shut my eyes and watched thin streams of white powder drift into the black rubber hole at the center of the sink. My fingers had grown sticky with fake-sugar; I shook with rage and humiliation as I emptied the packets. My mother stood with her hands clenched, livid at me for lying and disobeying her. My stomach lurched with hunger pains.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything more than I wanted that meal,” I said, opening my eyes again. The room seemed whiter than usual, and I had to steady myself by putting both palms facedown on the sofa. “Not any food, but that exact food. Every cell in my body anticipated that specific meal. The yogurt. The apple. I did not want anything else. I did not want to break my routine. I would rather have not eaten at all.”