by Nora Price
“Okay. Every nature documentary about Africa has a zebra scene in it,” I said. “Or a variation of a zebra scene. It’s the one where you see a pack of nice, gentle zebras going down to the river for a drink of water. Usually they get a wide shot of the zebras so you can see how many there are.”
“I seem to remember scenes involving zebras and rivers,” Alexandra said.
“And alligators,” I said. “Don’t forget the alligators. Everything starts out fine until one poor zebra chooses the wrong spot along the riverbank for his afternoon drink. For this part, the camera zooms in close. Too close. We watch the zebra bend his long neck down to the water’s surface, thirsty after a stressful day on the open plains. His nostrils flare in the heat. Suddenly, without warning—BAM—an alligator leaps up from beneath the water and clenches its jaws around the zebra’s neck.”
I shivered.
“Predator meets prey,” Alexandra said.
“And then the alligator is literally eating the zebra in midair. Can you imagine? Being eaten in midair?”
Alexandra paused, squinted, and then shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “I just tried. I can’t imagine it.”
“Well, I can. Easily.”
“Do you identify with the zebra or the alligator?
“The zebra,” I said. “Jesus. What do you think I am, a psycho? Who identifies with the alligator?”
She ignored my question. “So you feel like a prey animal,” she said. “Vulnerable. Tell me why.”
Why was an easy question to answer. I explained to her about the breakfast incident. About the strange things Brooke had said to me. As I did this, a flicker of unease crossed Alexandra’s face, and her jaw grew taut.
“Would you mind telling me again what Brooke said?” Alexandra asked, flipping to a fresh sheet on her legal pad. “Her exact words, if you can? Verbatim.”
Her tone was different. Like a cross-examining attorney.
“It’s hard to remember the exact words,” I said. “I wasn’t taking notes or anything. The whole thing took me by surprise. But she said, I think, that how dare I look at her as though she were crazy, given my history.”
“‘Given your history’?” Alexandra repeated.
I nodded.
Looking even more perturbed, she scribbled something down on her notepad, then emphatically crossed it out and scribbled something else. Ten neon orange nails flew above the page. She paused, pen hovering, and looked up at me.
“This isn’t the first time that you’ve had a hostile interaction with one of the girls,” she said. “The first was when Caroline asked you to justify your presence at Twin Birch. The second time was when Brooke accused you of stealing her dress. The third was when she accused you of staring at her in a way that made her uncomfortable.”
“Hostile interaction makes it sound mutual,” I said. “It wasn’t mutual. They were the aggressors.”
“Do you see a pattern?”
“Between what?”
“Between these interactions. A commonality.”
I did not see a commonality.
“Each time you’ve had a conflict with Brooke or Caroline,” Alexandra said, “it’s because one of them appears to feel bothered by your presence, or is suspicious of you. And each time, from your perspective, the conflict seems completely unmotivated and random.”
“Are you saying that I’ve been threatening them?”
“No, no. I’m saying that, for whatever reason, you strike them as a threatening presence.”
“I don’t see how this is my fault,” I said. “They’re both hypersensitive.”
“Be that as it may,” Alexandra said, “can you think of any reason why Brooke or Caroline would see you as a threat?”
A fiery pit was developing in my stomach. A distress signal.
“No.”
“Let’s go at this from a different angle. Let’s revisit that first conflict, when Caroline asked you why you were at Twin Birch. Do you think she was genuinely curious about the reasons why you might be here?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“And are you?”
“Am I what?” I said.
“Curious,” Alexandra replied. “Have you asked yourself why you’re at Twin Birch?”
All the goddamn time, you moron, I wanted to scream. I controlled myself.
“It wasn’t my decision to come here,” I said quietly.
“That might be another reason to think about the question. A very good reason, maybe.”
Her tone had the air of conveying a lot of information in a coded manner. Too much information for me to absorb. Information that I was not equipped to understand.
Alexandra continued, “This might be harder for you than you think, but I think it’s also going to be easier. For example, your letters to Elise—”
“What does Elise have to do with Brooke?” I interrupted.
“Quite a lot.”
“No,” I said. “There is no connection between those two things.”
“You seem upset that I’ve suggested a link,” Alexandra said.
She leaned forward, hands clasped in the prayer position. “Zoe,” she said, her voice alarmingly gentle. “You’re here at Twin Birch for a reason.”
Nothingness.
“Have you talked to my mother?” I asked.
“Many times.”
“And she said—”
“You’re here for a reason, Zoe. I need you to try and understand that.”
Her lipstick was freshly applied. In the white office, it looked like a spot of blood on snow. Alexandra got up and fetched a blanket from the cabinet—I guess I was shivering. I hate her ability to notice every little thing. I hate being watched like a lab rat. She put the blanket next to me on the sofa. I did not touch it.
“This is something we can work on together,” she went on. “Understanding why you are here.”
There’s nothing the matter with me. Why can’t anyone see that?
A knock at the door alerted us to the arrival of another patient.
“That’s Jane, and she’s early,” Alexandra said. “Please, Zoe, sit down. We have a few more minutes.”
“No,” I said, already throwing my full weight against the door. “We don’t.”
[Day Twenty-Two]
I opened my eyes to a sky the color of concrete. A dismal day for a dismal girl.
My legs have changed shape. A few weeks ago, I could stand upright, feet together, and feel a gap between my thighs as broad as a cell phone. Now, I’d be lucky to fit a quarter into the same area. My stomach has acquired a soft bulge which makes me look as though I’m three months pregnant. That’s not a figure of speech. When you gain weight quickly, it all goes straight to your stomach and redistributes over time. I’ve stopped looking in the mirror when I brush my teeth or wash my face at night. What’s the point? I know what I look like. There is physical matter where there used to be air.
I see it in other girls, too. Caroline’s elbows are no longer sharp enough to cut butter. The brittleness has vanished from Haley’s face.
Other changes have occurred. There are fewer chattering teeth. When did it peter out? I don’t know; my own teeth never chattered. I was never thin enough for that. But the rest of the patients were, and it occurred to me as we warmed up this morning that the sound had diminished to barely anything. Instead of crustaceans scrabbling across a rocky beach, there was quiet. Not even the sound of a lost hermit crab or two.
I’ve developed a writing callus on my right middle finger. Composing long letters to Elise has created a bump big enough to alter the silhouette of my hand. I’m expanding in every physical dimension. Inch by inch, day by day.
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 destinati
on 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
[Day Twenty-Three]
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 th
e 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.
Carrot Crack Fries to Commemorate Sudden Disappearances
3 large carrots
2 tbsp. oil (use safflower, peanut, or coconut oil)
Sea salt
1 tbsp. maple syrup
Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Cut carrots into french-fry shapes (use a sharp knife), then toss in oil, salt, and maple syrup. Spread out on a cookie sheet and cook for 35–45 minutes, until slightly browned.
Eat by the handful to celebrate the retreat of an enemy.
“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.