Zoe Letting Go (10 page)

Twin Birch is supposed to be the inverse of high school, but instead of feeling cozily safe, I’m soaked in a different version of the anxiety that dogged me at home. Here, I’m one of six patients occupying a house with a 1:2 ratio of girls to adults. Even when I’m alone, I have the distinct sense that I am being watched. That my behavior is being tabulated. I’ve been sleeping poorly, and often I wake up feeling as though my body has been preserved in syrup.

We are officially woken up at seven o’clock by Devon, who strolls up and down the hallway ringing an antique brass bell until everyone is up. The bell is heavy and unpolished, and loud in a way that suggests it may have served, in some past century, as a primitive PA system for a very large house like this one. In its present use, it lends Devon the ability to function as a walking analogue alarm clock. She’s very effective in this capacity. Today I was
particularly groggy upon waking, and it was only when Caroline poked me in the shoulder that I came to consciousness. Even then, the elements of daylight and activity failed to serve their usual orienting purpose.

Please write back. I miss you.

Love,

Zoe

Of the four Twin Birch
tenets outlined in my purloined paper, Intake is almost as bad as the dreaded Group Downtime. It’s hard to have much of an appetite when you’re buckling under anxiety, and watching five other girls struggle to eat even a single bite.

Breakfast follows the same pattern as dinner. We eat in the dining room, which looks quite different in daylight than it does in the evening. Devon cooks, and we take turns serving ourselves. If we do not serve ourselves the required amount of food—which nobody does, because the required amount is sickening—Devon ensures that we serve ourselves seconds, and thirds, and sometimes fourths, until we have each eaten to her requirements. How, you might wonder, does a single counselor force six girls to eat everything on their plates? Does she hold a gun to our heads? Does she handcuff us to our chairs?

No, none of the above. It’s a wily system they’ve set up here.
If I weren’t the victim of it, I’d consider it a model of simplicity and expedience. The basic rule is this: Nobody is allowed to leave the room until every person has fulfilled her eating requirement. Those who eat slowly, or who refuse to eat at all, must therefore face a wall of peer pressure intense enough to crush a soda can from those who have already finished their meals.

The dining room is swathed in gilded chairs and leafy palms, but it is the least pleasant room in the entire house, and nobody would volunteer to occupy her velvet cushion a second longer than necessary. For those who come to Twin Birch, food is enemy number one, and the dining room reeks of food. The smell of that loathed substance clings to the walls, the carpets, the napkins. With every rustle of curtain, the smells of orange peel and hot bread and basil pesto are released anew. The windows remain shut. I’m not sure if it is physically possible to open them. As long as we languish in the dining room, helplessly pushing grains of risotto and roasted chickpeas around our plates, there is no fresh, clean air for us to breathe. The candles that are refreshed every night burn for an hour before flickering out, and occasionally we end a meal in total darkness.

So we eat. Not willingly, but we eat.

This morning I stood in line with my plate in order to receive a stack of thick, steaming discs topped with honey, almond butter, and fresh cherries. The discs resembled pancakes in shape but not in any other dimension: They were a dark gray color, and instead of hot dough they smelled like crushed walnuts. My tablemates were Haley and Victoria, both of whom I’ve been sitting with since Victoria introduced herself on my first day.

Haley lifted a pancake with two fingers and dropped it. The disc was so heavy it produced an audible thud. “What … the … hell?” she groaned.

“Buckwheat pancakes,” Victoria explained. “High in protein, low in flavor.”

“Close your eyes,” I suggested. “It’ll taste just like a beignet.”

“I oughtta slap you for that,” Victoria said, her Southern accent twanging. “In the face. With a pancake.”

Haley giggled, causing her red braids to shudder. Victoria remained wry, smiling with a pair of doll-like lips that looked as though somebody drew them on with a fine-tipped pen. If she weren’t so frail, she’d be beautiful. Haley is her little sidekick.

“What are these things anyway?” Haley asked, staring at her plate. “What’s buckwheat?”

“Have you ever had soba noodles?” I asked. “It’s what they use to make soba noodles.”

“We don’t have those in Phoenix.”

“They’re kind of nutty,” Victoria said. “Not that bad. It’s the texture that’s a problem.” She prodded a pancake with her fork. “Feels like a fake boob.”

I poked my stack with a finger, avoiding the slick of almond butter that surrounded it like a moat. “Whoa, yeah,” I said. “Firm, yet squishy.”

“Victoria’s Secret is gonna have a Buckwheat Pancake Bra in six months, bet on it,” she said. “These things keep you full forever. You can eat two pancakes and not be hungry until dinner.”

“Are they bad for you?” Haley asked.

“No, that’s the thing. They’re supposed to be healthy.”

I ate one cherry, and then another. Neither Victoria nor Haley was eating her food, though each conducted a separate ritual while we talked. Haley counted her cherries (sixteen), cut each one in half (thirty-two), and isolated them on the left side of her plate. Then she scraped all of the almond butter off the pancakes and dammed it on the right side of her plate. Finally, she sliced each pancake into tiny bite-sized pieces, piled them in the center (bookended by almond butter and fruit), and, as a finale, pushed her plate away without transferring a single item to her mouth.

Victoria took a simpler approach. She mashed her food together with a fork, then compressed it into a hockey puck.

At the other table, Caroline was engaged in a staring contest with her food. She wore a sleeveless yellow polo shirt that exacerbated the thinness of her shoulders, which were so angular and sharp-edged that they looked like something out of a Cubist painting. I didn’t even know that shoulders had so many bones. There was no padding left. How could she move her arms, I wondered, without making a clicking sound?

Next to Caroline sat Jane, who raked her fork through the almond butter, creating cross-hatch patterns that quickly melted away. To her left, Brooke was engaged in a private discussion with Devon. Unlike the rest of us, Brooke had emptied her plate, though not without creating a mess: Her smock dress was covered in smears of brown and red. Spattered against the green cotton dress, it looked like blood—even when you reminded yourself that it was only nut butter and cherry juice. I leaned as far backward as I could without looking conspicuous, but I wasn’t able to hear what Devon and Brooke were saying.

A choking sound filled the air as Haley began crying. Devon appeared at her side, and the two of them engaged in a private conference while Victoria and I looked down at our plates. “I don’t want to do it,” Haley said, her voice stuttering with sobs. From the other table, Brooke looked over and rolled her eyes with exasperation.

“What’s the problem?” she said, addressing Haley. “Do you understand that you’re making everyone else wait?”

“I—” Haley blubbered.

“Brooke, please,” Devon said.

Brooke folded her arms and sat back, her eyes glued to Haley’s shuddering back.

Victoria and I had both managed to shovel down our pancakes, but Victoria hadn’t eaten anything else on her plate. “If I eat another pancake, can I
not
eat the almond butter?” she asked Devon, trying to negotiate a deal.

“No.”

“If I—”

“Victoria,” Devon said, her voice a warning. Haley, meanwhile, had partially recovered from her fit and was lifting a cherry toward her lips.
Come on
, I silently urged, praying that she’d swallow her food. The cherry wavered an inch from her mouth.
Almost there
, I thought.
Just one more inch …

Her fork clattered against the plate, splattering cherry pieces all over the tablecloth.
Dammit
, I thought, as Haley began crying again. “She can’t help it,” Victoria mouthed at me with a shrug. Brooke and Jane, at the next table, shot daggers at Haley, who tried not to notice. Caroline was perched blankly at the edge of
her seat, staring into the middle distance as though she’d been immobilized. I sighed and fidgeted until Haley finished, my limbs twitching with impatience.

I’d finished my own breakfast an hour earlier, starting with the cherries and moving on to the almond butter. Following Victoria’s example, I took a small, exploratory bite of pancake, willing myself not to gag.
How odd
, I thought, chewing—it tasted nothing like a regular pancake. I took a second bite. If normal pancakes are little more than a blank canvas for butter and syrup, these had a taste of their own. A strong taste, too—like something a miner would have eaten in 1850 before heading out to pan for gold at Sutter’s Mill. They tasted old-fashioned.

Somehow, I managed to get through the whole stack. And Victoria was right: By the time I finished, I knew that I wouldn’t be hungry again for days.

After the breakfast warm-up period, we trooped outside for gardening class. “Class” is a loose designation for what amounts to supervised digging. Today we re-staked tomato plants, picked basil and zucchini, and weeded a carrot patch. I ended up kneeling next to Brooke, watching her smock dress become streaked with dirt and mud as she attacked crabgrass and knotweed. When I asked to borrow her trowel, she ignored me entirely.

When we moved to the zucchini patch, I took the chance to move myself into friendlier territory, setting my things down next to Victoria. Plucking one of the plant’s curly tendrils, I held it up next to her curly head. “Check it out,” I said. “The plant’s imitating your hair.”

She blew one of her own curly tendrils out of her face and groaned. “I hate these things. They make my face look fat.”

“They do not.”

“They do. And I forgot my flat-iron.”

I turned to the girl next to me, who happened to be Jane. “Jane, tell Victoria that her adorable, angelic curls do not make her face look fat,” I said.

Jane looked up, startled to hear her name. Her eyes flicked
between Victoria and me for an awkward moment until Victoria broke the silence by saying, “Hey, eighty-five percent of men prefer straight hair to curly hair. I rest my case.”

Jane didn’t respond. Instead, she picked up her trowel and walked quickly away from us to the row of basil plants where Brooke was collecting leaves. I looked at Victoria in puzzlement.

“That was weird,” I said.

“She’s shy,” Victoria said.

“She hates me.”

“Why would she hate you? That’s crazy,” Victoria said. “Look, I found a good one.”

She snipped another tendril from the vine and whipped it around in the air. “Why are curly things so funny? Curly pasta, pigs’ tails—”

“Slinkies.”

“The word
boing
.”

We laughed.

“It’s true. Curly things are inherently funny.”

“Such is my fate,” Victoria sighed. “To be a Southern girl with comical hair.”

Devon came around with a bucket. “Zoe. Haley. Victoria. Anything to add to the harvest?” she asked.

“Yeah, two,” Victoria said, depositing a pair of zucchinis in the bucket.

She waited until Devon was out of earshot and then whispered, “The way she always says our names reminds me of a car salesman.”

“Or a cult leader,” I added. We mulled over this in silence.
Jane and Brooke, I saw, were conferring as they snipped at the glossy basil plants. I’d heard both of them complain incessantly about gardening class—about the fact that their nails get dirty and their thighs ache—but I know the truth, which is that gardening is their favorite part of the day. Why? Because it burns calories. Gardening is basically a sequence of squats, lifts, and lunges, with pots instead of free weights and weeds instead of rowing machines. It’s the only quasi-aerobic activity we’re permitted to do. I guarantee that every one of Brooke’s movements is calculated to burn the maximum number of breakfast calories. Same thing for Jane.

While I boiled under the sun, I tried to imagine what my mother was doing at home. No doubt relaxing on the porch with a copy of
Artforum
and a glass of mint tea, cool as a cucumber. What does she have to worry about? Nothing, especially now that’s she’s gotten rid of me for the summer. Had she known that her daughter would be slaving away under the eye of a ponytailed overseer in khaki shorts? Probably. She probably knew exactly what she was signing me up for.

But why?

The question brought my trowel to a freeze halfway through its mound of sun-warmed dirt. I had assumed, over the past four days, that my mother was kept incommunicado simply because my phone and Internet privileges had been yanked away. But what if that weren’t the case? What if she were receiving daily updates about my activities and my progress?

That would explain the prickling sense of surveillance that
attends every second of the day here, whether expressed through Devon’s hawkish gaze or the creepily ambient sense of being watched.

For the amount of money my mom is forking over, I reasoned, she must be receiving bulletins of some kind. There must be daily phone conferences—or, at the very least, e-mail exchanges. Did the memo say anything about all of this? I must remember to check tonight.