Zoe Letting Go (17 page)

“A little announcement,” Victoria echoed.

“Correct. We say, ‘Listen up, ladies. We know what’s up. We know what’s missing and we also know who took it.”

“But we don’t,” Haley pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s a bluff,” Victoria said, nodding. She was starting to understand what I was getting at.

“Oh,” said Haley.

“Right,” I continued. “We stand up in front of everyone and say some version of the following: The thief knows who she is. And so do we. Frankly, we’d like nothing more than to rat her out and see her gone from this place. But lucky for her, we have an ounce of
empathy in our hearts. Therefore, we’re willing to strike a compromise. If we see the clothes returned to their proper places by bedtime tonight, we’ll consider the case closed. Finished. Understood?”

“That’s good,” Victoria said. “That’s genius.”

“I have goose bumps.” Haley shivered. “Do you think it will really work?”

“Haven’t you ever played poker?” I speared a gnocchi and held it up to the light. Haley reached into the basket of kale chips, selected the tiniest one, and put it in her mouth, wincing slightly. “What matters most,” I said, “is delivery. Without an impeccable delivery, this plan will fail. Like all bluffs.”

“This is actually good,” Haley said, crunching on her chip. “Eat one. I promise it’s good.”

I ate a kale chip. It was good. Salty and crunchy and vaguely satisfying. “This is the first thing we’ve made that I like,” I acknowledged.

“It tastes frizzly,” Haley said.

“Not a word,” Victoria mumbled, clearly not interested in proving Haley right.

“I know, but eat one. You’ll see what I mean.”

Victoria took a kale chip. “Huh,” she said. “I see what you mean.” She finished chewing and then held up a finger. “I hate to be a killjoy, Zoe, but there’s a glaring flaw in this plan.”

Crap.
What had I forgotten?

“The flaw is this,” Victoria went on. “If we play this right, you’ll get your leggings back, but we still won’t know who took them in the first place. We still won’t know who we can and can’t trust.”

She was right. I’d recognized the flaw from the plan’s inception; I was just hoping no one else would notice.

I nibbled at a kale chip while I pretended to mull over her objection. “You’re right,” I said. “But it still seems like a small price to pay. The main thing is that it will curb any future thefts. If the person knows that she’s been caught or thinks that she’s been caught, she’s not going to risk doing it again. That would be suicide.”

“True,” Victoria said. “Okay. You’ve convinced me. I’m on board.”

“Me too,” Haley said. “This is fun. This is like a
CSI
episode.”

“Excellent,” I confirmed. As with any solid plan, the execution was a basic matter of rehearsing and carrying out the motions. Having settled on a course of action, we picked up our forks and started fiddling with the gnocchi, which were now cold and slimy (for extra booger-verisimilitude).

Somehow, the basket of kale chips had emptied out during the conversation without our even noticing it.

That
, I thought cynically,
was a first.

Having paved the road with Haley and Victoria for the rest of the day, I decided to strike out on my own for a pre-dinner walk around the grounds. The adrenaline stoked by our plan mingled with that peculiar heightened feeling that summer nights can have, and it seemed to me that the grass smelled grassier than usual. The feeling was anticipatory, like creeping downstairs to open your Christmas stocking or getting an e-mail that you’ve been tagged on Facebook. Except that this time, there was an added tinge of fear. After two laps around the shambling brick building—Twin Birch’s isolation means that we’re allowed to roam unsupervised, since there’s no possible route of escape—I found a thick spot on the lawn and lay down, staring upward. The tree leaves waved like tiny silk fans. I reached for my phone to take a picture and then stopped, remembering where I was. My phone was locked away.

Perhaps it is a predictable observation, but being without a cellphone makes me aware of how infrequently I actually have the chance to indulge in long thoughts without the possibility of interruption. I hadn’t noticed before, but every time a text popped up on my phone (or on Elise’s), it created a tiny,
near-invisible distraction. And while tiny distractions are not in themselves harmful, they do add up into an implacable distance, and a distance that you eventually stop noticing because it so quickly becomes the norm. As I lay flat on my back, letting the breeze tickle my nose, I began to wonder how deep a conversation between two people can be if you’re both aware that you may be interrupted at a moment’s notice.

Maybe it makes no difference.

At quarter to seven I got up to wash my hands and prepare for dinner. Haley and Victoria were lingering by the door when I arrived at the dining room, waiting for Devon to choose her seat so that we could sit at the other table. Very strategic.

“It smells like a fart in here,” Haley observed.

“Roasted broccoli,” Victoria said. “A wild guess.”

She was right. Roasted broccoli, corn chowder with smoked cheddar, and sprouted flax bread. Dessert was a blackberry-fig cobbler that nobody but Devon partook of. If it is hard enough to choke down our meals on an ordinary day, today was even worse. There’s nothing like pre-performance jitters to flush your appetite down the toilet.

Although I was careful not to act unusual, I did make one small mistake while Devon was in the kitchen fetching dessert. I allowed my eyes to wander over to Caroline, Jane, and Brooke—in retrospect, I wonder if a sixth sense guided me to do so—and caught them bent forward at their table, taking advantage of Devon’s absence to whisper an urgent exchange. When Brooke caught my eye, she clamped her mouth shut and reeled back into her chair with a look of alarm, as though I’d been reading her lips.

If only.

Figs and blackberries were followed by herbal tea and warm-up period. The possibility of a movie was introduced. At that point, the mission unfolded exactly as I’d hoped.

On my signal, we stood up, shed our blankets, gathered at the front of the living room, and faced the group.

“What’s up, girls?” Devon asked, startled.

We didn’t reply. Instead, we delivered our announcement, as choreographed, with confidence and simplicity. As a postscript, I added the following:

“Victoria, Haley, and I will spend the next forty minutes outside on the lawn, star-gazing, in order to provide the thief enough time to return the garments to their original places without fear of being caught. All that matters,” I said, “is that the items are returned. That’s all. We have no interest in punishment, entrapment, or deception.”

Devon’s eyes bugged like a goldfish’s, but she was frozen, too stunned at our audacity to commandeer the situation. And why should she? Our plan was a good one. It was a fair and decent one. After concluding our statement, we filed out the door, down the stairs, and out to the lawn. The evening air was translucent; our bodies shook with excitement.

“That went well, right?” Haley blurted, as soon as we were a safe distance from the house.

“It did,” I said cautiously. “But we can’t celebrate yet.”

Victoria was quiet.

“What’s up?” I nudged her. We lay down on our stomachs, slapping away mosquitos.

“Nothin’,” she said unconvincingly. “That was good.”

“Spill,” I said. “You’re worried about something.”

Victoria rolled over onto her back. “I am,” she admitted. “It’s the fact that even if the plan works, we still won’t know who committed the crime. I know that we don’t have any other options, but it still bugs me. I’m still creeped out.”

I frowned in the dark. Her comment annoyed me.
She
hadn’t offered a better plan, had she? I’d stayed up
hours
in order to read the damn Twin Birch memo and iron out the intricacies of our action, and she wasn’t satisfied? God.

Victoria seemed to read my thoughts because she hurriedly amended her opinion. “Scratch that. Zoe, I’m being retarded.”

“I just don’t know what the alternative is.”

“I know. We’re taking the high-minded approach, and I’m being a baby about it. Forget it. Don’t listen to me.”

“I
do
see what you mean, though,” I said, feeling generous after she’d admitted being wrong.

“No, you’re right about it,” Victoria added. “It’s not about making someone feel bad. It’s about fixing a weird situation so we can bury it in the past and not let it bother us. Your plan is good. It’s really good.”

“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.