Zoe Letting Go by Nora Price Page A

mean that they don’t want us to know this stuff?
    My wrist is limper than spaghetti; I need to put down the pen, though I wish I didn’t have to. Writing by hand feels like a cleansing habit—like there’s something about the physical movement of a pen across paper that hypnotizes me into being honest. I think. E-mail has the opposite effect. The speed of writing an e-mail is an invitation to embellish and omit. It’s too easy to type words on a keyboard. Too easy, also, to delete them.

Dear Elise,
    I accomplished my getting-ready chores this morning—day number four—like a broken machine. With one hand I rustled around in my makeup bag for the tube of mascara. I brushed it over my eyelashes: left, then right, then left again, then right again. Even a task as meaningless as this—a task that I’ve conducted approximately 1,095 times in my life—exhausts me at Twin Birch. I stood beneath the cold bathroom light. A zit was emerging on my hairline. A minor event: maybe a 2.3 out of 10 on the zit scale. But still.
    If you were here, you’d tell me that it’s actually
good
to have a couple of zits on your face because it makes the surrounding skin look even clearer. That’s the sort of thing you believe, and your optimism in such things iscontagious. “If your skin is too perfect, it just looks like you’re on Accutane,” you would explain. “Having perfect skin actually makes your skin look
worse
.” Usually you’re able to win me over with your arguments. If not, you’ll simply remind me of your personal motto—“It’s not a problem if makeup can solve it”—and unscrew the pot of concealer.
    It’s easy for you to say these things, of course. Your skin is perfect. Like an actress playing a teenager on TV, your face is unblemished by pimples and stray unibrow hairs. Sometimes when we watch TV together, I secretly compare your beauty with that of the actresses onscreen, and you know what’s crazy? You win every time.
    That’s a rare exception. For all the differences between TV teenagers and real teenagers, the two might as well be a different species. Teenagers on TV win arguments with adults, split desserts in restaurants, don’t stain their shirts with toothpaste, and never get their periods. The biggest thing that’s missing on TV, though, is this one social phenomenon. It’s a single, crucial element of teen existence that goes totally undocumented. Completely ignored. There isn’t even a name for it, this thing—it’s not a zit, it’s not premarital sex, and it’s not depression or SAT prep.
    It’s the reason I live in fear of Group Downtime.
    It is the vocabulary equivalent of a black hole. But for me—and for you—it constituted one of the most terrifying daily experiences of high school: the twenty-minute interval between classes.
    We’d have “Shakespeare” first period, then a twenty-minute break, then “Colonial Origins,” then a twenty-minute break, then “Environmental Chemistry,” and so forth. I don’t know why our school adopted this schedule, but I’d bet my savings it followed the publication of some research paper that proved a conclusive link between twenty-minute breaks and stellar SAT scores. If that is the case, every copy of that research paper ought to be pulped.
    Twenty minutes. It sounds like a snap of the fingers, and it is: Twenty minutes is not long enough to walk the six blocks to get in line for a decent latte, not long enough to complete a meaningful segment of homework, or watch an episode of something on your laptop. However, it’s also not a short-enough period of time to pass idly. When you have a small group of friends—or no friends except for one other person—twenty minutes is the precise length of time it takes to become achingly reacquainted with your loneliness.
    When I’m at home or wandering around my neighborhood, being alone is relaxing. I don’t have to adjust the direction in which I face someone based on the geography of my