Zoe Letting Go by Nora Price Page B

facial zits. I don’t have to worry about my hair. At school, it’s the opposite. It is impossible for a person to be more self-conscious than I was during one of those twenty-minute breaks when I couldn’t locate you in the halls. On these desperate occasions I did one of three things:
    1. Speed-walked through the halls with a purposeful look on my face, as though I were meeting someone to do something.
    2. Faked a cell phone conversation. (The most humiliating of social maneuvers?)
    3. Hid myself in the bathroom. If nobody else was in there with me, I’d stand at the sink and wash my hands ten times in a row, just to pass time. (My social anxiety is responsible for a forest’s worth of wasted paper towels. Trees: I’m sorry.)
    Usually I was able to save myself from these charades by locating you. If not, I did whatever possible to avoid standing alone, like a leper, while the rest of the school buzzed and cross-pollinated. I chatted on my cell phone (to a dead line) while browsing walls papered with announcements for plays and basketball games, asking myself: At what point does lingering turn into loitering? And which of those, really, is worse?
    Girls are so skilled at finding reasons to dislike other teenage girls. It’s always easier to be pretty than it is to be unpretty—trust me—but your looks, I admit, were a problem from the first day of high school. A tall, blond freshman with no concept of—and therefore no adherence to—the school’s existing social structure? Forget it. You were toast from the inaugural bell ring on Monday, September 2. And I, your best friend, was collateral damage.
    But for the most part, it didn’t matter because we had each other. It was during one of those first infernal twenty-minute breaks that we found a little yellow note stuck to your locker. We deciphered the note together in muted awe: It was from a senior named Alex whom we knew by looks alone. He was handsome, nice, and generally excellent at being a seventeen-year-old male, with broad shoulders and a lanky, lopey stride. Written on a torn sheet of binder paper, Alex’s note was written in a spidery boyish hand that made my heart flutter. He was asking you out to dinner on Saturday night—the night after Ahmed’s party. The note was just a few words long, with his phone number written hastily at the bottom. It looked as though he’d almost forgotten to include it.
    “Alex!” you mouthed.
    “Dinner!” I whispered.
    “Jesus Christ,” we said in tandem.
    We stared at each other, our eyes googly with disbelief. My head felt as bubbly as a glass of champagne.
    In our mind the restaurant date was a relic of the past; most people we knew simply made vague appointments to hook up at a party. But a real date—at a restaurant where waiters and other people would witness the whole thing! What a flattering omen. If this was the kind of thing that could happen on the first day of high school, how could the next four years fail to deliver on such a promise?
    “How does he know who I am?” you asked.
    “Never underestimate the efficiency of the grapevinewhen it comes to transmitting news of hot freshmen,” I said. “It’s like fiber-optic cable.”
    People swarmed around us as we examined the note, trying to figure out what the best way to respond would be.
    “You’re gonna go, right?” I asked.
    “I’d be retarded not to.”
    We pored over the note seeking clues about how to respond. The discovery was so exciting—and the hallway so packed with moving traffic—that I hadn’t noticed a girl standing on the stairs nearby, watching the entire episode unfold. Katie Lord was her name, though I didn’t find that out until later. All I knew was that a person with curly blond hair and an adultlike briskness to her manner had been observing us as she plucked a pack of Marlboros from her purse, and when she finally swept past on her way out the door, she turned around and addressed you.
    “You know that’s a joke,