But now: a phone call. And a refusal to speak, which must be proof of guilt, or if not that then some other strong emotion. An irresistible longing. An unvanquishable loneliness. Proof of something her mother feels. Proof that her mother feels something. She realizes now that this is what she’s been waiting for.
She has dance class today. An exercise class is among the college requirements, and she thought she might as well take something she could manage to pass fairly easily. Do the minimum has been her philosophy, but today she flings herself into every kick and turn. It feels good, she has to admit. To let her movement meet the music, to get those kicks up high, to sweat. Halfway through the class she notes the teacher watching her with barely repressed astonishment. But she pays no attention. She is not dancing for the teacher. She is just dancing.
After class the teacher comes up to her and says, “Zoe, I feel like I’ve never seen you before.”
“I’ve been here.”
“No, you haven’t.”
Zoe can’t really argue with this. “Well,” she says.
“You have enormous natural ability. Has anyone ever told you that?”
Zoe shrugs. Yes, they have, but it seems obnoxious to say so.
“And this is your first class? It’s a shame you didn’t start training earlier.”
“I danced when I was little. It’s just been a long time.”
“Well, those fundamentals don’t go away. You must have had good teachers.”
“My mother was a dancer,” Zoe says. And then she claps her hand to her mouth.
If the teacher notes how very weird this is, she’s too polite to reveal it. “You’ve just been taking this for your phys ed requirement, yes? Come talk to me. I’d like to tell you more about our program.”
Zoe says that she will, and she thinks she might even mean it.
She has resolved not to call the number again, at least not today or tomorrow. Just in case it was a misdial. She doesn’t want to stalk a stranger. But underneath that reason is another, truer one: she hopes if she gives her mother a day or two to think about it, a little silence, her mother will call her back. Zoe does her best to ignore this reason because it creates a prickly anticipation that the phone will ring, which is a little hard to live with, moment to moment, even as it’s strangely invigorating. Since she got out of bed this morning, she hasn’t gotten back into it once. She hasn’t even been tempted.
She goes back to the dorm after dance to shower, and when her roommate comes in later, opening the door quietly, as has become her habit since Zoe rose balefully from the bed and snapped at her one afternoon, Zoe is sitting at her desk, reading about the area with the 931 area code. “Oh!” her roommate says, and Zoe pivots in her chair and says hi. Her roommate looks astonished, not even trying to hide it. That’s the second person Zoe’s astonished today. It’s making her realize just what a walking corpse she’s been, the same way everybody remarking on the weight you’ve lost makes you realize how fat they used to think you.
“I’m out of bed,” Zoe says, because that’s so obviously what her roommate is thinking.
“Yeah,” her roommate says. She tosses her backpack on her own bed, then leans over Zoe’s shoulder, tentatively, for a closer look at the screen. Zoe has pulled up a photo of mountains with a white scud of cloud racing along their peaks. She resists the urge to cringe from her roommate’s nearness, to snap the laptop shut.
“Pretty,” her roommate says. “Very Lord of the Rings. Where is it?”
“Tennessee.”
“Are you going there or something?”
“Maybe,” Zoe says, though the idea had not yet occurred to her. “Maybe spring break.” She adds, because she can’t help it, “My mother is there.”
“I didn’t know you had a mother.”
Neither did I, Zoe thinks of saying, but that would be inviting questions and she’s not in the habit. She says lightly, “Did you think I sprang from the head of Zeus?”
Once again, she has managed to astonish her roommate—let’s just say her name, which is Anna—but this time Anna recovers quickly. “That’s exactly what I thought,” she says.
Zoe could probably think of something else funny to say, but Anna steps back as if the conversation’s over—maybe, to be fair to Anna, because Zoe’s never given her much reason to think she’d want to talk.