“Okay.” She shifts, and for a minute I’m afraid I’ve unintentionally ended the conversation altogether. But she just changes position so that we’re both cross-legged and facing each other, knees almost touching. “Road trips, love or hate?” she asks.
It’s so unexpected that I start laughing. “Um, hate, I guess—I can’t drive, I have no sense of direction, and I have a really small bladder. Why do you ask?”
“Because I want to know more things about you.”
I feel a small shift deep inside me, a little click, like something tiny has ignited. Zoe, with the Juilliard acceptance letter and the circle of admirers, wants to know more things about me.
“Oh,” I say, because I’m too surprised to say anything else.
“Now you,” she says, and I realize with a surge of happiness that this game could go on indefinitely.
“Okay,” I say. “Um, leggings—love or hate?”
“Under dresses, love. As pants, hate.”
“Me too!”
“Cats, love or hate?” she asks.
“The animal or the musical?”
“The musical.”
I feel pretty neutral about it, but I say, “Hate,” because I know every self-respecting theater person is supposed to hate Cats. “You?” I ask.
Zoe smiles sheepishly. “I kind of love it, honestly. It makes me nostalgic. I used to pin a scarf to the butt of a leotard like a tail and dance to the sound track every day when I was little.”
I love that she answered that way. I also wonder if she was testing me.
“Sleeping till noon, love or hate?” I ask her.
“Love,” Zoe says. “Sex—love or hate?”
I think about lying again, but that’s already backfired on me once, so I decide to go with the truth. “Not applicable,” I say.
“Really? You never did it with Jason?”
I shrug. “We did pretty much everything else, but I didn’t like him enough for that. I’m certainly not, like, waiting for marriage or anything, but I at least want to be in love.” I can tell my face is bright red, and I look down at my lap. “Is that weird?”
“No,” Zoe says. “Of course not.”
“How about you? Have you and Carlos…”
“Oh, yeah. Definitely love.” The way she says it, kind of throaty and knowing, makes me feel like she’s much older than me.
“My mom’s horrified I’ve never done it,” I say.
“She wants you to have sex? My mom would be horrified if she knew I had.”
“My mom is super-open about that stuff. Like, too much sometimes. I mean, it’s cool that we can talk about it, but I don’t need to know exactly what she did on the roof of the theater building in college, you know?”
Zoe laughs and says, “Eew,” and I feel like we’re the same age again.
Livvy knocks on our door and pops her head in. “Hey,” she says, “a bunch of us are going to watch Mean Girls. You guys want to come?”
Even though Livvy can’t possibly know she’s intruding, shattering our fragile, intimate little cocoon, I’m furious with her for a second. I brace for the impact of Zoe saying yes and ending our conversation, but instead she says, “Go ahead and start without us. We’re kind of in the middle of something.”
I look down and pretend to adjust my sandal so she won’t see how big my smile is.
Zoe and I play Love or Hate for what feels like hours. I learn that she loves the Muppets, paella, snow, The Wizard of Oz, and George Clooney, and that she hates high heels, jogging, juice cleanses, rompers, and the word “punctual.” The game grows steadily more personal, and Zoe confesses that she loves chivalry even though it’s outdated, and hates when directors correct the way she’s delivering a line, regardless of whether they’re right. I wish I could take notes on all the things I’m discovering about her.
When sitting on the floor starts getting uncomfortable, we sprawl on our beds and keep going. We never make it to Livvy’s room. I’ve known Zoe only a few days, but in a lot of ways, I already feel closer to her than to anyone I know back home. There are plenty of people I’m friendly with, but we never have long, charged conversations like this, ones that actually mean something. Even after knowing me for years, those girls don’t understand the things about me that Zoe inherently gets.
Around one in the morning, I ask Zoe’s opinion on the concept of love at first sight, and when she doesn’t answer, I realize she has fallen asleep. I’m disappointed, but I love that she wanted to talk to me up until the very last moment that she could stay conscious. It reminds me of the times Jason and I used to fall asleep on the phone, doing that stupid “You hang up first. No, you hang up first” thing just to continue hearing the sound of each other’s voices.
I turn off our lamps and match my breathing to Zoe’s in the dark, feeling for the first time like I’m in the right place after all.