“Whose turn it is next?” Zoe said desperately.
Eventually the game moved on to the next person, but Zoe was still stuck. What was wrong with her? If she had just laughed, like Sophie did, or teased someone else, everyone would have left her alone. Why did she have to be such a freak?
After a while something else started to prey on her mind. What did that mean, they wanted proof? What was going to happen, after she fell asleep? Was someone going to do the old trick of putting her hand into a glass of water?
Her lungs began to constrict, her veins began to prickle.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said, standing up.
“Why, are you going to pee yourself?” Jane laughed and a couple of others joined in.
Zoe wondered if that was exactly what she was going to do. The room was dark and she felt for the light switch on the wall. What had she been thinking, coming here? She wanted her mom, her apartment, her own bed—where she could sleep peacefully. I am in a safe place, she told herself. I am calm, collected, and in control.
But she felt a swell in her bladder, and panic gripped her. She pinned her knees together.
“Oh my God!” Jane said, turning her attention from whomever it was she was grilling. “Zoe is going to pee her pants.”
By the time the others looked, it was already streaming down Zoe’s legs. The girls flew to their feet, and then backed away, as if it might knock them down—a tsunami of pee instead of a small puddle at her feet. Zoe couldn’t bear to raise her head, so she just ran out of the room.
If you need anything, I’ll be here in a flash, her mom had said. But Zoe couldn’t find a phone. She picked her way along the corridor toward the front door—looking for a hallstand, somewhere a telephone would be. Down the hall she could hear the television—Jane’s parents watching TV. She tried to breathe, but her throat felt blocked. Her chest was close to bursting. Her heart hammered. She leaned against the wall for support. Her lungs felt flat and tight, a plastic bag void of air.
This was it; she was going to die. She had visions of the girls finding her here, flat on the floor, white-cold. Their terrified faces being the last ones Zoe saw before she blacked out of this world. She wanted her mom.
Just then the sensor light on the front porch flicked on. In the window Zoe saw her mother’s face. She was hallucinating.
“Zoe,” her mother instructed. “Open the door.”
Zoe did. She wondered how her mom could possibly have known that she needed her at that exact moment. Was that something mothers just knew?
“Are you all right?” her mother asked.
Zoe shook her head, gasping.
“Okay, just breathe,” her mother said. “Slowly, not too deep. Come outside and breathe in some fresh air.”
Still light-headed, Zoe allowed her mother to guide her into the cool night air. “Mom,” she gasped. “My chest. I’m … going … to die.”
“It’s just a panic attack, you’re not going to die.” Her mother’s voice was a cool stream on a hot day. She looked Zoe over, her eyes stopping at her soaked pajama pants but only for a second. “We’ve been through this before, it will all be over in a minute if you just relax.”
Zoe let her mom hold her and she weakened in her arms. When it was over, her mother put her into the car while she ran inside to get her things and explain what had happened to Jane’s mother. While she waited, Zoe noticed a blanket on the driver’s seat and a book and her mother’s reading glasses.
“How did you get here so fast?” she asked when her mother returned to the car.
For an instant, she looked guilty. “I just … wanted to be nearby. You know, in case you needed me.”
“Thank you,” Zoe said. But as they drove home, Zoe thought a more appropriate response would have been “Sorry.”
*
“Why so loud?” Dulcie cried when Zoe reached her apartment. “When I was a girl we walked up the stairs.”
Dulcie was sitting in a folding chair on the landing—she did that sometimes. As for the stairs, they were carpeted, so Zoe had literally been soundless as she’d run upstairs.
Dulcie lived in the apartment across the hall from them and was approximately a hundred and fifty years old. Around five years ago Zoe’s mom had offered to do Dulcie’s grocery shopping. Since she looked after old people for a living, she’d thought why not help out a sweet elderly neighbor? Problem was, Dulcie wasn’t sweet. She’d stopped thanking her mom for buying groceries several years ago and instead started treating her like the delivery person, making her stand there as she checked the groceries against her list to make sure that she’d got everything she asked for (and then usually shortchanging her mom). Once, Zoe had watched a TV comedian talk about the two types of elderly people. The fat ones who adored children, gave them sweets, and told them they were lovely. And the thin ones who complained about “young people being the problem with society these days.”
Dulcie was thin.
“Sorry, Dulcie,” Zoe said turning toward her own door.
“What if I’d been trying to sleep?” Dulcie cried. “You would have woken me up!”
Zoe apologized again, even though it was eight thirty on a Saturday night, and scrambled for her keys with useless, uncooperative hands. She just wanted to get out of this hallway into her apartment. Away from Dulcie and away from people. Finally she found her key and slid it into the door.
“Young people these days,” Dulcie muttered.
Inside, the lights were off, and it took Zoe a second or two to locate her mother on the couch, watching TV. A comforter was slung over her hips and a pizza box sat on the floor beside her.
She looked up, instantly panicked. “Mouse?”
Zoe had managed to hold back the tears all the way home, but at the sight of her mother she broke into a full-blown ugly cry.
“What happened? Oh, no. Come here.”
Her mom opened the comforter and Zoe crawled in. She laid her head on her mom’s chest, drenching her.
“I tried, Mom,” she said when her sobs had slowed enough for her to talk. “I went to the mall. I even talked to Em. But then the boys came up and I … I started to panic. I ran away in front of everyone. I ran!”
Zoe could see her mother’s face in the window reflection. She shook her head, resolute. “At least you tried. You should be proud of yourself.”
Zoe knew she’d say something like this, and yet today it made her angry. “Proud of myself? I’m a freak, Mom. A fucking freak.”
Once again she liquefied into tears.
“I know it seems hard to believe now,” her mom said, “but this is not the end of the world.”
Zoe felt her face mangle in pain. “I lost my best friend. My only friend. For a high school student, that’s the end of the world.”
“You don’t know you’ve lost her, hon. I’m sure Em will understand.”
Her mom’s voice was still calm, still soothing. But when Zoe snuck a look at her mom’s face in the reflection she saw a mangled mirror image of her own.