Trouble is a Friend of Mine

‘Is it like you can’t get out of bed because you feel like someone’s sitting on your chest, but who cares anyway because what’s the point?’ he said. ‘Or like you can’t be around people because you feel like everyone knows?’


‘Fine. I skipped class a bunch when my parents were divorcing, but Dad said it’d look bad on my transcript, so he called his psychiatrist friend and … I’m a fake, okay?’

‘Just because your psychiatrist’s note’s fake, it doesn’t mean you’re not really depressed.’

I hadn’t considered that.

‘But hey,’ Digby continued, ‘your dad’s got a medical professional who’s willing to falsify medical records for you, huh? That’s pretty handy.’ He pointed at my earrings, a pair of big diamond studs. I’d wondered if I shouldn’t wear them to school, but when he gave them to me, Dad had insisted that I never take them off. ‘Is that part of the official uniform of Team Dad?’ When I winced, he said, ‘Just kidding. They’re beautiful, Princeton.’ Digby turned and walked away.

‘Hey, wait! Now what?’ I said.

‘I’m going to check out the cafeteria,’ he said. ‘Zoe Webster, right? You have a school e-mail? I’ll e-mail you.’

Then I didn’t see or hear from him for weeks.





THREE


When we first moved to River Heights, everyone was visibly freaked about Marina Jane Miller’s abduction. People didn’t go out after dark. They walked dogs in groups. By mid-September, though, the local news stopped talking about her, and the ‘Where’s Marina?’ posters curled up and fell off the trees after it rained. Soon it sounded more like an urban legend and less like something that could happen to me. Before long, River Heights went back to normal – with normal meaning boring and lonely.

After starting some awkward conversations that went nowhere, I realized Digby was right about it being hard to make friends here. Most people gave me attitude because they expected me to have an attitude about moving to River Heights … which I sort of did, but it had nothing to do with them.

When I asked my lab partner how to turn on the Bunsen burners, she said, ‘Bet your old school had automatic ones, huh?’ I said yes and tried to say something quippy about almost burning off my eyebrows once, but it came off as a lame humble-brag. Even I heard it. We spent the rest of the experiment in painful silence.

I told myself that since I was transferring, I didn’t have to sweat the no-friends situation. Prentiss would be my salvation. Of course Mom wasn’t happy about Prentiss. How could she be? She’d fought hard for my custody, and transferring to Prentiss meant I’d move right back to the city and live with Dad and his new wife. Mom accused my dad of doing an end run around the custody judge, but almost as soon as she’d said it, her therapy kicked in. She’d shut herself down, saying over and over, ‘It’s not about me.’ Later, while looking for Band-Aids, I’d found a pile of Post-its in her drawer with mantras like ‘It’s not about you’ and ‘Transcend to transform.’

I had to admit, my class schedule was sweet. Digby and I were supposedly working on our project for the first two periods, so I slept in every day. Sure, I worried about actually doing the assignment, but from September, December looked far away.

I never saw Digby at school, but with the stress of figuring out where my classes were and how to make friends, I wasn’t looking for him that hard.

One day, I got home to find that Dad had forwarded the application package from Prentiss. Mom hovered by the sink, looking extremely casual while she made dinner. ‘Baked spaghetti, okay?’ She used her best transcending-to-transform voice, as if she hadn’t even noticed the Prentiss envelope sitting on the kitchen table.

Okay. So it was going to be a game of chicken. I slid the Prentiss application to one side and unzipped my backpack. ‘Ever feel like we should eat more vegetables?’

‘I could sprinkle parsley on it …’ Her eyes were now locked on the thick envelope. ‘So.’

‘So?’ I was winning. But I got cocky. I started highlighting the novel I had to read for homework. Big mistake. Never wave a lowbrow book in front of an English professor. It will enrage them, distracting them from everything else.

‘O. Henry? That’s not what you’re reading in school, is it?’ She grabbed my book and flicked through it. ‘This is a nightmare. Why don’t they just assign you Reader’s Digest?’ When she realized I didn’t know what she was talking about, she said, ‘You don’t know what Reader’s Digest is? The nightmare deepens.’ The game of chicken was ruined. ‘For decades, it was the only contact some people had with any kind of literature –’

I ripped into the envelope my father sent me. Mom stopped talking and dumped the pasta in an oven dish, pretending to suddenly be totally into her cooking.