She's Not Coming

by Simone Kurland

            In 8th grade I met one of my best friends, Zoe Balog. She was new to Willard Middle school but very quickly she became a part of my group of friends. She had moved to California to live with her aunt Eva to get away from the problems back at home in Colorado. After living with Eva for two years, Eva gave up and said she had to leave. Eva had never been a parent before she took care of Zoe, and having her around did not fit into her lifestyle to say the least. After she became more than Eva could handle Zoe went to live with her grandparents in Palm Springs. All of us were devastated, we couldn't believe that she wouldn't be able to live in Berkeley with us anymore but we determined to stay in touch with her. For our friend Grace's birthday, Zoe had saved enough money from her job at a computer store to visit for the first time since she had left. For weeks all my friends and I could talk about was how excited we were to see her, how much we had missed her, and how badly we wanted her to move back. We were all counting down the days till Friday October 27th when we could finally see her. 

            The only reliable way to contact her was sending her messages on Myspace. Since she was always at work, she was always on a computer. The night before she came I excitedly messaged her about how soon we were going to see each other.  In return I got a message telling me she couldn't come. I didn't believe it, I wasn't upset because I couldn't even imagine that this was happening. She continued to tell me that her uncle's identity got stolen and that he was too busy to drive her to the airport. I became furious. Why couldn't he figure out a way to drive her? Why couldn't he ask a friend of his to do it? All I could think about was how can we get Zoe to the airport? Staring at the posters that Molly, Julia, and I had worked on for hours on earlier that night I realized she just had to come. We will figure something out. After calling what felt every shuttle company in America Molly and I found one that could pick Zoe up. After Molly's mom had agreed to pay for Zoë's shuttle to the airport we immediately called her phone to tell her the good news. A man answered, confused we asked to speak to her, but he told us she wasn't there. She wasn't online and we had no other way of contacting her.  Not knowing what else to do we called back and in hope that she would answer the cell phone that was used as a home phone. He answered again, "Can we please talk to Zoe? It is really important that we do" As we listened we heard in a harsh tone: "Zoe, your friends want to talk to you." Nervously we stared at each other while holding Molly's cell phone that was on speaker as we waited in hope of talking to her. Instead we could hear her sobbing and screaming about how upset she was, yelling that she wanted him to leave and didn't want to talk to anyone.  After trying to call to talk to her over and over again we had no choice but to go to sleep. 

            The next morning we woke up and realized it was true, she really wasn't coming. We both knew it, although we never would have expressed our doubts. We decided to call again in a last attempt to schedule a shuttle bus for her. This time her grandma answered, "Hello?" 

"Oh hi, could I talk to Zoe?" 

"I'll try to get her on the phone but I'm pretty sure she doesn't want to talk to anyone"

"Ok, thank you" we anxiously waited to see if Zoe would get on the phone, but rather than hearing Zoë's high pitched dragged out voice we heard her grandma banging on something.

"Zoe? ...Zoe? Come out of the bathroom your friends are on the phone" she continued to hit the door, "Zoe answer me, please open the door, Zooooooeeeeee? Im coming in if you won't answer me" we continued to listen to her grandmothers scared voice. "Zoe! what are you doing on the floor? Zoe get up! Wake up Zoe! Oh my god, what have you done?!" the phone cut out. We stared at the phone in complete silence not knowing what to say. 

            We called Julia to tell her what had just happened and picked her up on our way to school. No one said a word on the ride to school, but we didn't notice we were too involved in our racing minds. We got out of the car and crossed the street. We stopped and stared at each other and it finally hit us, we broke down and all began to cry. I didn't want to be upset, I didn't want to believe what I thought had happened.  I wiped my eyes as we walked to our first period class, I hugged them both and went into my ceramics room. As I went to my locker I could feel the tears rushing back. I sat down in front of my locker and as I was turning the dial on my combination my mind wouldn't stop. My hands were shaking and tears were running down my face. I couldn't move and I couldn't see who was around me so I just sat there with my backpack still on, waiting till I had calmed down enough to open the locker to get out my clay. 

            Without ever being able to open my locker I left the room. On the stairs next to my classroom I met Molly and Julia, together we walked out of school and down the street to be alone and free from questions such as "is there something wrong?" and "are you upset?" We sat down and began mumbling about how scared we all were. Once I looked up from staring at my scuffed black shoes and cold blue feet I saw the worry in Julia's face. I intently watched Julia as she tried to explain how unfair she felt all of this was, her shaking voice and tears slowly took over until she wasn't able to speak clearly. I looked at Molly hoping she had something to tell Julia to make her feel better since I defiantly couldn't think of anything. "If only she had stayed here in Berkeley this wouldn't have happened. She never did anything, she should have never had to deal with any of this."

As I sat there memories of Zoe came flooding back. I thought of her 79 cent coffee she would buy everyday from 7/11, I thought about the pink heart-shaped post it notes that went all around her room, I thought of our experiments with nail polish remover and matches, I thought of her cello that was twice as big as her, and I thought about her huge smile and loud laugh. I began to think about the first time I met Zoe, the first time I had hung out with her, and the first time my friends and I slept at her house.

I started to think back to the day I met Zoe. It was just like any other day at Willard Middle School. As I was walking to P.E. my first class of the day, when I saw Ms. Pecot walking a girl and her grandmother toward the gym. I had never seen the girl before and assumed she was a new student. I began staring at her bulging black side bag that was held together by about 25 safety pins, her clunky worn in black and pink skate shoes, light blue flared jeans, pink argyle vest, and her poorly dyed pink hair. All of a sudden Ms. Pecot turned around and asked if I would like to show her around the school. Excited about having someone new to meet I quickly linked arms with her and told her everything I knew about Willard. Although she barely said a word I could see she felt relieved knowing she wasn't alone. After first period I walked her to her science class and went to my spanish class. As soon as the bell rang for lunch, I bolted out of my english class to find her so she wouldn't have to eat alone. We went to meet my friends on the patchy green field where my friends eat. "My name is Zoe with two dots above the E" she told them as she sat down in the circle of my friends. My friends and I looked puzzled as we awkwardly watched her take out a zip-lock bag of sugar and began to pour it into her diet peach Snapple. Realizing that we were all staring at her, she looked up, "What? It's good!"

            My mind then went to the first time I hung out with Zoe. I thought about one important day after school. "My aunt told me I should go to this place...what was it called…tele...something..." Zoe said as her eyes looked up and moved side to side as if she was looking for a name that got lost in her brain. Although I had been to Telegraph much too many times, I agreed to take her since she had never been. After walking up Telegraph and going in and out of stores, we sat down at the top of Telegraph at Cal campus. As I watched Zoe eat a chocolate croissant I thought about ways to ask her why she moved here with out coming off as though she shouldn't be here. 

"So Zoe do you like Berkeley so far? Is it better than Colorado?"

"Yea it's cool I guess" Zoe replied while keeping her eyes glued to the chocolate croissant.

"Did you want to move here?"

"No, I had to"

"Well, why did you have to move here?" 

"They made me"

Zoe was proving to me much more difficult to find out information from than I expected.

"Who is they? and why would you have to move here?"

Zoe then turned to me and set her croissant down. "Do you actually want to know why I moved here?"

"Well only if you want to tell me"

"No I'll tell you, well the 'they' is the social workers and basically the reason that moved here was because my mom just went to rehab and I couldn't stay with my step dad because he doesn't have custody of me because he never ended up adopting me but my brother and sister still live with him because they are his kids, so basically my aunt said she would take care of me here."

Taken my surprise I wasn't sure what to say.

"I'm sorry?"

"No, its okay I like it here" Zoe cheerfully replied.

After hanging out with Zoe for a couple weeks she invited my friends and I to sleep over at her house. As I walked into her dimly lit room I attempted to turn on the light, to then realize the light was already on. The light was a single pink light bulb from the middle of the celling, which instead of giving a well lit room gave everyone a headache from squinting so hard. "Would you like to see my snail farm?" Zoe asked us as she picked up a small plastic box that are normally used to hold frogs or lizards.

"Oh my god! Eww! Why do they smell so bad?!" I said as she held the box up to my face. 

"Yeah, I'm not sure why but my aunt said I have to get rid of them because they smell so much. I just feel bad cause I already named them."

"What's their names?" Molly asked.

"Well the small one is Edwin, the big one is Gary and that one right there is I think Charles or maybe it's Fredrick...I get those two confused."

Since we had nothing to do, we then started to think of ideas. "Truth or dare?" Someone suggested. 

"I have a dare! I dare Zoe to pee in a bag!" Nicole said. After Zoe found a zip lock bag, peed in it, and came back with it, we once again had nothing to do. As Zoe held the bag by the top corner she dared Julia to throw it at her neighbor's window. We all looked to the wide window that was so close to hers, we looked in and saw a man sitting watching t.v. Before we even thought about it Julia had already taken the bag from Zoe and chucked it toward the window. It hit and burst open once it reached the ground, we looked to each other and all fell to the floor so he wasn't able to see us. After what felt like hours we slowly and quietly peered out her window to see that he hadn't even noticed the bag. 

I looked back down at my blue feet, and realized that they had fallen asleep. I looked to Julia. "Hey do remember that time when we taped Grace to the chair with Zoe?"

"I almost forgot! That was so funny! That was such a good night! That was the pee bag night wasn't it?" Julia excitedly responded, "Do you remember the pizza that we never took out of the oven that night?"

"That totally was the pee bag night and that pizza was straight black! It was like charcoal!" Molly laughed.

"I just keep thinking of the video with Zoe screaming Macintosh while chasing Nicole with that sword from Walgreens."

"Hell yea with that weird shield thing that was hanging on her closet door."

We shared stories back and forth and each story made me happier than the last. I realized how amazing our time together was and I couldn't stop crying from laughing so hard at all the great times we had.