Still there was a pang deep down in the pit of my stomach as I watched everybody else having fun For a second I thought Nia and Zara were going to invite me to come sit with them but then they looked away I frowned at my notebook What was taking Zoe so long Mrs Yang my English teacher always says that the hardest part is starting No matter how long you’ve been writing or how much you love it she says sometimes the blank page can be the scariest thing there is She says that you should just put a word on it Any word Then put another one I opened my notebook Zoe and Jade and the Best Lunch Ever I wrote at the top Eight words Take that blank page I stopped staring at Nia and Zara and Molly and Casey I took a deep breath I wrote more I took a bite of sandwich I kept going until the warning bell rang and when it did I barely even noticed In my story Zoe and I had just finished taking our milk mustache selfies and now we were making origami napkin birds for each other She was drawing funny faces on them and pretending hers were talking and I was trying to make mine talk back but I couldn’t because I was laughing too hard 3
When I finally closed my notebook and gathered gathered my stuff I noticed all the faces looking my way As bad as blank pages were blank stares were even worse My pale skin felt as red as my hair Yeah I wrote during lunch So what It was pretty obvious by the looks I got that people thought it was weird that my nose was always buried in my notebook But the one thing they never did was ask That was fine though I didn’t want to tell any body what I was writing anyway Out of the corner of my eye I peeked at Gresham Gorham or Clue as everybody called him It was bad enough that he knew my secret As if he could feel me looking Clue turned and stared me right in the face His dark serious eyes dropped to my notebook Then they flashed back to the one in his lap My heartbeat quickened so I took a few long breaths I pushed my purple glasses up higher on my nose and hugged my notebook to my chest That calmed me down right away same as it always did Forget Clue Forget other people Forget everything I had Zoe And that was all that mattered 4
2 The Beginning of Zoe When I started fourth grade my best friend was Joslin We'd just moved from Nevada and she'd introduced herself to me right away and everything was awesome She taught me how to play tetherball without getting hit in the face and we had nine amazing days of not getting hit in the face best friend fun Then she moved away and I never heard from her again I kept sending letters and she kept not writing back So then I hung out with Rosie Rosie liked to write like me 5
But not enough I guess After she moved she didn’t write letters or emails or postcards like she promised she would Not even one And no texts either either But I guess I can’t blame her because I was still the only kid in my grade and the world it felt like who didn’t have a cell phone I hadn’t been in Tiveda for that long but I was already sick of people coming and going so much People only lived here so they could feel like they were living in Denver even though they weren’t living living in Denver When they could afford something nicer usually in Denver they left Sometimes if they couldn’t afford something nicer or if they couldn’t even afford it here they’d move further down the road to Bertsburg where everyone everyone lived in trailers It wasn’t far away but far enough where the people who lived there went to another school which may as well have been a whole different universe Dad always compared Tiveda to those rest stops in random places off the highway People pulled over when they needed to stretch their legs to have a bathroom break and a snack and then they took off That’s what we were supposed to do while Mom painted murals in buildings around town and 6
