Maybe One Day

“Teach the dance class with me,” said Olivia, and she rolled onto her side and leaned her head on her hand. “The girls would love you.”

“No dance,” I said, shaking my head. It was amazing to me how … accepting Livvie had been of our being cut from NYBC. She taught a ballet class once a week, organized the spring recital for her dancers, then led a dance camp for two weeks over the summer. She even kept the photo from our first dance recital on her desk—the two of us smiling at the camera, our pink tutus squashed because we’re standing so close together. I, on the other hand, in an attempt to escape my failed dance career, had joined (and then quit) the soccer team, ripped the posters of ballerinas off my walls, thrown out all my dance paraphernalia, and forbidden anyone from uttering the word “ballet” in my presence. I couldn’t help envying her a little, but Livvie had always been the one to take things in stride.

Why should this be any different?

I watched her face, seeing her make the decision not to push me on the dance thing. “And you’re sure you don’t want to do soccer?” she asked.

“Positive.” The girls on the soccer team were awesome, but everything about the sport had felt so wrong. I’d gone out for the team because I wanted to get as far away from dance as possible, but instead of making me forget dancing, soccer had only made me miss it more. I remembered standing on the soccer field, all that sky and grass and the feeling that without ballet, there wasn’t enough gravity to keep me connected to earth.

A leaf dropped onto my foot, and I picked it up and tore a thin strip from the edge. It was incredible how our bloody, blistered feet had healed so beautifully over the past year. My toes shimmered with the pale pink polish I’d chosen when Livvie and I had gotten pedicures on Labor Day.

Livvie stretched her arms over her head, then reached for my ankle and patted it. “Just tell me why you won’t do the dance class,” she said sleepily.

I tried to put into words exactly how I felt. “I just …” I tilted my head and studied the canopy of leaves over our head, as if the answer might be written there. My explanation came slowly. “I thought … it was going to be my whole life, Livs. It was my whole life. And now it’s … what? A hobby? That feels so wrong.”

Livvie squeezed my foot to show she understood. “You could do something else at the rec center, you know? It wouldn’t have to be dance. There’s the tumbling class.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “You aren’t seriously hooking me up with the cheer squad, are you?”

“The kids in the class are adorable,” she said, not answering my question. Then she yawned again.

I turned away and snorted. “I’m not even dignifying that suggestion with a response.” I thought about how freshman year she and I had satisfied our community service requirement with the performances of The Nutcracker that NYBC did for the city’s public schools. Last year, I’d spent half a dozen afternoons cleaning up garbage at a nearby nature preserve with the soccer team. It was weird how far-reaching extracurricular activities were. Just because you did one thing, a whole bunch of other things—who you had lunch with, where you did your community service, what parties you went to—fell into place.

If you didn’t do something, on the other hand, you had no place to fall into.

I was so busy thinking about how I needed a place that I almost didn’t hear Olivia when she asked quietly, “What do you love, Zoe?”

I made my voice deep and mock-seductive, glad to be distracted from my depressing train of thought. “You, baby!”

But Livvie didn’t laugh. After a minute, I looked over at her. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing rhythmically.

It had been a long day, and though the sun was low, it was still warm out, warm enough that I could imagine how easy it would be to drift off into sleep. Still, no one fell asleep just like that. Was she faking it?

I nudged her calf gently with my foot, but she didn’t stir. She really was asleep.

Wrapping my arms around my legs, I leaned my cheek on my knees, thinking about what Livvie had asked. It was too embarrassing to admit the truth, like confessing you loved a guy who didn’t know you existed.

Still.

In my head I heard the music start, felt the grip of my toe shoes, the butterflies in my stomach. The tension in my legs intensified, as if I were a racehorse eager for the starting gate to be lifted. For years, every moment I wasn’t dancing was a moment I was waiting to dance. Dancing had been how I knew I was alive. How I knew I was me.

Without it, I somehow … wasn’t.

So there was only one answer to Olivia’s question.

“Dance,” I whispered, so quietly that even if Livvie had been awake, she wouldn’t have heard me. “I love dance.”

3

Mostly to get my parents off my back I went to the first meetings of the yearbook and the newspaper staff. My mom kept telling me I should try out for the play, but one look at the drama club was enough to let me know that it was the last place I wanted to spend my free time. The actors at Wamasset had all the bitchiness of the NYBC dancers, and the idea that I’d spend my free time with a bunch of backstabbers not dancing was laughable. I might have been lost, but I wasn’t insane.

But at least the drama club’s single-mindedness felt familiar. All the other activities—Model Congress, yearbook, Science Club—just seemed like things people were doing to pass the time or to make colleges accept them. I couldn’t see building my life around the passage of a fake Senate vote or the taking of the perfect photo of the volleyball team. It all seemed so … pointless. If I was going to do something, I wanted to give my life over to it, to love it, to wake up in the morning for it like I had for dance.

Was I seriously going to get out of bed every day for Chess Club?

By the time Saturday morning rolled around, it was starting to feel like my extracurricular activity was convincing my parents how busy I was without any extracurricular activities. My mom got up early and went to the gym, but I told her I had too much homework to join her. When I made the mistake of wandering out to the back deck, my dad asked if I wanted to help in the garden. I told him I had homework, and he asked if I could at least walk Flavia before I started working. I did, then sat in the kitchen—just out of his line of vision—with a cup of coffee cooling on the table in front of me. The thought of spending my Saturday morning writing an essay on imagery in the opening chapters of Madame Bovary was more than I could bear.

I am doing nothing, I thought to myself. If anyone asks me what I did this weekend, I can say, I literally did nothing, and it won’t be that annoying thing where people say literally when they mean figuratively.

Then I got Olivia’s text.

coming 4 u 4 lunch. no thank u helping of cheer squad.

A “no thank you helping” was what you got at Olivia’s house if her mom was serving something you didn’t like. For example, if she were to say, “Can I offer you some calf brain?” you might say, “No, thank you.” And then she would put a tiny bit of calf brain on your plate because Mrs. Greco believed a person should try everything at least once.

In the past when Olivia had invited me to go to lunch with her and the cheerleaders, I’d always taken a pass, but if I was still sitting at the kitchen table when my mom got home from the gym, my only options would be starting my essay or discussing with my parents (once again) my future.

The choice was clear. I got to my feet.

Mrs. Greco’s right, I thought as I dumped out the remaining coffee from my cup and put the mug in the dishwasher. You should try everything once.

Except, I quickly discovered, having lunch with Stacy Shaw, Emma Cho, and the rest of the Wamasset cheer squad. Because even the tiniest calf had a bigger brain than they did.

We were seated in a horseshoe-shaped booth big enough for eight. Emma was between me and Olivia. Immediately after we ordered, Emma turned to Olivia, gave her a hug, stroked her hair several times, then rested her head on Olivia’s shoulder with a sigh. “I wish you were my little sister,” she said. “You are just so awesome.”

Despite her general tolerance for cheerleader behavior, Livvie was clearly taken aback by Emma’s petting her as if she were a cat. She didn’t say anything, though, just sat there looking uncomfortable.

I turned my head and asked Emma, “Is that your way of saying you wish you were married to Olivia’s brother?”

“Oh, snap!” said Stacy. She reached across the table to high-five me as the other members of the cheer squad laughed. Emma looked embarrassed, and I felt bad. Maybe I’d needed to rescue Livvie, but did I have to do it by being a total bitch? It wasn’t like Emma had ever done anything to me. Still, there was Stacy’s hand, hovering halfway between us. I guess I could have not high-fived her, thereby alienating both Emma and Stacy in one fell swoop, but I chickened out and gave Stacy a limp high five back.

“You guys, aren’t those kids sooo cute?” wailed a sophomore named Hailey, thankfully changing the subject. Since sliding in next to her in the backseat of the car, I’d observed that every word that came out of Hailey’s mouth was a cry of some kind. It was as if she lived in a state of constant emotional suffering so great she could not contain it, not even to order her salad with dressing on the side.

“They are,” Olivia agreed. She stretched her arms over her head and rolled her neck. The gesture was graceful, but tired. It made me wonder if what I’d thought was discomfort earlier was really exhaustion.

“You guys, I am literally crying for those little girls,” said Emma, who, for the record, was not actually crying. “Their lives are, like, really hard. One of the new girls in the class told me that her brother’s in jail.”

Sitting in the two chairs at the end of the table were identical twins on the cheer squad, seniors named Margaret and Jamie Bailor, who as far as I could tell had received less than their fair share of the squad’s IQ. One of them said, “That’s why it’s really good that we’re teaching them tumbling and stuff.”

“Seriously,” agreed whichever twin had not made the initial point. “They need something in their lives. Tumbling is so much better than drugs.”

That night we lay side by side, Livvie on her bed, me on the trundle bed. The sprinklers were twirling a soothing rhythm outside her window.

“Okay,” she said, “I sense today’s lunch did not help us make strides toward your teaching tumbling with the cheer squad.”

A few glow-in-the-dark stars were still stuck to her ceiling from where we’d put them up in middle school. We’d planned to do an exact replica of the constellations in the northern hemisphere, but halfway through the Big Dipper we’d just started sticking them up any which way.

“An excellent deduction,” I said, yawning.

It was quiet for a minute, and then Livvie yawned also. “It’s so crazy that we’re juniors. Remember when we were freshmen? The juniors were older than Jake! We’re now older than people who were older than Jake used to be.” We both laughed at how nonsensical the last part of her sentence was.

I thought about freshman year, watching the juniors and seniors stand at the doors to the parking lot, swinging their car keys as they waited to go out to lunch with their friends. They’d seemed so … grown-up. So sure of themselves. I rubbed my forehead as if to remove the image of those confident upperclassmen from my brain and said, “I feel like people are going to expect us to know things we don’t actually know.”

“Yes!” There was the rustle of the sheet as Livvie rolled over. In the faint light coming under the door, I saw that she’d propped herself up on her arm and was facing me. “Driving! SATs! College. It always seemed so far away, but it’s not. It’s here.” She lay back down. “I don’t feel ready.”

“It’s still kind of far away,” I pointed out.

“Emphasis on the kind of.”

I could hear footsteps on the floor above us, and I knew it was one of Livvie’s parents checking on the twins. Then I heard someone coming down the stairs, then her mom talking to her dad. The hall light went off, and the room, which had seemed dark already, became nearly pitch-black. I pulled the soft sheet up to my chin, smelling the familiar smell of the detergent Livvie’s mom used.

“Calvin really looks at you when you talk to him.” Livvie’s voice was growing sleepy. “It’s intense.”

“That’s what you said about Milo Bradley,” I pointed out.

Milo Bradley was this boy who went to private school in Manhattan and took classes at Juilliard. He was a couple of years older than us, and Olivia and I met him freshman year right after Christmas break at a café we always went to when we had time between classes. He was cute in this nerdalicious way, and the three of us started getting together for coffee on a regular basis. He and Livvie would have these long, intense conversations, and it seemed pretty clear they were into each other, so I’d try to make myself scarce by doing stuff like staring intently at the screen of my phone and going to the bathroom every thirty seconds. Olivia went to watch him rehearse a few times (he played the piano) in these private practice spaces they have at Juilliard. It was kind of a big deal because we had to lie to her parents about how we were having extra rehearsals just so she could sneak away with him.

Each time they went off together, Livvie and I were sure they were totally going to fool around, but they never did. Once, when they were sitting next to each other on the piano bench, he kissed her hand, and another time he put his arm around her, but that was it, even though Olivia was practically dying to make out with him. She was too scared to ask him what was going on, so finally she just started telling him she was busy whenever he called to make plans. The third time it happened, he said, “I don’t get it. Are you breaking up with me?” I was with her at the time, and when she said, “I guess I am breaking up with you,” I just lost it. I mean, were they even going out? She had to practically beat me to death with a toe shoe to get me to stop laughing loud enough for him to hear me.

It had been a while since I’d teased her about dumping her clearly gay boyfriend, but Milo’s being a really good listener had been something she’d referenced constantly, so her saying the same thing about Calvin Taylor seemed a good reason to bring him up.

“Don’t remind me about Milo,” she wailed. “I’m begging you.”

I yawned. “Calvin’s annoying.” But I was too sleepy to really care if she liked him or not.

“Mmmm,” she answered, and I heard the rustle of sheets as she rolled over. “Don’t worry about finding something to do, Zoe,” she mumbled after a pause. “Everything will work out. I can tell. This is going to be a great year.”

I could feel myself dozing off, surrounded by the sounds and smells of Livvie’s house, as familiar to me as my own. My last thought before I fell asleep was that Olivia was right. This was going to be a really great year.

4

Livvie woke up with a fever Sunday, and she missed school Monday. Monday night when I talked to her she said she’d be in school Tuesday morning, but then she texted me and said she’d woken up with a fever again and her mom was taking her to the doctor.

I called Livvie at the start of lunch Tuesday, but she didn’t pick up the phone. I was standing by my locker, finishing leaving her a message, when Mia Roberts turned down the corridor.

Mia was the girl on the soccer team I knew the least. She’d been new freshman year (before coming east she’d lived in L.A.), and unlike the rest of the team (who hung out pretty much exclusively with one another), Mia hung with a lot of different people. And she didn’t just not hang out exclusively with the team; she also looked nothing like the other girls we played with, all of whom—whether white or black, Asian or Hispanic, freshmen or seniors—were very … American-looking. Clean-cut. Like, you could use any one of them in photos for an antidrug campaign.

But Mia’s hair was bleached white except for the tips, which were blue. When she wasn’t wearing her soccer uniform, she wore black pretty much exclusively, down to black motorcycle boots or Doc Martens.

“Hey,” she said. Today she was wearing a pair of black leggings with lace at the bottom and a black tank top. Her dark eyes were heavily made up with black liner.

“Hey,” I said. I put my phone in my bag.

“You heading to lunch?” Mia asked. I nodded, and she gestured for me to accompany her. “Let’s do it.” She was chewing gum, and while I watched, she blew a small bubble, then cracked it loudly between her teeth.

I fell into step beside her. “I love cracking my gum. It drives my mom batshit when I do it, though.”

“Well, your mom’s not here now, is she?” Mia reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of Juicy Fruit.

I eyed the pack suspiciously. “I don’t know. Sugar gum. Kind of a gateway drug, isn’t it?”

“Try it,” she said, wagging the pack at me. “The first slice is free.”

I reached for a piece, unwrapped it, and popped it in my mouth. “Oh my God,” I said as the fruity taste exploded on my tongue. I had to close my eyes for a second to savor the experience. “This is the first nonsugarless gum I’ve had in years.”

“I know, right?” said Mia, smiling triumphantly. “The dentist loves me. My mom says I’m sending his kids to college.”

“It’s worth it,” I assured her.

We passed a circle of football players, including Calvin and Jake. Each guy was surrounded by a healthy harem of cheerleaders. Jake looked up, saw me, and waved. I waved back. Calvin glanced my way also, but even though we were both at the Grecos’ practically every day, his glance slid over me as if I were some exchange student he’d never seen in his life.

Inwardly I rolled my eyes at what an ass he was.

“So,” said Mia, “how come you don’t do soccer anymore?”

“Um, because I so totally sucked at it?” I offered.

Mia laughed, but she didn’t correct me, which I appreciated. “Does that mean you went back to dancing again?” she asked.

Here was concrete proof of how little anyone outside the dance world understood it. I imagined a universe in which Olivia and I had randomly decided to take a year off from dancing and then—equally spontaneously—decided to return to it. I let myself see the two of us as Mia must have seen us. In control. Masters of our destiny.

The fantasy was awesome, which may explain why I lied to her. “Nah. I was kind of over dance.”

“Got it.” We turned down the hallway toward the cafeteria. It was more crowded here, with some people shoving to get in and others shoving to get out.

“You know,” said Mia, turning to me, “freshman year I was überintimidated by the two of you.”

I practically choked on my gum. “You were?”

“I was!” Mia imitated my tone exactly, then laughed. “Is that so surprising? You’re both tall and gorgeous. And you disappeared into Manhattan after school every day.” We stepped into the river of kids headed to the cafeteria. “I saw you once at The Nutcracker when my mom and I took my niece. I mean, I didn’t see you see you. Like, I couldn’t pick you out. But your names were in the program.”

I shook my head, as much at the idea of Mia’s being at the ballet as at the thought of her searching for us in a sea of dancers. “That’s so weird. I mean that we were on your radar like that.”

Mia raised an incredulous eyebrow at me. “It’s not weird, Zoe. You and Olivia were famous. I figured you were way too cool to hang out with regular people like me.”

“Really? You thought we were cool?” I squeaked, so uncool that both Mia and I laughed. She held open the door to the cafeteria and I followed her in. As we joined a table, I composed a text in my head to Livvie, telling her about how cool and terrifying the population of Wamasset had once found us.

I was irritated that Livvie didn’t respond to my text, which was, frankly, hilarious. Wasn’t she just sitting in the waiting room of Dr. Weiss, our pediatrician? Or sitting at Driscoll’s Pharmacy waiting for her mom to fill a prescription? Or sitting and waiting for me to call her? I didn’t stay home sick from school all that often, but when I did, that was my routine. The bell rang, ending math, our last period of the day, and Mr. Schumacher nodded in my direction. “You’ll give Olivia the homework.”

“Sure,” I said, then muttered under my breath, “if she ever texts me back.”

I went to my locker and slowly made my way outside. It was sunny but way cooler than it had been that morning, and I shivered, wishing I’d worn a jacket. The football team was heading out to the field all the way on the other side of the campus. I considered asking Jake if he knew where Olivia was, but the team was so far away I couldn’t even figure out which of the uniformed guys he was.

Just as I decided it wasn’t worth bothering, since Jake wasn’t going to have any idea anyway, my phone rang. Livvie! Finally. I dug my phone out of my bag.

But it wasn’t Livvie. It was some 212 number I didn’t recognize. This was getting so annoying.

“Hello?”

“Zoe?”

It was Livvie. But why was she calling me from an unfamiliar number?

“Livs!” I was so glad to hear from her I wasn’t even mad that she hadn’t called me back earlier. “Where have you been all day? Whose phone are you calling from?”

“My phone’s out of juice. Zoe, I have to tell you something.” Olivia’s voice sounded thin, as if she were calling from far away on a line with a bad connection. It didn’t help that it was super noisy in front of the school, where all two thousand members of the student body seemed to have chosen to gather before heading off to their afternoon activities. I pressed my free hand to my ear, trying to hear better.

“Where are you?” I moved away from the crowded concrete circle by the front entrance and onto the lawn.

“Zoe, I’m … I’m at the hospital.”

“The hospital?” For some reason, I thought of the twins. Could one of them have been in an accident? The possibility made my heart drop. Tommy and Luke could be super annoying, but they were also adorable. Last year, when they were in second grade and neither of them had their front teeth, Tommy would pronounce Zoe “Thoe.”

“I’m sick, Zoe,” said Livvie.

“Wait, you’re sick?” I was still thinking about the twins. “Hang on a second … what?”

“I’m at UH,” said Olivia.

University Hospital was only a few blocks from the Fischer Center, where NYBC was located. We’d driven by it every day on our way to and from dance classes and performances, its glass towers telling us we were just minutes from our destination or that we’d begun the journey home.

“But you were just at the doctor’s office.” I knew, even as I said it, that it was a stupid thing to say. It wasn’t like there was no way to travel from the doctor’s office to the hospital.

Olivia’s voice was freakishly precise. “The doctor found a bruise on the back of my leg,” she said.

“I saw that!” I shouted, remembering the bruise from when I’d slept over Saturday night. It was dark purple and spidery, and I’d almost asked her about it, but then we’d started talking about something else and I’d forgotten.