Maybe One Day

“It does look nice,” I said.

“I look like a third grader,” Olivia corrected me.

“A very pretty third grader,” I assured her.

She rolled her eyes at me.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I had to call Mrs. Jones at the rec center and tell her I was sick. They’re going to find someone else to teach the ballet class.”

“Oh.” I sat down in the chair her mom had vacated. “Well, I mean, that’s good, right? That they won’t have to cancel it or anything.”

“Yeah, I guess.” But her voice was sad.

I leaned toward her. “Livs?”

She toyed with the edge of her shirt, not meeting my eyes. “I like teaching the class, okay? And I’m just … I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Forget about it, okay? I mean”—she waved her hand around the room—“it’s not like I can teach the class from here. So let’s … let’s talk about something else. Tell me about your day.”

“Livvie …,” I started, and I reached for her hand.

But she shook her head and shut her eyes tightly, not facing me. “Tell me about your day,” she repeated. “Please.”

“Sure,” I said, not sure what else I could do. “Of course.”

Thirty-one minutes later, Mrs. Greco followed me out the door of Olivia’s room and down the hall. “Thanks for coming today, Zoe,” she said. “It means a lot to Olivia.”

I hoped it had, but I wasn’t so sure. Nothing, not even my Calvin-Taylor-really-is-a-vampire story, had seemed to cheer her up.

“I’ve spoken to Mr. Handleman,” she went on, “and it looks like—when she’s well enough—Olivia is going to be able to Skype her classes. But if there’s work that can’t be delivered via computer, I told him you or Jake could be the point person. I hope you don’t mind.” We were standing in front of the elevator, and Mrs. Greco pushed the down button.

“Of course not. I’m glad to help.” My parents always said Olivia was a part of our family, but I didn’t know if the Grecos felt the same way about me. Like, even though Livvie had been calling my parents Ed and Cathy since the day she met them, I still called her parents Mr. and Mrs. Greco. Sometimes I worried that they thought I was a bad influence on Livvie because our family wasn’t religious, my parents let me go to R-rated movies, my dad was a freelance journalist, and my mom earned more money than he did. Meanwhile, the Grecos went to church every Sunday, Mr. Greco was a lawyer who wore suits and went into the city every day, and Mrs. Greco was a stay-at-home mom. Livvie said I was totally paranoid, but I wasn’t so sure.

I didn’t want to explain to Mrs. Greco my whole theory about her thinking my parents were agnostic lefties with no family values, but I wanted her to know how much I loved Olivia. “I really hope you’ll rely on me in any way you can.”

I had this fantasy that Mrs. Greco would hug me, ask me to call her Adriana, and tell me that to her and Mr. Greco I was like family, but she just patted me gently on the cheek. “Of course,” she said. “We know we can count on you.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Greco,” I said. The elevator doors opened and I got on. “That means a lot to me.” And even though I was the one who said it, I couldn’t decide if I was being sarcastic or not.

I missed the train to Wamasset by less than ten minutes, so I had to kill almost an hour waiting for the next one. Penn Station’s got lousy stores, but whenever Livvie and I were stuck waiting for a train, we always managed to find something fun to do, even if it was checking out a shop full of lame touristy stuff or trying on tacky clothes we would never buy. Today, though, the time dragged while I wandered from Hot & Crusty to Duane Reade to New York Inc., finally settling in the waiting area, where I just sat and stared at the board listing the train departures. I couldn’t stop thinking about how sad Livvie had been all afternoon. Not that she shouldn’t have been. I mean, if getting a diagnosis of leukemia doesn’t give you the right to be sad, what does? But the crazy thing was, she almost hadn’t seemed sad about having cancer. It was like not teaching the dance class had been the straw that broke her back.

How was she going to last through weeks of treatment—months of treatment!—with nothing to look forward to besides Skyping her classes and receiving a daily inspirational message from the cheer squad? Thinking about her squeezing her eyes shut to stop herself from crying made me furious, and when I stood up after they announced the train to Wamasset, I was actually shaking my head, as if I were having an argument with the universe about the unfairness of it all.

And the worst part was, there was nothing I could do. I chucked my empty coffee cup in the trash and headed down to the platform. Dr. Maxwell’s telling me Livvie needed her friends suddenly felt like a bad joke. What did she need her friends for—so we could bear witness to her misery?

It wasn’t until the train was almost at my stop that I had my brainstorm. If Olivia could Skype her school classes, why couldn’t she Skype other classes? My hands were practically shaking with excitement as I dialed her number.

“Hey,” she said. She sounded really tired.

My idea burst out of me. “Let’s teach the class together.”

“What?”

I realized from how fuzzy her voice was that I must have woken her up, so I repeated myself, enunciating each word carefully. “Let’s. Teach. The. Class. Together! The dance class. We can use our phones. Or I’ll bring my dad’s laptop or something.”

There was a long pause.

“You don’t have to do this,” Livvie said finally. “I know you don’t want to do this.”

Was she serious?

“Livvie, come on. It’s so nothing.” Given what Olivia was going through, the idea that teaching her dance class with her was some big sacrifice had to be a joke.

I heard a voice in the background, and Livvie said, “I’m okay, Mom. Really.”

“Do you have to go?” I asked her. “We can talk about this tomorrow.”

“It could be a big job, Zoe,” said Olivia, ignoring my offer. “I might … I might be pretty sick sometimes, and … I mean, you might have to do it by yourself.” It sounded like she might be crying a little.

I made my voice mock angry. “Oh, so you think I can’t run a ballet class for beginners? Thanks a lot, bi-yatch!”

Olivia laughed. Like, really laughed. “The recital’s a lot of work—” she began.

“I’m not taking no for an answer,” I interrupted her. “So just, you know, stick that in your pipe and smoke it.”

There was another long pause. I stayed quiet, watching dusk turn the sky over New Jersey a deep purple.

“Zoe, are you sure?”

“Oh my God!” I cried, slapping my hand against the seat next to me. “Will you stop already? I’m doing it and that’s final.”

And suddenly Olivia didn’t sound tired or sick at all. “The girls are so great,” she said, speaking quickly. “I mean, they’ve just had the worst lives, but they’re still really into dancing. This one girl, Imani, she’s lived with four different foster families in the past year. Can you imagine that? Four families!”

I laughed. “Zoe, you don’t have to convince me. It was my idea, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah,” she said. Then she added, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if I’d staged this whole cancer thing just to get you to teach the dance class with me?”

“Hilarious,” I said. The computerized voice announced, “The next stop is Wamasset. Wamasset is the next stop.”

I heard her mom in the background, and this time Olivia said, “I gotta go.”

“Of course,” I said right away. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Zoe.” Olivia sounded slightly out of breath.

“Love ya,” I said, and then she said, “Love ya,” and we hung up. I walked to the door of the car. Even though I hadn’t wanted to make a big deal out of it, I felt good. Really good. Waiting was the worst. Waiting to visit Olivia. Waiting for her to get out of the hospital. To get better. To come back to school.

Doing something—even teaching a dance class—beat the hell out of waiting.

9

Jake had offered to give me a ride to the rec center, but it wasn’t his car that pulled into my driveway at eight thirty on Saturday morning.

It was Calvin Taylor’s.

Even before I saw Calvin’s car, I was already in a bad mood. There was some problem with the hot water heater so my shower was freezing. Then I couldn’t find a pair of ballet slippers. That might not be weird for most people, but all my life I’d had a minimum of a dozen pairs of ballet slippers and half as many pairs of toe shoes lying around my room at any given time. But like I said, when NYBC gave me and Livvie the ax, I chucked everything I owned that was ballet-related, so even rooting around in the attic and basement didn’t turn up an old pair of shoes. On the one hand, it was kind of cool how thorough I’d been. On the other, I was fucked. I stood in my room fuming, surrounded by piles of everything I’d yanked off the floor of my closet and from under my bed. Finally, I just called Livvie at the hospital, and she said she’d tell her mom to give Jake a pair of her shoes to give to me. Livvie and I had the same size foot, and while you can’t share toe shoes with another dancer since they mold to your feet, ballet slippers—especially ones you’re not wearing for some major performance—aren’t a problem.

I was running late and racing downstairs to grab something to eat before Jake picked me up and drove me to the rec center in downtown Newark, where—while I taught ballet and the cheerleaders taught tumbling—he and a bunch of the other guys on the football team would be teaching kids how to bench-press or tackle or rape or whatever it was that football players knew how to do well. I’d no sooner stepped foot in the kitchen than Calvin Taylor’s car pulled up in front of my house, and I thought, I now have objective proof that the universe is determined to screw with me.

I yelled good-bye to my parents and ran out the front door, blaming Calvin for my missing the most important meal of the day.

“Hi,” I said, sliding into the backseat of Calvin’s vintage BMW.

“Hi,” said Jake. Calvin didn’t say anything.

“Oh,” Jake said, “I’m supposed to give you these.” He reached between the front seats and handed me a bag with the shoes inside.

Calvin backed the car out of the driveway. His car had soft leather seats. It was maybe ten or even fifteen years old, but it was in beautiful shape. It was one of the things that semiannoyed me about Calvin, how in addition to everything else he had this cool vintage car. Still, he was giving me a ride.

“Thanks for driving me,” I said.

“Sure,” said Calvin. His tone was clipped. I couldn’t tell if it was I’m-mad-at-you-because-you-laughed-in-my-face clipped or It’s-eight-thirty-and-I’m-not-a-morning-person clipped. Jake said something to him that I couldn’t quite make out, and Calvin responded, “Not if he’s still injured.” Then Calvin turned up the music so I couldn’t hear them at all, and I leaned back against the seat and stared out the window.

When Calvin turned into the parking lot of the rec center, which was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, I figured the facility would be as awful as the rest of the block, but it was actually a pretty nice three-story brick building. There was a huge mural on the wall by the parking lot that had a black teenager guy being frisked by a cop. All around them were people holding cameras directed at the boy and the cop, and above the picture were the words LOVE YOUR CITY. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. It sounds depressing, but the colors were bright and the whole thing felt somehow energized and optimistic.

Calvin parked the car and the three of us got out. Jake put his arm around me as we walked toward the building.

“You doing okay?” he asked, squeezing my shoulders.

I loved Jake. Whether or not Mr. and Mrs. Greco saw me as family, Jake had always treated me like a little sister.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said, squeezing him back. “You okay?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “This is seriously fucked up, you know?”

There really wasn’t any other way to put it. “I know,” I agreed.

“Jake! Calvin! Zoe!” Jake and I turned around. Stacy, Emma, the Bailor twins, and Hailey were piling out of Stacy’s Lexus SUV.

“Come here, guys!” Emma called. She was gesturing us over frantically, as if the parking lot were on fire and she had discovered the only escape route.

Despite how annoyed he always seemed by Emma, Jake took his arm off my waist and headed toward the girls. “We’ll give you a ride home,” he said over his shoulder to me.

“Whipped much?” I teased him.

Laughing, he spun around in a full circle, pausing in my direction just long enough to give me the finger. “Just meet us back here after, okay?”

I shook my head, laughing also. “My dad’s getting me. I think he thinks we need some father-daughter bonding time.”

“Got it. See ya later.”

“Later.”

The girls literally swarmed Jake, and I watched him be engulfed by them. Emma managed to nuzzle in closer than all the rest, and when I saw him put his arm around her, I wondered if she felt triumph or just relief.

Stacy waved enthusiastically in my direction, but I just shook my head. It wasn’t until she called, “Calvin,” that I realized he was standing almost next to me.

“See you inside,” he called back. Then he started walking toward the entrance.

Watching him go, I thought about how he’d barely talked to me in the car. It started to make me feel a little uneasy. Maybe what he’d said about how everything was going to be okay was idiotic, but it had been a little bitchy of me to laugh at him like that. I flashed forward: If when Livvie got better she still liked Calvin and they started going out, the last thing I needed was my best friend’s boyfriend thinking I was a total asshole.

“Hey!” I shouted.

Calling after him made me feel a little like one of the cheerleaders.

He stopped and turned around. But he didn’t say anything or walk over to me. I covered the distance between us.

“So,” I began. “I … uh.” I chuckled nervously. “I feel kinda bad about how I acted when you came over to me. You know. The other day. At my locker.”

“Okay,” he said. His arms were crossed over the word Wamasset on his gray T-shirt.

“That’s it?” I crossed my arms also. “Okay?”

“Gee, Zoe, I’m sorry. I mean, I want to be good for a laugh. I just don’t know if we have the same sense of humor.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cheerleaders head into the rec center, Jake holding the door for them. Stacy and one of the Bailor twins had their arms around each other’s waists.

I thought of Olivia and how before she got sick, I’d told her I wouldn’t teach the dance class with her.

All at once I felt incredibly tired. “Just … just forget it, Calvin. Whatever.” I took a step toward the building, but he put out his hand to stop me.

“‘Whatever’? You’re kidding me, right?” He gave an incredulous laugh. “Let me get this straight—Tuesday night, I’m at Jake’s house. His phone is ringing off the hook. Aunts, uncles, grandparents. Fucking Emma alone calls, like, fifty times. And I’m just hanging out, watching him talk to the ten million people who are checking up on him, and suddenly I’m like, ‘Wow!’” He made his voice thoughtful, reenacting the realization itself. “‘I’ve never been in this house without Olivia and Zoe being here.’ And then I’m like, ‘I wonder if anyone is calling Zoe,’ because it seems to me that you two don’t hang out much with other people, and I don’t know if you have a lot of other friends or anything. So Wednesday morning I decide to find you and see if you’re okay, and the next thing I know, you’re making me feel like a total dick.”

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