Maybe One Day (22 page)

I shook my head. The last thing she needed was to be worried about me. “It’s nice to be back,” I lied. Or sort of lied.

As we stepped into the theater, the velvet seats and carpet muffling our steps, I had a sudden memory, so sharp it made me gasp. Livvie turned to me, concerned.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly, not wanting to get into it. “I’m fine.”

There were a few people sitting together almost exactly in the middle of the theater, but otherwise, it was empty. Lots of dance companies let people watch dress rehearsals—some even sell tickets to them—but Martin Hicks, the director of NYBC, was a total fascist about anyone attending his dress rehearsals. He didn’t even let members of the company attend unless they were his special pets. In fact, that was how you often found out who was in Mr. Hicks’s favor: someone let you know he or she had been invited to sit with him at a dress rehearsal.

As the door to the lobby slowly swung shut behind us, a single figure got up from the group in the center and headed toward us.

It was Martin Hicks.

In all my years with the company, he and I had never spoken. The hardest thing about putting today together had been the phone call I’d had to make to him. It had taken me a whole day just to work up the courage to dial the number. And now here he was, standing beside me, gripping my shoulder as if we were old friends.

“Zoe,” he said. “And Olivia.” He looked into our eyes as he said our names. “I’m so glad you could come watch today.” He was wearing his signature outfit: a black turtleneck and a pair of Levi’s 501s. I always forgot this, but he was almost exactly my height.

In my memory, he was seven feet tall.

“It was so nice of you to let us come,” I said. I’d played the cancer card
hard
with Mr. Hicks. He hadn’t even returned my first two calls.

“It was an honor to be asked.” He put his hand to his chest gently as if indicating we had literally touched his heart.

I knew for a fact he had basically no idea who we were, but he acted so moved that it was impossible not to believe he was sincere.

A voice from up near the stage called, “Martin!” and he excused himself. Olivia was still smiling a phony smile when she turned to me.

“Okay,” she said through her teeth, “he still terrifies me.”

“Duh. He terrifies everyone.”

“How did you pull it off?” she asked after we’d chosen our seats. “I’ve always dreamed of going to a dress rehearsal.”

I took Livvie’s hand and looked into her eyes. “Honestly?” I asked.

“Honestly,” she said.

“I told him you were dying,” I said. Immediately we both burst out laughing. The conversation that had been going on in the middle of the theater broke off, and I could feel several pair of eyes glaring at us. Livvie and I both slid down low in our seats, still giggling.

“Okay,” announced Mr. Hicks. “Let’s get this started.”

For a couple of minutes there was silence, and then the sounds of
The Nutcracker
’s overture—bright staccato notes jabbing the air—filled the theater. Something in my throat got tight as the music played. It had been less than two years since I’d heard it, yet so much had happened since the last time Olivia and I had danced
The Nutcracker
that this tune seemed to come at me from a different world.

The curtain rose on the party scene, Clara and Fritz and all their friends playing in the Stahlbaum living room, the beautiful tree shimmering stage right. Neither Olivia nor I had ever played Clara, but we had danced in this scene. In the darkness I felt Livvie’s hand wrap around my own, and I remembered how before we’d gone on, we’d often held hands—damp, sweaty palm against damp, sweaty palm—barely able to make out anything in the chaos of backstage
except each other.

I’d picked the restaurant because of its roof deck. Even though it was only five thirty, I was afraid that the restaurant would be crowded and Olivia would end up sitting next to someone incubating a cold. As long as we could sit outside, we were safe. The hostess I’d spoken to had assured me that the heating lamps would make it perfectly warm, and though Olivia shivered slightly as we made our way to our table, as soon as we sat down, she took off her coat in the toastiness of the giant lamps above us. Good for energy conservation? No. Good for a friend with a compromised immune system? Yes.

“This view is amazing,” said Olivia.

I’d been so focused on the health benefits of the outdoor seating that I hadn’t paid much attention to the whole view thing, but Olivia was right: the view was incredible. All of Manhattan was stretched out at our feet, fifty stories below us.

The waiter came and took our drink order, and as we sat sipping the virgin whiskey sours that he’d brought us, Livvie demanded, “Okay, be honest. Was it torture?”

I shook my head and put my drink down. “You know what I remembered?”

“What?”

“My mantra.” I twirled my maraschino cherry through the foam at the top of my drink, unable to meet Livvie’s eyes.

“You had a
mantra
?” she shrieked. A woman at the next
table glanced over at us, and Livvie lowered her voice. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

Instead of answering her question, I asked my own. “Do you want to know what it was?”

“Sure,” she said, my tone making her slightly less enthusiastic.

“It was . . .” I looked at a spot just above her head and recited in a robotic voice: “Let me be good enough. Let me be good enough. Let me be good enough.”

“Oh,” said Livvie quietly. When I finally looked her in the eye, the expression on her face showed we were thinking the same thing.

“I know,” I said, even though she hadn’t said anything. “It
is
depressing.”

Livvie reached across the table and gently placed her hand on my arm. “No, it’s not—”

“No, it
is
,” I interrupted her. “It’s awful.” Hearing my own mantra, forgotten all this time, had conjured for me all the other things I’d forgotten about those last months and even years of dancing—how frightened I’d been all the time, how desperate to prove I deserved to stay in the company, how insecure and pathetic I’d felt.

“It was stressful,” Livvie said gently. “We were
all
stressed out.”

There was a pause, and then I said, “I hated it.”

“No you didn’t,” Livvie said automatically.

But I stared across the table at her, and she didn’t argue anymore.

“I don’t get it,” said Livvie finally. “If you hated it so much, why didn’t you quit?”

“Grrr.” I dropped my head into my hands and yanked on my hair. “I don’t
know
. I don’t think I realized that I hated it. I mean, I thought I just hated myself for not being good enough. I hated that I wasn’t a better dancer.”

“You were an amazing dancer,” said Livvie.

“Thanks.”

I raised my head, and when our eyes met, hers were sad. “What?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I feel bad. I didn’t know you were so unhappy. I’m your best friend. How could I not have known?”

“I don’t think
I
knew,” I said after a pause. “I don’t think I knew until just now.”

A few tables away a couple laughed.

“I understand,” said Olivia. She dropped her chin into her hand. “I don’t know if I
hated
it, exactly. But it definitely stopped being fun. Except when we were messing around in your basement, I don’t think I liked dancing much by the end.” Cocking her head to the side, she asked, “Why did it stop being fun?”

“For me . . .” I looked at the Empire State Building, sparkling in the distance. “I think it stopped being fun when I started wanting to be the best.”

I turned back to her. Livvie’s eyes were bright. “Sometimes I wish we were still little again,” she said. “Just dancing at Madame Durand’s. Getting all excited for those stupid recitals.”

Neither of us said anything about Livvie’s being sick, but we were both thinking about it. “Me too,” I said, my eyes stinging.

Olivia sniffled, but she didn’t cry. “You know,” she said after a minute, “it’s dumb to be sad. I mean, we can still have the awesome apartment in Manhattan.”

“Snazzy jobs.” I snapped my fingers and did a little dance in my seat to emphasize the point. “Sexy boyfriends. Weekends in the Hamptons.”

“Day-into-evening wear,” she added. When we were younger, we read this article in some magazine about how every woman should have day-into-evening wear, and we’d thought it was the most hilarious concept ever. For months, it was pretty much the punch line of every joke we made. I’d be sitting in her den in sweats and a T-shirt and I’d go,
Hey, do you think this qualifies as day-into-evening wear?
And she’d go,
Oh, totally
.

“Day-into-evening wear,” I repeated.

“It’s going to be amazing,” she said, taking my hand across the white tablecloth and holding it tightly. “We’re not going to be dancers, but one day our lives are going to be amazing, Zoe.
Totally
amazing.”

I pictured the two of us sitting here in five years, ten years. Twenty years from now, we would still be less than forty years old. There was so much time for things to happen to us. Fabulous things. Things we’d never dreamed of because we were so busy dreaming of being ballerinas.

“Hey,” I said suddenly, “we have to start planning
your
birthday now.”

“It’s not until June,” Olivia pointed out, as if I’d somehow forgotten when her birthday was. “I think we have a little time.”

“Okay,” I said. “But we’ve got to plan something really
really
great.”

She looked around, taking in the view and the restaurant, then looking across the table at me. “It’s going to be hard to beat today.”

“Yeah,” I said, “today was pretty fun, wasn’t it?”

“It was better than pretty fun, Zoe. It was perfect.” She squeezed my fingers. “Except for one thing.”

Damn. I locked my hands together and closed my eyes. “Okay,” I said. “I’m ready. Break it to me gently. What did I screw up?” Livvie kicked me under the table. “Ouch!” My eyes snapped open. “I thought you’re supposed to be all weak and shit.”

She laughed. “It’s not something
you
messed up. It’s something
I
messed up. It’s your present. By the time I figured out what I wanted to give you, I didn’t have time to make it.”

“You’re
making
me something?”

“Maybe,” said Livvie, holding her hands palms up and shrugging mysteriously. “Or maybe I didn’t have enough time to make it
happen
.” She gave me a meaningful look and then cracked up.

For some reason, her saying that made my eyes fill with tears. Only I didn’t want Livvie to see that I was about to cry, so I just said, “You’re a terrible liar, you know that?”

“Well, you can’t have everything,” Livvie said. “Looks. Brains. Great sense of humor. Tragic cancer story. I’ll trade being a good liar for all of those.”

“It’s a good trade,” I agreed, my voice husky. And I think I would definitely have started bawling if right then the waiter hadn’t come over carrying menus, which he placed on the table in front of us.

“Would you like to hear the specials now?”

I sniffled and wiped at the corners of my eyes with my knuckles. It was stupid to cry. Livvie was right. Everything—from her birthday to the rest of our lives—was going to be awesome.

Totally awesome.

“Sure,” I said, smiling up at him. “I think we’re ready.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

24

I was a little surprised that Mrs. Greco said yes when Jake asked if he could have some people over to the house for his birthday, the last day of Christmas vacation. Olivia was scheduled to go back to the hospital for her third round of chemotherapy at the end of the following week, and the lead item in the news recently had been how bad the flu was this year. If Olivia had any sort of illness—even a cold—they wouldn’t start the chemo until she got better, and now that we were at the halfway mark of her treatment, Mrs. Greco was getting impatient to have it all over with. And not just Mrs. Greco. Olivia, too. We’d spent a lot of the vacation driving around in my dad’s car just the two of us, listening to cheesy music while coming up with destinations that would give us an excuse to keep driving:
Let’s rent a video! Let’s get Pop-Tarts at the Kwik Mart! Let’s go to Weehawken and look at the skyline
. As we’d driven and talked, I’d noticed how Livvie had started saying,
When I’m better we’ll . . 
. or
After this is over I’ll . . 
. It was like the cancer was already in her rearview mirror.

But between the small guest list and his promise that everyone would wear surgical masks if they were in the same room with Livvie, Jake managed to convince his mom that it was okay for him to have a few friends over. So the Sunday before we went back to school, about twenty people gathered at the Grecos’ to celebrate Jake.

Most of the guys were hanging out in the den playing Xbox, though not Calvin, who was still skiing with his family. Olivia and I had made our camp in the den with Lashanna and Mia.

I was sitting on the floor near Livvie’s chair, and even though she was the only one in the room wearing a sweater, it seemed to me that she looked totally normal. Or as normal as any of us, considering we were all wearing surgical masks.

Mia’s parents were freaking because her PSAT scores had been way lower than they’d anticipated. “It’s so dumb,” Mia said, scooping a handful of chips out of the silver bowl on the coffee table. “UCLA doesn’t even care about SAT scores. They care about the brilliant documentary I’ll be sending them.”

“Is that the thing you’re making about the rec center?” My PSAT scores had been the opposite of Mia’s—way higher than my parents expected. When they’d arrived, my dad
had practically gone online to book a hotel for Yale’s parents’ weekend two years hence.