Maybe One Day (15 page)

Livvie had a beautiful bathroom. Technically it wasn’t hers; it was down the hall from her room, and there was a bedroom next to it, but that was a guest room, so she was the only one who really used this particular bathroom. It was very small, barely big enough for a sink, a bathtub, and the toilet, but there was a stained-glass window and these old fixtures and a huge antique mirror over the sink. When we were in fourth grade, without asking permission, Livvie and I hid out in her bathroom and shaved her legs, and before Livvie was allowed to wear makeup, she and I would come up here and experiment, slathering our faces with contraband lipstick, mascara, rouge, and eye shadow that we’d borrowed from girls at NYBC, and then frantically washing it off when her mom would call us to dinner.

The weird thing was, this almost felt like one of those crazy afternoons from elementary school. First of all, we couldn’t figure out what to do at all. We tried just shaving the hair, but that was impossible—it was too long, and the razor kept getting stuffed with hair and then jamming or pulling on the strands so hard it hurt. The third or fourth time I tried and failed to shave off more than a strand or two at a time, Livvie started giggling.

“You seriously suck at this, you know?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had a PhD in head shaving.” Laughing, I handed her the heavy black razor. “Here. You do it.”

“I can’t see the top of my
head
,” she said, pushing the razor away. “Just . . . try again.” But it was impossible. Finally I asked Mrs. Greco for scissors, and together Livvie and I started cutting. Once we got into it, there was something satisfying about the work, the sharp snap of metal on the long, delicate strands.

“When you think about it, they’re just dead cells,” I pointed out. The more hair we cut away, the bigger Livvie’s eyes looked, exactly what had happened to me. Her ears were small and delicate, which I’d never noticed before.

“Yeah,” said Olivia. She had a towel draped over her shirt. There was hair everywhere—on the counter, in the sink, all over the floor. My hoodie was covered with long blond strands.

The only place there weren’t long hairs was on Olivia’s head.

“We could leave it like this,” I offered. A spiky, somewhat uneven layer of hair covered her skull. “I mean, I’d even it out and everything.”

Olivia stared at her reflection. At first I thought she was considering what I was suggesting, but then I saw that she was looking into her own eyes and wasn’t seeing her head. “No,” she said, dropping her eyes to the counter and feeling around for her dad’s electric razor underneath all the hair. “It all needs
to come off.”

Twenty minutes later, we were done. Olivia’s scalp was shiny and smooth, her forehead running up to the top of her head without any way to tell where her face ended and her scalp began. A small blue vein showed just above where her hairline must have been. Her eyes were even bigger than they’d been when her hair was short, but overall she looked small and fragile. We made eye contact in the mirror.

“So,” she said. “This is me bald.” Her voice shook a little, but it didn’t break.

I pulled on a lock of my hair and held the scissors to it. “I think I should join you. Sisters in baldness.”

But Livvie’s hand shot up. “No!” she said.

“I don’t care,” I assured her, not letting myself think about whether or not I cared. How could I care? “We’ll grow our hair back together.”

She took the scissors from my hand. “It’s only hair, anyway.” She looked at herself in the mirror, staring hard at her reflection. “Dr. Maxwell said I can go to school next week if I wear a surgical mask.” She paused briefly. “Bald with a surgical mask. Look! There goes that girl with cancer.” Her eyes welled up again, but then she shook her head, forcefully and took a deep, audible breath. “I’m going to get a hot pink wig.”

“Fantastic!” I said quickly. “I love it already.”

Livvie surveyed the hairy bathroom. “What a mess.”

“You go lie down,” I told her. “I’ll clean it up.”

Olivia hesitated for a second, but then she said, “Okay. I am kind of tired.”

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked quickly. “I could clean it up and just go so you can sleep.”

She shook her head. “I want you to stay. If I fall asleep, just wake me, okay?”

“Okay,” I promised.

Hair apparently has a life of its own. No matter how many times I went over the bathroom with a broom and a wet paper towel, there was still hair everywhere, almost as if each individual strand split into a dozen more every time I turned my back. Finally Mrs. Greco came by the bathroom. When she saw Olivia’s hair all over the place, she pressed her lips together into a tight, thin line, but she didn’t say anything and she didn’t cry. Then she disappeared, and a minute later she came back with the vacuum.

“How is she?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Mrs. Greco put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m so glad she has you.”

I was scared I was going to start bawling. But I swallowed hard. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m lucky to have her, too.”

“We all are,” her mom said. “I thank God for her every day.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. How could you thank God for Olivia when God was the one who’d made her sick?
That was my problem with religion. It didn’t make any sense.

When I went into Olivia’s room, she was curled up on her bed, fast asleep. Even though she’d told me to wake her, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I went over to her desk. On it I placed a thick lock of Olivia’s hair that I’d salvaged from the bathroom.

The room was dimly lit, but the hair in my hand seemed to gather whatever light there was, glowing—just as it had on Olivia’s head—with an intensity that almost made it seem alive. I glanced from the hair to Olivia, her shiny head all that was visible of her body, which was buried under her comforter.

I wished I could think of what to say to her. Maybe if I could have, I would have woken her up. But all I could think was,
It doesn’t matter
. And even though I knew that was true, I also knew that it wasn’t.

I grabbed a pen from the Lucite holder on the desk and slid a piece of paper out of the top drawer of her desk.

For the memory box. Call me when you wake up. Love ya
.

xoxo, Me

I put the note next to the hair. Then I slipped out of the room and downstairs, leaving the house without saying goodbye to anyone.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

17

“Don’t forget to get your car washed on Saturday! All proceeds go to fight leukemia! Bake sale and car wash!”

There was a phalanx of cheerleaders around the front entrance to the building, all of them wearing their uniforms and handing out bright pink flyers. Stacy was standing on the bottom step, and when she saw me coming up the walk, she gave a yelp of joy, ran down, and threw her arms around me. Then she stepped back and handed me a flyer.

“‘Save a life: Get your car washed,’” I read out loud. I looked up at her. “Who knew that was all it takes?”

“What?” she asked. Then she laughed. “Oh, I get it. Well, you know . . . it’s just meant to get people psyched and stuff.” When she blinked, her sparkly blue eye shadow shimmered in the early morning sun.

“No, I know.” I shook my head. “Sorry, I’m just a bitch sometimes.”

Stacy looked genuinely surprised. “No you’re not.” She gave me another hug. “Don’t forget to bake something for the bake sale! And just wait until you see our cheer at Friday’s assembly.” She stepped back and kicked one leg high in the air, then placed her hands firmly on her hips. “
Goooo, Olivia!
”

There was something beautiful—almost balletic—about Stacy’s sharp, precise movements. “Hey, that was really good,” I said. “You’re a really good cheerleader.” I meant it too. For what might have been the first time in my entire life, I was talking to Stacy Shaw without being even a tiny bit sarcastic.

Stacy shrugged almost shyly. “I know. Well, gotta go.” She waved the flyers in my direction. “Can’t go home holding any of these.” Then she turned back to the crowd. “Save a life! Get your car washed!” she cried.

If I believed in that kind of thing, I might have seen some link between what the cheer squad did for Olivia at Friday’s assembly and the text I got from her twenty minutes later. Was it possible that their shouting her name and kicking their legs and waving their pom-poms had led to the four miraculous words that appeared on my screen halfway through math?

MY COUNTS ARE NORMAL!

Immediately I asked Mr. Schumacher if I could go to the bathroom.

“Livvie, that’s amazing!” I said as soon as I was safely ensconced in the girls’ room. I knew she’d been getting stronger, that her counts were going up. But normal was huge. Normal meant . . .

“If it’s warm tomorrow, Dr. Maxwell said I can go to the car wash,” she crowed.

I screamed and pounded on the tile wall. “You’re free!”

“Is that dumb?” Suddenly Livvie sounded embarrassed. “Maybe it’s dumb for me to want to go. I mean, it’s kind of a stupid event, right?”

“God, Livs, it’s not dumb. It’s an event in your honor. Of course you should go.”

“Did I tell you that Stacy’s mom sent over dinner for my family a couple of nights while I was in the hospital?” Olivia asked.

“She did? Wow that . . . that was really nice of her.” To my embarrassment, my first thought was,
Did
my
mom think to send dinner over to the Grecos?

Livvie was already on to a different subject. “My mom made an appointment for me to get my wig on Saturday morning. So at least any little kids at the car wash won’t run screaming when they see me.”

“No one’s going to run screaming from you, Livs. You’re beautiful even when you’re bald.”

“Yeah, well, just imagine how beautiful I’ll be when I’m rocking that pink wig!”

It was obvious just from her voice how much happier she was now that she was out of the hospital. Why did she have to go
back
for more chemo? It was so awful I could have cried. But then I remembered what my dad had said about how anticipating bad things wasn’t helpful to Olivia. Here she was all excited to come to the car wash on Saturday afternoon, and here I was upset about her having to go back to the hospital soon.

I was the antifriend.

“Livs, you are
so
going to be rocking that pink wig,” I agreed, and when she laughed—really laughed, even though it hadn’t been much of a joke—I felt grateful to my dad for pointing out the obvious.

Team Livvie needed to look on the bright side.

While Livvie and her mom went into Manhattan to get her wig, I headed to Newark to teach dance class. I’d come up with some steps for the recital, which had been surprisingly fun to do. It was harder than I’d thought, not so much trying to fit together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle as trying to create a jigsaw puzzle out of thin air. So I was excited to show the girls what I’d done and to see if any of them had ideas for building on what I’d choreographed.

But even though I’d been looking forward to teaching the
class, when I got there, nothing went the way I’d planned. It was hard to get them to focus, and I ended up getting impatient with them. I didn’t want to lose my temper, so instead I made a few snarky jokes to get them to stop fooling around. At one point Aaliyah kept doing cartwheels while she was waiting for her turn to glissade across the room, and finally I snapped, “I guess
some
people don’t know the difference between tumbling and ballet.” I laughed right after I said it, but she could tell I was irritated.

At least she stopped doing cartwheels.

But even if the cartwheels stopped, the class didn’t improve. No one seemed excited about coming up with their own steps, and everyone was fidgety. It felt like they could tell how much time I’d put into preparing and they were trying to let me know me what a waste it had all been. I thought of how obedient the students at NYBC were—we’d have just as soon stripped naked and run through the streets of Manhattan as messed around during a class.

The more I resented how they weren’t taking class seriously, the more frustrated I got, and the more frustrated I got, the worse they behaved. It was looking like they’d be performing twenty minutes of standing still when that recital date rolled around.

Luckily, before I actually started screaming at the girls that they didn’t deserve to study steps that dancers had been working their asses off to perfect for centuries, the bell rang.
Everyone started packing up, and I crossed the room to shut off the music, rolling my eyes to myself as soon as my back was turned on the class.

Right when I hit stop, I felt someone throw her arms around my waist. It was so startling I gave a little yelp, and then I looked down and saw the top of Imani’s head. Her whole body was wrapped around mine; she’d even wound her feet around my calves.

“Thanks, Zoe,” she said. “That was really fun.”

Surprised, I hugged her back, a little bit of my frustration dissolving. “Really?”

She arched her neck so she could look up at me, her expression puzzled. Then her face suddenly split into an enormous smile. “I get it,” she said. “That was a joke.” She laughed. “You’re the funny one,” she explained.

Now it was my turn to be confused, and not just because my
Really?
had been genuine. “What do you mean?” I asked, unraveling her from my body and kneeling so our faces were level.

“You know, with Olivia.” She smiled and shrugged. “You’re the funny one.”

“Then what’s Olivia?” I asked. I poked Imani lightly in the side and made my voice deep and my face mock stern. “The serious one?”

“Not exactly,” said Imani. I had the feeling she was debating whether or not to add anything, but she just gave me
one more quick hug and a wave, then ran out of the room to join her friends.

Washing my hands in the bathroom after class, I was still thinking about what Imani had said. Or hadn’t said. If I was the funny one, what was Olivia?