Maybe One Day (29 page)

I slid the chair back, then headed out of the office and down the hall. I was already crying by the time I hit the parking lot.

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33

Olivia did come home from the hospital on Sunday. But her homecoming was nothing like it had been the day she came home from her two rounds of chemotherapy.

First of all, she was still weak. Like, seriously weak. She could sit up for brief periods of time, and she could walk to and from the bathroom, but that was all. As her mom settled her into bed, I thought of how Livvie and I had shaved her head the first time she’d come home from chemo. It was almost impossible to imagine her doing all the things she’d done that day. I doubted she could even sit on a stool for a minute now, much less for all the time it had taken to cut and shave her hair. When Mrs. Greco said it was time for me to leave, I didn’t even bother to object. You didn’t have to be Olivia’s mother to know she needed her rest.

As I pulled open the front door, I literally walked into Jake, who was coming in. Calvin was standing right behind him.

“Hey, Zoe,” said Jake.

“Hey.” He hugged me, and I hugged him back, hard. Ever since the bone marrow transplant, I felt this intense gratitude to Jake. Without him, Olivia wouldn’t even be alive.

“It’s freezing out. You want a ride?” he asked. He was carrying a plastic bag from Driscoll’s Pharmacy. It was overflowing with the small white paper bags that prescriptions come in, and I thought of Livvie struggling to swallow all the pills in them.

I shook my head. “I feel like walking.”

Jake slipped inside as I held the storm door open for him. “You going in?” I asked Calvin. His cheeks were bright with cold.

“I could walk you home,” he offered.

I let the door close behind me. It was cold and silent outside, and I pulled him out of the light that spilled onto the front porch from the foyer and pressed him up against the side of the house. For a second his lips were cold, and then they warmed up. His tongue was gentle, but it was still enough to make me dizzy. I grabbed hold of his shoulders, squeezing his body through the soft material of his down jacket.

“We’re not walking,” he whispered, breaking away from a kiss.

“We’re not?” He had his hands buried in my hair, and I
tried to kiss him again, but he nodded toward the house. “Jake said she’s feeling pretty rocky.”

The streetlight flicked on, throwing my shadow over Calvin’s chest. “It’s okay,” I assured him. “She’s going to be okay.” I kissed him again, hard, and he kissed me back.

But for the first time, his kiss wasn’t quite enough to shut out what was happening in the house we were leaning against.

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part 3

Spring

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34

As we neared day sixty, Olivia started getting noticeably stronger. Her hair began to grow in, a soft blond fuzz that made her look like a baby chick. And her face, which had been so gaunt and pale—almost as if it were made of wax—filled out a little, the old, healthy Olivia showing through ever so slightly, just like her hair.

On Thursday after school—day fifty-eight—I came in and found her sitting at the kitchen table. She was wearing a long-sleeved blue T-shirt with white piping at the neck and wrists. Thin as she was, she could have been a healthy girl hanging out in her kitchen and talking on her cell. If you’d put her in one of Mia’s black ensembles, the buzz cut wouldn’t even have been out of place. She just would have looked like a
serious
badass.

She gestured for me to sit down at the table with her. “Right. . . . Great. . . . Yeah, I think that would be totally possible. . . . You too. . . . Thanks.”

“That was Mrs. Jones,” she said after she’d hung up. “She asked if I thought I’d be up for teaching the dance class again next year. I said I had to talk to you about it.”

I burst out laughing. “What, you think I’m going to want to keep it for myself?”

“I don’t know.” Livvie gave me a wicked smile. “I thought we could do it together.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Um, why do I feel like I’ve had this conversation before?”

“You’ve done an
amazing
job without me. Just imagine how great it—”

“Olivia, I have
not
done an amazing job without you.” I sat down next to her, putting my bag on the floor. “I’ve done a mediocre-to-crappy job without you. A nine-year-old girl
dropped out
because I was so mean to her.” It was true. After Charlotte had left, she’d never come back. Mrs. Jones had tried to reach her, but with no luck. And while I was definitely getting the girls to march to my tune as we learned the steps to a dance for the recital, the dance class, which I had the feeling had once been the high point of their week, had begun to feel like something we
all
dreaded.

“Look, you don’t have to answer now,” said Olivia. She picked up her spoon and dipped it into the bowl of rice pudding
in front of her. “I just told Mrs. Jones that I would probably do it.” She took a bite and swallowed. “But I would really,
really
rather we do it together, okay? So, you know”—she pointed her spoon at me—“think about it.” She stretched luxuriously and then laughed. “I feel so not bad today.”

“Is not bad the same as good?” I asked.

“It’s close enough,” she said.

Calvin wasn’t with Jake when he pulled into my driveway Saturday morning, so it was just me and Jake in the car. We ended up getting into an argument about this really lame rap he was listening to. Or at least
I
thought it was lame. He thought it was awesome.

“It sucks, Jake,” I told him. “Seriously. It’s just noise.”

“Oh, is that your professional opinion?” he demanded, laughing.

“It is. Now . . .” I took out my phone and looked for a song to play for him. “Aha!” I said when I got to “Pauvre Lola.” “
This
is a good song.” I connected my phone to the car stereo. “It makes you want to move. It’s
music
.” As soon as the song came on, I grew antsy. It was impossible to sit still while that beat grabbed your body and moved through it.

Jake rolled his eyes, but by the time the chorus came on for the second time, he was tapping the steering wheel to the beat. We pulled into the parking lot, and I saw Calvin’s car by the door. It made me feel good to know that even if I wasn’t
with him, at least he was close. Jake put his arm around my shoulders, and together we walked toward the building.

Suddenly Jake started laughing. “Damn you, Zoe. Now I can’t get that song out of my head.”

“Really?” I asked. In lieu of an answer, Jake did a dance move somewhere between a moonwalk and an electric slide. “Dude,” I said, “that is just sad.”

“It’s a miracle!” Jake cried, jumping up and down. “A white guy can dance! A white guy can dance!”

And that’s when I got my idea.

After we did our warm-up, I made the announcement. “We’re going to play a game,” I said.

“What game?” asked Aaliyah. Her voice was suspicious, like she couldn’t actually believe I was going to do something as fun as an actual game.

“It doesn’t have a name yet. I just made it up.”

“Really?” asked Imani. She giggled. So did a few of the other girls. Then they suddenly looked nervous—like maybe I was going to yell at them—and stopped.

This was what I’d done: made dance class a place where you got in trouble for laughing.

“Really,” I said. I walked to the center of the room. “Here’s how it’s going to go. I’m going to do a move. Then I’m going to call someone’s name, and that person is going to do the same move. Then she’ll call someone
else’s
name, and that person will
do the move. The trick is to do the move and call someone’s name as fast as you can
without
being sloppy about your form.”

“It’s like hot potato,” said a girl named Desiree. I couldn’t remember Desiree ever speaking before. My mnemonic for her was
Desiree does not desire to discourse
.

“Exactly!” I agreed. “It’s just like hot potato.”

I plugged my phone into the speaker and hit play. Serge Gainsbourg filled the room. “What’s this?” asked Imani.

“Like it?” I asked. The song popped and rolled. I could see a couple of the girls start moving their hips.

“What is it?” asked Lourdes, still suspicious.

“Oh my God, will you just dance?” I laughed and turned the music up really loud so they couldn’t ask any more questions.

“Plié,” I called out, and then I did one and yelled, “Lourdes.”

Lourdes panicked and stared at me. “Plié!” I repeated, doing another one. Quickly she dropped her knees. “Who’s next?” I prompted her.

“Oh. Imani!” she said.

“Louder!” I urged her.

“Imani!” she shouted.

Imani did a plié and threw it to Anna who threw it to Rashad who threw it back to Lourdes who threw it to Mirabelle. When every girl in the room had gone at least once, I yelled, “Two chaînés.” Then I quickly did the turns, holding first position briefly when I was finished.

“No fair! That’s too hard!” Lourdes said.

“I can’t hear you,” I lied. “Lourdes, two chaînés.”

The turns she did weren’t great, but she did them. When she finished, she held her position as I had and called to Rashad.

You could feel the energy in the room, the girls nervous and excited, holding themselves still as they waited for their names to be called but also moving a little, the energy of the music impossible to resist. I knew how they felt. Each time it was my turn to call a move, I got excited, my body spinning and leaping with a pleasure I hadn’t felt since before Ms. Daniels had called me into her office at NYBC and brought my life crashing to an end.

No. It had been longer than that. As I moved and spun and leaped, it seemed to me that I hadn’t enjoyed a dance class this much since before NYBC had accepted me.

When the class was finished, everyone was flushed. There was an unfamiliar energetic buzz in the room.

“That was
awesome
!” I told them. I clapped, and a few of the girls clapped too. I’d actually gone over by about five minutes—the music must have been too loud for me to hear the bell. “You guys, I’m really sorry, but it’s time to go.”

Aaliyah did a line of jetés from where she was standing to where I was standing. Then she hugged me. She only came up to my waist, so her ear was pressed against my belly button. “You’re a great teacher, Zoe,” she said. “I love dance class!”

I knelt down so I could hug her back. “Seriously?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “You look so surprised.”

“I guess I am,” I admitted. I sat on the floor and looked up at her. “I thought I was too mean to be a good teacher.”

“Well, you’re
kind
of mean,” Aaliyah admitted. “But you’re kind of nice, too.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “I appreciate your honesty, Aaliyah.”

“Okay,” she said. “See you next week.”

“See you next week,” I said.

Everyone
, as they left, said, “See you next week.”

And they all seemed happy about saying it.

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35

I went home and showered and changed. It was such a habit now. I had the feeling that in a few weeks, when Olivia wasn’t immunosuppressed anymore, it would be weird
not
to have to try to make myself sterile before going over to her house. My mom and dad were on their way to some lecture, and they gave me a ride to Livvie’s.

As I strolled up Olivia’s front walk, I considered how I might use what we’d done in class today for the recital. We could do something where one or two girls at a time did a move and then maybe that move was picked up by other girls until everybody was doing a move in unison. Maybe we’d plan out some of the routine and some of it we’d improvise so the performance would have a little of the energy of today’s class. I could still feel the buzz, still see the top of Aaliyah’s head
as she put her arms around my waist. The girls had worked hard, but they’d had fun, too. It had actually been
fun
. I was glad that in the fall Olivia and I would be teaching it again. It would be weird to never see any of those girls again.

It would be sad.

As I rang the bell, I found myself thinking,
I’ve missed dancing
. Not NYBC dancing. Not will-Martin-Hicks-think-I’m-good-enough dancing.

Listening-to-music-and-moving-my-body dancing. Dancing-for-fun dancing. Dancing because it felt good.

Just dancing.

But maybe I didn’t have to miss it. Maybe I could still—

The door opened, and I found myself looking at Mr. Greco. He was wearing a pair of khakis and a blue oxford under a wine-colored sweater, which was about as casual as Mr. Greco believed in getting.

His answering the door gave me a sudden flicker of anxiety. If you’d asked me why, I don’t think I could have put my finger on what it was exactly. But Mr. Greco’s answering the door was . . .
wrong
. It was just wrong. He pretty much never answered the door unless the Grecos were having a party. Certainly he’d never answered the door for me.

“Hi,” I said, and it was then that I noticed that—behind his glasses—his eyes were bloodshot.

“Hi, Zoe.” He put his hand on my shoulder, and a tear rolled down his cheek.

Olivia’s father was crying.

Olivia’s father was standing in the front hallway of his house and he was crying.