Maybe One Day (21 page)

“So are we ever going to acknowledge what happened at Mack’s party?” Calvin interrupted me.

I forced a laugh. “Um, is no an option?”

Calvin snapped his fingers and made a disappointed face. “Oh, too late. I already wrote about it in my diary.”

“Ha-ha.”

Another pause.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Were you just drunk? Was that it?”

Just say yes
.

Just say, “Yes as a matter of fact, I
was
just drunk.
”

His eyes bored into mine. I looked away and studied the shelf of trophies set into the wall next to me as if I really gave a shit that we’d been the 2012 regional fencing champions.

“No,” I said finally. Reluctantly. “I wasn’t just drunk.”

“Then why—” He turned away, slapped his leg in frustration, and turned back. “Why are you fucking with me?”

“I’m not fucking with you,” I snapped, taking my eyes off
the trophy case and looking at him. “What does that even mean, ‘Why are you fucking with me?’ That’s like—that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yes it does. Fucking with someone is”—he started enumerating his points on his fingers—“flirting with that person—”

“I never
flirted
with you!” I corrected him.

“And thanks for letting me finish. It’s
dancing
with someone.” He counted the second point off on a finger. “It’s making
out
with someone.” He looked at me as if waiting for me to object, and when I didn’t, he made his last point. “And then
ignoring
that person.”

“You ignored me, too!” I reminded him.

“Zoe, the last words you spoke to me were ‘Go fuck yourself!’ I’m sorry, what exactly is the appropriate follow-up to that?”

“What am I supposed to say, Calvin?” I dropped my hands to my sides. “I had a lot to drink, okay? I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear? I’m sorry.”

He stared at me. “I know you’re going through a tough time,” he said finally. “I don’t need an apology.”

“So what do you
want
from me?” I threw my arms wide to show how exasperated I was.

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head and wagged his index finger back and forth. “The question is: What do
you
want from
me
?”

I gave a little laugh, as if what he’d just said was the
stupidest thing in the world.

Calvin waited for me to do more than laugh at him, and when I didn’t, he shrugged. “Well, when you’re ready to tell me, I’m ready to hear it.”

Just as he finished talking, the bell rang. It was like he’d
timed
it or something. People started spilling out of classrooms and into the building through the front door. I only needed a minute to figure out some amazing, clever, brilliant retort, but before I could come up with one, he was gone.

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22

When I called him after school, Mr. Greco instantly understood what I wanted from him.

“You need me to help you pull it off,” he said as soon as I told him that I was calling because Olivia had asked me to plan something special the two of us could do for my birthday.

“Exactly,” I said, relieved that this was going more smoothly than I’d hoped.

“We’re going to have to finesse it with Adriana. She’ll be nervous about letting Olivia go out.”

“Right.” I was walking home. I’d been too thrown by my exchange with Calvin to try and call Mr. Greco again until now.

“We’ll need Dr. Maxwell’s approval, of course. What are you planning?”

I looked around me. The neighborhood Olivia and I lived in wasn’t one of those awful developments where every house is identical, but it was definitely suburban. There was nothing cool for us to do here. “Something in Manhattan,” I said.

There was the slightest pause, and then Mr. Greco said, “Sounds a bit vague.”

“I realize that.”

Was I crazy or did this moment call for a
sir
?

In the background, I could hear his other line ringing. “I can’t go to Adriana and Dr. Maxwell with ‘something in Manhattan.’”

“No, of course not,” I said quickly.

“Well, you think of a specific plan and get back to me,” he said briskly. “I’ll help you in any way I can.” He hung up.

“And
that’s
why I always feel like an asshole when I talk to you!” I shouted into my phone.

Well, at least he hadn’t said no. And he was willing to help.

Still, even if he would drive us and pay for stuff, the central question remained:

What the hell were we going to do?

Three days before my birthday, I still hadn’t come up with a plan. When I came downstairs, I sat across the table from my dad, eating a bowl of cereal and staring at the back of the
New York Times
, which he was holding in front of him.

“Way to be social, Dad.” I didn’t know why I was criticizing
him for not talking, since I didn’t feel like making conversation either. All I wanted was to figure out what the hell I was going to do with Olivia Saturday afternoon. She’d asked me about my plans almost daily, and I’d kept assuring her things were shaping up nicely. I’d implied the wow factor was going to be
pretty sweet
. I might even have used those exact words: pretty sweet.

Oh, did I say pretty
sweet?
I meant, pretty
lame.

My dad slid the sections of the
Times
that he wasn’t reading down the table toward me. “Here,” he said. “Educate yourself.”

I didn’t bother to pick up the paper, just kept staring at the back of the page he was reading in a kind of zoned-out way. There was a full-page ad for NYBC’s
Nutcracker
.

God, Livvie and I had loved dancing
The Nutcracker
. It was exhausting and crazy and by the last performance we never wanted to hear the word
snowflake
for as long as we lived, but still. You got to be
onstage
. You got to
dance onstage
. Every year, our parents and grandparents would come, and after the show they would come backstage bearing elaborate bouquets. We’d started dancing our very first year with NYBC. Last year had been our first year not doing a performance.

I banged my head against the table. “Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.”

“I know,” my dad said. “The world is going to hell in a handbasket. Luckily, it’s the Christmas season. We can all celebrate peace on earth and goodwill toward men. Except for all the war zones out there.”

It was my dad’s saying the word
celebrate
that gave me the first inkling of an idea. Slowly, I lifted my head off the table and stared at the ad, which featured a woman’s leg from the knee down, her toe shoe tightly laced up her calf. Next to her foot, miniature mice and children danced around a Christmas tree.

Olivia would love to see
The Nutcracker
again. Our moms had taken us every year from the time we were three. We’d only stopped seeing it when we’d started dancing in it.

Of course, it would be impossible for her to go. The company performed to packed theaters. Nothing would be more dangerous to Olivia than a confined space with hundreds of people in it. And it wasn’t as if I was in a position to make an audience of theatergoers put on surgical masks.

Unless.

There
were
a handful of performances that weren’t going to be sold out. That would be empty, in fact. Or nearly empty.

But for us to get to watch one of them, I would have to make another phone call, one to a man far scarier than Mr. Greco.

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23

“Are we going to sit here all day? Because that’s not so much a celebration as it is, you know, incredibly boring.”

“All in good time, my dear,” I assured Livvie. “All in good time.”

It was Saturday afternoon and we were sitting in the Grecos’ living room with her parents, her grandparents, Jake, and the twins. My nervousness about pulling off this escapade had made my road test (which I’d passed) a breeze, and I’d been so distracted by the details of my plan that it had been hard to feign excitement about the new phone my parents had gotten me. All I’d thought about for almost a week was whether or not Livvie was going to like what I’d planned. Livvie wasn’t one to ask for something lightly. In fact, looking back over more than a decade of friendship, I couldn’t think of
one other major thing she’d asked me to do for her.

So I’d figured this had better be good.

As per my request, Livvie was dressed up, wearing a dark blue dress she’d bought for the last NYBC gala we’d attended. Mrs. Greco felt “young girls” shouldn’t wear black, so almost every time Livvie and I went shopping for a fancy dress for her, she ended up with a dress in the darkest blue she could find. The one she was wearing now was taffeta, about ten shades darker than navy, and it had a scoop neck and a three-quarter-length skirt.

Maybe because I’d gotten used to it, Livvie’s wig looked more natural to me. I tried to imagine how she would look to a stranger, and I couldn’t see how anyone who didn’t already know would guess she was sick. And right now she wasn’t
that
sick. I’d been there two days ago when Dr. Maxwell had come to say good-bye, and she’d sounded really optimistic about how well Olivia was doing.

“Your numbers are excellent,” Dr. Maxwell had said. “Your counts are coming back up beautifully. We’ll do some more blood work next week.”

“What are you looking at when you do blood work?” I’d asked from the radiator, where I was sitting and admiring the gorgeous view of the river. If UH had had apartments instead of hospital rooms, they would have sold for a fortune. “If her counts are basically back to normal, what are you checking for?”

“Minimal residual disease,” answered Dr. Maxwell. “All it takes for leukemia to come back is one leukemia cell. We want no detectable leukemia, and with modern technology, we can find one cancerous cell in a million. We want to
not
find those cells.”

“If they find them,” Olivia explained, “they have to change my treatment. I might get different medicine.” She toyed with the strap of her overnight bag, which was packed and sitting on the bed next to her. “Or I might need a bone marrow transplant.” The last sentence was spoken in a near whisper.

“You’re not going to need a bone marrow transplant,” I said, getting up from the radiator and going to stand next to her. “So let’s . . . we don’t have to think about it. I’m sorry I even asked.” There was silence again.

Gently, Dr. Maxwell asked Livvie, “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Totally.” She looked up at Dr. Maxwell and changed the subject. “So, you going to tell me all about this amazing afternoon Zoe’s planned for me? I know she had to get your permission.

Dr. Maxwell smiled like the
Mona Lisa
. “I’m sure the experience will be quite . . . satisfactory,” she promised Livvie. Then she said good-bye to both of us and left the room.

Now I saw Mr. Greco, who’d been watching the street, suddenly nod at something beyond the window and say, “It’s time, girls.” He stood up and walked out of the house.

I got to my feet. I was wearing a magenta wraparound silk
dress and a pair of heels. The combination of Livvie’s whole family sitting around in the living room waiting to see us off and our both being so dressed up made me feel like we were going to the prom.

“What’s going
on
?” Livvie demanded as she accepted the coat Jake was holding out for her. She was trying to sound frustrated, but it was obvious how excited she was.

Just as I went to open the door, Mrs. Greco cried, “Wait!” Then she threw an extra scarf around Livvie’s neck. “You take it very,
very
easy, okay? I don’t want you overdoing it.”

“Yes, Mom,” said Olivia, hugging her mother. Despite her thick hat, scarf, and coat, she looked beautiful. Mrs. Greco hugged me, also.

“Take care of her, okay? Don’t let her get tired out.”

“I won’t,” I promised. I pushed open the front door and stepped onto the porch. Mr. Greco was in the driveway, standing next to a black Mercedes-Benz and talking to a man in a chauffeur’s uniform.

“Holy cannoli!” Livvie whispered at my side. Her eyes were enormous with amazement.

“A limo seemed tacky,” I explained, relieved that the first part of my birthday extravaganza seemed to be having the desired effect. “Black Mercedes says, ‘I’m important. But don’t notice me.’”

We were both giggling as we headed to the car.

The lobby of the NYBC theater was nearly empty. As we walked through the echoing, marble and glass space, I forced myself not to think of all the dozens of times we’d seen performances here.
Been
in performances here. Livvie clutched my arm. Her face glowed with excitement, but then she turned to me and asked with concern, “Is this killing you? Being here?”