Maybe One Day (7 page)

If you’d asked me on my walk that morning to list ten things I was worried about, I would have started with a pop quiz in history, because I’d only kind of done the reading. If you’d asked me to come up with ten more things, chances are global warming might have made it onto the list. And if you’d asked me to list
another
ten, I might have added something
about bioterrorism, because sometimes when it was late at night and I couldn’t sleep, I worried about how my parents and I would get out of New Jersey if there were a terrorist attack.

But no matter how many multiples of ten you’d added, I just don’t think
I’m worried that Olivia has cancer
would have made it onto one of my lists. Because there are some things you worry about. And then there are some things you
don’t
worry about.

You don’t worry about them because they’re too awful to contemplate worrying about.

We pulled up into the driveway. I followed my mom up the stairs to the front porch and waited while she fished for her keys. She opened the door and flipped on the light. From the kitchen came a whimper.

“Oh my God,” my mom whispered. “We forgot all about Flavia.”

She raced into the kitchen, and I followed her. Flavia was lying on the floor, his paw covering his face as if he were ashamed. A few feet away was a small puddle of pee.

It was my job to give Flavia his afternoon walk. I pictured him waiting for me to get home from school, imagined how confused he must have been when I raced into the house and then raced out again, taking my mom with me instead of him.

I went over and dropped to the floor. “I’m so sorry, Flavia,” I said, putting my arms around him. “I’m so sorry.” For a second
he seemed to resist my hug, and then he gave a little sigh and rested his head on my lap as if to say,
I understand. I forgive you
.

“I just forgot. Livvie’s sick, and I just forgot.” Flavia blinked at me. The last time I’d walked him, I’d gone over to Olivia’s house after. She hadn’t been sick then. Except she had been. I pictured her bone marrow, full of terrifying child soldiers, the kind that were sometimes featured on the front page of the
New York Times
, with their dead eyes and their automatic weapons. They’d been hiding out inside her, their numbers growing for weeks. Months. Maybe years? We were driving in and out of Manhattan and dancing and planning our glamorous futures, and all that time, an enemy deep in Olivia’s DNA was plotting and waiting and getting ready to strike.

“She’s okay, Flavia,” I said. “She’s going to be okay. Really. She is. You don’t need to worry, Flavia. She’s going to be fine.” And then I wrapped my arms around his body and the tight feeling inside me burst and I cried and cried into his soft, warm fur.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

7

I would have said that after Livvie’s diagnosis nothing could shock me, but the next morning, when I pushed open the door to Wamasset High School minutes before the first bell, still bleary-eyed from my night of tossing and turning, it turned out there was something for which I was
completely
unprepared.

No sooner had I entered the lobby than there was an ear-splitting scream, followed by the cry, “Oh my
God
,
Zoe
!”

It was as if I’d tripped some personalized burglar alarm. I stood, frozen, waiting to see where the voice had come from.

The lobby was wall-to-wall people, but the crowds parted as Stacy, Emma, and the Bailor twins flew toward me, hurled their bodies at mine, threw their arms around my shoulders, and—and here I am not exaggerating—began to sob.

“Zoe, it’s so awful!” Stacy dug her chin into my shoulder.
Her ponytail slapped my face.

“It’s just so awful!” Emma echoed. She was clutching my arm and patting the side of my head.

Within seconds, the rest of the cheer squad had gathered around us, all of them damp-eyed, a few with tears running down their faces.

Stacy released me from the hug, then grabbed my hand. “Zoe, we just love you so much.”

The cheer squad loved me?

“It’s true,” Emma asserted, though I hadn’t spoken my doubts out loud. She dropped her head onto my shoulder. “Have you seen Jake this morning?”

“Listen,” Stacy continued, “last night we were talking about doing a fund-raiser for the Leukemia Foundation of America. And I just know that I speak for everyone at Wamasset when I say that we will
all
participate as we work to find a cure for this deadly disease.”

“Are you . . . planning a speech or something?” I asked.

She nodded. “To Principal Handleman. I’m going to propose we do a car wash and blood drive. Do you think Olivia would like that?”

They stared at me, waiting for an answer.

Do not be a total bitch. Do not be a total bitch
.

“Um, yeah, that’s really nice of you guys. I’m sure something like that would mean a lot to her,” I said. My phone buzzed, and I checked the screen.
OLIVIA
.

“I have to go,” I said. I would have been relieved to hear from her anyway, but given my situation, her phone call was doubly welcome.

“Oh my God,” wailed Hailey. “Is that Olivia?”

“Yeah,” I admitted, “it is, actually.” I am not exaggerating when I say a reverent hush fell over the girls surrounding me, as if I had just told a group of nuns that Jesus Christ himself was on the line.

“Hi,” I said into the phone, ducking my head slightly so I wasn’t looking into all those eager faces. “Um, I’m standing here with the cheerleaders.”

There was a pause. Then Livvie said, “Seriously? But you hate those guys.”

I glanced up. Everyone was still staring at me. “Olivia says hi.”

“Hi, Olivia!” They shouted. “Tell her we love her!” a couple of voices added.

“They say they love you,” I repeated.

“Oh,” said Olivia. “Thanks.”

“She says thanks,” I said. Then I made a gesture to indicate I was having trouble hearing what was being said at the other end of the phone and began sliding toward my locker.

“Bye, Livvie!” cried Stacy. She began to wave, and the other cheerleaders followed suit, as if I were a cruise ship pulling slowly away from the dock.

“Zoe, you have to help us plan the car wash!” added
Emma. I nodded and nodded and made the same I-need-to-go-somewhere-I-can-hear gesture and then I was blissfully out of the lobby and on my way down the two hundreds corridor.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “This is really weird. They want to do a car wash.”

“I know,” said Olivia. “Stacy sent me a text last night. And this morning I got an email. She signed me up to receive daily inspirational messages. Today’s was all about the goodness within me.”

“Holy shit! Did you puke immediately?”

Olivia gave a tired laugh. “Already did that.”

“Oh, honey.” I leaned against my locker. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, I’m okay.” She had this brave but tired voice that I’d never heard her use before. It made me want to crawl through the phone and curl up next to her on the hospital bed. The warning bell rang.

“I heard that,” said Olivia. “You’ve gotta go.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Whatever. I’ll be late.”

“Actually, I’m kinda cooked,” she admitted. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“Right,” I said fast. “Of course. I’m sorry. You get some rest. I’ll call you later.”

After we hung up, I opened my locker, but I didn’t take anything out or put anything in. My hands were shaking, and I leaned the side of my head against the cool of the metal shelf. On my locker door was the picture she had taken the first day
of school. We were tan. Our smiles were wide, and I realized Livvie’s dress was blue and white and so was my shirt, almost as if we were wearing some kind of uniform.
You two look like salt and pepper shakers
. That’s what my mom used to say when we both had long hair.
You’re a couple of salt and pepper shakers
. And now here I was, just a stupid, lonely pepper shaker. What was the point of a pepper shaker without a salt shaker? I didn’t even
like
pepper.

“Hey, Zoe.” It was a boy’s voice. I figured it was Jake, but when I turned around what I saw was Calvin Taylor, who, apparently, had decided to acknowledge my existence.

“Oh,” I said. “Hey.” I was still thinking about Olivia’s voice. It had been so frail.

“How are you?” he asked. He was taller than I was, and he leaned down a little when he asked. Maybe because he was such a professional stud I’d imagined him smelling of cologne or aftershave or something equally . . . studly, but he just smelled like the outdoors.

I shrugged. “I’m great. Just, you know, peachy.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Okay, why do I doubt that?”

“Well,” I snapped, “I mean, how do you think I am, Calvin? I suck, okay? I can’t even . . .” Why the hell was I confessing my feelings to Calvin Taylor, of all people? I sighed and turned to the contents of my locker, but I couldn’t register them. Survive a month of school without Olivia? I might as well try to cross the Atlantic Ocean on an empty refrigerator box.

“You can’t even what?” Calvin asked. He’d moved around to stand next to me, but I didn’t turn my head to look at him, just kept staring at the spines of my textbooks and binders.

“I can’t even get my mind around it. I can’t even
see
it.” I lifted my hands and looked down at them. “First I think of Livvie, and that’s horrible. And then I think of her family and I feel so awful for them. And then I feel bad for myself.” I shook my head. “I do. I feel really sorry for myself, okay? Because I’m just that selfish.” I seriously could not figure out what books I needed for first period, and even if I could have, I didn’t give a crap about having them, so I just shut my locker and snapped the lock on it. Then I turned to face Calvin.

He was leaning against the locker next to mine. His snug T-shirt showed off his upper body, and he was wearing fitted but slightly low-slung jeans that made you know he had six-pack abs to match his broad, muscled (but not
too
muscled) shoulders. His hair was damp and sexy-shaggy. He pushed it off his forehead, revealing eyes that were an intense greenish-brown.

Our eyes met. And as they did, I suddenly remembered the joke I’d made to Olivia about his being a vampire.

That’s when I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I kept picturing him lowering his head and sinking his fangs into my neck.
Now you are among the undead, foolish girl! You will worship me as do all the girls at Wamasset. Ha ha ha!

Tears of laughter ran down my face. Uneasily, Calvin
asked, “Did I miss something funny?” but I couldn’t catch my breath long enough to answer him.

“You’re just so . . .” But I was laughing too hard to finish my sentence, and I didn’t even know for sure what I would have said if I could have spoken. “Nothing,” I gasped finally. “I’m sorry. Did you come over here to tell me something?”

He must have decided to write my laughter off as some kind of best-friend-has-cancer-induced hysteria because he continued talking without addressing it. “I just wanted to say . . .” He put his hand on my shoulder. His voice, when he spoke, was calm and soothing. “It’s going to be okay.”

Wait, had he seriously just said,
It’s going to be okay
?

Was that, like, supposed to comfort me?

Wiping tears of laughter out of the corners of my eyes, I reached up and squeezed his shoulder, then attempted to imitate his condescending tone. “Thanks, Calvin. I can’t . . . I can’t tell you how reassuring it is to hear you say that.” I started laughing all over again, and I was still laughing when I turned away from him and headed for physics class.
Livvie
, I wanted to scream,
it’s bad enough that you have cancer. But why did you have to fall for such a cheese ball?

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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

8

I’d been expecting to find Olivia asleep or maybe vomiting into a basin, but when I got to the hospital after school, she was sitting up in bed dressed in a pair of jeans and a plaid button-down shirt we’d gotten together at this old-school army-navy store last year. It was good to see her in regular clothes rather than a hospital gown. Her hair was in a thick braid down her back, a style she hadn’t worn in a long time. Her mom was sitting in the pleather chair next to the bed.

“You look really pretty,” I said to Olivia. She did, too. Young, but pretty.

She gave me a thin smile. “They started this new antinausea medication, so I’m supposedly feeling better already.”

“Well, that’s supposedly good news,” I said. “Hi, Mrs. Greco.”

“Hello, Zoe.” Mrs. Greco looked way more tired than she had the day before, and I wondered if she’d had as bad a night’s sleep as I had. “Would you Purell your hands, please?” She smiled at me, but it was a smile I’d never seen on Olivia’s mom’s face before. There was something brittle under it, like any second it could crack and something sad and scared and ugly would poke through.

I went over to the Purell dispenser, hearing Livvie and her mom talking in whispers behind me. When I turned around, Mrs. Greco was still smiling that creepy smile. “Okay, girls,” she said. “I’ll give you some time. But half an hour. That’s it.” She fussed briefly with Olivia’s bed, and I noticed that someone had brought Olivia’s comforter from home. “Well, that’s better,” said Mrs. Greco, having fixed whatever was bothering her. “Okay. I’ll see you both in a bit.”

As soon as her mom left, Olivia sighed and dropped her head back against the pillow. “She is driving me crazy.”

“She’s freaked out,” I said, making my way over to stand by the bed.

“I wish she’d stop smiling for a minute,” said Olivia. “It’s freaking
me
out.”