Maybe One Day

by Melissa Kantor

  It was official: junior year had begun.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  2

  In Olivia’s backyard was an enormous beech tree that had to be about a hundred years old. In it was what we call the fortress.

  The fortress was a . . . thing her dad and Jake built in the tree a few summers ago. It was supposed to be a place that would lure the twins, Tommy and Luke (they’re eight now), outside for hours of fun so they wouldn’t drive their mom batshit with their running around in the house.

  Everyone called it the fortress, but really it was just a platform. The plan was for it to be a real fort, with walls and a ceiling and everything (I remember looking at some pretty complicated architectural drawings her dad commissioned), but then Jake made the football team and wasn’t so into building it and Tommy and Luke said a tree fort was babyish and now Livvie and I were pretty much the only ones who used it.

  At five o’clock, we climbed up for what we felt was a much-deserved break. It didn’t seem possible that we had so much homework already, but after an hour and a half of working in Livvie’s kitchen, neither of us had put a dent in our assignments. It was only the first day of school. How were we ever going to survive junior year?

  We lay on the wooden planks of the fortress, half trying to get our heads around the amount of work we had to do, half watching Jake and Calvin Taylor toss a football back and forth.

  “I can’t believe they come home from football practice and play football,” I said. We were on our stomachs, our chins resting on our hands.

  “Zoe, we danced for, like, six hours a day, remember?”

  I ignored her question, which was rhetorical anyway, and we watched Jake and Calvin in silence. Calvin leaped up to catch the ball Jake had just thrown. For a second he seemed to hang in the air before gently dropping to earth, almost as graceful as a dancer.

  “I cannot get over how hot Calvin Taylor is,” said Livvie.

  I eyed him lazily. He and Jake were both wearing shorts and no shirts, and their skin was shiny with sweat. Jake wasn’t fat, but compared to Calvin, who was long and lean, he was definitely thickish. You couldn’t see it from up in the tree, but Calvin has a beautiful face that’s saved from being too pretty by his nose being a little crooked from where it got broken during some football game.

  “I swear to you,” Livvie continued, “we had a moment.”

  I groaned. “Are you still talking about that ice cream run you guys did? Livvie, that was, like, a month ago. Besides, you’d have to murder all those cheerleaders and then climb over their dead bodies to get to him.”

  Livvie smacked her lips exaggeratedly. “It might be worth it.”

  I must have been the only girl at Wamasset who didn’t think Calvin Taylor was God’s gift to our zip code. He moved here late—the summer before his sophomore year—and immediately made varsity football and every girl’s top-ten list. He and Jake started hanging out a lot, and at first I didn’t think he was so bad, but then I found out what an asshole he really was.

  That year, my freshman year, I had this . . . well, I guess you couldn’t say boyfriend since we went on exactly one date. His name was Jackson, and his sister was in my and Olivia’s class and he was a sophomore like Jake and Calvin. Livs and I went to a Halloween party at his sister’s house, and Jackson and I ended up hanging out a little, and the next night he called and asked me out on a date. Like a real date—a dinner-and-a-movie date. The whole thing would have been awkward enough (what with our barely knowing each other and his parents driving us to the mall), but then when we got to the theater (we were going to see the new James Bond movie), pretty much the entire football team was there. Most of the guys tried to be cool about it, just all, “Hey, Zoe; hey, Jackson,” and kind of pretending they didn’t see us, but Calvin kept giving us these knowing looks while we were waiting on line to buy snacks. And then he came over to our seats during the previews with a bag of popcorn that he said was “special delivery from the guys for the lovely young couple.” Jackson laughed, but I seriously wanted to punch Calvin. It was hard for me to even think about whether I was glad Jackson was holding my hand during the movie because I was so busy hating Calvin, and later, when Jackson and I were waiting for his dad in this darkish part of the parking lot and Jackson started kissing me, I could barely concentrate because I kept expecting Calvin to jump out from between two parked cars and be all “Surprise!” Jackson’s family moved away the day after our date (okay, it was more like a month later, but between football and dance we never found a time to go out again), so I guess you could say Calvin Taylor not only ruined my first date and my first kiss but also my first (and only) relationship.

  The idea that my best friend might be falling for my nemesis was more than I could take.

  I rolled my eyes. “Calvin’s the worst, Livs. Don’t be another notch in his belt.”

  She was still watching him and Jake. “I’m telling you I’m, like, bizarrely drawn to him.”

  Thinking a different tactic might be more effective, I got to my hands and knees and crawled toward Olivia. “He’s so handsome and magnetic. And he lives in that big mansion up in the Estates. Beware! Maybe the reason you’re so drawn to him is because he’s really a vampire! Raarh!” When Livvie laughed, I growled, baring imaginary fangs, then rolled onto my back and stared into the leaves of the tree. I could barely feel a breeze, but their shimmering proved that there was one.

  “Liv?”

  “Mmm?”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “About what?” She yawned. “Sorry. I’m so tired. Did I tell you I almost fell asleep in physics? I jerked awake at the last second, but I think Mr. Thomas is onto me.”

  “About my life. What should I do with my life?” I sat up and looked over Olivia’s enormous Victorian house and across the hedges at the edge of her yard. Up and down the block were other houses, and in each of the houses were people. What did they do with their lives?

  “Teach the dance class with me,” said Olivia, and she rolled onto her side and leaned her head on her hand. “The girls would love you.”

  “No dance,” I said shaking my head. It was amazing to me how . . . accepting Livvie had been of our being cut from NYBC. She taught a ballet class once a week, organized the spring recital for her dancers, then led a dance camp for two weeks over the summer. She even kept the photo from our first dance recital on her desk—the two of us smiling at the camera, our pink tutus squashed because we’re standing so close together. I, on the other hand, in an attempt to escape my failed dance career, had joined (and then quit) the soccer team, ripped the posters of ballerinas off my walls, thrown out all my dance paraphernalia, and forbidden anyone from uttering the word “ballet” in my presence. I couldn’t help envying her a little, but Livvie had always been the one to take things in stride.

  Why should this be any different?

  I watched her face, seeing her make the decision not to push me on the dance thing. “And you’re sure you don’t want to do soccer?” she asked.

  “Positive.” The girls on the soccer team were awesome, but everything about the sport had felt so wrong. I’d gone out for the team because I wanted to get as far away from dance as possible, but instead of making me forget dancing, soccer had only made me miss it more. I remembered standing on the soccer field, all that sky and grass and the feeling that without ballet, there wasn’t enough gravity to keep me connected to earth.

  A leaf dropped onto my foot, and I picked it up and tore a thin strip from the edge. It was incredible how our bloody, blistered feet had healed so beautifully over the past year. My toes shimmered with the pale pink polish I’d chosen when Livvie and I had gotten pedicures on Labor Day.

  Livvie stretched her arms over her head, then reached for my ankle and patted it. “Just tell me why you won’t do the dance class,” she sai
d sleepily.

  I tried to put into words exactly how I felt. “I just . . .” I tilted my head and studied the canopy of leaves over our head, as if the answer might be written there. My explanation came slowly. “I thought . . . it was going to be my whole life, Livs. It was my whole life. And now it’s . . . what? A hobby? That feels so wrong.”

  Livvie squeezed my foot to show she understood. “You could do something else at the rec center, you know? It wouldn’t have to be dance. There’s the tumbling class.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “You aren’t seriously hooking me up with the cheer squad, are you?”

  “The kids in the class are adorable,” she said, not answering my question. Then she yawned again.

  I turned away and snorted. “I’m not even dignifying that suggestion with a response.” I thought about how freshman year she and I had satisfied our community service requirement with the performances of The Nutcracker that NYBC did for the city’s public schools. Last year, I’d spent half a dozen afternoons cleaning up garbage at a nearby nature preserve with the soccer team. It was weird how far-reaching extracurricular activities were. Just because you did one thing, a whole bunch of other things—who you had lunch with, where you did your community service, what parties you went to—fell into place.

  If you didn’t do something, on the other hand, you had no place to fall into.

  I was so busy thinking about how I needed a place that I almost didn’t hear Olivia when she asked quietly, “What do you love, Zoe?”

  I made my voice deep and mock-seductive, glad to be distracted from my depressing train of thought. “You, baby!”

  But Livvie didn’t laugh. After a minute, I looked over at her. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing rhythmically.

  It had been a long day, and though the sun was low, it was still warm out, warm enough that I could imagine how easy it would be to drift off into sleep. Still, no one fell asleep just like that. Was she faking it?

  I nudged her calf gently with my foot, but she didn’t stir. She really was asleep.

  Wrapping my arms around my legs, I leaned my cheek on my knees, thinking about what Livvie had asked. It was too embarrassing to admit the truth, like confessing you loved a guy who didn’t know you existed.

  Still.

  In my head I heard the music start, felt the grip of my toe shoes, the butterflies in my stomach. The tension in my legs intensified, as if I were a racehorse eager for the starting gate to be lifted. For years, every moment I wasn’t dancing was a moment I was waiting to dance. Dancing had been how I knew I was alive. How I knew I was me.

  Without it, I somehow . . . wasn’t.

  So there was only one answer to Olivia’s question.

  “Dance,” I whispered, so quietly that even if Livvie had been awake, she wouldn’t have heard me. “I love dance.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  3

  Mostly to get my parents off my back I went to the first meetings of the yearbook and the newspaper staff. My mom kept telling me I should try out for the play, but one look at the drama club was enough to let me know that it was the last place I wanted to spend my free time. The actors at Wamasset had all the bitchiness of the NYBC dancers, and the idea that I’d spend my free time with a bunch of backstabbers not dancing was laughable. I might have been lost, but I wasn’t insane.

  But at least the drama club’s single-mindedness felt familiar. All the other activities—Model Congress, yearbook, Science Club—just seemed like things people were doing to pass the time or to make colleges accept them. I couldn’t see building my life around the passage of a fake Senate vote or the taking of the perfect photo of the volleyball team. It all seemed so . . . pointless. If I was going to do something, I wanted to give my life over to it, to love it, to wake up in the morning for it like I had for dance.

  Was I seriously going to get out of bed every day for Chess Club?

  By the time Saturday morning rolled around, it was starting to feel like my extracurricular activity was convincing my parents how busy I was without any extracurricular activities. My mom got up early and went to the gym, but I told her I had too much homework to join her. When I made the mistake of wandering out to the back deck, my dad asked if I wanted to help in the garden. I told him I had homework, and he asked if I could at least walk Flavia before I started working. I did, then sat in the kitchen—just out of his line of vision—with a cup of coffee cooling on the table in front of me. The thought of spending my Saturday morning writing an essay on imagery in the opening chapters of Madame Bovary was more than I could bear.

  I am doing nothing, I thought to myself. If anyone asks me what I did this weekend, I can say, I literally did nothing, and it won’t be that annoying thing where people say literally when they mean figuratively.

  Then I got Olivia’s text.

  coming 4 u 4 lunch. no thank u helping of cheer squad.

  A “no thank you helping” was what you got at Olivia’s house if her mom was serving something you didn’t like. For example, if she were to say, “Can I offer you some calf brain?” you might say, “No, thank you.” And then she would put a tiny bit of calf brain on your plate, because Mrs. Greco believed a person should try everything at least once.

  In the past, when Olivia had invited me to go to lunch with her and the cheerleaders, I’d always taken a pass, but if I was still sitting at the kitchen table when my mom got home from the gym, my only options would be starting my essay or discussing with my parents (once again) my future.

  The choice was clear. I got to my feet.

  Mrs. Greco’s right, I thought as I dumped out the remaining coffee from my cup and put the mug in the dishwasher. You should try everything once.

  Except, I quickly discovered, having lunch with Stacy Shaw, Emma Cho, and the rest of the Wamasset cheer squad. Because even the tiniest calf had a bigger brain than they did.

  We were seated in a horseshoe-shaped booth big enough for eight. Emma was between me and Olivia. Immediately after we ordered, Emma turned to Olivia, gave her a hug, stroked her hair several times, then rested her head on Olivia’s shoulder with a sigh. “I wish you were my little sister,” she said. “You are just so awesome.”

  Despite her general tolerance for cheerleader behavior, Livvie was clearly taken aback by Emma’s petting her as if she were a cat. She didn’t say anything, though, just sat there looking uncomfortable.

  I turned my head and asked Emma, “Is that your way of saying you wish you were married to Olivia’s brother?”

  “Oh, snap!” said Stacy. She reached across the table to high-five me as the other members of the cheer squad laughed. Emma looked embarrassed, and I felt bad. Maybe I’d needed to rescue Livvie, but did I have to do it by being a total bitch? It wasn’t like Emma had ever done anything to me. Still, there was Stacy’s hand, hovering halfway between us. I guess I could have not high-fived her, thereby alienating both Emma and Stacy in one fell swoop, but I chickened out and gave Stacy a limp high five back.

  “You guys, aren’t those kids sooo cute?” wailed a sophomore named Hailey, thankfully changing the subject. Since sliding in next to her in the backseat of the car, I’d observed that every word that came out of Hailey’s mouth was a cry of some kind. It was as if she lived in a state of constant emotional suffering so great she could not contain it, not even to order her salad with dressing on the side.

  “They are,” Olivia agreed. She stretched her arms over her head and rolled her neck. The gesture was graceful, but tired. It made me wonder if what I’d thought was discomfort earlier was really exhaustion.

  “You guys, I am literally crying for those little girls,” said Emma, who, for the record, was not actually crying. “Their lives are, like, really hard. One of the new girls in the class told me that her brother’s in jail.”

  Sitting in the two chairs a
t the end of the table were identical twins on the cheer squad, seniors named Margaret and Jamie Bailor, who as far as I could tell had received less than their fair share of the squad’s IQ. One of them said, “That’s why it’s really good that we’re teaching them tumbling and stuff.”

  “Seriously,” agreed whichever twin had not made the initial point. “They need something in their lives. Tumbling is so much better than drugs.”

  That night we lay side by side, Livvie on her bed, me on the trundle bed. The sprinklers were twirling a soothing rhythm outside her window.

  “Okay,” she said, “I sense today’s lunch did not help us make strides toward your teaching tumbling with the cheer squad.”

  A few glow-in-the-dark stars were still stuck to her ceiling from where we’d put them up in middle school. We’d planned to do an exact replica of the constellations in the northern hemisphere, but halfway through the Big Dipper we’d just started sticking them up any which way.

  “An excellent deduction,” I said, yawning.

  It was quiet for a minute, and then Livvie yawned also. “It’s so crazy that we’re juniors. Remember when we were freshmen? The juniors were older than Jake! We’re now older than people who were older than Jake used to be.” We both laughed at how nonsensical the last part of her sentence was.

  I thought about freshman year, watching the juniors and seniors stand at the doors to the parking lot, swinging their car keys as they waited to go out to lunch with their friends. They’d seemed so . . . grown-up. So sure of themselves. I rubbed my forehead as if to remove the image of those confident upperclassmen from my brain and said, “I feel like people are going to expect us to know things we don’t actually know.”