“Yeah, but then someone else would have to drive us.” Right there, in my opinion, was the difference between the city and the New Jersey suburbs: You might be a cool driver at seventeen in NJ, but you weren’t cool enough to sit behind the wheel on the other side of the bridge until you were eighteen. “Olivia’s mom makes her totally batshit, and my parents wouldn’t understand why they couldn’t just come to the restaurant with us.”
“Could Olivia’s dad drive you?” Bethany asked.
“Possibly.” Mr. Greco was definitely the most likely candidate to support an extravaganza. And I meant that literally. Even if I could (miraculously) think of some amazing celebration, how was I going to pay for it? And even if I could figure out how to pay for it, how was I going to get Mrs. Greco to let Olivia go? Now that Olivia’s chemo was over and it was just a matter of waiting for her counts to come up so she could come home from the hospital, Livvie’s mom was already talking about “when this is over” and “as soon as Olivia’s had her last round of chemo.” This was not a woman who was going to be eager to let her daughter do anything risky. I crumpled up the wrapping from my sandwich and stuffed it into my bag.
“If he said it was okay for us to do something,” I said, speaking the idea as I had it, “Olivia’s mom would have to go along with it.” I remembered how he’d gotten her mom to back off the surgical mask thing on the day of the car wash.
“How very 1955,” observed Mia. She shoved her bag under her head and lay down, closing her eyes against the sun.
I toyed with the strap of my backpack. “Maybe I should go call him now,” I mused out loud.
“What if you guys went out for dinner someplace swanky, only you went really early so it wouldn’t be crowded,” Lashanna suggested as I got to my feet.
“Early bird special,” Mia said. “Way to celebrate.”
Lashanna flipped Mia the bird.
“Yeah, I’m going to go call him,” I announced. I said bye and headed inside. I was nervous about calling Mr. Greco, and I didn’t want to do it with Lashanna and Mia watching. It wasn’t like he wasn’t perfectly polite, but he always made me feel that I was wasting his time.
Olivia said that was because he thought in billable hours.
The lobby was deserted. Most people who weren’t in the cafeteria or in class were outside on the lawn. I googled the number of Mr. Greco’s firm and dialed it, but as I put my phone to my ear, I saw two guys walking down the hallway toward me. I was about to duck into the alcove where the school’s only pay phone was located, but then I saw that one of the guys was Calvin.
I froze, my cell pressed to my ear.
Ever since the party, I’d been successfully avoiding him. We passed each other in the hallways sometimes, but there were always tons of people around, and he never said anything to me and I never said anything to him. The few times we’d both been in the Grecos’ house at the same time, I’d always managed to slip out the door without having to talk to him.
It was extremely helpful that Olivia’s house had two staircases.
But there was no staircase in the Wamasset lobby. Calvin saw me, hesitated, then said something to the guy he was walking with. Whoever it was turned down the science corridor.
Alone, Calvin walked down the hallway toward me.
“Thompson, Miller, Greco and Stein.” The woman’s voice was chipper and professional.
I hung up without saying a word.
“Hi,” he said when he was just a few feet away. He was wearing an old white oxford that was partially untucked. I forced my eyes away from where the shirt met his jeans.
“Hi,” I said.
Silence.
“So I just hung up on Mr. Greco’s office.” My voice was pitched about an octave higher than normal.
Calvin didn’t say anything, and I continued, speaking very quickly. “I’m calling him because Olivia wants to do something special for my birthday, and I can’t figure out what to do. I thought maybe we’d go out for dinner, but it would have to be really early to avoid the crowds. Mia was like, ‘Early bird special, way to celebrate.’”
Nothing.
I traced my thumb over the screen of my phone. “I don’t even know if Livvie wants to go out for dinner. Maybe—”
“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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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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“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?”
I shook my head. The last thing she needed was to be worried about me. “It’s nice to be back,” I lied. Or sort of lied.
As we stepped into the theater, the velvet seats and carpet muffling our steps, I had a sudden memory, so sharp it made me gasp. Livvie turned to me, concerned.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said quickly, not wanting to get into it. “I’m fine.”
There were a few people sitting together almost exactly in the middle of the theater, but otherwise, it was empty. Lots of dance companies let people watch dress rehearsals—some even sell tickets to them—but Martin Hicks, the director of NYBC, was a total fascist about anyone attending his dress rehearsals. He didn’t even let members of the company attend unless they were his special pets. In fact, that was how you often found out who was in Mr. Hicks’s favor: someone let you know he or she had been invited to sit with him at a dress rehearsal.
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