She was halfway up the stairs. I barely managed to get across the foyer before I heard the door to her room slam.
I was sure she would have locked her door, but when I tried the knob, it turned, and then I was in her room. She was standing by the far wall, her back to me.
“Liv, I—”
“I really don’t want to talk to you right now,” she said, not even bothering to turn around.
“I know, but if you’ll just let me explain. It was a horrible mistake.” I was panting from my sprint up the stairs. “I told you how drunk I was. It didn’t mean anything. I swear.”
“Maybe it didn’t mean anything to you, but it means something to me.” Her voice was shaking.
“I’m so, so sorry, Livs.” I took a tentative step toward her. “I know you like him and—”
She spun around. “You think this is because I like him?” Her eyes blazed with fury. “I don’t even—I had a tiny crush on him, okay? The point is that you lied to me.”
“Olivia, I—”
“And not just once. Not just when I asked you about what happened at the party. Constantly. You have this whole secret . . . thing with Calvin.” She shook her head, amazed anew by what she’d just discovered.
“Okay, I do not have a thing with Calvin!” I shouted. Then I lowered my voice. “We fooled around. Once. When I was drunk.”
“And you haven’t spoken to him since? Is that what you’re telling me?” She folded her arms across her chest.
“Olivia.” I looked at her like, Give me a break, but when she didn’t speak, I said, “We go to the same school. We see each other. I am not claiming that I haven’t exchanged a single word with Calvin Taylor in the past two months.”
“You are such a liar, you know that?” Glaring at me, she made her voice high-pitched and enthusiastic. “‘Oh, Olivia, I love you so much. Oh, Olivia, I’d do anything for you. Oh, except tell you the truth.’”
I started to cry. “You know that isn’t true. You know I’ve never lied to you.”
“You lied to me every day. Every time you looked at me it was a lie.” She was crying also.
“That is so not fair. What happened with Calvin was a mistake.”
“You felt sorry for me. You pitied me.”
“That is not true.” I emphasized each word as I spoke it. “That is not fucking true.”
She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. “I feel like such an idiot,” she said quietly.
“Olivia, please.” I took another step toward her. “You have to believe me. I’m so sorry. Please, Olivia.” I was crying hard now, panicky tears that made it hard for me to think straight.
Olivia’s face was hard. “Get out of here.”
“Please. Livvie.” I held out my hand to her.
“I swear, Zoe, if you don’t get out of my house this second I am going to call my father and he’ll come upstairs and make you get out.”
The thought of Mr. Greco throwing me out of his house on Olivia’s orders was more than I could take. I started sobbing so hard I could barely breathe, but my tears had no effect on Olivia. She just kept watching me with the same cold stare. Finally she said through gritted teeth, “Get. Out. Of. My. House.”
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25
After I left I called Olivia’s cell all afternoon, but she never picked up. Out of desperation I finally called the landline, but Mrs. Greco told me Olivia was sleeping. I couldn’t tell from her voice if she was lying or not.
For two days, I kept trying to reach her and she kept not responding. I considered going over to her house, but imagining her mom blocking my entrance and saying Olivia wasn’t up for visitors stopped me cold. On the third day, I forced myself to stop trying to contact her. What if my constant texting and emailing and calling was just making her madder?
Some song my dad likes has a line that goes, “The waiting is the hardest part.” The guy who wrote that definitely knew what he was talking about because I would have seriously rather done just about anything than sit on my ass waiting for my phone to ring. But that’s what I did for almost a week: I waited. I even started leaving my cell at home because it made me so crazy to sit in class staring at it all the time. I kept seeing Jake around school, and I thought about asking him how Olivia was doing, but I was embarrassed. If he didn’t know Olivia and I were in a fight, my asking him how she was would definitely tell him. And once he knew we were fighting, he’d want to know why.
It was bad enough that Olivia knew what a lying sack of shit I was. Did the rest of the Grecos have to know also?
“Hey,” said Mia, coming up to my locker Thursday after school. “What are you doing now?”
“Nothing,” I answered. “Less than nothing.” Because that was what waiting was starting to feel like—less than nothing.
“Perfect.” She bent down and picked up my bag from the floor. “Come get a latte with me before I have to start editing?”
“Oh . . . no,” I said. I turned and gave her an apologetic smile. “I mean, sorry. Thanks. But I can’t.”
“Yeah,” said Mia, leaning against the locker next to mine. “I can see how doing nothing is better than getting a latte with your awesome friend Mia.”
I looked at her. Mia seriously wanted to spend time with me. Why? Why would anyone want to spend time with me?
“Are you okay?” she asked, seeing the expression on my face.
“Yeah,” I said, and immediately burst into tears.
The bleachers were empty, and sitting on the highest one we could see the entire campus spread out beneath us. It was amazing how getting just a few feet up made everything on the ground look so tiny.
“Wow,” said Mia when I finished telling her what had happened. “That really sucks.”
“Yeah.” I leaned forward and wiped my nose on my jeans.
She dug into her bag and handed me a napkin. “Here. I think it’s more or less clean.”
“Thanks.”
Mia surveyed the trees on the edge of the lawn. “Maybe . . . is it possible you just really like Calvin and that’s why you fooled around with him? That doesn’t have to have anything to do with you and Olivia, does it? I mean, obviously the timing sucks, but falling for a guy when your friend is sick doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“You left out the part about my falling for a guy my sick friend likes,” I said, stuffing the dirty napkin in my pocket.
“Oh, come on, Zoe.” Mia pursed her lips in disbelief. “She said herself she doesn’t give a shit about him. She’s mad because you lied to her. But she’ll get over that.”
“How can you be so sure?” I snapped. “Why can’t she just be mad at me forever?”
“Zoe, you’re a great friend, okay?” Mia said patiently. “I’ve seen what a good friend you are. And you’re basically an honest person who just made a bad call.”
“You don’t know that.” I shook my head frantically from side to side. “You don’t know that I’m basically an honest person.”
“Fine, you’re a lying sack of shit. Feel better now?” She leaned back on her elbows.
I looked down at the empty football field below us. The white lines were faded, but in some places you could still make out ghostly numbers in the grass. “I lied to you.”
“Oh yeah? What, you secretly bombed your PSATs?”
“No,” I said sulkily. “But I told you I decided not to dance anymore. That’s not what happened. I was cut. I wasn’t good enough, and they asked me to leave the school.” I turned to glare at her. “So there you go. Make your case for what an honest person I am now.”
“I don’t get it,” said Mia, meeting my gaze. “You thought I’d like you better if you were a quitter than if you weren’t good enough?”
I looked back at the field. “Something like that.”
Mia laughed. “Jesus, give peop
le a little credit, will you?” She stood up. “Look, I’m leaving because I’ve got to get to the editing room, not because I’m so horrified by what you’ve just told me that I can’t stand to sit here with you anymore. I think it’s too bad that you thought I’d judge you for getting kicked out of dancing school, but I can see why it would be embarrassing for you to tell someone you barely knew at the time what happened. I can only hope—and this conversation gives me hope—that if the same thing happened today, you would feel you could be honest with me.
“Now”—Mia leaned over and picked up her enormous black leather bag—“this fight with Olivia is awful. But I feel confident that you’re going to work it out. Because while I have not known you nearly as long as Olivia has, and while you and I are not one one-thousandth of the friends you and Olivia are, I can promise you that I would forgive you something like this because you are a really awesome person and a really awesome friend.”
I could feel my eyes getting damp again. “Thanks,” I said. I smiled up at her. “You are a really awesome friend too.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s my superpower.” She headed down the bleacher stairs, but before she got to the bottom, she turned back. “You should go home and do something you like to do,” she called up to me. “Make yourself feel better.”
“That’s the problem with me,” I yelled. “I don’t like to do anything.”
Mia put her hand on her hip. “I thought you liked to dance.”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging one shoulder. “Maybe.”
“Try it,” she said, and she waved good-bye to me.
There was no call from Olivia when I got home. I practically wasn’t even surprised not to hear from her anymore. After I walked Flavia, I tried doing homework, but it was pretty much impossible to focus on sines and cosines.
Our last year at NYBC, Livvie and I were friendly with a French girl whose parents had a super-swanky apartment near the UN. She’d invited us to one of their parties, and we’d gotten dressed at her place, listening to the French singer Serge Gainsbourg and dancing around her enormous bathroom, slathering heavy, dramatic makeup on our eyes and putting our hair into elaborate twists.
Now I plugged my phone into my speakers and put on the same song we’d played that afternoon. My parents weren’t home, and I blasted it as loud as it would go. I started moving, not dancing so much as occupying the music. I remembered how we’d bopped around Nadia’s bedroom that long-ago afternoon wearing nothing but our bras and underwear, so used to getting changed in front of one another that we barely noticed we were more or less naked. Everything had been so beautiful—the three of us dancing and laughing, Nadia singing along with Gainsbourg, me and Olivia pretending to sing along even though neither of us knew French.
I pressed my hands against my eyes, seeing in the blackness behind my palms the perfection of that day. Now, as I stood in my bedroom, the music was so loud it drowned out thought. Spinning around with my eyes closed and my ears throbbing, I could almost pretend that I wasn’t dancing by myself.
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26
Friday morning, as I was walking up the steps to school, I felt a hand tap my shoulder. I turned around and found myself staring at Calvin.
This was the closest we’d been to each other since the night we’d made out at Mack Wilson’s party. It was so weird that he was at the center of this huge fight Olivia and I were having, and yet we barely knew each other. I hadn’t even talked to him since before my birthday, that day when he’d asked me why I was fucking with him.
“Hey,” he said. “Can I talk to you?” He seemed nervous.
I was suddenly weirdly nervous too. I thought about what Mia had said about my maybe really liking him.
Was it true? Did I like Calvin?
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.” We were five minutes from the warning bell, and pretty much every Wamasset student was heading into the building. Calvin turned into the crowd and, like a snowplow, pushed a path for me out past the main steps and gravel walkway and over to one of the stone benches that lined the lawn. When we got there, he didn’t say anything, just sat down and stared at the pavement between his feet. I stood facing him. There was a puddle with a thin layer of ice, and he tapped it lightly with his heel until it cracked.
Eyes still on the ground, he asked, “Something’s up with you and Olivia, isn’t it?”
It was the last thing I’d expected him to say, and I definitely didn’t know how to respond. Did he know that we were fighting? Did he know why we were fighting?
I kept my eyes on the puddle also. “What makes you ask?”
He laughed. “Zoe, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been over at the Grecos’ without your being there. Suddenly I haven’t run into you once in almost a week? Did you guys have a fight or something?”
“You could say that,” I said cautiously. I glanced at him.
He was staring up at me, squinting into the sun behind my back. “Zoe, when’s the last time you spoke to Olivia?”
“Why?” I was suddenly nervous, but now it wasn’t because of Calvin. What was going on here?
He reached forward and took hold of my fingers, pulling me a couple of steps closer to him. “Zoe, I have to tell you something. About Olivia.”
How could Calvin Taylor possibly know something about Olivia that I didn’t? “What do you mean?”
“I . . . They . . . Shit.” He let go of my hands and rubbed his thighs, gazing out over the lawn. “When they did her blood work, you know, those checks they do?”
“Yeah, I know.” My heart was racing. Whatever he was about to tell me had nothing to do with my fight with Olivia.
His voice was quiet. “They found some leukemia cells. The results came back yesterday morning.”
There was a long, long silence. I felt waves of panic crashing over me, and I dropped down on the bench next to Calvin. The important thing was to remain calm and focused.
“What . . .” I cleared my throat. “What does that mean, exactly?”
Calvin turned his head to look at me. “Dr. Maxwell met with the family yesterday afternoon. They’re going to do a bone marrow transplant. Jake’s a match for her. But I think you already know that.”
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“Olivia went into the hospital last night. They’re giving her chemo. It’s what they do to try and get her into remission before the transplant.”
“Oh God,” I said again. I pressed my fingers hard against my lips to try to get them to stop quivering.
The warning bell rang, but neither of us made a move to leave. Calvin put his arm around me. I realized as he did that my whole body was shaking. “Work it out with her, Zoe,” he said finally, his voice quiet. “Whatever it is, work it out.”
By second period everyone knew that Olivia was going to have a bone marrow transplant. People kept asking me how Olivia was doing, and despite Mia’s advising me to tell the truth, each time someone came up to me and asked about her, I just lied. “She’s, you know, she’s okay,” I said. “She’s doing as well as you would expect.” Every time I opened my mouth I fucking loathed myself. If only I’d had the balls to tell people the truth. I don’t know how she’s doing. She hates me, okay?
It was halfway through lunch when Stacy and Emma came over to where I was sitting with Bethany, Lashanna, and Mia. They were both wearing their cheer uniforms, and Stacy put her arms around me and instantly started weeping.
“Oh my God, Zoe, I’m so scared for Olivia,” she said. The enormous bow in her ponytail bobbed against my chin.
“And for Jake,” Emma added. Her nails were long and square, and when she wiped at a tear on her cheek, I was surprised she didn’t take out her own cornea. “They’re going to take a needle and go into his bone!”
“Seriously?” asked Mia. She looked to
me for confirmation, and I nodded. “Jesus.”
“When are they doing it?” Lashanna asked me.
Of course she asked me. Why wouldn’t I know? Why wouldn’t I know all the details of my best friend’s illness and treatment unless it was because I had totally betrayed her and she fucking loathed me?
Instead of answering, I mashed my straw wrapper into a ball.
“Next week. Tuesday morning,” Stacy told Lashanna.
From across the cafeteria, a guy called, “Yo, Stacy!” and both Stacy and Emma looked up. Then Stacy answered, “Just a sec!”
She turned back to the table. “Olivia’s going to get this huge dose of chemotherapy. More than she’s ever had before. It’s so everything gets killed.”
Emma picked up the explanation. “Jake was telling us that after she gets his bone marrow, she’ll have a whole new immune system. He said his cells are going to be like the American soldiers on the beach at Normandy.”
“Wow,” said Lashanna. “That’s incredible.”
“We’ll see you later, ’kay?” Emma said. As she and Stacy walked away, Stacy called over her shoulder to me, “When you talk to Olivia, tell her I love her and I’ll call her later.”
Clearly she was one more person who had no idea that I probably wasn’t going to talk to Olivia later.
“Are you okay?” asked Mia as soon as they were gone.
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean no. I mean . . . I don’t know.” Suddenly I could not sit in that cafeteria for one more second. I stood up abruptly, sending my chair sliding over the smooth floor. “I’ve gotta go.”
“Where are you going?” Lashanna asked.
“You want us to come with you?” asked Mia.
“You can’t,” I called out to them without turning around.
Then I left the cafeteria, walked down the hallway, crossed the lobby, and exited the building.
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