“Maybe you just have to show them who’s the alpha dog,” Mia suggested. “Maybe they’re waiting for you to take control of the class.”
“But I don’t want them to hate me!”
“I don’t think that can be your priority,” said Mia. “You have to get them to take you seriously, and if they hate you . . . well, too bad.”
I thought about that. Maybe I was being too easy on the girls. I kept asking them what they wanted to do. Letting them goof off. When Olivia ran the class, she didn’t do that. She was firm with them. Maybe that was what I needed: to be firm with them. I turned around, shut my locker, and jammed the lock onto it.
“Okay,” I said to Mia. “No more Mr. Nice Guy”
Saturday morning, I was like a drill sergeant, and the girls seemed to be responding. When I told them to line up, they lined up. When they started giggling about something, I told them to stop it immediately, and they did. Twenty minutes into class, we’d gotten through more than we normally got through in the whole hour. I made a promise to myself: today, they’d either learn the steps I’d come up with or they’d come up with their own. No excuses.
Just as I had that thought, Charlotte ran into the room. She was often late, but she’d never been this late before.
“Why are you late?” I demanded.
“It’s not my fault,” she said. “The bus was late.”
I thought about Mia’s saying the class needed an alpha dog. Maybe accepting Charlotte’s lame excuses for her lateness was just one more way I’d been too easy on everyone.
“Look, Charlotte,” I said, giving her my hardest stare, “you need to leave your house earlier. Because the bus being late is not an acceptable excuse for you being late.”
Charlotte looked at me for a long minute. I waited for her to say something snotty or defensive or mean, so I could show her that I wasn’t going to take that kind of talk anymore. But she didn’t say a word. Instead, she did the one thing I never in a million years would have expected.
She turned and ran out of the dance studio.
When Mrs. Jones called me into her office as I was walking out of the building, I’d actually forgotten all about what had happened with Charlotte. I figured the director wanted to know how Olivia was doing, so that was the first thing I told her about when she closed the door behind me.
“Olivia’s supposed to come home tomorrow, but I don’t know if it’s really going to happen. It’s like something always goes wrong.”
“Yes.” She settled into her chair and gestured for me to sit in one of the chairs facing her desk. “I spoke to Olivia’s mother earlier this week. I understand the bone marrow transplant has been a very frightening procedure.”
“Oh,” I said, sitting down, “I didn’t realize you were in touch with her.”
“Yes, I am,” Mrs. Jones said. “I actually called you in here on another matter entirely today.” She folded her hands on the desk in front of her
“Okay,” I said. I still wasn’t worried. After Charlotte had left, we’d actually had a really productive class. Maybe not the happiest dance class in the history of the world, but a productive one.
“How much do you know about Charlotte Bradley?” asked Mrs. Jones quietly.
“Charlotte Bradley?” When she said the name, I had no idea who she was talking about at first. Then I realized. “Oh, Charlotte. I don’t . . . I didn’t know that was her last name.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” Mrs. Jones made a tent with her fingers and rested her chin on them. “I spoke to Charlotte earlier today as she was leaving the building. I gather she was late to your class and you chastised her?”
“That’s right.” I leaned forward. I felt bad about how Charlotte had run off, but I wanted Mrs. Jones to understand that it wasn’t like she’d been late once and bam! I’d come down on her like a ton of bricks. “I didn’t mean to frighten her away from class or anything like that, but she’s late a lot, and, I mean, I think it’s important for the girls to be on time. I’m trying to get things a little more . . . organized.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Jones. Her tone didn’t indicate whether she thought my plan to get organized was a good one. “Did you know Charlotte is nine years old?”
“Nine?” I couldn’t believe it. She was taller than the twins. “I thought she was at least . . . I don’t know, twelve or thirteen.”
“No, she’s nine, all right.” Mrs. Jones’s expression didn’t change. We could have been talking about the weather. “She’s nine years old, and she’s got two younger sisters. Two sisters who she’s often made to babysit.”
“You can’t babysit when you’re nine,” I informed Mrs. Jones. “That’s, like, not even legal. Once, when I was ten and I was sick, my dad wanted to go out and get me juice, but he said he couldn’t leave me alone, so he waited until my mother got home.”
Mrs. Jones was giving me a certain look. At first I wasn’t able to place it, but then I realized she was looking at me the way I generally looked at Stacy Shaw. She was looking at me like, You are the stupidest person in the entire world.
“Look, Zoe,” Mrs. Jones said, leaning back in her chair, “that is a beautiful story about your parents, whose every waking moment is no doubt given over to your happiness and comfort. But Charlotte’s mother does not see the world that way. She does not particularly see herself as obligated to look after her daughters, do you understand what I am saying? She drinks too much and she smokes too much and it is my firm belief that before too much more time passes, those three beautiful little girls are going to be taken away from their mother, which, it is sad to say, is no doubt going to be the best thing that could happen to them, and that is definitely not saying much.
“But that little Charlotte is so strong and so brave that every Saturday morning she manages to get here to come to your dance class.” Mrs. Jones got to her feet and walked slowly around the desk. “She takes the bus by herself. And sometimes she first has to find someone to leave her sisters with, because she feels more of an obligation to those little girls than anyone has ever felt for her. And she comes because she has made a commitment to this class.” She was standing directly in front of me, and she put her hands on the arms of my chair. “So when you complain about her being late, why don’t you take a minute and think about what it takes for her to get here at all?”
There was a pause. Then, without my responding, Mrs. Jones stood back up. “Now, I know you are feeling bad about what I’ve just told you, and I’m sorry for that. Sometimes it’s hard to hear when we’ve done something wrong. But we can learn from our mistakes. And I sincerely hope you will learn from this one.” She’d made her way back to the other side of her desk. “You may go now.”
I slid the chair back, then headed out of the office and down the hall. I was already crying by the time I hit the parking lot.
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Olivia did come home from the hospital on Sunday. But her homecoming was nothing like it had been the day she came home from her two rounds of chemotherapy.
First of all, she was still weak. Like, seriously weak. She could sit up for brief periods of time, and she could walk to and from the bathroom, but that was all. As her mom settled her into bed, I thought of how Livvie and I had shaved her head the first time she’d come home from chemo. It was almost impossible to imagine her doing all the things she’d done that day. I doubted she could even sit on a stool for a minute now, much less for all the time it had taken to cut and shave her hair. When Mrs. Greco said it was time for me to leave, I didn’t even bother to object. You didn’t have to be Olivia’s mother to know she needed her rest.
As I pulled open the front door, I literally walked into Jake, who was coming in. Calvin was standing right behind him.
“Hey, Zoe,” said Jake.
“Hey.” He hugged me, and I hugged him back,
hard. Ever since the bone marrow transplant, I felt this intense gratitude to Jake. Without him, Olivia wouldn’t even be alive.
“It’s freezing out. You want a ride?” he asked. He was carrying a plastic bag from Driscoll’s Pharmacy. It was overflowing with the small white paper bags that prescriptions come in, and I thought of Livvie struggling to swallow all the pills in them.
I shook my head. “I feel like walking.”
Jake slipped inside as I held the storm door open for him. “You going in?” I asked Calvin. His cheeks were bright with cold.
“I could walk you home,” he offered.
I let the door close behind me. It was cold and silent outside, and I pulled him out of the light that spilled onto the front porch from the foyer and pressed him up against the side of the house. For a second his lips were cold, and then they warmed up. His tongue was gentle, but it was still enough to make me dizzy. I grabbed hold of his shoulders, squeezing his body through the soft material of his down jacket.
“We’re not walking,” he whispered, breaking away from a kiss.
“We’re not?” He had his hands buried in my hair, and I tried to kiss him again, but he nodded toward the house. “Jake said she’s feeling pretty rocky.”
The streetlight flicked on, throwing my shadow over Calvin’s chest. “It’s okay,” I assured him. “She’s going to be okay.” I kissed him again, hard, and he kissed me back.
But for the first time, his kiss wasn’t quite enough to shut out what was happening in the house we were leaning against.
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part 3
Spring
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As we neared day sixty, Olivia started getting noticeably stronger. Her hair began to grow in, a soft blond fuzz that made her look like a baby chick. And her face, which had been so gaunt and pale—almost as if it were made of wax—filled out a little, the old, healthy Olivia showing through ever so slightly, just like her hair.
On Thursday after school—day fifty-eight—I came in and found her sitting at the kitchen table. She was wearing a long-sleeved blue T-shirt with white piping at the neck and wrists. Thin as she was, she could have been a healthy girl hanging out in her kitchen and talking on her cell. If you’d put her in one of Mia’s black ensembles, the buzz cut wouldn’t even have been out of place. She just would have looked like a serious badass.
She gestured for me to sit down at the table with her. “Right. . . . Great. . . . Yeah, I think that would be totally possible. . . . You too. . . . Thanks.”
“That was Mrs. Jones,” she said after she’d hung up. “She asked if I thought I’d be up for teaching the dance class again next year. I said I had to talk to you about it.”
I burst out laughing. “What, you think I’m going to want to keep it for myself?”
“I don’t know.” Livvie gave me a wicked smile. “I thought we could do it together.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Um, why do I feel like I’ve had this conversation before?”
“You’ve done an amazing job without me. Just imagine how great it—”
“Olivia, I have not done an amazing job without you.” I sat down next to her, putting my bag on the floor. “I’ve done a mediocre-to-crappy job without you. A nine-year-old girl dropped out because I was so mean to her.” It was true. After Charlotte had left, she’d never come back. Mrs. Jones had tried to reach her, but with no luck. And while I was definitely getting the girls to march to my tune as we learned the steps to a dance for the recital, the dance class, which I had the feeling had once been the high point of their week, had begun to feel like something we all dreaded.
“Look, you don’t have to answer now,” said Olivia. She picked up her spoon and dipped it into the bowl of rice pudding in front of her. “I just told Mrs. Jones that I would probably do it.” She took a bite and swallowed. “But I would really, really rather we do it together, okay? So, you know”—she pointed her spoon at me—“think about it.” She stretched luxuriously and then laughed. “I feel so not bad today.”
“Is not bad the same as good?” I asked.
“It’s close enough,” she said.
Calvin wasn’t with Jake when he pulled into my driveway Saturday morning, so it was just me and Jake in the car. We ended up getting into an argument about this really lame rap he was listening to. Or at least I thought it was lame. He thought it was awesome.
“It sucks, Jake,” I told him. “Seriously. It’s just noise.”
“Oh, is that your professional opinion?” he demanded, laughing.
“It is. Now . . .” I took out my phone and looked for a song to play for him. “Aha!” I said when I got to “Pauvre Lola.” “This is a good song.” I connected my phone to the car stereo. “It makes you want to move. It’s music.” As soon as the song came on, I grew antsy. It was impossible to sit still while that beat grabbed your body and moved through it.
Jake rolled his eyes, but by the time the chorus came on for the second time, he was tapping the steering wheel to the beat. We pulled into the parking lot, and I saw Calvin’s car by the door. It made me feel good to know that even if I wasn’t with him, at least he was close. Jake put his arm around my shoulders, and together we walked toward the building.
Suddenly Jake started laughing. “Damn you, Zoe. Now I can’t get that song out of my head.”
“Really?” I asked. In lieu of an answer, Jake did a dance move somewhere between a moonwalk and an electric slide. “Dude,” I said, “that is just sad.”
“It’s a miracle!” Jake cried, jumping up and down. “A white guy can dance! A white guy can dance!”
And that’s when I got my idea.
After we did our warm-up, I made the announcement. “We’re going to play a game,” I said.
“What game?” asked Aaliyah. Her voice was suspicious, like she couldn’t actually believe I was going to do something as fun as an actual game.
“It doesn’t have a name yet. I just made it up.”
“Really?” asked Imani. She giggled. So did a few of the other girls. Then they suddenly looked nervous—like maybe I was going to yell at them—and stopped.
This was what I’d done: made dance class a place where you got in trouble for laughing.
“Really,” I said. I walked to the center of the room. “Here’s how it’s going to go. I’m going to do a move. Then I’m going to call someone’s name, and that person is going to do the same move. Then she’ll call someone else’s name, and that person will do the move. The trick is to do the move and call someone’s name as fast as you can without being sloppy about your form.”
“It’s like hot potato,” said a girl named Desiree. I couldn’t remember Desiree ever speaking before. My mnemonic for her was Desiree does not desire to discourse.
“Exactly!” I agreed. “It’s just like hot potato.”
I plugged my phone into the speaker and hit play. Serge Gainsbourg filled the room. “What’s this?” asked Imani.
“Like it?” I asked. The song popped and rolled. I could see a couple of the girls start moving their hips.
“What is it?” asked Lourdes, still suspicious.
“Oh my God, will you just dance?” I laughed and turned the music up really loud so they couldn’t ask any more questions.
“Plié,” I called out, and then I did one and yelled, “Lourdes.”
Lourdes panicked and stared at me. “Plié!” I repeated, doing another one. Quickly she dropped her knees. “Who’s next?” I prompted her.
“Oh. Imani!” she said.
“Louder!” I urged her.
“Imani!” she shouted.
Imani did a plié and threw it to Anna who threw it to Ra
shad who threw it back to Lourdes who threw it to Mirabelle. When every girl in the room had gone at least once, I yelled, “Two chaînés.” Then I quickly did the turns, holding first position briefly when I was finished.
“No fair! That’s too hard!” Lourdes said.
“I can’t hear you,” I lied. “Lourdes, two chaînés.”
The turns she did weren’t great, but she did them. When she finished, she held her position as I had and called to Rashad.
You could feel the energy in the room, the girls nervous and excited, holding themselves still as they waited for their names to be called but also moving a little, the energy of the music impossible to resist. I knew how they felt. Each time it was my turn to call a move, I got excited, my body spinning and leaping with a pleasure I hadn’t felt since before Ms. Daniels had called me into her office at NYBC and brought my life crashing to an end.
No. It had been longer than that. As I moved and spun and leaped, it seemed to me that I hadn’t enjoyed a dance class this much since before NYBC had accepted me.
When the class was finished, everyone was flushed. There was an unfamiliar energetic buzz in the room.
“That was awesome!” I told them. I clapped, and a few of the girls clapped too. I’d actually gone over by about five minutes—the music must have been too loud for me to hear the bell. “You guys, I’m really sorry, but it’s time to go.”
Aaliyah did a line of jetés from where she was standing to where I was standing. Then she hugged me. She only came up to my waist, so her ear was pressed against my belly button. “You’re a great teacher, Zoe,” she said. “I love dance class!”
I knelt down so I could hug her back. “Seriously?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “You look so surprised.”
“I guess I am,” I admitted. I sat on the floor and looked up at her. “I thought I was too mean to be a good teacher.”
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