“Thanks,” she muttered, and even though she tried not to look like she cared, she couldn’t completely hide her smile.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
When the other girls arrived, they helped demonstrate for Charlotte how we threw a move from one person to another. There was more to catch her up on than I would have thought; it ended up taking most of the class. We really had covered a lot of ground over the past few classes. I was glad to have something nice to tell Olivia. I knew she’d want to hear how well things were going.
But when I got to the Grecos’ after class, Mr. Greco told me that after I’d left, Olivia had clearly been in a lot of pain. The hospice nurse had suggested starting her on morphine, which they had done. By the time I arrived, she’d already been on morphine for several hours.
Two days later, without ever regaining consciousness, she died.
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Over a thousand people showed up for Olivia’s funeral—kids from school, Olivia’s family, neighbors, people Mrs. Greco knew from her charity work, people from Mr. Greco’s law firm. The church was packed. People spilled out into the parish hall and the basement, and there they watched the speeches and listened to the music on a huge screen that had been set up for the occasion. Someone had told NYBC, and girls we’d used to dance with and even a few of our old teachers showed up. I barely spoke to anyone, keeping my head down, letting my mom guide me to and from a pew. At the cemetery, as they started lowering Olivia’s casket into the ground, Mrs. Greco wailed the same way she had that day in the hospital room, and as she pulled at her clothes and hair, Mr. Greco held her fiercely in his arms, almost as if he was sure she might throw herself into the grave along with her daughter. It was only April, but it was brutally hot. A couple of old people fainted, and a few others had to be helped into the shade.
I wasn’t hot.
I was cold.
Icy cold, as if I’d headed to Alaska without Olivia, lain down in the snowy landscape, and gone numb. Everyone went back to the house after the funeral, and I sat in the living room with my parents. A few people tried to talk to me, but I delivered monosyllabic responses that finally scared them away. Even Mia took the hint. Twice she approached me and twice I got rid of her. As my family was leaving, I saw Calvin coming down the stairs. I don’t know if he saw me, but I managed to get out of the house with my parents before he could come over to us.
Days passed. At night, I dreamed about Olivia. I was at her house with a lot of other people. It was her funeral. Lonely, I went upstairs to her room, where I found Livvie sitting on her bed. She looked how she’d looked before she got sick, her hair long and thick. Sometimes she was wearing a leotard and tights, sometimes she was in a hospital gown, but no matter what she wore, the dialogue was always the same.
“Oh my God!” I said every time. “Livvie! I thought you were dead.”
She laughed. “You did? That’s so crazy.”
“Livvie.” I went over to her, feeling a sense of relief so intense it was almost painful. “Livvie. I missed you so much. It was horrible.”
“Don’t cry,” she said. “It was just a dream.”
And I would wake up and I would be crying and Livvie wouldn’t be there because it had just been a dream.
The girls in the ballet class had the idea to dedicate the recital to Olivia, and in the program that’s what it said. We dedicate our dance today to the memory of Olivia Greco. When my mom saw it, she started crying. “It was so beautiful,” she said. “That they dedicated it to Olivia was such a beautiful idea, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was, I guess.”
My mom gave me a concerned look.
“What?” I demanded. “You asked me if it was beautiful. I said yes. Why are you staring at me?”
My mom squeezed my shoulder. “No reason,” she said.
My parents sat in the audience, but I watched the girls perform from the wings. They did a fantastic job. Thanks to Stacy, who’d gone to a florist that morning, I had a single rose to give every dancer, and they took their curtain calls holding them. They all hugged me after, even Charlotte, and I hugged every one of them back and told each one what an amazing job she’d done. Mrs. Jones told me how impressed she was by what the girls and I had accomplished, and she said that she was sure Olivia was proud of us also.
Every morning at school Mia brought me a latte. She didn’t say much besides, “Here.” On Friday mornings, after she said “here,” she said, “You want to come over and maybe watch a movie or something?”
Every day I thanked her for the latte. And every Friday I thanked her for the invitation. By the fourth time she asked, I told her she could stop asking. “I really appreciate your inviting me. But I’m not going to say yes.”
“Look,” said Mia. “I know you’re not going to say yes for a long, long time. But one day, even if it’s, you know, a year from now, you will. And when you do, we’ll hang out and watch a movie.”
The idea that one day I’d want to do anything—even watch a movie—would have been laughable if I could have imagined laughing.
Jake came back to school a couple of weeks after the funeral, and each time we saw each other, we hugged. I didn’t know what to say to him. Maybe he didn’t know what to say to me, either.
Why would he? I wasn’t a person. I was an icicle.
The first week of June, Mrs. Jones asked me to come by the rec center. I suggested we could talk about whatever it was over the phone, but she wanted to talk in person. So I drove down to Newark and went to her office.
“It’s a terrible thing when a young person dies,” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed. I hoped I hadn’t driven all the way to Newark just to hear her say that. It had been a long drive.
“So,” she said, placing her hands carefully on the desk in front of her, “I was wondering how you were planning to keep Olivia alive.”
I laughed. “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head and blowing the air out of my mouth loudly in an attempt to get control of myself. “I really don’t know what you mean.”
Mrs. Jones didn’t seem to mind that I was laughing at her. She pointed at the center of my chest. “You need to be true to the part of you that has Olivia inside of it. The part of you that did such a beautiful job with those girls at that recital. The part of you that helped Charlotte. In short, I’d like to see you teach the dance class again next fall.”
So that was what this was about. Inwardly I rolled my eyes. “Mrs. Jones, I appreciate your saying all of those things. I really do. But I’m not Olivia.”
“No one would want or expect you to be.” She nodded as if she were agreeing with rather than contradicting me.
“Well, whatever.” I toyed with the car keys in my lap. “The point is, the only reason I stuck with the class at all was because Olivia wanted me to.”
Mrs. Jones nodded. “And now Olivia is gone.”
“That would seem to be the case, yes.”
“Well, Zoe . . .” She pressed her hands on her desk, straightening her arms and sitting back in her chair. “I think the important thing for you to decide is how you are going to honor her memory.”
“With a gazebo.”
She sat forward slightly. “I beg your pardon?”
I leaned in also, lowering my voice as if I were revealing a state secret. “With. A. Gazebo,” I said slowly. “The Grecos donated a gazebo to Wamasset. There’s a ceremony at the school on what would have been her seventeenth birthday. That’s how we’re honoring Olivia’s memory.”
“That is a lovely thing,” said Mrs. Jones. “But it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
“I know it wasn’t.” I got to my feet. “But I’m afraid it’s all I’ve got.” I extended my hand to her. “I appreciate your confidence in me. I’m sorry not to be more deserving o
f it.”
“Well, we’ll see,” she said after a pause. Then she too stood up, reached across her desk, and shook my hand. “Life is long.”
“Not always,” I reminded her, and I walked out of the office.
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The day of the dedication of the gazebo dawned hot and cloudless, a beautiful June Saturday. Principal Handleman was going to speak. So was Mr. Greco. The Wamasset High orchestra was playing “selections from Tchaikovsky.” Mrs. Greco had called and asked me if I wanted to speak, but I’d told her I didn’t like talking in front of crowds, and she said okay. I suggested that Stacy Shaw would probably love to say some words. It was the only conversation we’d had since Olivia’s death, and she must have called Stacy, because her name was on the program.
They’d put up the gazebo in record time. I’d watched the construction from my physics classroom, the intricate white wood structure emerging from the pile of lumber that had been delivered and dumped in a pile one afternoon. The spot they’d picked to erect it on was the only hill on campus, a small rise out beyond the fields near the woods that surrounded the school. Chairs had been set up in rows on Friday, and they were filled Saturday morning more than an hour before the ceremony started. Mrs. Greco had asked me to sit with the family, so I didn’t have to fight my way to get a seat.
It was sticky and overcast. Principal Handleman talked about how Olivia’s illness had brought the school together. He used the word tragedy three or four times, and I found my mind wandering. A group of birds flew overhead, and I wondered if they were ducks or geese. It occurred to me that they were probably called a flock. Or were they? A flock of ducks? A group of ducks? A gaggle of ducks? It was tempting to take out my phone and google it.
When Principal Handleman finished, there was a pause while Stacy Shaw slowly made her way up the steps of the gazebo to the podium. She was wearing a tight black dress, black stockings, and black heels. She’d blown her hair straight.
It was as if she’d chosen her wardrobe by downloading a funeral attire app.
“My name is Stacy Shaw,” she began. “A lot of you were at the car wash that the other cheerleaders and I organized. We hoped that it would be enough to keep Olivia alive, but we were wrong.”
Flock of ducks. All birds were flocks. I was positive.
Reasonably positive.
“. . . because during her illness, I really got to know Olivia Greco. She was an amazing friend. She was funny. She was smart. She was talented. Even when she was sick, she was always interested in other people. I emailed her every day, and when she responded, she always asked about my life. Even when she was in the hospital, she would want to know how I was feeling.”
I snorted. Luke was sitting next to me, and he glanced over. I lowered my head.
“The important thing is that we should not cry for Olivia.” Stacy’s voice was bold. She could have been calling a cheer. “Olivia has gone to a better place. And though we miss her, we must picture her there. Dancing with the angels.” Stacy’s voice broke.
Dancing with the angels? Was she fucking kidding me?
And before I could stop myself, I looked around to roll my eyes at Olivia. Literally. I actually turned my head to the right and caught a glimpse of Mrs. Greco’s tear-stained face before I thought, Wait. Olivia’s not here. Olivia is dead.
Olivia is dead.
It was as if I had just gotten the news, as if it hadn’t happened almost two months ago but had happened now, this instant. Olivia is dead. My lips began to tremble and my eyes filled. I wanted to tell Olivia what Stacy was saying about her, but I couldn’t because Stacy was talking at Olivia’s memorial service.
Just this one thing, I thought, but it was more of a prayer than a thought. Please let me tell her this one thing. Just the thing about dancing with the angels.
Her number was still programmed into my cell phone. Surely if I sent her a text she would get it. Surely in this modern world where everything is connected and wired and people can talk to China using satellites thousands of miles up in space, surely I can just send my dead friend one fucking text from her memorial service.
And suddenly I started to cry. Serious sobs, the kind where your stomach hurts and you can’t breathe and there’s snot running down your face. I was crying so hard I couldn’t even mute the sounds I was making, and Luke put his hand on my back and I thought about how everyone would think that I was crying because of Stacy’s fucking speech and I wanted to kill someone. I wanted to kill someone and I wanted to die and I wanted to run as far and as fast as I could because she was never coming back. She had fallen off the face of the earth and she was never coming back.
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part 4
Summer
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It is agony to thaw.
I’d failed to appreciate how the permafrost in which I was encased was protecting me, and now that it had melted, everything hurt. Sunlight. The walk to school. The cold metal of my lock as I jerked it open every morning. Lying in bed and watching the numbers on my alarm clock as they flipped, the minutes passing glacially as I failed to fall asleep for yet another night.
The astonishing thing, the truly shocking thing, was that life went on. There were finals. They didn’t cancel the prom. Stacy told me (and I am completely not joking here) that to honor Olivia’s memory, a lot of girls would be wearing black dresses that night. And then she told me (and I am still not joking) that she knew Calvin would want to go to the prom with me, and she suggested (still not joking) that it would be good for me to get out.
To give credit where credit is due, Calvin found me at the end of that same day and told me he was not going to the prom. He and Jake were going to go to Jake’s house and just watch movies.
“Do you want to come?” he asked. “Not as . . . anything.”
We were standing in the hallway. I’d avoided looking at him when he’d come over, but now I looked. He was leaning against the locker next to mine, and he’d gotten his hair cut. It looked good. Really good. I remembered how I’d told Olivia that the reason Calvin was irresistible was because he was a vampire.
That was how life was now—all roads led to Olivia.
“I can’t, Calvin,” I said, turning away from him. I shut my locker and slipped the lock through it, glad to have something to do with my hands and my eyes.
“Okay,” he said. Then he said, “Zoe?”
“Yeah?” I could tell he was waiting for me to look at him, but I just studied the linoleum floor at my feet.
We stood there, not looking at each other and not talking, and then he finally said, “See you, Zoe.”
By the time I looked up, he’d disappeared into the crowded hallway.
June ended and then it was summer and I would sit in my room and I would think, A year ago, Olivia was alive. A year ago, we didn’t even know Olivia was sick. And then my mom or my dad would come upstairs to see if I was doing the work I was supposed to be doing because I’d taken incompletes in four of my six classes. And when they saw that I wasn’t doing my work, that I wasn’t doing anything for that matter, they would hug me and tell me it was going to be okay. About once a week, they’d ask if I wanted to talk to someone. And I would think, Yes I want to talk to someone.
They meant a therapist.
I meant Olivia.
And then, the first week of August, Mrs. Greco called and asked if I would come over to the house.
I didn’t want to go, but you can’t say no to something like that. You can’t say, I’m sorry, Mrs. Greco, b
ut I can’t handle coming to your house. The house my best friend used to live in. The house you have to wake up in every morning even though your only daughter is dead.
I said what you have to say when something like that happens.
I said yes.
The last of Mrs. Greco’s rosebushes were still in bloom on the afternoon that I made my way up the front walk. The lawn was the same perfect emerald green it always was. On the porch, the swing Olivia and I had never sat in even though we were always saying how it was a really nice swing and we should sit in it was still there.
Everything was completely unchanged.
Mrs. Greco answered the bell. She was unchanged also. It was a ridiculously hot day, but her hair shaped her face gracefully, as groomed as ever. She was wearing a crisp blue cotton dress and a pair of dark brown sandals. Her nails were polished a pale coral. You could never have imagined that the coiffed woman standing in front of me had, on the day of her daughter’s funeral, clawed at her own suit so frantically she’d ripped the fabric.
She gave me a long, hard hug, and then I followed her into the kitchen.
“Would you like some water or lemonade?” she asked me.
It was her voice that gave her away. Even though she was only offering me something to drink, it shook ever so slightly, and I knew that no matter how polished she looked, inside she was still tearing at her clothing.
“Sure,” I said. “Lemonade would be great.” As soon as she took the carton out of the refrigerator, I saw that I’d made a mistake. Livvie’s family always stocked this amazing pink lemonade that my mother refused to buy because it wasn’t organic. For over a decade, I’d drunk it only at Olivia’s house. Mrs. Greco brought me the glass and I thanked her, but I didn’t so much as put my lips to it. One taste of the familiar drink would, I knew, push me over the edge.
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