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  He was leaning against the locker next to mine. His snug T-shirt showed off his upper body, and he was wearing fitted but slightly low-slung jeans that made you know he had six-pack abs to match his broad, muscled (but not too muscled) shoulders. His hair was damp and sexy-shaggy. He pushed it off his forehead, revealing eyes that were an intense greenish-brown.

  Our eyes met. And as they did, I suddenly remembered the joke I’d made to Olivia about his being a vampire.

  That’s when I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I kept picturing him lowering his head and sinking his fangs into my neck. Now you are among the undead, foolish girl! You will worship me as do all the girls at Wamasset. Ha ha ha!

  Tears of laughter ran down my face. Uneasily, Calvin asked, “Did I miss something funny?” but I couldn’t catch my breath long enough to answer him.

  “You’re just so . . .” But I was laughing too hard to finish my sentence, and I didn’t even know for sure what I would have said if I could have spoken. “Nothing,” I gasped finally. “I’m sorry. Did you come over here to tell me something?”

  He must have decided to write my laughter off as some kind of best-friend-has-cancer-induced hysteria because he continued talking without addressing it. “I just wanted to say . . .” He put his hand on my shoulder. His voice, when he spoke, was calm and soothing. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Wait, had he seriously just said, It’s going to be okay?

  Was that, like, supposed to comfort me?

  Wiping tears of laughter out of the corners of my eyes, I reached up and squeezed his shoulder, then attempted to imitate his condescending tone. “Thanks, Calvin. I can’t . . . I can’t tell you how reassuring it is to hear you say that.” I started laughing all over again, and I was still laughing when I turned away from him and headed for physics class. Livvie, I wanted to scream, it’s bad enough that you have cancer. But why did you have to fall for such a cheese ball?

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  8

  I’d been expecting to find Olivia asleep or maybe vomiting into a basin, but when I got to the hospital after school, she was sitting up in bed dressed in a pair of jeans and a plaid button-down shirt we’d gotten together at this old-school army-navy store last year. It was good to see her in regular clothes rather than a hospital gown. Her hair was in a thick braid down her back, a style she hadn’t worn in a long time. Her mom was sitting in the pleather chair next to the bed.

  “You look really pretty,” I said to Olivia. She did, too. Young, but pretty.

  She gave me a thin smile. “They started this new antinausea medication, so I’m supposedly feeling better already.”

  “Well, that’s supposedly good news,” I said. “Hi, Mrs. Greco.”

  “Hello, Zoe.” Mrs. Greco looked way more tired than she had the day before, and I wondered if she’d had as bad a night’s sleep as I had. “Would you Purell your hands, please?” She smiled at me, but it was a smile I’d never seen on Olivia’s mom’s face before. There was something brittle under it, like any second it could crack and something sad and scared and ugly would poke through.

  I went over to the Purell dispenser, hearing Livvie and her mom talking in whispers behind me. When I turned around, Mrs. Greco was still smiling that creepy smile. “Okay, girls,” she said. “I’ll give you some time. But half an hour. That’s it.” She fussed briefly with Olivia’s bed, and I noticed that someone had brought Olivia’s comforter from home. “Well, that’s better,” said Mrs. Greco, having fixed whatever was bothering her. “Okay. I’ll see you both in a bit.”

  As soon as her mom left, Olivia sighed and dropped her head back against the pillow. “She is driving me crazy.”

  “She’s freaked out,” I said, making my way over to stand by the bed.

  “I wish she’d stop smiling for a minute,” said Olivia. “It’s freaking me out.”

  “Yeah, that smile is fucking bizarre,” I agreed.

  Livvie leaned toward me and took my hands in hers, then split her face into a terrifying grimace. “How are you feeling, honey? Are you tired? Would you like to eat something? Is it too cold in here? Is it too warm in here? Do you want to walk down the hall? Do you want your book? Can I get you anything? Anything at all?” With each question, she made her smile wider and more frightening. Then she flopped back and let go of my hand. “That’s why I finally let her braid my hair. I figured at least I wouldn’t have to look at her smiling while she did it.”

  “It does look nice,” I said.

  “I look like a third grader,” Olivia corrected me.

  “A very pretty third grader,” I assured her.

  She rolled her eyes at me.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I had to call Mrs. Jones at the rec center and tell her I was sick. They’re going to find someone else to teach the ballet class.”

  “Oh.” I sat down in the chair her mom had vacated. “Well, I mean, that’s good, right? That they won’t have to cancel it or anything.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” But her voice was sad.

  I leaned toward her. “Livs?”

  She toyed with the edge of her shirt, not meeting my eyes. “I like teaching the class, okay? And I’m just . . . I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Forget about it, okay? I mean”—she waved her hand around the room—“it’s not like I can teach the class from here. So let’s . . . let’s talk about something else. Tell me about your day.”

  “Livvie . . . ,” I started, and I reached for her hand.

  But she shook her head and shut her eyes tightly, not facing me. “Tell me about your day,” she repeated. “Please.”

  “Sure,” I said, not sure what else I could do. “Of course.”

  Thirty-one minutes later, Mrs. Greco followed me out the door of Olivia’s room and down the hall. “Thanks for coming today, Zoe,” she said. “It means a lot to Olivia.”

  I hoped it had, but I wasn’t so sure. Nothing, not even my Calvin-Taylor-really-is-a-vampire story, had seemed to cheer her up.

  “I’ve spoken to Mr. Handleman,” she went on, “and it looks like—when she’s well enough—Olivia is going to be able to Skype her classes. But if there’s work that can’t be delivered via computer, I told him you or Jake could be the point person. I hope you don’t mind.” We were standing in front of the elevator, and Mrs. Greco pushed the down button.

  “Of course not. I’m glad to help.” My parents always said Olivia was a part of our family, but I didn’t know if the Grecos felt the same way about me. Like, even though Livvie had been calling my parents Ed and Cathy since the day she met them, I still called her parents Mr. and Mrs. Greco. Sometimes I worried that they thought I was a bad influence on Livvie because our family wasn’t religious, my parents let me go to R-rated movies, my dad was a freelance journalist, and my mom earned more money than he did. Meanwhile, the Grecos went to church every Sunday, Mr. Greco was a lawyer who wore suits and went into the city every day, and Mrs. Greco was a stay-at-home mom. Livvie said I was totally paranoid, but I wasn’t so sure.

  I didn’t want to explain to Mrs. Greco my whole theory about her thinking my parents were agnostic lefties with no family values, but I wanted her to know how much I loved Olivia. “I really hope you’ll rely on me in any way you can.”

  I had this fantasy that Mrs. Greco would hug me, ask me to call her Adriana and tell me that to her and Mr. Greco I was like family, but she just patted me gently on the cheek. “Of course,” she said. “We know we can count on you.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Greco,” I said. The elevator doors opened and I got on. “That means a lot to me.” And even though I was the one who said it, I couldn’t decide if I was being sarcastic or not.

  I missed the train to Wamasset by less than ten minutes, so I had to kill almost an hour waiting for the next one. Penn Station’s
got lousy stores, but whenever Livvie and I were stuck waiting for a train, we always managed to find something fun to do, even if it was checking out a shop full of lame touristy stuff or trying on tacky clothes we would never buy. Today, though, the time dragged while I wandered from Hot & Crusty to Duane Reade to New York Inc., finally settling in the waiting area, where I just sat and stared at the board listing the train departures. I couldn’t stop thinking about how sad Livvie had been all afternoon. Not that she shouldn’t have been. I mean, if getting a diagnosis of leukemia doesn’t give you the right to be sad, what does? But the crazy thing was, she almost hadn’t seemed sad about having cancer. It was like not teaching the dance class had been the straw that broke her back.

  How was she going to last through weeks of treatment—months of treatment!—with nothing to look forward to besides Skyping her classes and receiving a daily inspirational message from the cheer squad? Thinking about her squeezing her eyes shut to stop herself from crying made me furious, and when I stood up after they announced the train to Wamasset, I was actually shaking my head, as if I were having an argument with the universe about the unfairness of it all.

  And the worst part was, there was nothing I could do. I chucked my empty coffee cup in the trash and headed down to the platform. Dr. Maxwell’s telling me Livvie needed her friends suddenly felt like a bad joke. What did she need her friends for—so we could bear witness to her misery?

  It wasn’t until the train was almost at my stop that I had my brainstorm. If Olivia could Skype her school classes, why couldn’t she Skype other classes? My hands were practically shaking with excitement as I dialed her number.

  “Hey,” she said. She sounded really tired.

  My idea burst out of me. “Let’s teach the class together.”

  “What?”

  I realized from how fuzzy her voice was that I must have woken her up, so I repeated myself, enunciating each word carefully. “Let’s. Teach. The. Class. Together! The dance class. You could Skype it and I could be, you know, the tech person or whatever. I’ll download Skype onto my phone. It’s no big deal—my dad uses it for interviews when he can’t meet someone in person.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Livvie said finally. “I know you don’t want to do this.”

  Was she serious?

  “Livvie, come on. It’s so nothing.” Given what Olivia was going through, the idea that teaching her dance class for her was some big sacrifice had to be a joke.

  I heard a voice in the background, and Livvie said, “I’m okay, Mom. Really.”

  “Do you have to go?” I asked her. “We can talk about this tomorrow.”

  “It could be a big job, Zoe,” said Olivia, ignoring my offer. “I might . . . I might be pretty sick sometimes, and . . . I mean, you might have to do it by yourself.” It sounded like she might be crying a little.

  I made my voice mock angry. “Oh, so you think I can’t run a ballet class for beginners? Thanks a lot, bi-yatch!”

  Olivia laughed. Like, really laughed. “The recital’s a lot of work . . . ,” she began.

  “I’m not taking no for an answer,” I interrupted her. “So just, you know, stick that in your pipe and smoke it.”

  There was another long pause. I stayed quiet, watching dusk turn the sky over New Jersey a deep purple.

  “Zoe, are you sure?”

  “Oh my God!” I cried, slapping my hand against the seat next to me. “Will you stop already? I’m doing it and that’s final.”

  And suddenly Olivia didn’t sound tired or sick at all. “The girls are so great,” she said, speaking quickly. “I mean, they’ve just had the worst lives, but they’re still really into dancing. This one girl, Imani, she’s lived with four different foster families in the past year. Can you imagine that? Four families!”

  I laughed. “Zoe, you don’t have to convince me. It was my idea, remember?”

  “Oh. Yeah,” she said. Then she added, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if I’d staged this whole cancer thing just to get you to teach the dance class with me?”

  “Hilarious,” I said. The computerized voice announced, “The next stop is Wamasset. Wamasset is the next stop.”

  I heard her mom in the background, and this time Olivia said, “I gotta go.”

  “Of course,” I said right away. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, Zoe.” Olivia sounded slightly out of breath.

  “Love ya,” I said, and then she said, “Love ya,” and we hung up. I walked to the door of the car. Even though I hadn’t wanted to make a big deal out of it, I felt good. Really good. Waiting was the worst. Waiting to visit Olivia. Waiting for her to get out of the hospital. To get better. To come back to school.

  Doing something—even teaching a dance class—beat the hell out of waiting.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  9

  Jake had offered to give me a ride to the rec center, but it wasn’t his car that pulled into my driveway at eight thirty on Saturday morning.

  It was Calvin Taylor’s.

  Even before I saw Calvin’s car, I was already in a bad mood. The “two seconds” my dad had assured me it would take to download Skype to my phone had turned into about two years, and by the end he and I were barely speaking, just cursing the phone and the program under our breath. Then I couldn’t find a pair of ballet slippers. That might not be weird for most people, but all my life I’d had a minimum of a dozen pairs of ballet slippers and half as many pairs of toe shoes lying around my room at any given time. But like I said, when NYBC gave me and Livvie the ax, I chucked everything I owned that was ballet-related, so even rooting around in the attic and basement didn’t turn up an old pair of shoes. On the one hand, it was kind of cool how thorough I’d been. On the other, I was fucked. I stood in my room fuming, surrounded by piles of everything I’d yanked off the floor of my closet and from under my bed. Finally, I just called Livvie at the hospital, and she said she’d tell her mom to give Jake a pair of her shoes to give to me. Livvie and I had the same size foot, and while you can’t share toe shoes with another dancer since they mold to your feet, ballet slippers—especially ones you’re not wearing for some major performance—aren’t a problem.

  I was running late and racing downstairs to grab something to eat before Jake picked me up and drove me to the rec center in downtown Newark where—while I taught ballet and the cheerleaders taught tumbling—he and a bunch of the other guys on the football team would be teaching kids how to bench-press or tackle or rape or whatever it was that football players knew how to do well. I’d no sooner stepped foot in the kitchen than Calvin Taylor’s car pulled up in front of my house, and I thought, I now have objective proof that the universe is determined to screw with me.

  I yelled good-bye to my parents and ran out the front door, blaming Calvin for my missing the most important meal of the day.

  “Hi,” I said, sliding into the backseat of Calvin’s vintage BMW.

  “Hi,” said Jake. Calvin didn’t say anything.

  “Oh,” Jake said, “I’m supposed to give you these.” He reached between the front seats and handed me a bag with the shoes inside.

  Calvin backed the car out of the driveway. His car had soft leather seats. It was maybe ten or even fifteen years old, but it was in beautiful shape. It was one of the things that semiannoyed me about Calvin, how in addition to everything else he had this cool vintage car. Still, he was giving me a ride.

  “Thanks for driving me,” I said.

  “Sure,” said Calvin. His tone was clipped. I couldn’t tell if it was I’m-mad-at-you-because-you-laughed-in-my-face clipped or It’s-eight-thirty-and-I’m-not-a-morning-person clipped. Jake said something to him that I couldn’t quite make out, and Calvin responded, “Not if he’s still injured.” Then Calvin turned up the music so I couldn�
�t hear them at all, and I leaned back against the seat and stared out the window.

  When Calvin turned into the parking lot of the rec center, which was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, I figured the facility would be as awful as the rest of the block, but it was actually a pretty nice three-story brick building. There was a huge mural on the wall by the parking lot that had a black teenager guy being frisked by a cop. All around them were people holding cameras directed at the boy and the cop, and above the picture were the words LOVE YOUR CITY. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. It sounds depressing, but the colors were bright and the whole thing felt somehow energized and optimistic.

  Calvin parked the car and the three of us got out. Jake put his arm around me as we walked toward the building.

  “You doing okay?” he asked, squeezing my shoulders.

  I loved Jake. Whether or not Mr. and Mrs. Greco saw me as family, Jake had always treated me like a little sister.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said, squeezing him back. “You okay?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “This is seriously fucked up, you know?”

  There really wasn’t any other way to put it. “I know,” I agreed.

  “Jake! Calvin! Zoe!” Jake and I turned around. Stacy, Emma, the Bailor twins, and Hailey were piling out of Stacy’s Lexus SUV.

  “Come here, guys!” Emma called. She was gesturing us over frantically, as if the parking lot were on fire and she had discovered the only escape route.

  Despite how annoyed he always seemed by Emma, Jake took his arm off my waist and headed toward the girls. “We’ll give you a ride home,” he said over his shoulder to me.