Maybe One Day (2 page)

“Hi, Livs!” Her red-and-white cheerleading skirt flared out above her knees. High,
high
above her knees.

“Hey, Emma,” said Olivia, hugging her back. Right after we got the ax from NYBC, Olivia started teaching a dance class for at-risk girls at this rec center in Newark where her mom’s on the board. A lot of people from our high school satisfied their community service requirement there—including the cheerleaders—and sometimes Olivia had lunch with the squad on Saturdays after they taught their classes. That my best friend regularly hung out with cheerleaders was one of the great mysteries of my life.

“Zoe!” Emma squealed, hurling herself at me when her hug with Olivia came to an end.

“Oh. Hey. I mean, hi. Hi, Emma.” I patted her awkwardly on the back. The cheerleaders were always nice enough to me, but I couldn’t help feeling like they saw me as this weird birth defect of Olivia’s, something she would have been wise to have removed but for some reason chose to live with.

“I
still
can’t believe you guys didn’t try out for cheer squad last spring,” Emma said, stepping out of my lackluster embrace and shaking her head in amazement.

“I couldn’t. Soccer,” I answered immediately, even though after one awful season as the world’s worst soccer player, I’d dropped it.

“Dance class,” said Livvie.

Emma made a pouty face. “But
we
do the tumbling class
and
we cheer. You could do
both
.”

“I
know
!” said Olivia, ignoring Emma’s implied criticism. “You guys are awesome.”

I smiled vaguely.

Placated by Olivia’s praise, Emma waved good-bye to us, made Olivia promise to have lunch with the squad on Saturday, then skittered off to join her fellow cheerleaders. As I watched her go, I spotted Bethany and Lashanna. They waved at me and I waved back. I’d been nervous that they’d be mad when I didn’t go out for soccer again this year, but they’d seemed to understand.

Taking Livvie by the hand, I started walking toward them, but she pulled me back, reaching into her bag and pulling out her phone. “Wait a sec.”

I groaned but stayed put while Livvie switched the phone to camera, then swiped at a lock of heavy blond hair that had dropped over her eyes. Until last summer I’d also had long hair, though my hair is so black it’s almost blue. But the day after we were thrown out of NYBC, Livvie came with me to Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow and watched me get approximately three feet of hair chopped off my head. When the woman
asked if I wanted to take a lock to remember it by, I just stared at her like,
Why would I want to remember my hair?

No more dance. No more soccer. I shivered slightly. My parents and my guidance counselor were on my case to pick an extracurricular activity and to pick it fast. I’d played some tennis up at my grandparents’ this summer, but was I seriously going to try out for the tennis team like I’d told my parents I might? Livvie slipped her arm around my waist, and we stood shoulder to shoulder as she held the camera up at face level. “Say, ‘Olivia is so cheesy.’”

Glad to be pulled out of my thoughts, I repeated, “Olivia is so cheesy,” and she snapped the picture. To say Livvie had dealt better than I had with our being dumped from NYBC would be an understatement. Sometimes I wondered if the secret to being well-adjusted wasn’t blond hair.

“Nice,” she said, angling the screen toward me. Livvie and I were almost exactly the same height—five seven—so our faces were right next to each other. Olivia was grinning widely, her dimple pronounced, her eyes sparkling.

“You look like a prom queen,” I told her. “I’m all ‘Take me to your leader.’” I have big eyes, which I’d always known but which I hadn’t fully appreciated were quite so enormous until I got my pixie cut. I looked exactly like a cartoon drawing of an alien.

“You’re beautiful. Your eyes are seriously
awesome
. No joke.” She hip-checked me absently, still studying the screen.
“Am I crazy or do I have a picture of you wearing this exact same shirt?”

I glanced at the cap sleeve of my dark blue T-shirt. “That’s impossible. I’ve never worn this shirt before.”

“Hmmm . . .” Livvie bit her upper lip and stared at the image, then shrugged. “Well, whatever.” She dropped her phone into her bag, took me by the hand, and led me toward the front steps of Wamasset High, so named because on this site a proud tribe of Wamasset Indians made their last stand against a group of British settlers who were ultimately successful in their attempt to brutally exterminate every last one of them.

“Do you think it’s comforting to the dead Wamasset that the descendants of their murderers attend a high school named in their honor?” I asked.

Livvie’d been trying to get me to have a more positive outlook on life, and now she turned around and pointed her finger at me threateningly. “Stop that.”

I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender, and we headed into the lobby. The noise was deafening. Bethany and Lashanna weren’t anywhere to be seen, but half a dozen cheerleaders were, including Stacy Shaw—one of the captains of the cheerleading squad—and Jake’s would-be girlfriend Emma.

STACY
: (
Screaming
.) Aaaaah!

EMMA
: (
Also screaming
.) Aaaaah!

(
They embrace
.)

STACY
: (
Wails
.) I wish you’d gotten captain. (
She bursts into tears
.)

EMMA
: (
Also bursting into tears
.) Staaaaaaay!

STACY
: Emms!!!!

EMMA
: I love you so much.

STACY
: I love
you
so much. (
They continue to embrace, weeping
.)

Olivia and I made eye contact. “You regularly lunch with those people,” I pointed out.

“They’re not as bad once you get to know them,” she insisted.

“Let me guess: That’s what you tell them about me, right?”

Laughing, we turned out of the lobby and down the two hundreds corridor. When we got to my homeroom, Livvie hugged me good-bye.

“Fortress after school, right?” she asked, even though odds were we’d have at least a couple of classes together.

“Right,” I agreed. As I hugged her back, I realized something. “Hey, Livs,” I said, pulling away. “You’re not just my best friend—you’re my extracurricular activity.”

Livvie pressed her hands to her chest and got a dreamy expression on her face. “I’ve always longed to be an extracurricular activity.” Then she kissed me lightly on the cheek and headed down the corridor. “Love ya,” she called over her shoulder.

“Love ya,” I called back.

I stepped into the classroom, nervous for a second that no one I hung out with would be in homeroom with me, but then I saw Bethany. She saw me, too, grinned, and moved her bag off the desk next to hers. Grinning back at her, I made my way across the room. Just as the bell rang I slipped into my seat, and then Ms. Evans raised her head from the papers she’d been shuffling on her desk, walked over to the door, and shut it. She looked around the room at all of us as we slowly got quiet. “Welcome, everyone!” she announced, the tight curls of her perm bobbing as she nodded and smiled at us. “I hope you all had a wonderful summer.”

It was official: junior year had begun.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

2

In Olivia’s backyard was an enormous beech tree that had to be about a hundred years old. In it was what we call the fortress.

The fortress was a . . . thing her dad and Jake built in the tree a few summers ago. It was supposed to be a place that would lure the twins, Tommy and Luke (they’re eight now), outside for hours of fun so they wouldn’t drive their mom batshit with their running around in the house.

Everyone called it the fortress, but really it was just a platform. The plan was for it to be a
real
fort, with walls and a ceiling and everything (I remember looking at some pretty complicated architectural drawings her dad commissioned), but then Jake made the football team and wasn’t so into building it and Tommy and Luke said a tree fort was babyish and now Livvie and I were pretty much the only ones who
used it.

At five o’clock, we climbed up for what we felt was a much-deserved break. It didn’t seem possible that we had so much homework already, but after an hour and a half of working in Livvie’s kitchen, neither of us had put a dent in our assignments. It was only the first day of school. How were we ever going to survive junior year?

We lay on the wooden planks of the fortress, half trying to get our heads around the amount of work we had to do, half watching Jake and Calvin Taylor toss a football back and forth.

“I can’t believe they come home from football practice and play football,” I said. We were on our stomachs, our chins resting on our hands.

“Zoe, we danced for, like, six hours a day, remember?”

I ignored her question, which was rhetorical anyway, and we watched Jake and Calvin in silence. Calvin leaped up to catch the ball Jake had just thrown. For a second he seemed to hang in the air before gently dropping to earth, almost as graceful as a dancer.

“I cannot get over how hot Calvin Taylor is,” said Livvie.

I eyed him lazily. He and Jake were both wearing shorts and no shirts, and their skin was shiny with sweat. Jake wasn’t fat, but compared to Calvin, who was long and lean, he was definitely thickish. You couldn’t see it from up in the tree, but Calvin has a beautiful face that’s saved from being too pretty
by his nose being a little crooked from where it got broken during some football game.

“I swear to you,” Livvie continued, “we had a moment.”

I groaned. “Are you
still
talking about that ice cream run you guys did? Livvie, that was, like, a
month
ago. Besides, you’d have to murder all those cheerleaders and then climb over their dead bodies to get to him.”

Livvie smacked her lips exaggeratedly. “It might be worth it.”

I must have been the only girl at Wamasset who didn’t think Calvin Taylor was God’s gift to our zip code. He moved here late—the summer before his sophomore year—and immediately made varsity football and every girl’s top-ten list. He and Jake started hanging out a lot, and at first I didn’t think he was so bad, but then I found out what an asshole he really was.

That year, my freshman year, I had this . . . well, I guess you couldn’t say boyfriend since we went on exactly one date. His name was Jackson, and his sister was in my and Olivia’s class and he was a sophomore like Jake and Calvin. Livs and I went to a Halloween party at his sister’s house, and Jackson and I ended up hanging out a little, and the next night he called and asked me out on a date. Like a real date—a dinner-and-a-movie date. The whole thing would have been awkward enough (what with our barely knowing each other and his parents driving us to the mall), but then when we got to the
theater (we were going to see the new James Bond movie), pretty much the
entire
football team was there. Most of the guys tried to be cool about it, just all, “Hey, Zoe; hey, Jackson,” and kind of pretending they didn’t see us, but Calvin kept giving us these knowing looks while we were waiting on line to buy snacks. And then he came over to our seats during the previews with a bag of popcorn that he said was “special delivery from the guys for the lovely young couple.” Jackson laughed, but I seriously wanted to punch Calvin. It was hard for me to even think about whether I was glad Jackson was holding my hand during the movie because I was so busy hating Calvin, and later, when Jackson and I were waiting for his dad in this darkish part of the parking lot and Jackson started kissing me, I could barely concentrate because I kept expecting Calvin to jump out from between two parked cars and be all “Surprise!” Jackson’s family moved away the day after our date (okay, it was more like a month later, but between football and dance we never found a time to go out again), so I guess you could say Calvin Taylor not only ruined my first date
and
my first kiss but also my first (and only) relationship.

The idea that my best friend might be falling for my nemesis was more than I could take.

I rolled my eyes. “Calvin’s the worst, Livs. Don’t be another notch in his belt.”

She was still watching him and Jake. “I’m telling you I’m, like, bizarrely drawn to him.”

Thinking a different tactic might be more effective, I got to my hands and knees and crawled toward Olivia. “He’s so handsome and magnetic. And he lives in that big mansion up in the Estates. Beware! Maybe the reason you’re so drawn to him is because he’s really a
vampire
!
Raarh!
” When Livvie laughed, I growled, baring imaginary fangs, then rolled onto my back and stared into the leaves of the tree. I could barely feel a breeze, but their shimmering proved that there was one.

“Liv?”

“Mmm?”

“What do you think I should do?”

“About what?” She yawned. “Sorry. I’m so tired. Did I tell you I almost fell asleep in physics? I jerked awake at the last second, but I think Mr. Thomas is onto me.”

“About my
life
. What should I do with my life?” I sat up and looked over Olivia’s enormous Victorian house and across the hedges at the edge of her yard. Up and down the block were other houses, and in each of the houses were people. What did
they
do with their lives?

“Teach the dance class with me,” said Olivia, and she rolled onto her side and leaned her head on her hand. “The girls would
love
you.”

“No dance,” I said shaking my head. It was amazing to me how . . . accepting Livvie had been of our being cut from NYBC. She taught a ballet class once a week, organized the spring recital for her dancers, then led a dance camp for two
weeks over the summer. She even kept the photo from our first dance recital on her desk—the two of us smiling at the camera, our pink tutus squashed because we’re standing so close together. I, on the other hand, in an attempt to escape my failed dance career, had joined (and then quit) the soccer team, ripped the posters of ballerinas off my walls, thrown out all my dance paraphernalia, and forbidden anyone from uttering the word “ballet” in my presence. I couldn’t help envying her a little, but Livvie had always been the one to take things in stride.