“Oh,” I said. “Hey.” I was still thinking about Olivia’s voice. It had been so frail.
“How are you?” he asked. He was taller than I was, and he leaned down a little when he asked. Maybe because he was such a professional stud I’d imagined him smelling of cologne or aftershave or something equally … studly, but he just smelled like the outdoors.
I shrugged. “I’m great. Just, you know, peachy.”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Okay, why do I doubt that?”
“Well,” I snapped, “I mean, how do you think I am, Calvin? I suck, okay? I can’t even …” Why the hell was I confessing my feelings to Calvin Taylor of all people? I sighed and turned to the contents of my locker, but I couldn’t register them. Survive a month of school without Olivia? I might as well try to cross the Atlantic Ocean on an empty refrigerator box.
“You can’t even what?” Calvin asked. He’d moved around to stand next to me, but I didn’t turn my head to look at him, just kept staring at the spines of my textbooks and binders.
“I can’t even get my mind around it. I can’t even see it.” I lifted my hands and looked down at them. “First I think of Livvie, and that’s horrible. And then I think of her family and I feel so awful for them. And then I feel bad for myself.” I shook my head. “I do. I feel really sorry for myself, okay? Because I’m just that selfish.” I seriously could not figure out what books I needed for first period, and even if I could have, I didn’t give a crap about having them, so I just shut my locker and snapped the lock on it. Then I turned to face Calvin.
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?
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 a brittle edge there, 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.