If you didn’t do something, on the other hand, you had no place to fall into.
I was so busy thinking about how I needed a place that I almost didn’t hear Olivia when she asked quietly, “What do you love, Zoe?”
I made my voice deep and mock-seductive, glad to be distracted from my depressing train of thought. “You, baby!”
But Livvie didn’t laugh. After a minute, I looked over at her. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing rhythmically.
It had been a long day, and though the sun was low, it was still warm out, warm enough that I could imagine how easy it would be to drift off into sleep. Still, no one fell asleep just like that. Was she faking it?
I nudged her calf gently with my foot, but she didn’t stir. She really was asleep.
Wrapping my arms around my legs, I leaned my cheek on my knees, thinking about what Livvie had asked. It was too embarrassing to admit the truth, like confessing you loved a guy who didn’t know you existed.
Still.
In my head I heard the music start, felt the grip of my toe shoes, the butterflies in my stomach. The tension in my legs intensified, as if I were a racehorse eager for the starting gate to be lifted. For years, every moment I wasn’t dancing was a moment I was waiting to dance. Dancing had been how I knew I was alive. How I knew I was me.
Without it, I somehow … wasn’t.
So there was only one answer to Olivia’s question.
“Dance,” I whispered, so quietly that even if Livvie had been awake, she wouldn’t have heard me. “I love dance.”
Mostly to get my parents off my back I went to the first meetings of the yearbook and the newspaper staff. My mom kept telling me I should try out for the play, but one look at the drama club was enough to let me know that it was the last place I wanted to spend my free time. The actors at Wamasset had all the bitchiness of the NYBC dancers, and the idea that I’d spend my free time with a bunch of backstabbers not dancing was laughable. I might have been lost, but I wasn’t insane.
But at least the drama club’s single-mindedness felt familiar. All the other activities—Model Congress, yearbook, Science Club—just seemed like things people were doing to pass the time or to make colleges accept them. I couldn’t see building my life around the passage of a fake Senate vote or the taking of the perfect photo of the volleyball team. It all seemed so … pointless. If I was going to do something, I wanted to give my life over to it, to love it, to wake up in the morning for it like I had for dance.
Was I seriously going to get out of bed every day for Chess Club?
By the time Saturday morning rolled around, it was starting to feel like my extracurricular activity was convincing my parents how busy I was without any extracurricular activities. My mom got up early and went to the gym, but I told her I had too much homework to join her. When I made the mistake of wandering out to the back deck, my dad asked if I wanted to help in the garden. I told him I had homework, and he asked if I could at least walk Flavia before I started working. I did, then sat in the kitchen—just out of his line of vision—with a cup of coffee cooling on the table in front of me. The thought of spending my Saturday morning writing an essay on imagery in the opening chapters of Madame Bovary was more than I could bear.
I am doing nothing, I thought to myself. If anyone asks me what I did this weekend, I can say, I literally did nothing, and it won’t be that annoying thing where people say literally when they mean figuratively.
Then I got Olivia’s text.
coming 4 u 4 lunch. no thank u helping of cheer squad.
A “no thank you helping” was what you got at Olivia’s house if her mom was serving something you didn’t like. For example, if she were to say, “Can I offer you some calf brain?” you might say, “No, thank you.” And then she would put a tiny bit of calf brain on your plate because Mrs. Greco believed a person should try everything at least once.
In the past when Olivia had invited me to go to lunch with her and the cheerleaders, I’d always taken a pass, but if I was still sitting at the kitchen table when my mom got home from the gym, my only options would be starting my essay or discussing with my parents (once again) my future.
The choice was clear. I got to my feet.
Mrs. Greco’s right, I thought as I dumped out the remaining coffee from my cup and put the mug in the dishwasher. You should try everything once.
Except, I quickly discovered, having lunch with Stacy Shaw, Emma Cho, and the rest of the Wamasset cheer squad. Because even the tiniest calf had a bigger brain than they did.
We were seated in a horseshoe-shaped booth big enough for eight. Emma was between me and Olivia. Immediately after we ordered, Emma turned to Olivia, gave her a hug, stroked her hair several times, then rested her head on Olivia’s shoulder with a sigh. “I wish you were my little sister,” she said. “You are just so awesome.”
Despite her general tolerance for cheerleader behavior, Livvie was clearly taken aback by Emma’s petting her as if she were a cat. She didn’t say anything, though, just sat there looking uncomfortable.
I turned my head and asked Emma, “Is that your way of saying you wish you were married to Olivia’s brother?”
“Oh, snap!” said Stacy. She reached across the table to high-five me as the other members of the cheer squad laughed. Emma looked embarrassed, and I felt bad. Maybe I’d needed to rescue Livvie, but did I have to do it by being a total bitch? It wasn’t like Emma had ever done anything to me. Still, there was Stacy’s hand, hovering halfway between us. I guess I could have not high-fived her, thereby alienating both Emma and Stacy in one fell swoop, but I chickened out and gave Stacy a limp high five back.
“You guys, aren’t those kids sooo cute?” wailed a sophomore named Hailey, thankfully changing the subject. Since sliding in next to her in the backseat of the car, I’d observed that every word that came out of Hailey’s mouth was a cry of some kind. It was as if she lived in a state of constant emotional suffering so great she could not contain it, not even to order her salad with dressing on the side.
“They are,” Olivia agreed. She stretched her arms over her head and rolled her neck. The gesture was graceful, but tired. It made me wonder if what I’d thought was discomfort earlier was really exhaustion.
“You guys, I am literally crying for those little girls,” said Emma, who, for the record, was not actually crying. “Their lives are, like, really hard. One of the new girls in the class told me that her brother’s in jail.”
Sitting in the two chairs at the end of the table were identical twins on the cheer squad, seniors named Margaret and Jamie Bailor, who as far as I could tell had received less than their fair share of the squad’s IQ. One of them said, “That’s why it’s really good that we’re teaching them tumbling and stuff.”
“Seriously,” agreed whichever twin had not made the initial point. “They need something in their lives. Tumbling is so much better than drugs.”
That night we lay side by side, Livvie on her bed, me on the trundle bed. The sprinklers were twirling a soothing rhythm outside her window.
“Okay,” she