Maybe One Day. Melissa Kantor

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Why should this be any different?

      I watched her face, seeing her make the decision not to push me on the dance thing. “And you’re sure you don’t want to do soccer?” she asked.

      “Positive.” The girls on the soccer team were awesome, but everything about the sport had felt so wrong. I’d gone out for the team because I wanted to get as far away from dance as possible, but instead of making me forget dancing, soccer had only made me miss it more. I remembered standing on the soccer field, all that sky and grass and the feeling that without ballet, there wasn’t enough gravity to keep me connected to earth.

      A leaf dropped onto my foot, and I picked it up and tore a thin strip from the edge. It was incredible how our bloody, blistered feet had healed so beautifully over the past year. My toes shimmered with the pale pink polish I’d chosen when Livvie and I had gotten pedicures on Labor Day.

      Livvie stretched her arms over her head, then reached for my ankle and patted it. “Just tell me why you won’t do the dance class,” she said sleepily.

      I tried to put into words exactly how I felt. “I just …” I tilted my head and studied the canopy of leaves over our head, as if the answer might be written there. My explanation came slowly. “I thought … it was going to be my whole life, Livs. It was my whole life. And now it’s … what? A hobby? That feels so wrong.”

      Livvie squeezed my foot to show she understood. “You could do something else at the rec center, you know? It wouldn’t have to be dance. There’s the tumbling class.”

      I raised my eyebrows at her. “You aren’t seriously hooking me up with the cheer squad, are you?”

      “The kids in the class are adorable,” she said, not answering my question. Then she yawned again.

      I turned away and snorted. “I’m not even dignifying that suggestion with a response.” I thought about how freshman year she and I had satisfied our community service requirement with the performances of The Nutcracker that NYBC did for the city’s public schools. Last year, I’d spent half a dozen afternoons cleaning up garbage at a nearby nature preserve with the soccer team. It was weird how far-reaching extracurricular activities were. Just because you did one thing, a whole bunch of other things—who you had lunch with, where you did your community service, what parties you went to—fell into place.

      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.”

      

3

      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 СКАЧАТЬ