Maybe One Day. Melissa Kantor

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 said, “I sense today’s lunch did not help us make strides toward your teaching tumbling with the cheer squad.”

      A few glow-in-the-dark stars were still stuck to her ceiling from where we’d put them up in middle school. We’d planned to do an exact replica of the constellations in the northern hemisphere, but halfway through the Big Dipper we’d just started sticking them up any which way.

      “An excellent deduction,” I said, yawning.

      It was quiet for a minute, and then Livvie yawned also. “It’s so crazy that we’re juniors. Remember when we were freshmen? The juniors were older than Jake! We’re now older than people who were older than Jake used to be.” We both laughed at how nonsensical the last part of her sentence was.

      I thought about freshman year, watching the juniors and seniors stand at the doors to the parking lot, swinging their car keys as they waited to go out to lunch with their friends. They’d seemed so … grown-up. So sure of themselves. I rubbed my forehead as if to remove the image of those confident upperclassmen from my brain and said, “I feel like people are going to expect us to know things we don’t actually know.”

      “Yes!” There was the rustle of the sheet as Livvie rolled over. In the faint light coming under the door, I saw that she’d propped herself up on her arm and was facing me. “Driving! SATs! College. It always seemed so far away, but it’s not. It’s here.” She lay back down. “I don’t feel ready.”

      “It’s still kind of far away,” I pointed out.

      “Emphasis on the kind of.”

      I could hear footsteps on the floor above us, and I knew it was one of Livvie’s parents checking on the twins. Then I heard someone coming down the stairs, then her mom talking to her dad. The hall light went off, and the room, which had seemed dark already, became nearly pitch-black. I pulled the soft sheet up to my chin, smelling the familiar smell of the detergent Livvie’s mom used.

      “Calvin really looks at you when you talk to him.” Livvie’s voice was growing sleepy. “It’s intense.”

      “That’s what you said about Milo Bradley,” I pointed out.

      Milo Bradley was this boy who went to private school in Manhattan and took classes at Juilliard. He was a couple of years older than us, and Olivia and I met him freshman year right after Christmas break at a café we always went to when we had time between classes. He was cute in this nerdalicious way, and the three of us started getting together for coffee on a regular basis. He and Livvie would have these long, intense conversations, and it seemed pretty clear they were into each other, so I’d try to make myself scarce by doing stuff like staring intently at the screen of my phone and going to the bathroom every thirty seconds. Olivia went to watch him rehearse a few times (he played the piano) in these private practice spaces they have at Juilliard. It was kind of a big deal because we had to lie to her parents about how we were having extra rehearsals just so she could sneak away with him.

      Each time they went off together, Livvie and I were sure they were totally going to fool around, but they never did. Once, when they were sitting next to each other on the piano bench, he kissed her hand, and another time he put his arm around her, but that was it, even though Olivia was practically dying to make out with him. She was too scared to ask him what was going on, so finally she just started telling him she was busy whenever he called to make plans. The third time it happened, he said, “I don’t get it. Are you breaking up with me?” I was with her at the time, and when she said, “I guess I am breaking up with you,” I just lost it. I mean, were they even going out? She had to practically beat me to death with a toe shoe to get me to stop laughing loud enough for him to hear me.

      It had been a while since I’d teased her about dumping her clearly gay boyfriend, but Milo’s being a really good listener had been something she’d referenced constantly, so her saying the same thing about Calvin Taylor seemed a good reason to bring him up.

      “Don’t remind me about Milo,” she wailed. “I’m begging you.”

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