You in Five Acts(17)

“Joy, please,” Liv said, her voice suddenly small and pleading. “I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

“I’m not mad,” I lied, to keep her tears at bay. “I just don’t know why you can’t let me have one crush without stepping in first to prove how much better you are.” Unexpected tears sprung to my eyes as I moved past her and yanked open the door. On the other side of the pass-through, Dave and Ethan were engaged in another one-sided conversation. You were standing off to the side, looking as dejected as I felt, all traces of Mr. Hospitality gone. It was a special kind of hell to be plunged into personal drama while the rest of the party raged on so obliviously. “Get a f*cking room,” I muttered under my breath as I pushed by a couple groping each other against the fridge.

I tried on one of Dave’s disposable smiles to say my quick goodbyes, pretending I was tired, but you saw right through it.

“Come on, don’t go,” you begged, following me to the door as I struggled with my zipper. “I’ll deal with her.”

“She needs to deal with herself,” I said, kicking through the detritus of empty cups still littering the entryway. Dante and his “associates” had apparently left the building. “She’s out of control.” It seemed so surreal that just four hours earlier, Liv and I had been fanning out napkins and gossiping, taking pictures of cabinets so we would know where to put things back the next morning. But life wasn’t like that; things got broken, and sometimes, no matter how hard you tried to force them, the pieces just didn’t fit together anymore.

“Did something happen between you guys?” you asked.

“No,” I said quickly. I couldn’t bring myself to admit the truth. As hurtful as it was, I knew it would sound pathetic if I tried to explain it out loud—We like the same boy! I was too proud to own up to that level of pettiness. “She’s just . . . embarrassing herself,” I mumbled. “And I can’t watch. I’m afraid she’s going to do something stupid.”

“Oh, shit,” you said, suddenly looking over my shoulder with an expression that hovered somewhere between shock and delight. “Too late.”

I turned around, steeling myself for what I was about to see. There was Liv, pressing him up again the wall, her arms around his neck, her tongue in his mouth.

Only it wasn’t Dave she was kissing. It was Ethan.

“Looks like she just made his whole life,” you laughed, holding a hand up to your grin, as Ethan eagerly wrapped his arms around Liv, dropping his drink on the rug in the process.

There was a part of me that wanted to laugh with you, to revel in the twist ending Liv had just thrown down. But I knew better—whatever she was doing, it wasn’t fueled by liquid courage. It was classic, impulsive Liv, trying to make things right. It was her own backward way of saying sorry.

“What is she doing?” I whispered. Whatever Liv was trying to prove to me, it was only going to make things worse for everyone else. Ethan had worshipped her for years, even though it was obvious to everyone she wasn’t into him. And as much as I’d hated seeing her all over Dave, I felt bad for him, too. He was standing there stunned, with a look on his face that made my heart ache.

I knew that expression; I’d been fighting it myself all day, ever since Ms. Adair had called me out before my solo. It was the look of someone watching something they desperately wanted slip between their fingers . . . and disappear.





Chapter Seven


    January 9

124 days left


I WALKED TO THE FOUNTAIN on Monday with a creeping sense of dread, but for the wrong reasons. The anxieties stacked up inside me like layers of rock sediment, or maybe Dante’s Inferno (Dante the thirteenth-century Italian poet, not Dante the twenty-first-century Manhattan drug dealer, although both of them brought to mind circles of hell). On top, the most all-consuming, was the Showcase cast list, which according to tradition would be posted on the bulletin board outside the auditorium after lunch, at the beginning of sixth period. I was fresh out of pointe class with Ms. Adair, and the way she’d treated me had made my blood pressure spike. It wasn’t that she’d been cold or cruel, like I’d worried she’d be; it had been worse—she’d been extra nice, complimenting my form in front of the class, asking me to demonstrate a high arabesque, even commenting that my ribbons were laced perfectly. To anyone else I probably looked like a teacher’s pet, but I had the distinct feeling that she was just killing me with kindness to set me up for a crushing blow she already knew was coming.

Underneath that, of course, was my fear of seeing Liv—or Dave, or Ethan . . . pretty much anyone except you (though I’d even been relieved to have had pointe class that morning so that you wouldn’t be there, just to put off having to talk about any of the other three for a while). I’d lived the rest of my weekend in a sort of bubble, keeping my phone mostly silent, doing homework and helping my dad cook, watching dance movies on cable. I did check every few hours to see if Liv had texted, but amazingly, she never did. I knew she was alive, though, because she’d posted a photo on Saturday, of a toddler face-planting on a Slip’N Slide, accompanied by the hashtag #currentmood.

At the bottom of my pile of worries, throbbing faintly but unmistakably, was my right ankle. Something was wrong; it wasn’t just sore, and no amount of ice over the weekend had made the gnawing pain go away. That should have been my first priority, I knew that, but it felt like denial was the only option. I couldn’t stop dancing, not with Showcase and potential company auditions coming up, and telling anyone I was injured would only ensure that I would be taken out of the running. I couldn’t imagine my parents not freaking out, since apart from a stable income, my health was the biggest thing we fought over about ballet. I’d had this Alvin Ailey poster above my bed since I was nine that pictured a beautiful dancer clutching her shoulders, facing the camera, in the middle of an acrobatic grand jeté. I loved it because she didn’t look perfect and prissy; her face was almost in anguish, her hair flying out wild above her. To me, she looked like passion incarnate, but every time my mom saw the poster she’d say, “Look at that gorgeous body! I bet her joints are crumbling.”