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“… love is strong as death …”
—Song of Solomon
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part 1: Fall, Junior Year
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part 2: Winter
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part 3: Spring
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Part 4: Summer
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
“I realize this is upsetting news,” said Ms. Daniels, watching me and Olivia across her enormous wooden desk.
There was no way I was letting her see me cry. I bit my lip and stared at the wall behind her.
It was hung with photographs of ballerinas—on stage wearing elaborate tutus; in leg warmers and cutoff T-shirts, draped over the barre; at dressing tables, the lights around their mirrors casting a halo as they stared soulfully at their own reflections. Across the bottom of each was a scrawled message and an autograph, the first letters of the signatures dwarfing the rest of the name like principle dancers before the corps de ballet. It didn’t matter that you couldn’t decipher all the names. If you had been dancing as long as I had, if you had been in the ballet world your entire life, each of the women on Ms. Daniels’s wall was as recognizable as the president of the United States.
Olivia and I had dreamed that one day our photographs would be on Ms. Daniels’s wall too.
But apparently, they were not going to be.
Ms. Daniels had called us into her office immediately after the final class of the summer intensive, and now she sat and fussed with a heavy-looking silver pen that lay on the center of her immaculate blotter. We had known it probably wasn’t good news she was going to deliver when she asked to see us; girls who met with Ms. Daniels after class almost always walked out of her office crying. So we’d been ready to hear we hadn’t performed as well as we should have this summer and that we were going to be repeating a class in the fall.
But not this.
We’d never imagined this.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Olivia’s bare arm. The strap of her leotard had slipped off her shoulder, and as I watched, she slid it back up. I would have done the same thing—as NYBC dancers, we’d been warned for years about the ramifications of looking sloppy at school—but suddenly the gesture struck me as insane.
Who cared if we looked sloppy anymore?
Ms. Daniels abruptly put her pen in the drawer and glanced at her watch.
Olivia cleared her throat. “We both …” Her voice caught, and for a second I thought she was going to start crying, but she just swallowed and went on. “Zoe and I worked very hard this summer.”
“I realize that,” said Ms. Daniels. “Unfortunately, hard work is not always enough.” She touched her tongue to her lip, then slipped it back into her mouth when she saw me notice.
Olivia and I had been dancing with the elite NYBC—the most competitive ballet school in the country—since we were nine years old. The year we’d auditioned, eight hundred other girls had tried out for twelve spots. We’d planned on auditioning for the studio company when we were juniors in high school. If we’d been accepted, senior year we would have left Wamasset High to take dance classes at NYBC full-time, earning our high school diplomas by correspondence class. We’d get our own apartment in Manhattan and have glamorous tours through the capitals of Europe, brilliant reviews in Dance Magazine and the New York Times, thrilling romances with visiting dancers from Moscow and Paris.
Little girls would put posters of us on their walls.
“I appreciate that this is difficult news to process, so I want to make sure what I am saying is completely clear,” said Ms. Daniels, looking from me to Olivia. “There is no longer space for you at NYBC.”
If I even tried to answer her, I was definitely going to start bawling. For five years, Monday through Friday, we’d come into Manhattan from New Jersey. Saturday mornings, while other girls were sleeping late or shopping at the mall or playing sports or doing homework or going to birthday parties, we went back to the city and danced some more.
And now, according to the school’s director, we were finished.
Did she really think her message might somehow be unclear?
“We understand.” My voice was shaking, and suddenly I felt Olivia’s hand on mine. It wasn’t until she touched me that I realized how tightly I had been squeezing the arm of the chair.
For a second, I took my eyes off Ms. Daniels and looked at Olivia in the chair next to mine. She was still staring straight ahead, and as I watched, her profile morphed into Olivia in the dressing room at the New Jersey ballet school where we’d met when we were four. Can you help me? she’d said, walking over to me with the barrette that had slid out of her long blond hair.
Well, there was no way I was going to be able to help her with this.
I looked back at Ms. Daniels. She adjusted the pin shaped like a toe shoe that held her elaborate silk scarf in place. Once again, her tongue flickered at the corner of her mouth.
The silence deepened. Finally, Ms. Daniels stood up. Then we did too.
“I hope you will both see this not just as an end but as a beginning.” She gave a small, sad smile. “Dance is one thing to do with your life. But it is not the only thing.”
The words were professional. Smooth. I imagined her polishing them semester after semester as she spoke to girls just like me and Olivia. Girls who had worked hard. Who had worked so hard they had done nothing but work. Girls who had given everything they had to dance. But who were still never going to be good enough.
I made this weird noise, half laugh, half cry. It must have sounded as if I was choking, and Livvie slipped her fingers into mine.
Ms. Daniels didn’t acknowledge the sound, just held her hand out to me. Not knowing what else to do, I shook it with my free hand, then turned away and walked across her office to the door, my toe shoes silent on the thick beige carpet.
“Good luck,” said Ms. Daniels. “Keep in touch.”
“Thank you, Ms. Daniels,” said Olivia as automatically as she’d adjusted the strap of her leotard. Then she followed me out of Ms. Daniels’s office and pulled the door shut behind us.
We looked at each other. Neither of us spoke.
This is the worst thing that will ever happen, I thought, and as I stared into Olivia’s enormous green eyes, I knew she was thinking the same thing. This is the worst thing that will happen to us in our entire lives.
Since it was the first day of school, Olivia’s brother Jake gave us a ride, and as he slid into an empty space in the parking lot, Emma Cho, a wildly enthusiastic cheerleader who’d been trying more or less since birth to make Jake her boyfriend, hurled herself at us so violently that for a second I thought Jake had hit her with the car. But the blinding smile she flashed Jake as we got out and the “He-ey, Jake!” she sang to him made it seem unlikely she’d just been rammed by his Honda.
“Hey,” he answered. Jake was a senior, and really good-looking and he was on the football team, so while Emma might have been the most determined, she was hardly the only girl who was madly in love with him. He and his best friend Calvin Taylor, who was the QB, should have listed beating girls off with a stick as an extracurricular activity on their college applications. Jake hugged Emma back, but he didn’t linger, just said “See ya” to all of us and headed over to join a bunch of senior guys who were standing near the edge of the parking lot. When he did that, Emma looked briefly forlorn, then threw her arms around Olivia.
“Hi, Livs!” Her red-and-white cheerleading skirt flared out above her knees. High, high above her knees.
“Hey, Emma,” said Olivia, hugging her back. Right after we got the ax from NYBC, Olivia started teaching a dance class for at-risk girls at this rec center in Newark where her mom’s on the board. A lot of people from our high school satisfied their community service requirement there—including the cheerleaders—and somzetimes Olivia had lunch with the squad on Saturdays after they taught their classes. That my best friend regularly hung out with cheerleaders was one of the great mysteries of my life.
“Zoe!” Emma squealed, hurling herself at me when her hug with Olivia came to an end.
“Oh. Hey. I mean, hi. Hi, Emma.” I patted her awkwardly on the back. The cheerleaders were always nice enough to me, but I couldn’t help feeling like they saw me as this weird birth defect of Olivia’s, something she would have been wise to have removed but for some reason chose to live with.
“I still can’t believe you guys didn’t try out for cheer squad last spring,” Emma said, stepping out of my lackluster embrace and shaking her head in amazement.
“I couldn’t. Soccer,” I answered immediately, even though after one awful season as the world’s worst soccer player, I’d dropped it.
“Dance class,” said Livvie.
Emma made a pouty face. “But we do the tumbling class and we cheer. You could do both.”
“I know!” said Olivia, ignoring Emma’s implied criticism. “You guys are awesome.”
I smiled vaguely.
Placated by Olivia’s praise, Emma waved good-bye to us, made Olivia promise to have lunch with the squad on Saturday, then skittered off to join her fellow cheerleaders. As I watched her go, I spotted Bethany and Lashanna. They waved at me and I waved back. I’d been nervous that they’d be mad when I didn’t go out for soccer again this year, but they’d seemed to understand.
Taking Livvie by the hand, I started walking toward them, but she pulled me back, reaching into her bag and pulling out her phone. “Wait a sec.”
I groaned but stayed put while Livvie fussed with her phone, then swiped at a lock of heavy blond hair that had dropped over her eyes. Until last summer I’d also had long hair, though my hair is so black it’s almost blue. But the day after we were thrown out of NYBC, Livvie came with me to Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow and watched me get approximately three feet of hair chopped off my head. When the woman asked if I wanted to take a lock to remember it by, I just stared at her like, Why would I want to remember my hair?
No more dance. No more soccer. I shivered slightly. My parents and my guidance counselor were on my case to pick an extracurricular activity and to pick it fast. I’d played some tennis up at my grandparents’ this summer, but was I seriously going to try out for the tennis team like I’d told my parents I might? Livvie slipped her arm around my waist, and we stood shoulder to shoulder as she held the camera up at face level. “Say, ‘Olivia is so cheesy.’”
Glad to be pulled out of my thoughts, I repeated, “Olivia is so cheesy,” and she snapped the picture. To say Livvie had dealt better than I had with our being dumped from NYBC would be an understatement. Sometimes I wondered if the secret to being well-adjusted wasn’t blond hair.
“Nice,” she said, angling the screen toward me. Livvie and I were almost exactly the same height—five seven—so our faces were right next to each other. Olivia was grinning widely, her dimple pronounced, her eyes sparkling.
“You look like a prom queen,” I told her. “I’m all ‘Take me to your leader.’” I have big eyes, which I’d always known but which I hadn’t fully appreciated were quite so enormous until I got my pixie cut. I looked exactly like a cartoon drawing of an alien.
“You’re beautiful. Your eyes are seriously awesome. No joke.” She hip-checked me absently, still studying the screen. “Am I crazy or do I have a picture of you wearing this exact same shirt?”
I glanced at the cap sleeve of my dark blue T-shirt. “That’s impossible. I’ve never worn this shirt before.”
“Hmmm …” Livvie bit her upper lip and stared at the image, then shrugged. “Well, whatever.” She dropped her phone into her bag, took me by the hand, and led me toward the front steps of Wamasset High, so named because on this site a proud tribe of Wamasset Indians made their last stand against a group of British settlers who were ultimately successful in their attempt to brutally exterminate every last one of them.
“Do you think it’s comforting to the dead Wamasset that the descendants of their murderers attend a high school named in their honor?” I asked.
Livvie’d been trying to get me to have a more positive outlook on life, and now she turned around and pointed her finger at me threateningly. “Stop that.”
I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender, and we headed into the lobby. The noise was deafening. Bethany and Lashanna weren’t anywhere to be seen, but half a dozen cheerleaders were, including Stacy Shaw—one of the captains of the cheerleading squad—and Jake’s would-be girlfriend Emma.
STACY: (Screaming.) Aaaaah!
EMMA: (Also screaming.) Aaaaah!
(They embrace.)
STACY: (Wails.) I wish you’d gotten captain. (She bursts into tears.)
EMMA: (Also bursting into tears.) Staaaaaaay!
STACY: Emms!!!!
EMMA: I love you so much.
STACY: I love you so much. (They continue to embrace, weeping.)
Olivia and I made eye contact. “You regularly lunch with those people,” I pointed out.
“They’re not as bad once you get to know them,” she insisted.
“Let me guess: That’s what you tell them about me, right?”
Laughing, we turned out of the lobby and down the two hundreds corridor. When we got to my homeroom, Livvie hugged me good-bye.
“Fortress after school, right?” she asked, even though odds were we’d have at least a couple of classes together.
“Right,” I agreed. As I hugged her back, I realized something. “Hey, Livs,” I said, pulling away. “You’re not just my best friend—you’re my extracurricular activity.”
Livvie pressed her hands to her chest and got a dreamy expression on her face. “I’ve always longed to be an extracurricular activity.” Then she kissed me lightly on the cheek and headed down the corridor. “Love ya,” she called over her shoulder.
“Love ya,” I called back.
I stepped into the classroom, nervous for a second that no one I hung out with would be in homeroom with me, but then I saw Bethany. She saw me, too, grinned, and moved her bag off the desk next to hers. Grinning back at her, I made my way across the room. Just as the bell rang I slipped into my seat, and then Ms. Evans raised her head from the papers she’d been shuffling on her desk, walked over to the door, and shut it. She looked around the room at all of us as we slowly got quiet. “Welcome, everyone!” she announced, the tight curls of her perm bobbing as she nodded and smiled at us. “I hope you all had a wonderful summer.”
It was official: junior year had begun.
In Olivia’s backyard was an enormous beech tree that had to be about a hundred years old. In it was what we call the fortress.
The fortress was a … thing her dad and Jake built in the tree a few summers ago. It was supposed to be a place that would lure the twins, Tommy and Luke (they were eight now), outside for hours of fun so they wouldn’t drive their mom batshit with their running around in the house.
Everyone called it the fortress, but really it was just a platform. The plan had been for it to be a real fort, with walls and a ceiling and everything (I remember looking at some pretty complicated architectural drawings her dad commissioned), but then Jake made the football team and wasn’t so into building it and Tommy and Luke said a tree fort was babyish and now Livvie and I were pretty much the only ones who used it.
At five o’clock, we climbed up for what we felt was a much-deserved break. It didn’t seem possible that we had so much homework already, but after an hour and a half of working in Livvie’s kitchen, neither of us had put a dent in our assignments. It was only the first day of school. How were we ever going to survive junior year?
We lay on the wooden planks of the fortress, half trying to get our heads around the amount of work we had to do, half watching Jake and Calvin Taylor toss a football back and forth.
“I can’t believe they come home from football practice and play football,” I said. We were on our stomachs, our chins resting on our hands.
“Zoe, we danced for, like, six hours a day, remember?”
I ignored her question, which was rhetorical anyway, and we watched Jake and Calvin in silence. Calvin leaped up to catch the ball Jake had just thrown. For a second he seemed to hang in the air before gently dropping to earth, almost as graceful as a dancer.
“I cannot get over how hot Calvin Taylor is,” said Livvie.
I eyed him lazily. He and Jake were both wearing shorts and no shirts, and their skin was shiny with sweat. Jake wasn’t fat, but compared to Calvin, who was long and lean, he was definitely thickish. You couldn’t see it from up in the tree, but Calvin had a beautiful face that was saved from being too pretty by his nose being a little crooked from where it got broken during some football game.
“I swear to you,” Livvie continued, “we had a moment.”
I groaned. “Are you still talking about that ice cream run you guys did? Livvie, that was, like, a month ago. Besides, you’d have to murder all those cheerleaders and then climb over their dead bodies to get to him.”
Livvie smacked her lips exaggeratedly. “It might be worth it.”
I must have been the only girl at Wamasset who didn’t think Calvin Taylor was God’s gift to our zip code. He’d moved here late—the summer before his sophomore year—and immediately made varsity football and every girl’s top-ten list. He and Jake started hanging out a lot, and at first I didn’t think he was so bad, but then I found out what an asshole he really was.
That year, my freshman year, I had this … well, I guess you couldn’t say boyfriend since we went on exactly one date. His name was Jackson, and his sister was in my and Olivia’s class and he was a sophomore like Jake and Calvin. Livs and I went to a Halloween party at his sister’s house, and Jackson and I ended up hanging out a little, and the next night he called and asked me out on a date. Like a real date—a dinner-and-a-movie date. The whole thing would have been awkward enough (what with our barely knowing each other and his parents driving us to the mall), but then when we got to the theater (we were going to see the new James Bond movie), pretty much the entire football team was there. Most of the guys tried to be cool about it, just all, “Hey, Zoe; hey, Jackson,” and kind of pretending they didn’t see us, but Calvin kept giving us these knowing looks while we were waiting on line to buy snacks. And then he came over to our seats during the previews with a bag of popcorn that he said was “special delivery from the guys for the lovely young couple.” Jackson laughed, but I seriously wanted to punch Calvin. It was hard for me to even think about whether I was glad Jackson was holding my hand during the movie because I was so busy hating Calvin, and later, when Jackson and I were waiting for his dad in this darkish part of the parking lot and Jackson started kissing me, I could barely concentrate because I kept expecting Calvin to jump out from between two parked cars and be all “Surprise!” Jackson’s family moved away the day after our date (okay, it was more like a month later, but between football and dance we never found a time to go out again), so I guess you could say Calvin Taylor not only ruined my first date and my first kiss but also my first (and only) relationship.
The idea that my best friend might be falling for my nemesis was more than I could take.
I rolled my eyes. “Calvin’s the worst, Livs. Don’t be another notch in his belt.”
She was still watching him and Jake. “I’m telling you I’m, like, bizarrely drawn to him.”
Thinking a different tactic might be more effective, I got to my hands and knees and crawled toward Olivia. “He’s so handsome and magnetic. And he lives in that mansion up in the Estates. Beware! Maybe the reason you’re so drawn to him is because he’s really a vampire! Raarh!” When Livvie laughed, I growled, baring imaginary fangs, then rolled onto my back and stared into the leaves of the tree. I could barely feel a breeze, but their shimmering proved that there was one.
“Liv?”
“Mmm?”
“What do you think I should do?”
“About what?” She yawned. “Sorry. I’m so tired. Did I tell you I almost fell asleep in physics? I jerked awake at the last second, but I think Mr. Thomas is onto me.”
“About my life. What should I do with my life?” I sat up and looked over Olivia’s enormous Victorian house and across the hedges at the edge of her yard. Up and down the block were other houses, and in each of the houses were people. What did they do with their lives?