Dante gave me a funny look and then burst out laughing. “Sell to her? Man, she sells for me now. Girl’s got that whole school on lock.” He shook his head. “She’s a natural, too, unloads a six-hundred-dollar bottle in a day.”
I lunged at him. It wasn’t planned, just animal instinct, fear and rage and shame. I’d worked hard to get where I was, to carve out a space in the world that was just mine, far away from the big-talking, wannabe-hustler letdowns who haunted me, past and present, in our apartment complex. Dante could have his little corner of the world, but I’d die before I let him take over mine. I hooked him by the neck and swung him back against the stairwell wall, this time holding him with my elbow.
“Shit, I thought you knew!” Dante cried, his eyes wide with shock and a touch of amusement. He tried to push my arm down and I let him; I didn’t really want a fight. “Look, I get it,” he said, “but some people don’t have some fancy scholarship, you know? Some of us just gotta survive.”
“I don’t care what you do. Just leave her out of it.”
“It’s not that easy,” Dante said, stepping back. “She’s a valuable asset.”
I swallowed bitter, coppery saliva. “But we’re family,” I said.
He shrugged. “Family is family, money is money.”
“And which one’s worth more?”
“It’s not like that,” he said. “Liv’s a big girl, she can make her own decisions. I’m not some gangster keeping her in line. Every weekend when the new stuff comes in she just shows up. I don’t know if she doesn’t have anywhere else to be or if she just gets off on being a tourist in the projects, or what. But no one’s got her on a leash. She can leave if she wants to.” His face softened, and for a second, under the carefully manicured facial hair and studied Clint Eastwood squint, I saw the boy I used to look up to. “I could have let her OD or let her fall off the roof at that party, but what did I do? I called you, right? Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Not much,” I said.
“Whatever, man,” he said, sneering and starting down the stairs two at a time with his hands shoved in the pockets of his hoodie. “Relax. It’s not life or death.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
May 13
14 hours left
“ARE YOU READY?”
I woke up with a start, sweating and panting, reaching for you. In the dream, we’d been onstage, doing the pas de deux, in front of hundreds of people—a packed house (everyone had been dressed in suits, even my mom, which was strange, but otherwise everything was normal). Right before the press lift, you’d whispered, “Are you ready?” and I’d nodded, but when I lifted you into the final position, the muscles in my arm gave out—just crumbled to dust—and I dropped you from seven feet up. The look in your eyes as you fell was so real. I heard your neck snap. I could still hear it.
I flopped back on my bed and hugged a pillow to my chest. Above me, through the crack in the curtains, I could see a triangle of dark gray sky slowly giving way to sunrise. It was the morning of Showcase, the morning that was supposed to be the first day of the rest of my life, or something cheesy like that. And I was dreading it.
It’s not life or death. That’s what Dante had said, and probably why I had the dream in the first place. But I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling it left me with. It seemed like a bad omen, some kind of message I couldn’t decode.
today’s the day! I texted you, not sure what to do with myself.
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! you wrote back, within seconds.
I smiled, then. That scream wasn’t real yet.
? ? ?
“How you feelin’, man?” I asked Dave as we met center court, in the playground on the corner of 77th and Amsterdam a few blocks from his house. It was almost noon but he looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, and his hair must have been in a special state, because it was stuffed under a knit cap even in the breezy 65-degree weather.
“OK, actually,” he said, yawning and dribbling sloppily until the ball hit his sneaker and shot off down the pavement. I jogged after it, already feeling a little bit better with the spring air filling my lungs.
“You skip school yesterday?” I asked, taking an easy lay-up.
“Yeah.” Dave yawned again. “Ethan sent us this incredibly long, pretentious e-mail Thursday night saying that the play was canceled and we were traitors and terrible people and bad actors, so I decided I didn’t feel like dealing with that in person.” I tossed him the ball, and he just held it, staring at it like he wasn’t sure what it was for. “Then, when I found out the, um . . . other stuff,” he said, “I guess I was glad I wasn’t there.”
“I missed it, too.” I nodded at him, encouraging him to take a shot, and he hurled it half-heartedly, missing the hoop.
“I’m off my game today,” he said.
“Yeah. Today,” I joked. I ran after the ball again, since Dave didn’t seem ready to move. “You talk to her yet?” I asked casually.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what to say. I feel like I should have known.”
“Nobody knew,” I said, feeling a stab of guilt.