Fireworks Read online

  I put the paper down on the bedspread. “No, but . . .” But I need to tell you something important, and I’m afraid of what’s going to happen when I do. “I’m kind of tired now, though.”

  Olivia frowned. “We don’t really have time for you to be tired, Dana.”

  There was an edge in her voice that took me by surprise. “Are you mad at me?” I asked, sitting up and looking at her closely.

  Olivia shook her head. “No, of course not. It’s just—I know you hate Kristin, but she and I were talking, and we thought—”

  My heart dropped. “You talked to Kristin about me?”

  Right away, I could tell Olivia knew she’d made a mistake. “Don’t get defensive,” she said.

  “Well, then don’t pick on me with some girl we just met!”

  “I’m not picking on you!” She held her hands up. “But realistically, if we’re going to make this group work, we need to do everything we can to make sure everybody’s more or less at the same level, you know?”

  I felt my cheeks flame. “I know I’m the worst one here, Liv. I don’t need you to remind me.”

  Olivia rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a baby,” she said. “This is work, is all.”

  “Don’t be a baby?” All at once I remembered what Sarah Jane had said about Olivia being the kind of person who was used to being taken care of. I’d never been the person in our relationship who got upset.

  “I’m sorry,” Liv said, putting the binder aside and coming to sit on the edge of my bed. “I didn’t mean that. I know it’s been harder for you than we thought since we got here.”

  I sighed noisily, flopping back onto the pillows. I felt embarrassed and bruised and far from her. “Today sucked,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Olivia said. “It kind of did, huh?” She lay back beside me, nudged me with her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she told me.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said to the ceiling. “I know you were trying to help.”

  We stayed like that for a while, the silence not quite comfortable. I could hear the sound of her breathing, the air conditioner clicking on and off overheard. Suddenly Olivia looked at me, alert. “I’m an asshole,” she said. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  I hesitated. What I wanted to talk to her about was Alex, but now I didn’t know how. It felt like a weird fissure had opened up between us, and telling her what had happened would only widen it. “Nothing,” I promised, shaking my head into the pillows. “It wasn’t a big deal at all.”

  TWELVE

  “What are you doing tonight?” Alex asked me on Thursday afternoon at the studio, leaning against the wall beside the water cooler where I was refilling my bottle. He was wearing an old blue T-shirt from the Galveston Children’s Theater; he smelled like deodorant and clean sweat.

  “Um,” I said, straightening up too quickly, splashing water all over my bare feet. I’d been dodging Alex all week, making sure we were never alone in the same place at the same time. “Hmm.”

  “Yeeeeees?” Alex prompted, the hint of a smile teasing at the edges of his mouth.

  I made a face at him. “Well, I’ve got a binder full of vocal exercises with my name on it,” I said. “So, you know. Probably that.”

  Alex shook his head at that. “That’s too bad.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Too bad, huh?”

  “It is too bad.”

  We looked at each other for a moment. I like you, his expression said. You shouldn’t, is what I was trying to tell him, but I must not have been doing a very good job because Alex smiled for real then, one of those silver-dollar grins that you could use to power a city or send rocket ships to outer space. It felt like hitting the lottery, Alex’s smile. It felt like getting picked to join a band. “I should get back,” I finally said.

  “What you should do is come out with us tonight,” Alex told me, still leaning against the wall like he had no place in particular to be, even though I knew his rehearsal was going on just down the hall. “That’s what I wanted to tell you in the first place. Austin knows some bar near here that doesn’t card. We’re going to go around nine or so. It’ll probably be a total dump, but it might be fun.”

  “It might be,” I agreed; in fact, I liked the idea of spending some time out with Olivia, for us to have a chance to goof around together like we used to back at home. And I liked the idea of seeing Alex, too. “But I don’t think the other girls are going to go for it.”

  “You could come by yourself,” Alex suggested, and I snorted.

  “Yeah, right.” I looked at him for another moment, debating. “I’ll float it,” I said finally. “Okay?”

  Alex smiled again, pushed himself off the wall. “I’ll take what I can get.”

  The bar Austin brought us to was a hot, tiny dive at the edge of a sketchy-looking strip mall twenty minutes from the apartments, with no windows and a big bald bouncer sitting on a stool outside the narrow door. He waved us inside without asking for ID, though, offering the girls and me an appraising leer as we passed. Cigarette smoke was thick in the air, coupled with the smell of old beer and something that seemed to be coming from the bathrooms.

  “This is bleak,” Ashley announced, peering around the dark, windowless space at the neon bar signs and a huge, smudgy mirror stamped with a whiskey logo. Alan Jackson was clanging away on the jukebox. A couple of greasy-looking guys sprawled on stools at one end of the bar.

  “What’d I tell you?” Alex asked me, his mouth tipped so close to my ear that I could feel his warm breath on the back of my neck, making all the tiny hairs there stand straight up. “Kind of fun, right?”

  I swallowed hard, then glanced at Olivia, who was flagging down the bartender. I’d been surprised when the other girls had been so willing to come out, knew in the back of my mind it was mostly so that Olivia could hang out with Alex. I felt like the worst kind of traitor.

  “Come on,” I said now, stepping away from Alex without looking back at him, grabbing Olivia’s hand and pulling her toward the jukebox. “Let’s dance.”

  The bar wasn’t actually so bad once we switched the music up; I drank my Bud Light, danced with Olivia and the others to the Spice Girls and Mariah Carey. Even Kristin seemed to be having fun. “I really love you guys,” she promised as Austin spun her around and around, her dark hair swirling, the sentiment weird and out of character for her. “I’m sorry I was a bitch to you! We’re gonna get so famous, I can feel it.”

  “What she can feel are those rum and Cokes,” Olivia muttered, and I laughed. It felt like she’d come back to me, like we could have been at a house party in Jessell, everything the same as it had always been.

  The bathrooms were through a back room with a pool table and a couple of dusty old pinball machines, wooden floors creaking like your foot might fall right through at any moment. I was wiping my hands on my jeans as I came through the door—of course there were no paper towels—and almost crashed right into Alex, who was waiting outside.

  “Hey,” he said. He was wearing jeans and a clean white T-shirt that made him look even more impossibly tan than normal, like someone whose body stored up sunlight.

  “Hey,” I echoed, tucking my hair behind my ears, suddenly nervous. He was standing so, so close. We stared at each other for a moment; I thought again that it was easy to see why Guy had picked him for Hurricane State, why everybody said he was the star. Alex was the kind of person you wanted to look at. The kind of person you wanted to be near all the time.

  The jukebox had changed over to Joe Cocker, a lazy kind of old-school rock and roll that begged for a slow dance. I wished it were something really unromantic, like Ozzy Osbourne. I wished it were a polka from 1935.

  If we stood here another second, I was pretty sure he was going to kiss me, so instead I grabbed his wrist roughly and held it up in front of my face, examining the dozen friendship bracelets looped around it—the bright primary colors of the ones that were newer, and the faded blues and greens of the ones he’d obviously been
wearing for a long time. The designs were complicated—not just the simple braids I’d learned how to do at recess when I was a kid but intricate knots and patterns, thick diamonds and chevrons. They must have taken forever. “Where did you get all these, huh?” I asked him, brushing my thumb over the hard knot of bone in his wrist before I could stop myself. His skin was very warm.

  Alex tilted his head to look at me. “I made ’em,” he said.

  I snorted. “You did not.”

  “It’s girly, I know.” Alex shrugged. “I had this babysitter when I was a kid who taught me how, and I like to. It calms me down.”

  “Does it?” I said distractedly. I wanted to bite him. God, I needed to get out of here before Olivia saw us talking, or worse. “Okay,” I said. “Well. See you out there.”

  “Do I smell?” Alex asked me.

  I blinked. “Pardon me?”

  “I just— The way you’re running away from me all the time, I thought maybe I have a hygiene issue I’m not aware of.”

  I blew out a noisy breath, checking over his shoulder like an instinct to make sure Olivia wasn’t watching. “Maybe I’m just not interested.”

  Alex looked surprised at that, and a little hurt. “Is that true?” he asked, blue eyes narrowing, taking a step back like he was suddenly worried he was crowding me. “If that’s true, then my bad, I’ll get out of your hair.”

  I glanced over his shoulder again, crossed my bare arms. “You’re not in my hair,” I said sulkily. “And you don’t smell. Overmuch.”

  Alex smiled. “Okay,” he said, perching on the edge of the pool table, settling in. “So you wanna tell me what the problem is, or should I keep guessing?”

  I hesitated. I wasn’t going to throw Olivia under the bus, not ever. But I also couldn’t bear the idea of Alex thinking I didn’t want him around. “One of the other girls here likes you,” I told him finally.

  “Oh yeah?” Alex’s eyebrows went up. “Which one?”

  I scowled. “Don’t be gross,” I said. “If you’re gonna be like that, then I’ll just go back out there and—”

  “I’m sorry.” Alex scrambled to his feet so fast it was almost funny. “I’m just teasing, I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “Don’t go.”

  I sighed noisily. “Okay. Well. In addition to the whole not-shitting-where-I-eat thing, which, honestly, would be enough of a reason to stay away from you, I’m not going to go around breaking the girl code the first chance I get.”

  Alex nodded slowly. “Does it matter who I like?” he asked.

  “Not particularly,” I told him.

  “That doesn’t seem very fair.”

  “Life’s not fair,” I replied. “You’re eighteen; you should know that by now.”

  “I’m a young eighteen,” he said, taking a step closer.

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s a fact.”

  “Okay.” Alex took another step, smirked. Looked at me again. I shivered. I never knew that looking could do that before, that it could feel so obscenely intimate.

  “Anyway,” I said, clearing my throat. “I didn’t, you know, call shotgun fast enough. So.”

  “Call shotgun?” Alex snorted. “What am I, the front seat of your car?”

  “I don’t have a car, remember?”

  “Yeah, and I’m not claimed or whatever just because somebody else says I am.”

  “That’s not—” I broke off, struggling. The real point was getting lost here, that Olivia was my best friend and worth more to me than some guy I’d barely met, no matter what kind of pull I felt when I looked at him. “I can’t do this,” I said finally.

  “Look,” Alex said, “I hear you about not wanting to stir things up with your friends. So if you tell me to leave you alone, I will. But I don’t wanna play games with you, Dana. I like you a lot. I think you are, like, really pretty. And I’d like to hang out with you more.”

  “Alex—” I broke off, huffing a bit, but I was smiling. I couldn’t help it. I could feel the electrons vibrating in the air between us, like they were buzzing loud enough to make a sound, like I could hear them over the music. “I’m sorry,” was the best I could come up with.

  I looked at him one more time before I walked away.

  THIRTEEN

  I woke up the next morning with a beery headache pulsing behind my eyeballs, my stomach a swamp full of acid and bile. I could barely choke down a slice of toast. No matter how much concealer I smeared under my eyes, my face still looked swollen and puffy. “Are you hungover?” Kristin demanded in the bathroom, as I poked at my cheeks with a bronzer brush.

  I didn’t understand how she wasn’t, frankly; still, considering the way she was looking at me in the mirror, there was no way I was about to admit that out loud. “What?” I said, trying to look alert and ready. “No, not at all.”

  “You better not be,” she said, scowling. So much for last night’s drunken lovefest, I supposed.

  “Drink water,” Olivia advised quietly, but all it did was make me nauseated. I could feel sour sweat prickling on my back as we crossed the parking lot to the studio.

  “Pull it together, Cartwright,” I muttered, pinching my cheeks as we walked into the dance studio. I stopped like I’d been punched in the stomach: sitting in a folding chair in the corner was Guy Monroe himself.

  “There they are,” he said cheerfully, standing up as we came in. “How you doing, ladies?”

  “Guy’s here to check out your progress,” Juliet explained, crossing her arms over her perfectly starched button-down. “We’re going to have you girls put on a little impromptu performance today, show us what you’ve got so far.”

  An impromptu performance? I gaped at them, a fresh wave of nausea cresting over me. Olivia’s lips had all but disappeared.

  “I’m looking forward to you wowing me,” Guy told us. He smelled like aftershave, something lemony and faint. In the weeks since rehearsals had started, Guy had turned into a kind of storybook character in my mind, like Santa Claus or the Big Bad Wolf—larger than life but also not exactly real, something adults had invented to keep kids in line. Seeing him in the flesh again was kind of a shock. “Charla and Lucas tell me you’ve been working your asses off.”

  Olivia was the first to recover, poised and pulled together. “We have been,” she assured him. “Definitely.”

  I nodded in agreement, though I was barely listening, already running through a mental catalogue of my harmonies, going over and over the moves to our songs in my brain. Pop, arms, arms, hips, turn, turn, down, right, left—

  Left, right?

  Shit.

  “All right, ladies,” Charla told us, pushing herself off the wall where she was leaning, clapping her hands together once. “I’m thinking ‘Only for You,’ ‘Across the Ocean,’ and ‘Slam.’ Ready to get started?”

  “Olivia,” I whispered as we took our places. “In ‘Only for You,’ what order are the elbows?”

  Olivia turned and looked at me like I was insane. “In—”

  “‘Only for You’!” I whispered again, but Charla was already dimming the lights to make it feel more like a real performance. Olivia was still staring at me, wide-eyed. Calm down, I told myself. You’ve got this. I hadn’t been a tenth this nervous at the audition. Back then, it had all felt like a silly lark, like an adventure. It hadn’t felt like anything was actually at stake.

  Now, in the split second before the music started, it occurred to me that everything was.

  As soon as Lucas’s hands hit the keyboard I could feel that I had the rhythm wrong in my body. When I opened my mouth to sing, I couldn’t find my note. It was like that dream where you get to school and realize you have a huge test you didn’t know about and haven’t studied for, only this wasn’t a dream—it was actually happening. I felt like I was outside myself, watching; I could see Guy’s impassive face in the dim light, his expression impossible to read.

  The three songs felt like they went on forever; I wasn’t finding my harmonies, wasn’t hitt
ing my marks, my limbs feeling awkward and foreign and leaded. I tried not to make eye contact with Guy or any of the coaches, but I could see that Juliet’s lips were pursed disapprovingly. Lucas looked like he was going to puke.

  “Girls,” Juliet said when we were finally finished, her voice as tight and clipped as her expression. Nobody had clapped. “Go change your clothes and get some water. Then come back here ready to listen.” Her voice didn’t leave any room for argument. My whole body felt hot and prickly with shame.

  “Oh my God,” I said once we were all in the bathroom, clustered tightly together like hens in the rain. “Oh my God, you guys, that was a disaster.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Ashley said.

  “It was bad,” Kristin said, tossing an icy glare in my direction. “Nice of you to care all of a sudden.”

  “What do you mean, all of a sudden?” I demanded. “I care about this just as much as you.”

  “Do you?” Kristin asked. “Could have fooled me.”

  “Enough,” Olivia said, grabbing my arm and tugging, her dark eyebrows knitted together. It was the first time she’d spoken since we’d been back here. “Let’s go.”

  Guy was standing in front of the mirrors talking to Juliet when we got back into the rehearsal studio. “Ladies,” he said, crossing his arms. He didn’t say anything else for a moment, just looked at us with open appraisal, like he could see straight into our souls and wasn’t particularly impressed by them. I could feel my heart like a giant ball of phlegm at the back of my throat. The silence seemed to stretch on for ages, just hanging there like some kind of awful set decoration, although in reality it was probably only thirty seconds and made for a nice bit of theater on his part: if it hadn’t been obvious already, in that moment it was clear there was a whole new sheriff in town. I could tell Olivia was about to open her mouth and start apologizing when Guy finally spoke.

  “Well, I’m not gonna sugarcoat this,” he said, settling back into the flimsy folding chair with his hands on his knees. He had a slight New York accent I hadn’t noticed before, or otherwise it only came out when he was really annoyed. “That was one hundred percent the opposite of what I was hoping to see.”