Fireworks Read online

  “Well, okay, the thing is—” Kristin started, but Guy raised one thick eyebrow at her and she shut up like he’d waved a magic wand.

  “Tulsa MacCreadie made thirteen million dollars last year,” he continued calmly, leaning back and resting his ankle on his opposite knee like he was sitting in a leather armchair in some fancy smoking lounge. “Do you understand that? Do you have any idea how much money thirteen million dollars is? I do. I’ve been doing this for a decade. I don’t need the money; I have the money. And I can tell you, girls, you’re never gonna see it with a crap performance like the one you just made me sit through.”

  I winced. My head was still throbbing; my skin felt clammy and hot.

  “Do you think that was thirteen-million-dollar work we just saw?” Guy asked us. It sounded rhetorical, but after a moment he pressed, “Do you?”

  “No,” we all mumbled.

  “No,” Guy repeated. “And I’m not here to be the bully and the bad guy, but if you want to have any kind of success in this business, you need to give a thirteen-million-dollar performance every single time. I don’t care if you’re tired, and I don’t care if you just broke up with your boyfriend, and I don’t care if you’re on your period, or whatever. Amateur hour is over here. You with me?”

  A flicker of annoyance sparked in me at his examples, but Guy changed tactics then, expression softening. “Part of this is my fault, because I haven’t been here to push you,” he told us. “I’ll be honest. I’ve been spread too thin lately, and I haven’t been able to give you the attention you need, but that’s going to change. You’re going to be seeing a lot more of me as we move forward.

  “Look, girls,” Guy said, “greatness takes sacrifice. It’s how I got here; it’s how Tulsa got where he is. And it’s what I’m gonna require from all of you if I’m going to keep Daisy Chain together.”

  If he kept the group together? I felt my stomach flip unpleasantly, cutting my gaze over to Ashley and Kristin, who looked equally cowed. Olivia was staring hard at the floor.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Guy said, and from the way his voice changed I could tell we were getting close to the end of what he had come here to tell us. He had a quality to him like a politician or preacher, convincing like that. “All you girls are here for a reason—I picked all of you for a reason, and I don’t make mistakes. All you girls have the capacity to do the kind of work that’s required here.” He looked at each of us in turn, and I felt myself straighten up like a reflex, suddenly wanting him to know I was paying attention.

  “Take the weekend, think about whether you actually want to be here,” Guy advised us, standing up and nodding at the coaches, then looking at the four of us one more time. “And come back on Monday ready to work.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Do you care if I borrow your car for a couple of hours?” I asked Olivia the next afternoon, putting one knee up on the bed where she was flipping through the pages of her lyrics binder, a furrow between her brows. “I’ve got some errands I wanna run.”

  “Yeah, go ahead,” Olivia said, glancing up for the briefest of moments, and I told myself I was imagining the coolness in her tone. We hadn’t talked about what had happened at rehearsals yesterday. For the first time in the history of our friendship, it felt like neither one of us knew exactly what to say.

  I thanked her and scooped the keys out of the bowl on her dresser. Instead of driving west toward the shopping center or the mall, I turned east and made my way to the studio. I let myself into the cool, dark space, flicked the lights on in the voice room. Took a deep breath and got to work.

  I don’t know exactly why I hadn’t wanted to tell Olivia where I was going. Maybe I was worried that no amount of practice would be enough. I wasn’t used to being embarrassed in front of her, to feeling like I was letting her down all the time just because I wasn’t as good at something as she was. I’d never been as good at this as she was—I’d never had any reason to want to be. That had never mattered, until now. Coming here had felt like my only option for getting out of Jessell. But I worried that it had been a massive mistake.

  I warmed up with scales to start with, my voice echoing off the tall beige walls. I took my time, singing phrases over and over, doubling back when they didn’t sound right, starting over. It was weird, but I actually liked being in there with nobody listening, nobody to make faces when I didn’t hit my notes correctly. Nobody to disappoint. I’d made it all the way through “Only for You” when someone behind me started to clap.

  “Jesus Christ,” I exclaimed, whirling around with no small amount of horror to find Alex standing in the doorway. My heart was pounding, my face flooded hotly with embarrassment—that he’d heard me, that he knew I was struggling, that I was here rehearsing at all. “You gotta stop sneaking up on me, buddy.”

  “Sorry,” Alex said, smiling like a person who wasn’t, really. “Didn’t mean to. What are you doing here?” he asked, taking a couple of steps into the studio. He was wearing baggy shorts and a T-shirt, a faded baseball cap pulled down over his golden hair. “It’s Saturday.”

  I shrugged. “You’re here,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, but I’m an overachiever.”

  “I bet.” I glared at him a moment longer, then sighed. There was something about Alex that made me want to tell him the truth. “I bit it in front of Guy yesterday,” I admitted. “Like, full-on crash and burn, couldn’t hit my harmonies, screwed up all three songs. And now everybody hates me even more than they did before.”

  “Ouch,” Alex said, wincing. “That bad, huh?”

  “Bad,” I assured him. “It was humiliating, if you want to know. So anyway”—I gestured around—“here I am.”

  Alex nodded thoughtfully. “Can I hear you again?” he asked.

  My eyes narrowed. “What, now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why, so you can make fun of me?”

  Alex made a face like that was ridiculous. “Maybe I can help.”

  No way. I wasn’t about to spend any more time alone with Alex, if I could help it, on top of which I was too proud to let him hear any more of my suckage than he already had. I shook my head. “Thanks,” I said, “but I don’t want to keep you from your own practice.”

  “Well, from the sound of things, you need it more than I do.”

  “Screw you,” I said, but he was smiling at me again, and after a moment I couldn’t help but smile back. Still. “That’s okay,” I told him. “Really.”

  “If you’re going to do this, you’re going to have to get used to people hearing you,” he pointed out.

  “I know that, thank you,” I said, irritated. He could be such a know-it-all sometimes. “But it’s also easier to let people hear you when you’ve had, like, a million years of voice training. Which everybody else here has, just FYI.”

  “Well,” Alex replied, sounding unruffled, “you better start playing catch-up, then. You got sheet music?”

  “What, you’re going to—” I broke off as he sat down on the bench Lucas usually occupied and reached for my binder, flipping through the pages until he found what he was looking for. “You can play piano?”

  “Sure,” Alex said, shrugging like it was no big deal. “Here”—he tapped “Only for You”—“this is the one you were just singing, right?”

  “I—” I sighed. “Yeah.”

  Alex nodded and set to playing the intro.

  So. This was happening, then. There didn’t seem to be anything to do but sing—which I did, fumbling my way through the first verse as Alex listened seriously, his sharp face still and thoughtful, not giving anything away. When I was finished, he looked up at me and nodded again.

  “Well, first of all, I know this is probably the last thing you want to hear from me, but you’re breathing wrong.”

  I scowled. “I hate you.”

  “No you don’t,” Alex said with confidence. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Which is how we wound up spending the afternoon
working through every Daisy Chain song in my lyrics binder, Alex breaking down the harmonies and going over them as many times as it took. He was a good teacher: knowledgeable and easygoing, exacting and particular, but patient, too. I liked that he never made me feel stupid for not knowing a musician or a vocal term he dropped into conversation—and, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I liked the glowing smile he shot my way whenever I got things right. When I finally glanced up at the clock on the wall, it was almost dinnertime.

  “I’m a jerk, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I ate up your whole afternoon.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Alex asked, shaking his head. “I had a blast. You’re talented, Dana,” he told me. “Like, sure, you haven’t had the training or whatever, but you have whatever that thing is that just makes me want to listen to you, you know? Not everybody has that.”

  I ducked my head, not knowing how to respond, exactly; it was the first time anyone had ever said anything remotely like that to me. “Thanks,” I finally said. “For all of it, really. You didn’t have to help me like that.”

  “I wanted to,” Alex said stubbornly, then, reaching for my arm as we headed across the parking lot: “Dana.” In the late-afternoon sunlight he looked almost shy. “Look, I’m going to ask one more time, and if you say no, then I’ll drop it. Will you—”

  “Alex.” I shook my head. “I can’t. I just—it has nothing to do with not wanting to. But I can’t.”

  Alex smiled. “Can’t blame a guy for asking, right?” he said. “I’ll see you around.”

  It was nearing dark by the time I got back to the complex; I was tired and starving, a little cranky as I climbed the stairs to our unit. I wanted to collapse into my bed and take a nap. I had just reached the door when I heard Ashley’s voice from the living room: “—she’s completely screwing up our chances. And even if she manages to somehow pull it together, which is a big if, I just don’t understand why she got picked in the first place.”

  “Because she’s hot,” Kristin fired back, just as I put my key in the lock. “Probably Guy wanted to screw her, so he chose her even though she’s got zero talent.”

  I froze for a moment, stunned and stupid and still somehow completely unsurprised that this was happening: of course it was. I felt my face, my whole body, flame with embarrassment and anger.

  If I hadn’t already given myself away with the key in the door, I would have walked away right then, back down to the car and straight home to Jessell. As it was, I had to go inside. Ashley, Kristin, and—I realized with a dull thud—Olivia were all sitting in the living room, silent as stones and just as motionless, like somehow I’d accidentally cast a spell over them. As I came into the living room, it broke. “Hey!” Olivia said, too brightly, her wide-eyed gaze darting to the other girls, then back to me. “You’re home!”

  “Hey,” I said slowly, putting my bag down on the sofa, not making any actual eye contact. For some reason I hadn’t thought she’d be in here with them. For some reason I hadn’t imagined that at all. “What are you guys up to?”

  “We’re going to drive out to the mall and see a movie,” Olivia said, speaking for all of them; I couldn’t tell if this was a plan they’d actually made or if she was just making stuff up to distract me, compulsively filling the silence like she sometimes did when she was uncomfortable or afraid. Kristin was examining her fingernails. Ashley was looking at the floor. “You wanna come?”

  “Nah,” I said, swallowing; for a second it felt like I might be about to cry, which was ridiculous. “I’m, um, pretty beat.”

  I sat on the couch for a long time after the three of them left the apartment, staring blankly at the vacant TV and telling myself I was being dumb. Girls were bitches sometimes, was all, Kristin and Ashley in particular. It was weird that Guy had chosen me, frankly. And there was no reason to expect Olivia to defend me at every turn.

  Still, our high school had been full of best friends who weren’t really, girls who talked behind each other’s backs and secretly schemed against each other, like happiness was a zero-sum game. Olivia and I had never been like that. We’d rooted for each other; we’d cheered each other on.

  We’d been here all of three weeks, and already things were changing.

  Finally, I got up off the couch and left the apartment. The air was even swampier than usual, thick gray clouds hanging low and suffocating. I stomped downstairs and crossed the parking lot, then climbed the flight to Alex and Trevor’s apartment, banging the tiny, useless knocker that decorated all the doors at this place.

  Those girls from school made out with each other’s boyfriends, too, said a nasty voice at the back of my mind. I made myself push the thought away.

  Alex’s eyes widened the tiniest bit when he answered the door, wavy hair damp and curling down over his ears. He was wearing a soft-looking gray T-shirt and looking at me like I was Cinder-freaking-ella, never mind that I was still in my sweaty rehearsal clothes, that I hadn’t showered or even combed my lanky, tangled hair. Nobody, not one other person, had ever, ever looked at me like that. “It’s you,” he said.

  “It’s me,” I said, feeling my bad mood melt away at the sight of him, like a puddle of ice cream on the hot, steamy sidewalk. It was Saturday night, and we were eighteen. “You wanna get out of here?”

  Alex grinned.

  FIFTEEN

  Alex was appalled that I’d been in Orlando this long and still hadn’t made it to Disney, so we did what felt like the obvious thing and drove all the way to the park before realizing that tickets to get in were, like, fifty bucks each. Instead we got King Cones and brought them back to his car in the parking lot as the sun sank behind the dark outlines of the roller coasters inside the gates. “I thought you were regionally famous,” I teased, bumping my shoulder with his. “You don’t have a personal in with Mickey Mouse?”

  “Guy’s got us on an allowance,” Alex explained, looking sheepish. “I didn’t really think this plan through.”

  “No, it’s perfect,” I promised him, licking my ice cream to avoid a drip—the inside of the SUV was immaculate, especially considering it belonged to a teenage boy, and I didn’t want to make a mess. “I’m teasing, really. I just needed to get away from the apartment for a minute.”

  “How come?” Alex asked, seemingly oblivious to his own melty cone. “What happened?”

  I shook my head, watching the steady trickle of park-goers through the windshield—couples and families, little kids in Mickey Mouse ears and old people in motorized wheelchairs. I didn’t want to tell him about Olivia and the others, what a disaster this all had turned into. How sure they all were that the only reason I was here was how I looked.

  “Do you ever get nervous?” I asked instead, wanting to change the subject. “When you perform?”

  Alex shook his head. “Nah.”

  “Of course not,” I said, which made him smile. The hand that wasn’t holding his ice-cream cone was resting on my bare knee, his palm warm and heavy against my skin. It felt like every nerve ending in my body was focused in that one single spot, like iron filings rushing to a magnet.

  “Seriously, though, what’s there to be nervous about?” Alex asked. It was just twilight, the last of the sunset casting the side of his face in pinks and golds. “You got this, Dana. Guy picked you for a reason.”

  “He picked me because I’m pretty,” I blurted before I could stop myself, then blushed. “I’m not saying that to be conceited, I just—”

  “That’s not true,” Alex said, then hurried to correct himself: “I mean, you are pretty. Really pretty. But that’s not all.”

  “It’s not, huh?” I raised my eyebrows, not buying it. I wasn’t fishing for compliments. The truth was, my looks had gotten me plenty of stuff in my life so far: a C on a test I knew I should have failed in Mr. Lambert’s geometry class last winter; a simple warning from the store manager when I’d gotten caught shoplifting lipstick when I was thirteen. Being pretty, I’d learned, was enough to keep you
in the competition for a little while. But it was never enough to win.

  Alex was shaking his head, sincere. “I meant it, what I said earlier. You, you’re like—you’re the whole package.”

  That made me blush. I couldn’t help it—it all felt like a lot all of a sudden, his hand on my knee and the close quarters of the front seat, the cold ice cream in my throat. “I already made out with you once,” I managed finally. “You don’t have to flatter me. When I actually stop and think about it for five seconds, I know there’s no way this is going to be an actual real thing that happens. It’s a nice diversion, being down here. That’s all.”

  Alex wasn’t buying it. “So why even bother practicing?” he asked pointedly.

  “Because I don’t want to humiliate myself every day if I can help it.” I shrugged. “But I’m not—I’m not the kind of person stuff like this happens to. Do you understand that?”

  “Stuff like what?”

  “Like being a pop star!”

  “You are, though,” Alex argued. “The fact that you’re here at all means you are. You can have this if you really want it, there’s literally no doubt in my mind. You’ve got, like, that indefinable thing. The know-it-when-you-see-it thing.”

  I was still blushing. I wasn’t used to the kinds of compliments Alex threw around like handfuls of confetti, didn’t know if he meant them for real or if this was just how he was. Either way, I wondered how you got to be that confident—in yourself or in anyone else. “I don’t know about that,” I said.

  Alex nodded. “Trust me,” he said, and in spite of myself, I did.

  He sat back in his seat then, eating the rest of his ice cream in three big bites like he’d suddenly remembered he had it. My skin buzzed hotly where his hand had been. “Can I ask you something? You said you didn’t even really mean to audition, right?” He tilted his head to the side, and I nodded. “So why did you decide you wanted to be in the group?”