Fireworks

by Katie Cotugno

  DEDICATION

  For one J. Taylor Hanson, who taught me a good amount

  about love and about music, and for one R. Sierra Rooney,

  who probably didn’t think I would follow through

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Katie Cotugno

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  Jonah Royce threw a rager in the field behind his stepdad’s house the night after high school graduation, which is why Olivia and I were both so unbelievably hungover on the afternoon everything changed.

  “Just kill me,” Olivia said, leaning back in her ancient beanbag chair so her long dark hair brushed the carpet. “Seriously, just bludgeon me to death with the phone book and get it over with.”

  I grinned. “I would love to do that for you, truly, but then I’d have to move.” We were sprawled in her rec room, chugging water and watching Live More! With Junia Jerricksen, this low-budget, long-airing talk show both of us had been obsessed with since we were twelve. It had a weird, tinkling theme song that we found hilarious, half eighties hair band and half cha-cha; in ninth grade we’d made up a dance to it that we still did sometimes if we were feeling particularly ridiculous. We’d done it last night in Olivia’s front yard, both of us stinking of wine coolers, giggling so hard we fell down right on the grass and had woken up this morning with bright green stains on our knees.

  Thinking of the wine coolers turned my stomach, even though it was after four in the afternoon and we’d been sitting in these exact spots for most of the day, both of us still in our pajamas. The party had been a big one, the first in what promised to be a long summer full of them—everybody in our graduating class wanting to say good-bye to one another as many times as possible, never mind the fact that nobody was really even leaving town come fall.

  Well. Almost nobody. I glanced over at Olivia, then back at the TV.

  “Are you girls going to hide out in this cave all day?” Mrs. Maxwell called from the top of the short staircase that led up to the kitchen. Olivia’s house was a split-level, somebody always just up or down; the walls in the basement were all covered in fake wood paneling, which Mrs. Maxwell complained about constantly but which I’d always kind of liked.

  “That’s the plan!” Olivia called back. “It’s too hot to go outside.”

  “Well, you’re not wrong about that,” Mrs. Maxwell said. Mrs. Maxwell hated the heat in Georgia; she’d grown up in the Northeast and her accent still tended that way, all hard consonants and a general air of impatience. “Olivia,” she continued, “get your laundry out of the dining room before your father comes home, at least. I folded it for you, because I’m nice. And then you need to tell me if you’re going to do that Orlando thing or what.”

  With some effort, I pried my head off the beanbag. “What Orlando thing?”

  “Oh!” Olivia said. “I meant to tell you about this last night, but then I got so”—she glanced at her mom, who was peering down at us dubiously—“distracted that I forgot. Please hold.” She heaved herself off the beanbag and up the stairs, moving more than either of us had moved all day.

  Mrs. Maxwell was unconvinced, but she didn’t press it, crossing her arms and leaning against the paneling. She was wearing one of the sleeveless collared blouses she had in a dozen different patterns—bright pink flowers today; Olivia always joked that she bought them in bulk at Moms “R” Us.

  “You staying for dinner?” Mrs. Maxwell asked me now.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Mrs. Maxwell nodded. We went through this every night, or most of them; I spent so much time at Olivia’s house that in ninth grade her mom had finally just dropped the pretense entirely and put another twin bed in Olivia’s room for me. I appreciated the way she never assumed about dinner, though, both of us keeping up our nightly charade that my mom might actually be cooking something I’d want to go home and eat.

  Olivia returned a moment later holding a newspaper, which she parachuted down onto the carpet as her mom headed back upstairs to the kitchen. “Voilà!” she said, waving her arms grandly, all dorky talent-show dramatics. “I give you the Orlando thing.”

  I leaned halfway off the beanbag and braced one palm flat on the carpet, scanning the page: Guy Monroe, the superproducer behind superstar Tulsa MacCreadie, was looking for teenage performers to join a new girl group. He was holding auditions in New York, California, and Dallas—plus a round in Florida, four hours south of where we lived. I looked back at Olivia, wrinkling my nose. “You’re going to be a pop star?” I asked.

  “I mean, I’m gonna audition.” She mimicked my skeptical face, then turned it into an exaggerated grimace, the kind of overblown expression that would have read from the back row of a theater. “Maybe. Why, do you think that’s dumb?”

  “No,” I said immediately. “I mean, sure, yes, a little, but you should still do it.” Olivia had been performing as long as I’d known her, voice lessons and dance recitals and regional theater out of Atlanta. I spent basically our entire childhood making her entertain me on car rides and during long afternoons in the hammock in her backyard: Olivia, sing “Cherish” again. Sing that Carole King song. Sing “Like a Prayer.” “I actually think it’s kind of a great idea.”

  Olivia looked at the paper again, then back at me. “Yeah?” she asked, suddenly sounding unsure.

  “Absolutely,” I promised, ready to cheerlead. I glanced over in her direction; she was wearing the CLASS OF ’97 T-shirt we’d all gotten during senior week, the neck cut out so it showed off her sharp collarbones—almost too sharp, I noticed with a frown. I pushed the thought away and gazed back at the TV, where Junia was encouraging a woman whose husband had cheated on her with his own stepsister to get back at him with a sexy makeover and learn to love herself again. “Why not, right?”

  “Right.” Olivia sat back in her own beanbag, considering. “Do you have plans for this weekend?” she asked me. Then, without waiting for an answer: “Will you come with?”

  “What, to Orlando? I can’t.” I shook my head. “I have to get job applications this weekend.” Until two days ago I’d waited tables at Taquitos, a fake-Mexican restaurant that left me smelling like red onions and fry grease at the end of every shift, but back in the spring four people had gotten food poisoning from the chimichangas, and earlier this week, my manager, Virginia, had announced that we were closing, effective immediately.

  “Get them next week,” Olivia suggested, like a person who didn’t rely on a paycheck to pay for things like bus fare and tampons. When she grinned, it was all opt
imism. “Come on, it’ll be fun. We’ll stay in a hotel, swim in the pool. Plus, maybe Tulsa will be there and he’ll fall madly in love with you, and then you won’t need a job at all.”

  I snorted. “Seems like a solid plan. Definitely something to bank on.”

  “I’m serious,” she wheedled. “I mean, not about the Tulsa part. Well, maybe about the Tulsa part! But mostly about needing your best-friend services.”

  I hesitated. It was tempting, if only for the chance to spend some extra time with her. Olivia was headed to Georgia Southern University come the middle of August, while I’d stay here, living at my mom’s and working whatever job I could get. It was fine—it wasn’t like I’d ever harbored any delusions about going to college, and I knew Olivia and I would still be friends. It would just be . . . different. “I wish,” I said finally. “We’ll do a road trip later this summer or something, once I find another job.”

  Olivia sighed theatrically. “You’re very boring,” she said, but there was no heat behind it. She always got why I had to work.

  “I am,” I agreed, leaning all the way back the same way she had earlier, my long hair pooling on the floor. Olivia had used the crimping iron on it before the party last night, though now it was mostly frizz. I probably ought to have gone up and showered before dinner, but I was comfortable where I was: the basement smell of air-conditioning and deeper down of mildew, the hum of the dehumidifier working away in the corner near the laundry room. The shelves were stuffed with games and toys we hadn’t touched since we were little—Connect Four and a bin full of Barbies, plus a Fisher-Price dollhouse we’d played with until we were way too old for it, swearing each other to secrecy. It felt peaceful down here. It felt safe.

  “Later this summer,” I promised again, as Junia closed out her hour by imploring her studio audience to Live Life Forward!, everyone bursting into riotous applause. My hangover was mostly gone, just the faintest pulse behind my eyeballs. “Unless, you know, you’re too famous by then.”

  “Obviously,” Olivia said, thrusting her chin into the air with great fanfare. Both of us laughed out loud.

  “You want me to drive you home?” she asked after dinner. We’d had pork chops and orange carrots, debated the merits of Whitney Houston versus Madonna as optimal audition material. As we loaded the dishwasher, she was leaning toward Celine Dion.

  I shook my head. “I can walk it.” It wasn’t actually that far at all from Olivia’s house to mine, five blocks up and four blocks over; we’d been on the same bus route since kindergarten, which was how we’d become friends to begin with. Still, you’d never have mistaken them for the same neighborhood. On Olivia’s street, the houses were small but impeccably tidy, proud flowers lining neatly paved front walks and freshly washed minivans tucked under the carports.

  My street was . . . not like that.

  The TV was flickering blue when I let myself in through the side door, my mom on the sofa with her bare feet up on the coffee table. The curtains on the windows were pulled tightly shut. “I’m home,” I called, but I didn’t get an answer. I thought she might be asleep. Something smelled rotten in the kitchen garbage, so I tied the bag off and brought it to the alley outside, glass bottles clinking together inside the plastic. My mom’s grubby white terrier, Elvis, sniffed around my feet.

  I was putting another trash bag in the bin when my mom came into the kitchen and gasped, grabbing on to the counter for balance. “Jesus Christ, Dana, you scared the shit out of me.”

  “Sorry,” I told her. She was wearing one of my tank tops and a pair of denim cutoffs, her hair scooped into a stubby tail at the crown of her head. Also, she was drunk. “I said hi when I came in.”

  My mother ignored me. “Do you have any cash on you, baby?” she asked, her gaze the tiniest bit slow to focus. “I want to run out and grab something for dinner.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said again, cringing at how bitchy I felt, but also sincerely doubting that what she was after was money for food. I didn’t have a job anymore, I reminded myself. I couldn’t be floating her all the time. “I already ate.”

  My mom rolled her eyes at that, knowing I’d been at Olivia’s; she’d never liked the Maxwells. She thought they were snobs. “Well,” she said, “good for you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said for the third time in thirty seconds. Then, even though it was barely dark out, the endless start-of-summer twilight still visible out the kitchen window: “I’m gonna go to bed.”

  I shut the door to my bedroom behind me and sat down on the sagging mattress. I thought about Olivia leaving in the fall. I considered my last paycheck from Taquitos, sixty-five dollars and a handful of change that was all the money I had in the world, and imagined the future stretching out in front of me in a wide, flat expanse of nothing but this. Finally, I got up and went for the phone in the hallway, stretched the cord all the way back to my room.

  “Hey,” I said when Olivia answered. “You still want me to come?”

  TWO

  A tropical storm hit central Florida the afternoon of Olivia’s audition in Orlando, thunder bellowing and lightning skittering across the horizon like the sky itself was cracking open, like all hell was literally breaking loose.

  “I thought it would be fancier,” I said, squinting through the torrential rain at the huge stucco building, the wipers on Olivia’s scruffy little Toyota barely up to the task of sluicing water off the windshield. Guy Monroe’s studios were tucked away at the far side of an industrial park off I-4 and, from the outside at least, resembled an airplane hangar more than any concert venue I’d ever seen. “Didn’t you kind of picture it fancier?”

  “Honestly, I was trying not to picture it at all,” Olivia confessed, both hands still gripping the steering wheel hard enough to rip it out entirely. She’d already put the car in park.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. I’d figured this might happen—for a person who’d been performing as long as she had, and who loved it so enormously much, Olivia was plagued by crazy bouts of stage fright. She’d practically climbed the curtains before her senior solo in the spring chorus concert a couple of months earlier, leaving me running backstage and threatening to sing the whole thing for her in a Donald Duck voice before she pulled it together and knocked it out of the park. “You nervous?”

  “Something like that,” Olivia said, staring at her locked white knuckles instead of over at me. “Maybe we should just go home,” she suggested, her voice artificially bright. “I don’t really need to be doing this. I’m supposed to go to college in September, remember? Education is very important.”

  I snorted. “Education is very important,” I agreed, though as of this summer I was personally done with mine once and for all—and, I reminded myself, glad about it. “But there’s no way I’m letting you turn around now. Sorry. We have to go in.”

  “Why?” Olivia wailed.

  “Lots of reasons,” I told her. “One, because I have to pee, and two, because I want to see if Tulsa is in there scoping out all the hot young talent. And, you know, three, because of your audition.”

  “Since when are you interested in Tulsa?” Olivia asked, ignoring that last part, but at least looking over at me now, distracted, which was a good sign.

  “I’m not, particularly,” I defended myself. “I’ve just never seen a famous person before.”

  “Hot Rod Davison,” Olivia pointed out, and I laughed. Hot Rod Davison owned half a dozen car dealerships around Jessell and ran low-budget commercials on local TV where you could practically see his toupee flapping in the breeze. He’d come into Taquitos back in the spring, failed to tip, then told me I was a pretty girl and asked me if I wanted to “get out of here” with him.

  “Hot Rod Davison is definitely not famous.” I shook my head. “Come on,” I urged, reaching behind me and digging her makeup bag and sheet music out of the backseat. “We drove all this way.”

  This was a bluff on my part—honestly, I would have been happy to turn around and head right b
ack to Jessell, if I’d thought that was what Olivia really wanted. This trip had been worth it for the drive alone, as far as I was concerned—the two of us eating green grapes out of a cooler Mrs. Maxwell had packed, the windows rolled down and the Top 40 station blaring. I’d spent a good part of my high school career in this car, my bare feet up on the dashboard. I didn’t know how many more drives we’d have.

  In any case, I knew that turning around and fleeing wasn’t what Olivia was actually after. Freaking out was just part of her process. We went through this every time she had a big performance; it was my job as second-in-command to help her get out of her own way. “You’ve got this,” I promised now, knowing that all I needed to do was get her through the door of the studio, and she’d take care of the rest. “Come on, it’s me. I wouldn’t let you go in there and look stupid.”

  Olivia nodded, leaning her head back against the driver’s seat. “I know,” she said, the rain still hammering on the hood of the car. “I just really want it, you know? A big national gig like this? I’ve wanted it my whole life.”

  I did know, actually. I knew it by the way her feet were always covered in gnarly blisters from dancing, and the half dozen original Broadway cast recordings littering the floor of her car at this very moment. Olivia was going someplace; I’d known that about her since we were little. By now, the only question was where.

  “Well then,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt and opening the door before she had any more time to protest. “Let’s go get it for you.”

  The two of us dashed through the downpour and up a short flight of concrete stairs; my ponytail was sodden by the time we made it through the heavy glass doors at the front of the building, raindrops dripping from my eyelashes and the end of my nose. The studios weren’t much nicer inside than out, I thought, breathing hard, taking a moment to get my bearings: concrete floors and high ceilings, the faint reek of old sweat hanging low in the air. A giant framed poster of Tulsa MacCreadie filled one wall, while directly in front of us was a large lobby lined with black leather couches and armchairs occupied by more than a dozen other girls, all of whom had looked up at the commotion we’d made coming inside.