Fireworks

by Katie Cotugno

  “What?” Olivia asked, pulling her T-shirt over her head. All her clothes were already folded neatly in the bureau. “No, why?”

  “I dunno,” I said, grinning at her across the room. “You find me bashed over the head with a platform sneaker, I wouldn’t look too far for the culprit, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Oh, stop,” Olivia told me. “You’re gonna be fine.”

  There was enough of an edge in her voice this time that I looked at her curiously. “Hey, crabby,” I said, twisting a hair elastic around a messy bun to sleep in. “You okay?”

  Olivia sighed. “Yeah,” she said, sitting down on the mattress. “Sorry. Just nervous, I guess.”

  I nodded; I got it. After all, this had been her dream as long as either one of us could remember, and it was real now, our first rehearsal just hours away. Of course her nerves were kicking in. “You’re gonna be fine, too,” I promised, climbing into my own bed and pulling the unfamiliar covers up. “This is us, living our lives forward!”

  Olivia smiled at that, flicked off the bedside lamp. “Junia would be very proud,” she agreed.

  A few minutes later, I heard Liv’s breath get deep and even across the room. I waited for sleep myself, staring out the hermetically sealed window and watching the moon creep across the unfamiliar sky. But the longer I lay there, the more uneasily I found myself replaying my short conversation with Liv in my head. I didn’t have a Plan B if I crashed and burned in Orlando. It didn’t matter whether I belonged here, really: I had to make this work or go back home.

  Sleep wasn’t coming, that much was obvious; my stomach growled, reminding me that all I’d eaten for dinner was a few handfuls of fat-free popcorn. Finally, I got out of bed and pulled on a pair of denim shorts and a T-shirt, then let myself out of the apartment as quietly as I could.

  It was after ten now, but still hot and sticky, the sweaty concrete smell that all of Orlando seemed to have hanging heavy in the air. Cars whizzed down the wide, busy street beyond the parking lot; across four lanes of traffic was a strip mall housing a grimy-looking Kmart and a liquor store, plus two empty storefronts like a pair of missing teeth. Most of the people who lived in this complex were college kids, a fact evidenced not only by its cracked facade and the beer cans and cigarette butts floating in the pool, but also by the huge bank of vending machines at the near end of the parking lot.

  When I got to the bottom of the steps, I saw there was a blond guy about my age already down there, balancing an armload of Gatorades and chips in the crook of one elbow while he punched the keypad with his opposite thumb. I kept my distance while he finished up, arms crossed warily over my chest. The Coconut Palms didn’t seem particularly unsafe to me, on top of which this guy didn’t look like a serial killer—cargo shorts and a crisp white T-shirt, immaculate Adidas shell tops on his feet—but I wasn’t an idiot. In the harsh white glare of the parking lot floodlights, his hair was a messy yellow-gold.

  I’d planned to wait him out, but he was taking forever, adding a couple of chocolate bars and a package of pretzels to his vending-machine haul. Without entirely meaning to, I sighed. The guy looked up and saw me, his expression turning from surprised to embarrassed, a sheepish grin appearing on his face.

  “Oh, gosh, sorry!” he said, stepping aside immediately. He had a nice smile, I could give him that. “I didn’t see you there. Me and my roommate, this is how we grocery shop. Here you go. It’s all yours.”

  “Thanks,” I said, edging past him and digging a dollar out of my shorts pocket. Up close he was taller than me by nearly a foot. I rubbed my crumpled dollar back and forth against my thigh to flatten it out, then fed it into the machine, which spit it right back out immediately. A pair of grubby, homeless-looking cats eyed me dubiously from the curb.

  “That one’s tricky,” the guy said from behind me. He’d stopped a few feet away, lanky arms still laden with junk food. “You gotta sweet-talk it a little.”

  “I got it, thanks,” I said, sounding harsher than I meant to.

  “Sure thing,” the guy said, nodding earnestly as I tried again with absolutely zero success to get the machine to take my stupid dollar. I sighed, picking at the corners of the bill to straighten them out, feeling a hot, irrational embarrassment over the crappy condition of my money.

  He must have been able to read my mind, or more likely I wasn’t being particularly subtle, because he set his stuff down gently on the curb and held one big hand out. A tangle of brightly colored friendship bracelets looped riotously around his wrist. “You mind if I try?” he asked.

  Something about his general bearing—like, here was a person who was used to getting what he wanted, who had no reason to expect otherwise—made me want to say no to him, to struggle it out on my own. But it was late, and I was hungry. “Be my guest,” I said.

  He held either end of the dollar and rubbed it back and forth over the corner of the machine for a minute, then fed it into the slot with almost surgical precision. The hair on his arms was a pale golden blond. Of course the dumb vending machine took it right away this time, beeping happily like it was a robotic dog or something and he was its master.

  “Thanks,” I said, stabbing at the buttons on the keypad until the machine whirred to life and a Twix bar chunked to the bottom. I bent down and snatched it out.

  “No problem,” the guy said easily, scooping up his vending-machine groceries. The back of his shirt rode up a tiny bit, revealing a strip of tan, smooth skin. “You live here?” he asked.

  I raised my eyebrows. “You’re a stranger,” I pointed out.

  “Sorry,” he said immediately, that same dopily sheepish expression crossing his pretty face. “You’re right, that was invasive. I didn’t mean it. I’m Alex. I live up in two-two-eight.”

  I nodded, tearing into my Twix bar and taking a huge bite, swallowing without hardly bothering to chew. “Dana,” I allowed, after a moment of consideration.

  Alex smiled then. “Dana,” he said, like he was committing it to memory. “Nice to meet you.”

  I smiled back; I couldn’t help it. “Nice to meet you, too.”

  Alex nodded. “Okay,” he said. “So I don’t know if you live here, or if maybe this is just your querulous vending machine of choice. But if you do live here . . .” Alex tilted his head, shrugged a little. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. I could smell him—boy-who-just-took-a-shower smell, the zing of antibacterial soap. I felt myself blushing, my whole body warm.

  “G’night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  Alex jogged across the parking lot and up the concrete steps to what I saw now was unit 228, on the same level but on the other side of the parking lot from ours. He looked over his shoulder, caught me watching. He grinned and waved before he went inside.

  SIX

  The alarm went off at six-thirty the next morning, our first day of Daisy Chain rehearsal. The paperwork from Juliet had told us to pack clothes we could move in, so I pulled on a pair of shorts and my Jessell Jaguars gym shirt, scooped my hair up into a messy bun. “So hey,” I said to Olivia when she came out of the bathroom. “The weirdest thing happened last night.” I was about to tell her about the guy by the vending machines when I realized she was looking at me funny. “What?”

  “Is that what you’re wearing?” she replied.

  I raised my eyebrows. “I mean, not with that tone in your voice, I’m not.”

  Olivia grinned, shook her head. “Here,” she said, pulling her drawers open again and handing me an expensive-feeling pair of stretch pants and a tank top that, when I pulled it on, showed a pale strip of my stomach. I’d hardly ever seen her in these kinds of clothes before, let alone worn them myself.

  “I feel like an aerobics instructor,” I told her, looking at myself in the mirror. “Or, you know, a very athletic prostitute.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Olivia said, but she was laughing.

  As soon as we met the others in the living roo
m, I saw that she’d been right: Kristin was wearing a stretchy tank top with a line of rhinestones across the boobs, while Ashley had a fluttery dance skirt over leggings that stopped mid-calf. I would have stuck out even more than I did already in my scruffy gym stuff. At least in Olivia’s clothes I looked almost the same as everyone else. Thanks, I mouthed as we headed down to the parking lot, and Olivia winked.

  The studios were only about a ten-minute drive from the complex; Charla shuttled us all over in her shiny red SUV. I couldn’t stop looking around, feeling something like wonder that I’d come back to this place I’d fully expected never to see again—taking in the smell of old sweat and cleaning fluid covered over by a strong vanilla plug-in, the signed tour poster from Tulsa’s last trip across the world. It was different to walk through the doors feeling like somebody who actually belonged here—in theory, at least. In practice, I couldn’t have felt like more of an outsider.

  Charla herded the four of us into the dance room, shiny hardwood and wall-to-wall mirrors; when I looked I could see us all repeating off into infinity, getting smaller and smaller until we finally disappeared. “Drop your stuff in the dressing room,” Charla instructed, nodding at a small alcove off to one side. “Shoes and socks off.” She hit a button on a boom box in the corner and rhythmic, almost chantlike music filled the room. “We’re going to start easy, okay? Just warm-ups.”

  Charla was good as her word, keeping things simple at first—mostly stretching and a few basic dance steps, all of us getting used to following her lead. Then she had us start putting combinations together. When I’d thought about being a part of Daisy Chain, the dancing was what I’d been most excited about, something I could actually picture myself doing: my mom never had money for dance classes or anything like that, but I’d been making up routines with Olivia for as long as we’d known each other. I understood how to move my body—how to follow the steps in a combination, how to commit it quickly to memory both in my brain and in my limbs. It was actually sort of fun. I was a better dancer than Kristin, I noticed with relief, glancing at her in the long wall of mirrors. Her elbows were constantly jerking around. Ashley was really good, though, and Olivia was downright pristine: forever precise and calculated in her movements, never a step out of place.

  It was hard work, physical and demanding; by the time we broke for lunch, my stomach was actually growling. Juliet had run out for sandwiches, which we ate at a picnic table set up on a swath of scratchy crabgrass in the middle of the parking lot. The studio was set back in an industrial park, next to a shipping facility and a paint-your-own-pottery place that looked long shuttered. A couple of guys in delivery uniforms looked over at us curiously as they loaded boxes onto their trucks.

  “It’s too hot to eat,” Kristin said, and the others nodded in agreement, though I personally was not finding that to be the case whatsoever. Olivia picked at her sandwich, pulling the tomatoes off the bread and nibbling around their limp pink edges.

  “You’re not hungry?” I asked casually, and Olivia shook her head.

  I was trying to figure out what I could say to that in front of the others when a black van pulled into the far side of the parking lot and a group of guys piled out of it, slamming doors and laughing and generally making noise. “Um,” I said, not wanting to sound like an idiot and knowing I was going to. “Hey. There are boys here.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s Hurricane State,” Kristin said, glancing over her shoulder like it was no big deal. “They’re living at the complex, too, I think.”

  Olivia’s eyes widened, craning her neck to look. “Hurricane State is here?”

  “What’s Hurricane State?” I asked.

  “The group Guy put together last year,” Ashley informed me, in a voice that implied this was something I should have known already. “They’re touring, too.”

  “With us? I mean, with Tulsa?”

  Ashley smirked. “That’s the idea.”

  The boys noticed us a moment later and ambled over in our direction in a shaggy, sneakered pack. “Hey, ladies!” one of them called. There were five of them, around our age or maybe a little older, but as far as I was concerned there was only one worth looking at: he had wavy blond hair and high, sharp cheekbones, a dozen brightly colored friendship bracelets looped around his elegant wrist. Alex.

  He noticed me at the exact same moment, head tipped to one side and a slow grin spreading across his face. I looked away, feeling my body get warm down to the arches of my feet inside my sneakers, simultaneously annoyed that he hadn’t mentioned he was part of one of Guy’s groups and fully aware I’d left that information out, too. My tongue stuck dryly to the roof of my mouth.

  Ashley was calling hello back to them—so far none of the rest of us had—when Olivia clambered up from the picnic table and beelined in their direction. “Alex Harrison!” she called.

  Alex looked over at her, eyes narrowing for a moment before he smiled. “Hey!” he said, gathering her into a hug and lifting her up onto her toes like they were long-lost comrades from a far-off war. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s our first day of rehearsal,” she told him, motioning to the rest of us. “Daisy Chain.”

  I stared at the two of them, totally gobsmacked. Olivia and I knew all the same people—or at least, I thought we did. Clearly, I’d been wrong. I looked away, squinting into the sunlight; it was like the rubber band tethering me to reality had reached its elastic limit, snapping me back into the way things actually were.

  The others all introduced themselves—Austin was the oldest, at twenty; Mario wore a Diamondbacks ball cap tilted slightly to one side. Mikey had curly dark hair and was the closest to goofy-looking of any of them, while Trevor, a light-skinned black kid with a ring of puka shells around his neck, had the friendliest smile I’d ever seen. All of them were uniformly attractive. Standing in a cluster, they looked like an ad for the Gap.

  “So,” Alex asked, “is this the weirdest day of your life so far, or just second or third weirdest?”

  I thought he was addressing us generally; it took me a second to realize he was talking directly to me. “Oh, not even top ten,” I said, recovering. “But I’m a weird girl, so.”

  It came out distinctly unfriendly, which wasn’t exactly how I’d meant it; still, I thought that was for the best. Olivia was looking at him expectantly, her dark head tilted to the side. I pushed our random late-night conversation out of my head. Alex was cute. So what? They were all cute. That was literally the entire point.

  Alex looked like he was about to say something else to me, when Juliet opened the door to the studio, eyes narrowed. “Gentlemen!” she called, sounding impatient. “You coming in here, or what?”

  “We better go,” said one of them—Austin, I thought, the big brother of the group. “See you guys later.”

  “You should come over one night,” Trevor added. “We’re neighbors, after all.”

  Juliet called us in a few minutes later, and as we headed back into the studio I yanked Olivia aside. “Who was that?” I asked incredulously. “How do you know him?”

  Olivia looked over her shoulder, like Alex might materialize at any moment to hear her. “Do you remember Prince Charming?” she asked me quietly.

  “That’s Prince Charming?” I asked. Olivia used to talk about Prince Charming all the time in middle school, when she was doing a bunch of regional theater out of Atlanta. They’d been in Cinderella together when we were thirteen. He had not, in fact, played Prince Charming—he’d played a footman—but she’d had a massive crush on him, so the name had stuck. “Prince Charming is in this boy band?”

  “Shh!” Olivia hissed. Then, “What, you think that’s lame?”

  “No,” I said. “I think that’s the kind of irony that would make Alanis Morissette really proud.”

  “I can’t believe I threw myself at him like that,” she said. “I didn’t even think he’d remember me.”

  “You didn’t throw yourself at him,” I promised. �
�And of course he remembered you.”

  “We were kids.”

  “It was, like, four years ago!” I snorted. “Did you know they were touring with us?”

  Olivia shook her head. “I knew he was in Hurricane State now, but that was it. They’re, like, borderline actually famous. They did one of those MTV beach house things over spring break.” She was practically glowing. “Doesn’t that feel like a crazy coincidence?” she asked. “Both of us just . . . being here?”

  “Yeah,” I said, bumping her shoulder as we headed into the voice room, trying not to think about the fact that she’d known her crush might be here and hadn’t told me. “It’s pretty crazy.”

  Lucas, our voice coach, a trim, sandy-haired guy in his thirties wearing a fitted sky-blue polo shirt, was already waiting behind the piano, a massively irritated expression on his face. “First of all, you’re four minutes late to be in here,” he said, none of the cheery preamble we’d gotten from Charla. Clearly, he was not interested in knowing our hopes and dreams for Daisy Chain. “So let’s not waste any more time. You,” he said, nodding to Kristin. “Scales.”

  I blinked, taken aback. Still, Ashley had told us at lunch that Lucas was supposed to be the best voice coach on the East Coast outside of New York City. He’d trained Tulsa from the time Tulsa was twelve. Maybe this was just how it was done.

  Kristin sang her scales, then Olivia and Ashley, Lucas starting at one end of the keyboard and working higher and higher each time. I listened eagerly, trying to suss out everyone’s place here in spite of my ignorant ears. Kristin was a gunner. She was here to be the favorite, to stand out. Ash seemed more reserved. And Olivia was somewhere in between—capable and calm under pressure, with a voice that smoothed out the rough places in the harmonies, filling in the cracks.

  And me?

  I’d never sung scales before, but it didn’t seem terribly difficult; I tried to imitate what the others had done, ahh-ing along with the runs up and down the piano. Lucas didn’t say anything while I was singing, but when I was finished, he took his hands off the keys and placed them in his lap. “Remind me again what kind of training you’ve had?”