Fireworks

by Katie Cotugno

  I shook my head. “No training,” I admitted.

  “Right.” He raised his eyebrows. “So you can’t sight-read.”

  I shook my head again.

  Lucas sighed. “And you’ve never sung harmony before?”

  “Like I said, I’ve had no training,” I said, more snappishly than I meant to.

  He eyed me for a moment. “So you did,” he said, his voice quiet, and right away I could tell I’d made an enemy. I glanced over at Olivia for reassurance, but she was looking down at her feet. Kristin and Ashley were watching me, though, and I felt my face flame, red and embarrassed.

  Once warm-ups were finished, Lucas handed us all binders full of lyrics for the songs we’d be learning over the next couple of weeks, ran quickly through each of our individual parts, then jumped right into the intro of a purring ballad called “Only for You.” I gave it my best effort, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes before it was clear to everyone, me especially, that I was by far the worst singer in Daisy Chain.

  “Stop,” Lucas said, cutting us off mid-chorus. He took his hands off the keyboard entirely, the sudden silence startling and huge. “Stop, stop, stop. Dana, come on, pay attention. You’re not hitting your harmonies at all.”

  “I’m not?” I asked.

  I was playing dumb, and Lucas knew it. “No,” he said, running through my notes on the piano, plinking the keys harder than he really needed to. Kristin and Ash were watching, wide-eyed, while Olivia was studying her binder like it was the Rosetta freaking Stone. “Come on, try again.”

  I was trying, truthfully. I could sing my part alone okay, or when Lucas was singing with me, but as soon as the others jumped in, it was like I couldn’t hear the notes in my head anymore. “Try plugging your ears,” Lucas suggested. “See if you can do it that way.”

  I blinked at him. “Seriously?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” Lucas asked, sounding peevish. “Come on, give it a try.”

  It occurred to me all of a sudden that possibly this was a power game—that he was getting some nasty little thrill out of humiliating me, the same way he’d made me answer embarrassing questions that he probably already knew the answers to. No, I’d never taken voice lessons. No, I couldn’t read music.

  Yes, Guy had picked me anyway.

  Fine, then. I glanced from Lucas to Ashley and Kristin and finally to Olivia, who looked almost as miserable as I did. I wasn’t about to let anyone intimidate me. I clamped my hands over my ears as Lucas started up again on the piano. But by the look on his face—and everyone else’s—I could tell it wasn’t working. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try again.”

  Lucas sighed. “Yup,” he said, rolling his eyes at me. “From the top.”

  SEVEN

  “I’m dead,” I announced that afternoon after rehearsal, flopping onto the fake-leather couch of the apartment and propping my feet on the coffee table. I grabbed the remote off the armchair, flipped over to a Puff Daddy video on MTV. “Seriously. Even my eyelashes hurt. Also, I’m starving.”

  “Aw, I thought it was fun,” Olivia said, sitting down beside me. Kristin and Ashley had gone to the grocery store with Charla to get stuff for dinner, so it was just the two of us. “I really liked that second song we did, the doo-wop-sounding one.”

  “Easy for you to say, teacher’s pet.” I swung my feet up into her lap. “I was a total garbage fire, in case you somehow didn’t notice. Lucas hates me.”

  Olivia just shrugged. “He doesn’t hate you,” she said calmly. “The rest of us have been in coaching for years, is all. Of course you’re not going to be as professional.”

  “I—yeah,” I said, feeling weirdly self-conscious in front of her all of a sudden, wanting abruptly to talk about anything but this. “What are they getting for dinner, did they say?”

  “Salad stuff, I think? They’ll be back any minute.”

  I frowned. I was exhausted, back aching and muscles rubbery like I’d never felt before, not even after working a double at Taquitos on Cinco de Mayo. Still, I was restless: there had been talk of hanging out and watching a movie, but the last thing I wanted to do was sit around the apartment all night eating lettuce and discussing which member of Hurricane State would play what role in Kristin’s dream production of Into the Woods. “Wanna go exploring?” I asked Olivia hopefully. “Go for a ride, see what’s around here?”

  “What, tonight?” Olivia frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah!” I said, sitting upright, suddenly cheered. “I’m not saying I want to, like, go to a club and rage or anything. But it’s Friday, isn’t it? I mean, I doubt there’s anything quite so delicious as a Burger Delight around here, but we could see.”

  Olivia grinned at that. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Let’s do it. Should we wait and ask Kristin and Ash?”

  That was the last thing I wanted, but it wasn’t like they’d done anything to me. Maybe I was just being a baby, not wanting to share my best friend. “Sure,” I said, faking an enthusiasm I didn’t feel. “Absolutely.”

  Luck was on my side, though, and Kristin and Ashley both begged off.

  “Home by eleven,” Charla told us before we left the apartment. “Curfew.”

  “Definitely,” I promised.

  As soon as we pulled out of the complex, I felt my mood brighten; Olivia twirled the radio dial until she found the Top 40 station, singing along under her breath just like she always did while I chimed in on the chorus. I felt like I was finally coming up for air. The apartment made me claustrophobic—the feeling, however dumb or misguided, of everyone watching my every move: like they were waiting for more evidence of just how much I didn’t deserve to be here, what a disappointment I was turning out to be.

  It was easy to let that stuff go as Olivia and I cruised down the main drag toward the commercial district, the last dregs of late-afternoon sunlight turning everything toasted and gold. We passed car dealerships and a dozen different chain restaurants, bright stuccoed strip malls filled with drugstores and tanning salons and payday loan parlors. The farther we went, the more it looked like all the buildings had gone up in the last five minutes, everything somehow artificial looking, as if it might fold down at night like a child’s pop-up book.

  “There?” Olivia motioned to a burger joint off to the side, a riff on an old-fashioned drive-in where you ordered through a speaker and they brought your order out to your car.

  I nodded. “Will you eat, too?” I asked pointedly.

  “Of course,” Olivia said, making a face at me. “The usual?”

  I smiled. “You bet.”

  We ate with our feet up on the dashboard, the radio on and the smell of fry grease and salt thick in the air, the neon colors of the drive-in mixing with the purple twilight outside. “What do you think everybody else is doing right now?” Olivia asked. “At home, I mean.”

  I shrugged. “Same thing as every Friday, right?”

  Olivia smiled, rolling her eyes ruefully. “God, it’s such a relief not to be there for a change, isn’t it?”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it is.”

  Olivia nodded. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love those guys, but none of them are ever getting out of Jessell.”

  That surprised me—not because it wasn’t true, or because I hadn’t thought it myself before, but because of the way she said it. It was the first time I’d ever heard Olivia make that kind of distinction between herself and the rest of our friends. Sure, her life had always been more structured than the rest of ours, her afternoons and weekends filled with any number of rehearsals and lessons while we sat around in SJ’s yard and drank beers. She’d missed a whole summer once, at a quasi-professional performing arts day camp that left her too exhausted in the evenings to do anything but go straight home and sleep. Olivia was different; that much was undeniable. Still, that had never seemed to matter before—to her or to anyone else.

  Olivia frowned then, at an expression on my
face real or imagined. “I didn’t mean—” she began, but I shook my head at her.

  “No, of course not,” I said quickly. “I know.” Still, I thought suddenly of what she’d said the night Juliet called to offer me the spot in Daisy Chain: What else are you going to do? Right up until the moment the phone rang, there’d been no way I was getting out of Jessell, either—and if the look on Lucas’s face today had been any indication, I might wind up right back there. I didn’t know which side of Olivia’s line of demarcation I fell on.

  “I’m sorry today sucked so much,” Olivia said quietly.

  I waved my hand, not wanting to make a big deal out of it—not wanting to think about it at all. “Oh, I’ll survive.”

  “I know you will.” She smiled. “It’s what you do.”

  “Like a cockroach,” I joked.

  “That’s not exactly the metaphor I would have picked.”

  “I never said I was literary,” I pointed out.

  “Dork.” Olivia made a face at me, but then she smiled. “So,” she said, pulling one leg up onto the seat and looking for all the world like a little kid with a secret. “Alex.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, happy to change the subject. “Alex.” It had been a long time since Olivia had liked a boy—not since things with her last boyfriend, Stupid Pete Tripp, had crashed and burned at junior prom last year. I bit my lip, remembering how devastated she’d been when he broke up with her for Valerie Burton: I’d watched her like a parole officer for weeks afterward, packing all her favorite foods in my own lunch and doing everything I could think of short of force-feeding her to get her to eat them. It was the first time I’d ever seriously considered getting her mom involved: it wasn’t until she almost fainted in gym one morning and I’d actually gone to the pay phone in the lobby and dialed her house phone that Olivia came after me and promised me she’d stop. We’d gone directly to the cafeteria, where I’d watched her eat a turkey sandwich with chips and a fruit salad. It took two full periods; I missed a geometry test and had to take a zero. I sat there until every bite was gone.

  That had been more than a year ago, though. Olivia was better now.

  “So what’s your plan of attack?” I asked, tucking one foot under me as I finished my milk shake. It felt good to be talking to her about non-performance stuff, to be back on more familiar ground.

  Olivia shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s kind of reticent, you know? Shy, like.”

  “Well, in that case”—I raised my eyebrows—“you could always stand under his apartment window, sing him a love song.”

  “Shut up.” Olivia made a face at me. “I’m serious.”

  “I know you are,” I said. “Just talk to him. Be your fabulous self. He’d be crazy not to fall in love with you.”

  “Are you pep-talking me?” Olivia asked.

  “A little.” I grinned. “Is it working?”

  “A little.” She banged her head lightly against the seat. “He’s already a little famous, you realize. I don’t know. He seems like . . . out of my league.”

  “He is not out of your league,” I said immediately, feeling irrationally annoyed at Alex, wherever he was, and not wanting to think about why. “And he’s not even that famous! Regionally at best. One MTV spring break show, you said? That hardly even counts.”

  “Snob.” Olivia laughed. He was a big deal around Atlanta, she told me: he did a lot of regional theater, had cut a demo a couple of years earlier that had made it all the way up the ladder at Jupiter Records in Hollywood. He’d toured with the Broadway Across America company of Oliver! when he was five. “Either way, he’s, like, not the kind of guy they make at home, you know what I mean? He’s . . . different.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But he’s also kind of a nerd, right? I mean, he seems so corny.”

  Olivia looked at me quizzically. “What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “I just—” I broke off, realizing abruptly that I hadn’t actually gotten around to telling her about meeting Alex by the vending machines last night. It was a small, stupid thing—but for some reason it felt like it was too late now, that there was no way to say it out loud without making it into something bigger than it was. “All of them are, I mean. Hurricane State. The whole pop star thing.”

  “You know we’re doing the exact same thing as them.”

  “Uh-huh.” I grinned. “And I think it’s corny of us, too.”

  Olivia made a face at that. “All right,” she said. “But promise you’ll come to my rescue if you see me looking like a total loser.”

  “Don’t I always?” We laughed, and I breathed a secret sigh of relief. “Should we pick up fro-yo to bring back to everyone?” I asked as we crumpled up our waxed paper wrappers. “I think I saw a place on the way.”

  Olivia nodded. “That sounds awesome.” She put the car in drive and turned to look at me before she pulled out of the parking lot. “I’m really glad you’re the person I’m here with, you know that?”

  That made me smile, something deep inside me settling down. “I’m glad you’re the person I’m here with, too.”

  EIGHT

  “Need another?” Trevor asked a few nights later, handing me a Corona from the fridge in one of the dingy apartments on the ground level of the complex. Austin had gotten a cartload of beers at the liquor mart across the street, so the Hurricane State guys had invited us for a party.

  “Sure,” I said, smiling. Trevor was easy to be around, I was finding, with his casual bearing and relaxed, isn’t this bananas? attitude about all things pop star. “Thanks.”

  “Okay, okay, important question!” Mikey called from the living room, voice as loud as a carnival hawker’s. “If you were going to have a threesome with two Spice Girls, which two would you pick?”

  He was answered by assorted groans and hoots from the group crammed into the living room, all of us crowded onto various surfaces and the smell of body spray and weed pungent in the air. “You’re disgusting,” Ashley informed him, rolling her eyes from where she was sitting beside me cross-legged on the carpet. We’d spent the afternoon singing scale after scale with Lucas, and my throat felt scratchy and raw.

  Mikey shook his head. “Now, don’t feel left out of the conversation, ladies,” he said magnanimously. He was the self-styled cruise director of the group; it was easy to picture him telling crowds of girls to clap their hands and jump. “You’re welcome to answer as well.”

  “Ignore him,” Austin said, passing a joint around the circle with one hand and a bag of Doritos with the other. The apartment was his and Mario’s; they called their place the Model UN because Austin was Filipino, Mario was Mexican, and they’d both done catalog work for department stores before they came here. Everybody in the boys’ group looked like they’d been genetically engineered for maximum physical attractiveness. “We don’t let him out of his cage much.”

  “Clearly,” Kristin said, then shook her head as he offered her the weed. “That stuff is murder on your voice.” She looked at the rest of us with authority. “You guys shouldn’t do it, either.”

  “Yes, Mom,” Ashley said with a smile, and I laughed. A few days in, I was starting to feel a little less awkward around her and Kristin. Both of them were super into hugging, which didn’t really bother me except when we were all sweaty and gross from rehearsal, which was actually a lot of the time.

  I finished my beer and got up to pee in the grody bathroom; when I came out, Alex was waiting in the dimly lit hallway, leaning against the wall with his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his baggy khaki shorts. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said, stopping abruptly, with a quiet intake of breath I hoped he didn’t notice. I’d purposely avoided him since the first day of rehearsals, pushing Olivia forward and melting into the back of the group whenever Hurricane State was around, telling myself whatever flicker of interest I’d felt wasn’t worth it. “Having fun?”

  Alex nodded. “I am,” he said, and there was that slow, sweet smile agai
n, the same one from the night by the vending machines, the one I was working hard not to notice. The girls and I, crowded into the doorway of the studio and probably looking anything but inconspicuous, had caught the very end of Hurricane State’s dance rehearsal yesterday. Even just watching for a few minutes, it was obvious that Alex was the most talented one in the group: in my experience, teenage boys mostly look like total boners when they’re dancing, but Alex looked natural somehow, like he already knew the steps in his body, so he didn’t have to think about it too much. “How about you?”

  “Uh, yeah.” I glanced over my shoulder toward the living room, where I could see Olivia with her head ducked close to Kristin’s, their matching waterfalls of shiny hair. “I’m good. So. I’ll see ya.”

  Alex nodded, still smiling. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I repeated like an idiot. “So. Bye.”

  I told myself to pull it together and met up with the other girls, who had decamped to the apartment’s tiny patio, presumably to escape the voice-ruining pot smoke. As I opened the sliding glass door, the damp heat slammed into me like a wall of water, carrying the smell of car exhaust and humidity. Across the parking lot I could see a couple of barely dressed women waiting at the bus stop—probably not, I suspected, for a bus.

  “He definitely likes you,” Ashley was saying, tipping her Corona in Olivia’s direction and stretching her long legs out in front of her, crossing her delicate ankles. She was perched primly on one of the wobbly rubber-and-metal lawn chairs that came with all the apartments. “Dana,” she said, “don’t you think Alex likes Olivia?”

  I tugged the end of Olivia’s hair and squeezed into the rickety chair beside her. “I think he’s a moron if he doesn’t.”

  “That’s what I keep telling her,” Ashley said confidently. Ash was seventeen, a year younger than Olivia and me; she had a boyfriend at home in Oak Park and was saving herself for marriage, which didn’t stop her from taking a healthy interest in everyone else’s sex life. She’d flat-out asked me if I was a virgin the first night we met. “I love this, you guys meeting up again after all this time. It’s classic. I think he’s just shy, is all. He needs a girl who’s gonna make the first move.”