Mikey slid the door open just then, the noise from inside suddenly amplified in the hot, quiet air. His shirt had Dr. Evil from Austin Powers on the front of it. “What are we gossiping about, ladies?” he asked.
“Nothing you need to know about,” Olivia said, her voice turning so chilly that I almost felt bad for him—Mikey seemed harmless enough. She stood up, brushing some imaginary debris off her white denim shorts. “We’re going back in.”
Inside, the boys were watching old episodes of SNL on Comedy Central; Alex grinned at me as we came through the door, scooting over to make room on the couch. Mario plopped down beside him before I could react one way or the other: “You all wanna play Asshole?” he asked. “I got cards.”
I settled myself on the floor instead, rubbing idly at a spot on the side of my knee I’d missed when I shaved that morning. I was starting to feel tired and bored. The Saturday Night Live rerun ended; Mario wound up Asshole three rounds in a row. Olivia got up for another beer and Kristin followed her, a look on her face like she was about to hatch a plot—and sure enough, on their way back into the living room the two of them started singing that song from the musical Rent about lighting the candle, which I knew from earlier this week was one of Kristin’s favorites to belt at the top of her lungs whether anyone was listening or not.
I was surprised—for all the parties we’d been to together, I’d never seen Olivia stage an impromptu performance like this—but I understood all at once why she’d done it the moment Kristin dropped out and pulled Alex off the couch, pushing him up toward the TV, where Olivia was standing, as he jumped right in on the boy part, like a star athlete who’d been waiting for the coach to put him in. Their voices sounded right at home together. Olivia wrapped her arm around his waist.
Well, I thought as they got to their big finish, taken off guard by the sharp zing of disappointment behind my rib cage, feeling caught out and embarrassed and not wanting to investigate why.
That’s that.
I wanted to dump my Corona in the sink and call it a night, but Trevor followed me down the hallway, and ten minutes later I was sitting on the counter next to the refrigerator, eating Cheetos out of the bag and talking to him about Stephen King movies, which Olivia despised with every fiber of her being but which it turned out he and I both loved. “Ever seen Cujo, though?” I was saying, when Alex came in. “Cujo is freaking terrifying.”
“Cujo is scary as shit,” Trevor agreed. Then, to Alex, who I was clearly ignoring: “Hey, man.”
“Hey,” Alex said, leaning against the counter for a minute. He opened the mostly empty fridge and peered inside it. Then he closed it again.
“Looking for something?” I asked him finally, an edge in my voice.
“Looking for you,” Alex said.
I snorted, disbelief and a little bit of horror. Alex grinned.
“I gotta go,” Trevor announced suddenly, tipping his beer in my direction before he headed back into the living room.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I told Alex, once we were alone under the bright fluorescent light. This kitchen had the same dingy countertops and white cabinets as ours did, though it was closed to the living room: for the moment, at least, he and I were alone.
Alex raised his eyebrows. He was wearing a soft-looking gray T-shirt, that tangle of brightly colored friendship bracelets looped around his wrist. “Why not?” he asked.
“Because he’s gonna think—” I broke off, waving my hand vaguely. “Whatever. Forget it.”
“Trevor’s my roommate,” Alex told me, like this explained something. “He’s a good dude.”
I shrugged. “I’m sure he is.”
“He is,” Alex said, taking a couple of steps closer. His skin was perfectly, immaculately clear, just a couple of tiny freckles near the side of his mouth. It kind of made me want to punch him. “You feel like taking a walk with me?” he asked.
I felt my eyebrows shoot up like I wasn’t even controlling them, like they were two independent creatures on the top of my face. “You’ve got time for a walk?” I couldn’t resist saying, even though I knew it was infantile. “You don’t have a duet you need to be working on?”
Alex made a face at that, sheepish, like I’d caught him at something embarrassing: painting his nails, maybe, or jerking off. “That was kind of a performance we put on back there, huh?” he asked.
I wiped my Cheeto-y hands on my thighs, leaving a pale film of orange dust on my skin. “It was kind of a performance,” I agreed.
“I know,” Alex said. He was close enough now that his hip bone was touching my bare knee, his body burning-hot through his T-shirt. “It looked like showing off. I just get real wrapped up in it when people are singing, you know?” he asked, sounding sincere. “It doesn’t actually matter who or what. My dad’s a minister, and my brothers used to hate sitting there all day on Sundays wearing ties and whatever. But I always kind of liked it, ’cause of the singing.”
I didn’t know if it was real, this aw, shucks thing he did all the time. A minister’s son, Jesus Christ. “The music moved you?” I asked dubiously.
That made Alex laugh—this openmouthed rumble that was deeper than his normal voice so that for a moment it felt like I could see how he’d be when he was older, when he’d grown into all his long, elegant limbs. He was going to be a lot more than regionally famous. “Kind of!” he said, shrugging sort of helplessly. He had a little bit of an accent, that southern lilt. “Don’t be mad.”
“Oh, I’m not mad,” I said. I wasn’t, either—after all, I had no reason to be. Olivia was my best friend; Olivia liked Alex. As far as I was concerned, I told myself, it was as simple as that.
But Alex wasn’t buying. “You sure?” he asked, slipping one bold finger into the belt loop of my shorts and tugging me a little bit closer.
I let myself be pulled for just a second, then sat back on my hands. God, what was I doing? “I’m sure,” I said firmly.
“Okay,” Alex said. “Then I believe you. But I also think you’re probably not taking that walk with me, huh?”
I grinned back at him then—it was impossible not to, his eyelashes and his collarbones, the pull in my stomach and chest. Then I hopped down off the counter. “You’re smarter than you look,” I told him cheerfully, tugging his belt loop once in retaliation and slipping past him out the kitchen door.
NINE
Olivia’s bed was already made when I woke up on Saturday morning, though I could hear voices in the living room; when I got up and went in to investigate, hoping Charla had made something besides oatmeal for breakfast, I found Kristin, Olivia, and Ash all getting ready to leave. “Oh!” Kristin said when she saw me. “You’re up!”
“Hey,” I said, tightening my sleep-messy ponytail; Olivia’s car keys dangled from her hand. “What are you guys doing?”
“We’re going to check out the mall here,” Ashley said, a little too brightly. “You wanna come?”
I glanced from Olivia to the others and back again, thinking, Thanks for the invite, but not wanting to betray myself by saying it out loud. Olivia was looking at something in the neighborhood of my left ear. “Sure,” I told them slowly. “Let me just get dressed.”
The mall was a twenty-minute drive from the complex, newly built and aggressively air-conditioned, filled with the kinds of high-end stores I’d only ever seen ads for in magazines. We had a mall in Jessell—we weren’t that much of a backwater—but it was nothing like this. The floors were a shiny white marble; a fountain burbled away in an atrium, giving off a clean, bleachy smell. I felt like somebody was going to accuse me of shoplifting if I breathed wrong.
“I figured it wasn’t worth it to wake you,” Olivia explained quietly as we trailed across the food court. “I mean, you hate malls.”
I nodded. “No, yeah,” I said, telling myself it didn’t bother me, that I was bringing this strange, unsettled feeling upon myself. “Of course.”
Kristin and Ash were in their element, fl
itting from store to store, trying on that dress and those sandals, shiny gold sunglasses and jeans specially designed to give your butt extra lift. Olivia and I had never really been recreational shoppers—it’s boring, if you never actually buy anything—but I was surprised how much she knew about different designers, keeping up with Kristin and Ashley as they chattered away happily.
“You know what would be so cute?” Kristin suggested, doing laps in a boutique where all the clothes were black and white and denim. “We should get matching T-shirts.”
“Yes!” Ashley said. “How adorable would that be?”
I thought it sounded kind of like something out of peewee soccer, honestly, but this didn’t feel like the time to say that out loud. When I looked at the price tag on the shirt they were talking about, though, my eyeballs almost fell right out of my head.
“Olivia,” I said urgently, catching her by the arm and pulling her behind a stack of jeans. “This T-shirt is, like, forty bucks.”
Olivia bit her lip. “I can lend you the money,” she said.
“No, that’s not—” I shook my head. “I’m not asking you to front me, I just think it’s ridiculous to spend that much on a T-shirt when—”
“They are really cute, though,” she pointed out. “And we’re supposed to get our first paychecks this week. We need to look the part, right?”
“Look the part?” I repeated, trying not to laugh. “You sound like Kristin.”
“What’s up?” Kristin asked, and I shook my head again. The last thing I wanted was for her to know I couldn’t afford it, that I could stretch forty bucks into a month of groceries back in Jessell. That it was one more way I didn’t belong here.
“Nothing,” I said brightly, holding up the T-shirt and smiling. I could always return it later, right? Nobody needed to know. “You’re right—these are perfect. What else are you getting?”
A couple of nights later, we’d just gotten back from rehearsal, were still dropping our bags in the bedrooms, when the apartment phone rang. “Dana!” Charla hollered from the kitchen. “Phone’s for you.”
I was surprised. My mom hadn’t called at all since we’d been down here; instead Mrs. Maxwell had phoned for both of us, Olivia and I passing the phone back and forth like sisters at camp. “Mom?” I said when I picked up the receiver. “Everything okay?”
“Dana?” Sarah Jane’s voice said. “Is that you? We’re in town tonight!”
She turned up twenty minutes later, pulling her beat-up hatchback into the parking lot with Kerry-Ann and Becky in tow. She was wearing cutoffs and a tank top, barefoot on the concrete as they all climbed out of the car. “Look at this!” she crowed, turning a 360 on the concrete. “You guys are fance!”
“Your high school friends!” Kristin cooed as we all tromped back up to the apartment, Kerry-Ann exclaiming over the size of the bathroom and Becky bouncing experimentally on the bed. “That’s so cute!”
Ashley was more direct. “How long are they staying?” she wanted to know.
“Just the night,” Olivia assured her quickly. It was the first thing Liv had said in a while, actually; when I glanced over at her, she had a funny look on her face.
“You okay?” I murmured.
Olivia nodded. “I just wish they’d called first, you know?”
“They did,” I pointed out.
“No, like, actually called.” She shrugged, dropped her voice to a whisper. “I just worry we’re, like, imposing by having them stay here, you know?”
I frowned. “Imposing on who?” I asked. “Kristin and Ash? What do they care?”
“I don’t know.” Olivia glanced over her shoulder. “But nobody else’s home friends have showed up.”
“Maybe they don’t have any,” I suggested, and Olivia laughed. Still, I watched her eyes cut again to Sarah Jane and Becky, and all at once it occurred to me that it wasn’t imposing on the others she was worried about. Olivia was embarrassed, I realized—of Sarah Jane’s shitty car and loudness, of Becky’s thick accent and the fact that you could see her purple bra though her top. I bit my lip, looking back and forth uneasily. If our friends—the people we’d grown up with, the place we’d come from—were something to be ashamed of, did that mean I was, too?
“You guys hungry?” I asked.
All of us went out to dinner at Chili’s that night, the boys tagging along when they heard we had friends in town. Becky and Trevor paired off almost immediately, the two of them all over each other down at the far end of the table like a pair of climbing vines. I sat between Kerry-Ann and SJ, trying not to notice when Olivia stayed on the other side of the table with Kristin and Ash. These are our friends, I wanted to remind her. Our real friends.
Instead I turned to Sarah Jane, gesturing grandly around the noisy restaurant. “So this is fame,” I joked. “All the nachos and quesadillas you can possibly eat.”
“I mean, we don’t usually go to places like this,” Kristin assured her from across the table. She glanced over at Olivia, who’d ordered a salad. “It’s almost impossible to stick to a diet here, you know? Even the cheese and whatnot they put on supposedly healthy stuff really adds up.”
“Olivia can eat whatever she wants,” I said loudly. Then, turning to the waitress, “May I please have extra guac?”
When I glanced back across the table I saw that Alex was looking at me, grinning. I turned away, but not before SJ saw and nudged my leg with hers under the table. “Who’s that one?” she asked me quietly.
“That one is Olivia’s crush,” I informed her, and SJ didn’t ask about him again after that.
“Me and Keith broke up,” she reported later, when I went outside with her for a smoke break while the boys demolished another plate of nachos and Kristin and Ash debated seriously the best technique for achieving pure vowels while singing. “For good this time. That’s why we’re going to Miami.”
I exhaled, sitting down on a wooden bench near the door of the restaurant. “Oh, SJ, I’m sorry.”
Sarah Jane shook her head. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s not, it sucks, but. Like I’ve been saying since freshman year, he’s an asshole. Anyway.” She blew a long plume of smoke into the muggy air. “No reason not to get away for a couple days, right?” She grinned. “You should screw this Popsicle stand, come down with us.”
“I wish,” I said. It sounded awesome, actually—sitting on the beach with no responsibilities, finding a couple of guys to buy us beers. No rehearsal. No pressure. No niggling interest in a boy who was decidedly off-limits; no feeling of always getting it wrong.
“So is this what it’s like all the time?” Sarah Jane asked, flicking her cigarette into a nearby ashtray and sitting down, neither one of us in any hurry to go back inside.
“Going out and stuff?” I shook my head. “Normally we’re rehearsing and learning lyrics and dances. Honestly, I’m usually passed out in bed by ten.”
“No,” Sarah Jane said, smirking a little. “I mean, is this what they’re like all the time?”
“They’re not so bad!” I said, and Sarah Jane laughed.
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“Fine,” I admitted after a moment; then, unable to resist, I told her about the matching forty-dollar T-shirts.
“For a T-shirt?” She gaped. “Come the fuck on.”
“Thank you!” I said, vindicated. “I thought it was insane, too.”
SJ shrugged, stretching her legs out in front of her. “They’re a different kind of girl, is all.”
“Yeah,” I fired back. “Rich.”
“Not even that,” Sarah Jane said thoughtfully. “I mean, like . . . sheltered. Used to having other people take care of them. You know I love Olivia, but she’s that way, too.”
I felt my back straighten, involuntary. “No, she isn’t.”
“She is,” SJ said gently, no judgment in her voice at all. “But you’re not.” She was quiet for a moment; cars pulled in and out of the parking lot, velvety night-blue sky and the smell of a st
orm coming. “Is everything okay with y’all?” she asked, sounding cautious. “You and Liv?”
“Yeah,” I said, too quickly; it sounded like I was lying, but I didn’t know how to try to convince her without making it worse. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah Jane said, frowning. “Just asking. Lots of changes.”
“Not that many. Come on,” I said, standing up and holding out my hand. “Let’s get back.”
I walked Sarah Jane and the others downstairs the next morning, sun glaring off the concrete and SJ’s pink sunglasses shoved onto her face.
“I wish you guys didn’t have to go,” I said, and I was surprised to realize that it was the truth. Since yesterday, I’d felt happier and more at home than I had since we’d gotten to Orlando. But how could that possibly be true—how could I possibly be lonely here? I had Olivia with me. My actual best friend in the world.
“Let me know if you need anything, okay?” Sarah Jane instructed, rolling down the window to look at me over the top of her sunglasses. “You ever want to be picked up, I can be here in a day to take you home.”
“I’m good,” I promised her. “But thanks.”
I stood in the parking lot, waved good-bye as they pulled out into traffic. I watched the car until it disappeared.
TEN
In Orlando, I was an insomniac. Physically exhausted as I was from our hours of rehearsal, every night it felt like it took me longer and longer to settle down. I’d been sharing rooms with Olivia for more than a decade, her deep, even breaths lulling me like a metronome; now, though, I stared at the ceiling for hours after we turned the lights off, my mind whirring with a strange new anxiety, with harmonies I had yet to properly learn. Ashley suggested hypnosis. Charla plied me with chamomile tea. But nothing worked.
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