Fireworks

by Katie Cotugno

  Charla took Olivia and me for manicures on Friday afternoon, the three of us sitting side by side in the chairs while a pink-haired girl who couldn’t have been much older than me painted tiny stars on the nails of my ring fingers. “Looks pretty,” Olivia said, peering over my shoulder on her way to the dryers, her long hair hanging down into my face.

  “You look pretty,” I crowed, and she grinned.

  “Get a room, you two,” Charla chided, but she was smiling. Since Olivia and I had finally made up, we were inseparable in a way we hadn’t been since middle school, when we went to the bathroom together and made everyone call us Dolivia.

  We stopped for sugar-free raspberry smoothies afterward, and as we pulled out of the parking lot I was flipping radio stations when I heard the first few notes of a cheery, synth-y pop song I vaguely recognized but couldn’t place. At first I thought it was one of the eighties-era love anthems my mom liked, but then Charla slammed on the brakes and I turned to Olivia in shock.

  “This is you!” we both exclaimed at the same time.

  I’ll never forget what Olivia’s face looked like then, shock and disbelief and happiness and awe all playing across her delicate features in rapid succession. “Holy shit!” she said, mouth dropping open. Then she burst clean into tears.

  “I’m happy, I’m happy,” she said, laughing through her sobs as I reached into the backseat and tried to hug her, Charla making a sharp right that sent horns blaring and pulling into a parking spot in a strip mall so that we could listen properly.

  Adrenaline was thrumming through my veins as Charla cranked the car stereo, rolling all the windows down so the sound spilled out into the heat. “You sound amazing!” I said, and she really did. Of course I’d heard the demo—I’d heard the finished version, too, but this was different, the thrill of it coming out of actual radio speakers on actual airwaves, where the whole world could hear it, too. My heart thrummed along with the bass line. The chords echoed deep inside my brain. Of all the stuff I’d pictured about Olivia or me possibly getting famous, somehow I’d never imagined this moment. I felt so hugely, enormously proud.

  “Come on,” I said, throwing the car door open. I scrambled out onto the pavement, pulling Olivia out alongside me with one manicured hand. We sang along at the top of our lungs to her song on the radio, snotty, happy tears still running down her face as Charla shook her head and smiled like we were a couple of overgrown kids. Maybe this was success, I thought as we spun around on the concrete, the neon brightness of Orlando blurring by, maybe this was why I’d come here: to dance on the side of a highway with my one best friend in the world.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  That was the week we hit the road. August was fair season in the south; it seemed like every town from South Carolina to Texas was putting on some kind of festival, and Guy had booked Olivia and me to perform at what felt like all of them. The boys did the bigger ones with us, polishing their routines for Tulsa’s tour, but at some of them Olivia and I were solo, coming on before the crowning of the apple pie queen or the prize-winning Holstein cow. Still, I gave those performances everything I had, knowing that each one mattered. Even if Olivia and I wouldn’t admit it to each other, neither one of us had forgotten what was at stake here. Guy would be deciding which of us to take on tour any day now. Every bow I took felt like it could be the last.

  The boys headed back to Orlando before our last stop, a county fair in Alabama a couple of hours in the van from Birmingham. It was redneck country—farmland and tiny grocery stores attached to gas stations, bars that made the dive we’d been to in Orlando look like a velvet-rope club.

  The fair itself was actually kind of charming, though, or would have been—there were rides and games at one end and lines and lines of food stalls down the center, a flea market and a whole section for 4-H competitions complete with prize spaghetti squash and fat, oinking pigs. But it had rained earlier in the week and never dried out entirely, and the fields were sodden and muddy, sucking at our feet. Mosquitoes hung in dense, predatory clouds—I counted four bites on my arms and legs in the first twenty minutes we were there. It was so incredibly, sulkily hot. And there was a quality to the crowd I couldn’t put my finger on exactly, a tense, edgy restlessness that set my skin humming. I had a bad feeling from the moment I got out of the van, crossing my arms as I followed Juliet across the fairgrounds, glancing uneasily at the overflowing beer tent.

  “It looks like the zombie apocalypse here,” I told Olivia as both of us sidestepped a glassy-eyed girl about our age dragging a screaming toddler by the hand. “I don’t like it.”

  Juliet overheard me, rolled her eyes. “Don’t be getting too big for your britches,” she scolded. “We’re not at Madison Square Garden yet.”

  We were meant to go on at seven-thirty, right after the 4-H contest winners were announced, but there was a problem with one of the generators and it was fully dark by the time Olivia hopped up onto the makeshift stage, the end of summer coming. The platform was only about two feet off the ground, no barricades set up between her and the crowd, which was a few hundred people this time—a handful of kids who’d heard Olivia and my songs on the radio and come specifically for us, sure, but mostly folks who’d been hanging around the fair all afternoon and wanted to see what the fuss was all about. It occurred to me that there probably wasn’t a ton to do around here, other than this.

  It was a weird, tense-feeling set, Olivia’s mic shrieking feedback out into the crowd at one point, plus a cluster of drunk college-age dudes off to one side who kept howling like wolves and yelling shit, catcalling all the way through her first couple of songs. They’d obviously been drinking and baking in the sun all day, their faces gone red and their eyes slightly glazed. “Yes, gentlemen,” Olivia said at one point, trying to make a joke of it, but I could tell by the expression on her face and the way she was sticking mostly to the other side of the stage that she didn’t think it was funny at all. “I see you over there.”

  “You wanna see some more?” one of them called back, grabbing his crotch.

  “What the—” I whipped my head around to look at Juliet. “Did you—?”

  “She’s all right,” Juliet told me, laying a hand on my arm like she was worried I was going to charge out there and punch the guy in the face, which in fact was exactly what I wanted to do. “She’s handling it.”

  I wasn’t so sure. When I glanced over, I was glad to see Guy on the other side of the stage—the bulk of him reassuring, like nothing truly bad could happen as long as he was here. Still, I watched the rest of Olivia’s performance uneasily, arms crossed and spoiling for a fight.

  The set seemed to go on forever, though finally Olivia made it to her second-to-last song, an up-tempo number called “Rush” with a bunch of complicated turns and spins in the choreography.

  I had just turned to get miked for my own set when one of the guys in the front row reached up and smacked Olivia squarely on her ass.

  For a moment I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening; I felt the rush of pure white terror as clearly as if it had happened to me, this tidal wave of adrenaline like my whole body was on fire. Up onstage, Olivia froze. The guy was just grinning at her—pleased with himself, his face tomato-red and shiny. His buddies were laughing like he’d gotten to the punch line of a particularly funny joke.

  That was when Olivia bolted off the stage.

  I met her almost before she made it down the steps and behind the makeshift curtain—her backing track still clanging out into the audience, sounding tinny and artificial without her voice out in front of it. Guy was making his way across the stage with security by now; they grabbed the guys roughly, hustled them quickly away. Olivia was shaking. “Are you okay?” I asked, catching her face in both hands and forcing her to look at me, to focus over the noise of the confused, rowdy crowd. “Are you hurt?”

  “No,” she said, and her voice sounded like she was at the bottom of the ocean. I thought maybe she was in shock. “I’m okay.�
��

  “Are you sure? I’m going to kill those guys, I can’t believe they actually—I’m going to go out there and find them and rip their spines out like a video game.” Then, again: “Are you sure?”

  Olivia nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I was just—I’m okay.”

  “Olivia, sweetheart,” Juliet said, coming up behind me and placing her hand on Olivia’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry that just happened, that was terrible. Guy’s taking care of it now, all right? They’re gone.”

  “Okay.” Olivia nodded again—compliant or just dazed, I couldn’t tell. “Thank you.”

  “So what I need is for you to go back out there and finish your set, all right?”

  Both of us whirled to stare at her. “Are you serious?” I asked. “After what just—you want her to go back out there?”

  “It’s not up to me,” Juliet explained, looking sorry. “We’re contracted for a six-song set from each of you. Olivia’s only done five.”

  “Who the hell cares?”

  “The promoters care, Dana,” Juliet said, slightly testy now. “The same ones who have booked your last dozen performances, not to mention Tulsa’s entire tour.”

  “I can’t,” Olivia said, sounding frantic. “Dana. Tell her I can’t.”

  Tell them I can’t. I thought of the radio station performance a couple of weeks ago. I thought of her audition for Daisy Chain, and last spring’s talent show. Normally it was my job to convince Olivia that she had what it took to perform, that she could push past her fear and anxiety and stage fright and get the job done. But there was no way I was doing that today.

  “She can’t,” I told Juliet flatly.

  “Well, that’s not a call that she gets to make.”

  “Well, she’s making it,” I countered. “End of discussion.”

  Juliet stared at me for a moment, pissed and baffled. Neither of us had ever rebelled this openly before. “Fine, Dana,” she snapped eventually. “Have it your way. Go get miked, then; you’re up next.”

  I barked out a laugh, I couldn’t help it. “There’s no way I’m going out there,” I said.

  Juliet wasn’t amused. “Dana, I don’t know what you think you’re up to here today, but I’m not screwing around.”

  “No,” I told her evenly. I was tired of this, tired of being bossed around and prodded. Tired of feeling like everyone else’s interests were more important than ours. “Olivia’s not going back out there, and neither am I.”

  “What is this, a mutiny?” Juliet’s eyes narrowed, her gaze flicking back and forth between us. When neither one of us answered, she sighed. “All right, girls. That’s fine. Let’s see what happens when I bring Guy back here, how about.”

  “Fuck her,” I muttered when Juliet was gone. “Guy can come and say it to my face if he wants.” Olivia was looking at the floor now, hugging herself a bit.

  “I shouldn’t have been so close to the edge of the stage,” she said.

  “What? Bullshit,” I told her. “You did everything right. That guy was an asshole. That guy was a criminal!” I said, loud enough that everybody around us looked over, and Olivia started laughing, and then as soon as that happened she burst into tears.

  “Hey,” I said, wrapping her arms around me. “Hey hey hey, Liv, you’re okay. I gotcha. You’re with me,” I promised, holding on tight. “You’re safe.”

  Guy took my side, surprisingly: “Take ’em home,” he said to Charla, who drove us back to the hotel while he dealt with the fair runners.

  “I’m right next door if you need me,” she promised, hugging the both of us good night. They’d gotten us separate rooms, but I went in with Olivia, waiting on the bed while she scrubbed this whole place off in the shower. I couldn’t wait to get back to Orlando.

  “Are you okay?” I asked again, when she emerged in her pajamas, her hair hanging in a long wet tail down her back. I wanted to keep asking. I wanted her to know I was here if she wasn’t.

  “Yeah,” she said, sitting down on the bed with her legs folded up like a pretzel. She looked like she had back when we were in middle school, her face scrubbed clean and pink. “I’m fine, I just—”

  “You’re rattled.”

  She nodded.

  “You want to call your parents?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, okay.” I grinned. “I’ll just stay here and pee a circle around you, then.”

  That made Olivia smile. “Please do,” she said, leaning back into the pillows. “And then maybe go rip somebody’s spine out like a video game.”

  “I was worked up!” I said. “I’d still go rip somebody’s spine out. That was shit, that the coaches sent you out there when it wasn’t safe.”

  Olivia shrugged. “I don’t think they could know,” she said.

  “It’s their job to know,” I shot back.

  “You’re sure Guy wasn’t mad at us, though?” Olivia asked, sounding uncertain. “About ganging up on Juliet?”

  “Nah,” I reassured her. “When I talked to him he said he admired my chutzpah.”

  “I admire it, too,” Olivia said, and yawned, and as soon as she did it I yawned, too. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, I was physically exhausted, but both of us were still too unsettled to sleep, so we lay in bed side by side, flicking through the channels until we found a Meg Ryan movie on cable.

  “I wish Junia was on,” I said, and Olivia grinned.

  “This reminds me of the night of the auditions,” she said, stretching her long legs out in front of her. “Do you remember that?”

  “Of course,” I said, but I knew what she meant. Even though it had only been a few months ago, it felt like we’d been completely different people back then—weirdly innocent, like we had no idea what was ahead of us. We’d been friends most of our lives, but there was a part of her I’d never really known—that I couldn’t have known—until this summer. It hadn’t always been easy, but it felt like we were coming out closer than we’d ever been before.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to go on today,” she told me.

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked. “There’s no way I would have gotten up there after what happened to you. You have zero things to apologize for.”

  “I’m really glad you were there,” she said, rolling over to look at me. “I’m glad you’ve been here this whole time, honestly. You’re probably the only reason I haven’t gone totally insane yet.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “You were built for this, you know that.”

  “I thought I was.” Olivia shook her head again. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want to do it if you weren’t here. Or like, even more than that, I’m worried I couldn’t.” She sighed. “I wish he’d just keep us both,” she said, looping around to the thread of the conversation we’d had back in Orlando. She smelled like baby powder, same as she had since we were small.

  “Yeah, but he’ll never.”

  “Why not?” Olivia shrugged. “He changed his mind once, didn’t he? Guy’s not exactly what I would call a stay-the-course kind of guy.” She propped herself up on one elbow, tilted her head to the side. “What if we could convince him he could make money on us both?”

  “You think he’d go for that?” My voice was doubtful, but I could feel a tiny flicker of hope sparking inside my chest. Olivia knew how this stuff worked, didn’t she? It was a long shot, but if she thought it was possible, then maybe it was.

  “No way to find out except to try it,” Olivia said, tucking her feet underneath her. “But I think we’re different enough that there’s room in the market for both of us, you know? Your dancing is stronger than mine, that’s obvious. And the songs I’m really good at are the ballad-type ones. We’re already focused on different things, really. There’s no reason for it to be a zero-sum game.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “If we really play up what each of us are good at, eventually he’s gotta see it for himself, right?”

  “Honestly, I don’t s
ee how he wouldn’t.” Olivia nodded. “What if we make a pact?” she asked. “Either we get Guy to keep both of us, or we both walk away.”

  “What?” That surprised me. “You’d do that?”

  Olivia’s eyes narrowed just the slightest bit. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course I would,” I told her. “But you’ve wanted this your whole life.”

  “Yeah, and we’ve been friends for that long. I don’t want to be fighting you for Guy’s table scraps, you know? It isn’t worth it to me.”

  “Me either,” I promised, and as I said it out loud I realized it was the truth. I wanted this more than I’d ever wanted anything; I’d worked harder for it than I’d known I could work. But when I thought about what had happened today—when I thought about what had been happening all summer—I knew it wouldn’t mean anything without Olivia beside me. I wanted her with me on this adventure, or I didn’t want it at all.

  And then, of course, there was also the flip side: that I worried about what would happen to Olivia if I left her on her own with Guy and Juliet.

  “We’re in this together, or we both walk away.” Olivia looked at me, dark eyebrows raised. “Deal?”

  I nodded. “Deal.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The week seeped by; Tulsa’s tour crept closer. The days had started getting shorter, darkness falling a minute or two earlier each night, but the heat was unrelenting, like all of Orlando was covered in a film of plastic wrap.

  On Thursday, Olivia and I both had sessions with a photographer Guy worked with, the same woman who’d taken the iconic shot plastered on all of Tulsa’s tour photos. A blond girl with bright-red lips and dozens of tattoos did our makeup, the tiny brush tickling as she gave me a dramatic cat-eye with one expert flick of her wrist. Juliet hung all our new clothes on rolling racks.

  “Wait!” Olivia said just as we were finishing; she dashed out of the shot and grabbed my wrist, pulling me in front of the smooth white backdrop. “Take one of both of us,” she said. We flung our arms around each other, grinning. We held on tight as the camera flashed.