“You’re both way too calm about the talking mice,” said Malena.
I had to laugh at that. It was a small, anxious sound, but it was a laugh, and I felt better afterward. “You have no idea,” I said. Leaning forward, I kissed Dominic quickly and properly, savoring the feeling of his lips on mine. Then I stepped away, pulling my hand from his. “Come on. Let’s get some sleep. It’s going to be a big day tomorrow.”
Sixteen
“Your real friends will love you for who you are, no matter how many heads or limbs or ovipositors you have.”
—Evelyn Baker
The Crier Apartments, nowhere near enough hours later
“WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU LAST NIGHT?”
Lyra’s voice cut through the fog of sleep like a knife through a swamp bromeliad. My eyes snapped open a split second before I sat bolt upright in bed, turning to stare at her.
She was standing next to my bed, arms crossed, and a deeply irritated look on her face. “Oh, good, you’re awake. Because I was awake until almost midnight waiting for you to come the hell home so I could yell at you. What the hell, Valerie?”
That was enough to bring me the rest of the way from disoriented grogginess into full wakefulness. “Lyra, please, stop shouting. What time is it?”
“It’s good that we’re both talking about time, since you don’t seem to have any for me these days,” she snapped. “I knew things would be different with your boyfriend and sister hanging around—and don’t think I haven’t been tempted to report them both to Adrian, with the way you’ve been letting yourself get distracted—but I didn’t expect you to go and replace me with a newer model. What’s Malena got that I don’t have, huh?”
Scales and the ability to walk on walls. I blinked. “Are you jealous?”
“Uh, yeah, I am, bitch,” she said, without unfolding her arms. “You’re supposed to be my best friend. Do you know how few really good friends I have? I’m always dancing, or rehearsing, or auditioning. I don’t have time to make friends. I came back to this show partially because it would mean seeing you again, and here you are constantly running off with other people.” Her face fell. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No! Lyra, honey, no!” I jumped out of the bed and hurried to put my arms around her. “I’ve just been . . . it’s all hard on me. I’d stopped dancing.”
Her eyes went wide. “What?”
There it was: the words were out. I took a deep breath, and repeated, “I’d stopped dancing. When I couldn’t get work after the show, I decided to do something else with my life. I hadn’t danced in months when Adrian contacted me.”
“But . . .”
“I came back because I still love it, but I’ll be honest, I feel like an alcoholic who took a job at a bar. This isn’t my world anymore. Unless I win, I can’t let it be my world anymore. I’m trying not to fall so much in love that I can’t walk away when it’s all over.” Every word I said was true, and I hadn’t been expecting to say any of them.
“Oh, Val,” she said again. “I didn’t know.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t tell you.”
“How about this Sunday, we have a girls’ day, just you and me? We can get pedicures and talk about how much our legs ache.”
“I’d like that,” I said. “Thanks. What time is it?”
“Oh!” Lyra winced. “I was so surprised, I just forgot! You slept through the alarm, the cars are leaving for the theater in ten minutes. I came to wake you up.”
“What?!” I let her go, grabbing my makeup kit as I launched myself for the bedroom door. There was no one between me and the bathroom, and I was able to lock myself inside, beginning the quick and dirty process of putting my Valerie-face on.
Ten minutes later, I was standing on the sidewalk with the rest of my season, a fresh wig pinned to my head and just enough makeup on that I wouldn’t look dead when the cameras came into the rehearsal room. Pax glanced at me, eyebrows raising as he took in my black yoga pants and loose gray tank top. They were audition clothes, “don’t stand out too much” clothes, not “go to the rehearsal and keep the camera locked on you the whole time” clothes.
“You okay?” he asked. The real question—“How much sleep did you get?”—went unasked, but it hung between us, fat and ripe and poisonous.
“I’m good,” I said, mustering a smile. “I was just more stressed out about last night’s competition than I expected, and I guess I slept doubly hard because of it. I’m totally fine.”
“You never oversleep,” said Anders, pushing himself into the conversation without a trace of shame. “Remember how you used to wake me up by crouching at the foot of my bed like some sort of freaky gargoyle? You never missed a morning.”
“Everybody has a bad day,” I said.