Fireworks by Katie Cotugno
DEDICATION
For one J. Taylor Hanson, who taught me a good amount
about love and about music, and for one R. Sierra Rooney,
who probably didn’t think I would follow through
ONE
Jonah Royce threw a rager in the field behind his stepdad’s house the night after high school graduation, which is why Olivia and I were both so unbelievably hungover on the afternoon everything changed.
“Just kill me,” Olivia said, leaning back in her ancient beanbag chair so her long dark hair brushed the carpet. “Seriously, just bludgeon me to death with the phone book and get it over with.”
I grinned. “I would love to do that for you, truly, but then I’d have to move.” We were sprawled in her rec room, chugging water and watching Live More! With Junia Jerricksen, this low-budget, long-airing talk show both of us had been obsessed with since we were twelve. It had a weird, tinkling theme song that we found hilarious, half eighties hair band and half cha-cha; in ninth grade we’d made up a dance to it that we still did sometimes if we were feeling particularly ridiculous. We’d done it last night in Olivia’s front yard, both of us stinking of wine coolers, giggling so hard we fell down right on the grass and had woken up this morning with bright green stains on our knees.
Thinking of the wine coolers turned my stomach, even though it was after four in the afternoon and we’d been sitting in these exact spots for most of the day, both of us still in our pajamas. The party had been a big one, the first in what promised to be a long summer full of them—everybody in our graduating class wanting to say good-bye to one another as many times as possible, never mind the fact that nobody was really even leaving town come fall.
Well. Almost nobody. I glanced over at Olivia, then back at the TV.
“Are you girls going to hide out in this cave all day?” Mrs. Maxwell called from the top of the short staircase that led up to the kitchen. Olivia’s house was a split-level, somebody always just up or down; the walls in the basement were all covered in fake wood paneling, which Mrs. Maxwell complained about constantly but which I’d always kind of liked.
“That’s the plan!” Olivia called back. “It’s too hot to go outside.”
“Well, you’re not wrong about that,” Mrs. Maxwell said. Mrs. Maxwell hated the heat in Georgia; she’d grown up in the Northeast and her accent still tended that way, all hard consonants and a general air of impatience. “Olivia,” she continued, “get your laundry out of the dining room before your father comes home, at least. I folded it for you, because I’m nice. And then you need to tell me if you’re going to do that Orlando thing or what.”
With some effort, I pried my head off the beanbag. “What Orlando thing?”
“Oh!” Olivia said. “I meant to tell you about this last night, but then I got so”—she glanced at her mom, who was peering down at us dubiously—“distracted that I forgot. Please hold.” She heaved herself off the beanbag and up the stairs, moving more than either of us had moved all day.
Mrs. Maxwell was unconvinced, but she didn’t press it, crossing her arms and leaning against the paneling. She was wearing one of the sleeveless collared blouses she had in a dozen different patterns—bright pink flowers today; Olivia always joked that she bought them in bulk at Moms “R” Us.
“You staying for dinner?” Mrs. Maxwell asked me now.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you.”
Mrs. Maxwell nodded. We went through this every night, or most of them; I spent so much time at Olivia’s house that in ninth grade her mom had finally just dropped the pretense entirely and put another twin bed in Olivia’s room for me. I appreciated the way she never assumed about dinner, though, both of us keeping up our nightly charade that my mom might actually be cooking something I’d want to go home and eat.
Olivia returned a moment later holding a newspaper, which she parachuted down onto the carpet as her mom headed back upstairs to the kitchen. “Voilà!” she said, waving her arms grandly, all dorky talent-show dramatics. “I give you the Orlando thing.”
I leaned halfway off the beanbag and braced one palm flat on the carpet, scanning the page: Guy Monroe, the superproducer behind superstar Tulsa MacCreadie, was looking for teenage performers to join a new girl group. He was holding auditions in New York, California, and Dallas—plus a round in Florida, four hours south of where we lived. I looked back at Olivia, wrinkling my nose. “You’re going to be a pop star?” I asked.
“I mean, I’m gonna audition.” She mimicked my skeptical face, then turned it into an exaggerated grimace, the kind of overblown expression that would have read from the back row of a theater. “Maybe. Why, do you think that’s dumb?”
“No,” I said immediately. “I mean, sure, yes, a little, but you should still do it.” Olivia had been performing as long as I’d known her, voice lessons and dance recitals and regional theater out of Atlanta. I spent basically our entire childhood making her entertain me on car rides and during long afternoons in the hammock in her backyard: Olivia, sing “Cherish” again. Sing that Carole King song. Sing “Like a Prayer.” “I actually think it’s kind of a great idea.”
Olivia looked at the paper again, then back at me. “Yeah?” she asked, suddenly sounding unsure.
“Absolutely,” I promised, ready to cheerlead. I glanced over in her direction; she was wearing the CLASS OF ’97 T-shirt we’d all gotten during senior week, the neck cut out so it showed off her sharp collarbones—almost too sharp, I noticed with a frown. I pushed the thought away and gazed back at the TV, where Junia was encouraging a woman whose husband had cheated on her with his own stepsister to get back at him with a sexy makeover and learn to love herself again. “Why not, right?”
“Right.” Olivia sat back in her own beanbag, considering. “Do you have plans for this weekend?” she asked me. Then, without waiting for an answer: “Will you come with?”
“What, to Orlando? I can’t.” I shook my head. “I have to get job applications this weekend.” Until two days ago I’d waited tables at Taquitos, a fake-Mexican restaurant that left me smelling like red onions and fry grease at the end of every shift, but back in the spring four people had gotten food poisoning from the chimichangas, and earlier this week, my manager, Virginia, had announced that we were closing, effective immediately.
“Get them next week,” Olivia suggested, like a person who didn’t rely on a paycheck to pay for things like bus fare and tampons. When she grinned, it was all optimism. “Come on, it’ll be fun. We’ll stay in a hotel, swim in the pool. Plus, maybe Tulsa will be there and he’ll fall madly in love with you, and then you won’t need a job at all.”