Alex nodded. “Okay,” he said. “So I don’t know if you live here, or if maybe this is just your querulous vending machine of choice. But if you do live here . . .” Alex tilted his head, shrugged a little. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. I could smell him—boy-who-just-took-a-shower smell, the zing of antibacterial soap. I felt myself blushing, my whole body warm.
“G’night, then.”
“Good night.”
Alex jogged across the parking lot and up the concrete steps to what I saw now was unit 228, on the same level but on the other side of the parking lot from ours. He looked over his shoulder, caught me watching. He grinned and waved before he went inside.
SIX
The alarm went off at six-thirty the next morning, our first day of Daisy Chain rehearsal. The paperwork from Juliet had told us to pack clothes we could move in, so I pulled on a pair of shorts and my Jessell Jaguars gym shirt, scooped my hair up into a messy bun. “So hey,” I said to Olivia when she came out of the bathroom. “The weirdest thing happened last night.” I was about to tell her about the guy by the vending machines when I realized she was looking at me funny. “What?”
“Is that what you’re wearing?” she replied.
I raised my eyebrows. “I mean, not with that tone in your voice, I’m not.”
Olivia grinned, shook her head. “Here,” she said, pulling her drawers open again and handing me an expensive-feeling pair of stretch pants and a tank top that, when I pulled it on, showed a pale strip of my stomach. I’d hardly ever seen her in these kinds of clothes before, let alone worn them myself.
“I feel like an aerobics instructor,” I told her, looking at myself in the mirror. “Or, you know, a very athletic prostitute.”
“Oh, shut up,” Olivia said, but she was laughing.
As soon as we met the others in the living room, I saw that she’d been right: Kristin was wearing a stretchy tank top with a line of rhinestones across the boobs, while Ashley had a fluttery dance skirt over leggings that stopped mid-calf. I would have stuck out even more than I did already in my scruffy gym stuff. At least in Olivia’s clothes I looked almost the same as everyone else. Thanks, I mouthed as we headed down to the parking lot, and Olivia winked.
The studios were only about a ten-minute drive from the complex; Charla shuttled us all over in her shiny red SUV. I couldn’t stop looking around, feeling something like wonder that I’d come back to this place I’d fully expected never to see again—taking in the smell of old sweat and cleaning fluid covered over by a strong vanilla plug-in, the signed tour poster from Tulsa’s last trip across the world. It was different to walk through the doors feeling like somebody who actually belonged here—in theory, at least. In practice, I couldn’t have felt like more of an outsider.
Charla herded the four of us into the dance room, shiny hardwood and wall-to-wall mirrors; when I looked I could see us all repeating off into infinity, getting smaller and smaller until we finally disappeared. “Drop your stuff in the dressing room,” Charla instructed, nodding at a small alcove off to one side. “Shoes and socks off.” She hit a button on a boom box in the corner and rhythmic, almost chantlike music filled the room. “We’re going to start easy, okay? Just warm-ups.”
Charla was good as her word, keeping things simple at first—mostly stretching and a few basic dance steps, all of us getting used to following her lead. Then she had us start putting combinations together. When I’d thought about being a part of Daisy Chain, the dancing was what I’d been most excited about, something I could actually picture myself doing: my mom never had money for dance classes or anything like that, but I’d been making up routines with Olivia for as long as we’d known each other. I understood how to move my body—how to follow the steps in a combination, how to commit it quickly to memory both in my brain and in my limbs. It was actually sort of fun. I was a better dancer than Kristin, I noticed with relief, glancing at her in the long wall of mirrors. Her elbows were constantly jerking around. Ashley was really good, though, and Olivia was downright pristine: forever precise and calculated in her movements, never a step out of place.
It was hard work, physical and demanding; by the time we broke for lunch, my stomach was actually growling. Juliet had run out for sandwiches, which we ate at a picnic table set up on a swath of scratchy crabgrass in the middle of the parking lot. The studio was set back in an industrial park, next to a shipping facility and a paint-your-own-pottery place that looked long shuttered. A couple of guys in delivery uniforms looked over at us curiously as they loaded boxes onto their trucks.
“It’s too hot to eat,” Kristin said, and the others nodded in agreement, though I personally was not finding that to be the case whatsoever. Olivia picked at her sandwich, pulling the tomatoes off the bread and nibbling around their limp pink edges.
“You’re not hungry?” I asked casually, and Olivia shook her head.
I was trying to figure out what I could say to that in front of the others when a black van pulled into the far side of the parking lot and a group of guys piled out of it, slamming doors and laughing and generally making noise. “Um,” I said, not wanting to sound like an idiot and knowing I was going to. “Hey. There are boys here.”
“Oh yeah, that’s Hurricane State,” Kristin said, glancing over her shoulder like it was no big deal. “They’re living at the complex, too, I think.”
Olivia’s eyes widened, craning her neck to look. “Hurricane State is here?”
“What’s Hurricane State?” I asked.
“The group Guy put together last year,” Ashley informed me, in a voice that implied this was something I should have known already. “They’re touring, too.”
“With us? I mean, with Tulsa?”
Ashley smirked. “That’s the idea.”
The boys noticed us a moment later and ambled over in our direction in a shaggy, sneakered pack. “Hey, ladies!” one of them called. There were five of them, around our age or maybe a little older, but as far as I was concerned there was only one worth looking at: he had wavy blond hair and high, sharp cheekbones, a dozen brightly colored friendship bracelets looped around his elegant wrist. Alex.
He noticed me at the exact same moment, head tipped to one side and a slow grin spreading across his face. I looked away, feeling my body get warm down to the arches of my feet inside my sneakers, simultaneously annoyed that he hadn’t mentioned he was part of one of Guy’s groups and fully aware I’d left that information out, too. My tongue stuck dryly to the roof of my mouth.
Ashley was calling hello back to them—so far none of the rest of us had—when Olivia clambered up from the picnic table and beelined in their direction. “Alex Harrison!” she called.