I was playing dumb, and Lucas knew it. “No,” he said, running through my notes on the piano, plinking the keys harder than he really needed to. Kristin and Ash were watching, wide-eyed, while Olivia was studying her binder like it was the Rosetta freaking Stone. “Come on, try again.”
I was trying, truthfully. I could sing my part alone okay, or when Lucas was singing with me, but as soon as the others jumped in, it was like I couldn’t hear the notes in my head anymore. “Try plugging your ears,” Lucas suggested. “See if you can do it that way.”
I blinked at him. “Seriously?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” Lucas asked, sounding peevish. “Come on, give it a try.”
It occurred to me all of a sudden that possibly this was a power game—that he was getting some nasty little thrill out of humiliating me, the same way he’d made me answer embarrassing questions that he probably already knew the answers to. No, I’d never taken voice lessons. No, I couldn’t read music.
Yes, Guy had picked me anyway.
Fine, then. I glanced from Lucas to Ashley and Kristin and finally to Olivia, who looked almost as miserable as I did. I wasn’t about to let anyone intimidate me. I clamped my hands over my ears as Lucas started up again on the piano. But by the look on his face—and everyone else’s—I could tell it wasn’t working. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try again.”
Lucas sighed. “Yup,” he said, rolling his eyes at me. “From the top.”
SEVEN
“I’m dead,” I announced that afternoon after rehearsal, flopping onto the fake-leather couch of the apartment and propping my feet on the coffee table. I grabbed the remote off the armchair, flipped over to a Puff Daddy video on MTV. “Seriously. Even my eyelashes hurt. Also, I’m starving.”
“Aw, I thought it was fun,” Olivia said, sitting down beside me. Kristin and Ashley had gone to the grocery store with Charla to get stuff for dinner, so it was just the two of us. “I really liked that second song we did, the doo-wop-sounding one.”
“Easy for you to say, teacher’s pet.” I swung my feet up into her lap. “I was a total garbage fire, in case you somehow didn’t notice. Lucas hates me.”
Olivia just shrugged. “He doesn’t hate you,” she said calmly. “The rest of us have been in coaching for years, is all. Of course you’re not going to be as professional.”
“I—yeah,” I said, feeling weirdly self-conscious in front of her all of a sudden, wanting abruptly to talk about anything but this. “What are they getting for dinner, did they say?”
“Salad stuff, I think? They’ll be back any minute.”
I frowned. I was exhausted, back aching and muscles rubbery like I’d never felt before, not even after working a double at Taquitos on Cinco de Mayo. Still, I was restless: there had been talk of hanging out and watching a movie, but the last thing I wanted to do was sit around the apartment all night eating lettuce and discussing which member of Hurricane State would play what role in Kristin’s dream production of Into the Woods. “Wanna go exploring?” I asked Olivia hopefully. “Go for a ride, see what’s around here?”
“What, tonight?” Olivia frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah!” I said, sitting upright, suddenly cheered. “I’m not saying I want to, like, go to a club and rage or anything. But it’s Friday, isn’t it? I mean, I doubt there’s anything quite so delicious as a Burger Delight around here, but we could see.”
Olivia grinned at that. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Let’s do it. Should we wait and ask Kristin and Ash?”
That was the last thing I wanted, but it wasn’t like they’d done anything to me. Maybe I was just being a baby, not wanting to share my best friend. “Sure,” I said, faking an enthusiasm I didn’t feel. “Absolutely.”
Luck was on my side, though, and Kristin and Ashley both begged off.
“Home by eleven,” Charla told us before we left the apartment. “Curfew.”
“Definitely,” I promised.
As soon as we pulled out of the complex, I felt my mood brighten; Olivia twirled the radio dial until she found the Top 40 station, singing along under her breath just like she always did while I chimed in on the chorus. I felt like I was finally coming up for air. The apartment made me claustrophobic—the feeling, however dumb or misguided, of everyone watching my every move: like they were waiting for more evidence of just how much I didn’t deserve to be here, what a disappointment I was turning out to be.
It was easy to let that stuff go as Olivia and I cruised down the main drag toward the commercial district, the last dregs of late-afternoon sunlight turning everything toasted and gold. We passed car dealerships and a dozen different chain restaurants, bright stuccoed strip malls filled with drugstores and tanning salons and payday loan parlors. The farther we went, the more it looked like all the buildings had gone up in the last five minutes, everything somehow artificial looking, as if it might fold down at night like a child’s pop-up book.
“There?” Olivia motioned to a burger joint off to the side, a riff on an old-fashioned drive-in where you ordered through a speaker and they brought your order out to your car.
I nodded. “Will you eat, too?” I asked pointedly.
“Of course,” Olivia said, making a face at me. “The usual?”
I smiled. “You bet.”
We ate with our feet up on the dashboard, the radio on and the smell of fry grease and salt thick in the air, the neon colors of the drive-in mixing with the purple twilight outside. “What do you think everybody else is doing right now?” Olivia asked. “At home, I mean.”
I shrugged. “Same thing as every Friday, right?”
Olivia smiled, rolling her eyes ruefully. “God, it’s such a relief not to be there for a change, isn’t it?”
I thought about that for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it is.”
Olivia nodded. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love those guys, but none of them are ever getting out of Jessell.”
That surprised me—not because it wasn’t true, or because I hadn’t thought it myself before, but because of the way she said it. It was the first time I’d ever heard Olivia make that kind of distinction between herself and the rest of our friends. Sure, her life had always been more structured than the rest of ours, her afternoons and weekends filled with any number of rehearsals and lessons while we sat around in SJ’s yard and drank beers. She’d missed a whole summer once, at a quasi-professional performing arts day camp that left her too exhausted in the evenings to do anything but go straight home and sleep. Olivia was different; that much was undeniable. Still, that had never seemed to matter before—to her or to anyone else.