A couple of nights later, we’d just gotten back from rehearsal, were still dropping our bags in the bedrooms, when the apartment phone rang. “Dana!” Charla hollered from the kitchen. “Phone’s for you.”
I was surprised. My mom hadn’t called at all since we’d been down here; instead Mrs. Maxwell had phoned for both of us, Olivia and I passing the phone back and forth like sisters at camp. “Mom?” I said when I picked up the receiver. “Everything okay?”
“Dana?” Sarah Jane’s voice said. “Is that you? We’re in town tonight!”
She turned up twenty minutes later, pulling her beat-up hatchback into the parking lot with Kerry-Ann and Becky in tow. She was wearing cutoffs and a tank top, barefoot on the concrete as they all climbed out of the car. “Look at this!” she crowed, turning a 360 on the concrete. “You guys are fance!”
“Your high school friends!” Kristin cooed as we all tromped back up to the apartment, Kerry-Ann exclaiming over the size of the bathroom and Becky bouncing experimentally on the bed. “That’s so cute!”
Ashley was more direct. “How long are they staying?” she wanted to know.
“Just the night,” Olivia assured her quickly. It was the first thing Liv had said in a while, actually; when I glanced over at her, she had a funny look on her face.
“You okay?” I murmured.
Olivia nodded. “I just wish they’d called first, you know?”
“They did,” I pointed out.
“No, like, actually called.” She shrugged, dropped her voice to a whisper. “I just worry we’re, like, imposing by having them stay here, you know?”
I frowned. “Imposing on who?” I asked. “Kristin and Ash? What do they care?”
“I don’t know.” Olivia glanced over her shoulder. “But nobody else’s home friends have showed up.”
“Maybe they don’t have any,” I suggested, and Olivia laughed. Still, I watched her eyes cut again to Sarah Jane and Becky, and all at once it occurred to me that it wasn’t imposing on the others she was worried about. Olivia was embarrassed, I realized—of Sarah Jane’s shitty car and loudness, of Becky’s thick accent and the fact that you could see her purple bra though her top. I bit my lip, looking back and forth uneasily. If our friends—the people we’d grown up with, the place we’d come from—were something to be ashamed of, did that mean I was, too?
“You guys hungry?” I asked.
All of us went out to dinner at Chili’s that night, the boys tagging along when they heard we had friends in town. Becky and Trevor paired off almost immediately, the two of them all over each other down at the far end of the table like a pair of climbing vines. I sat between Kerry-Ann and SJ, trying not to notice when Olivia stayed on the other side of the table with Kristin and Ash. These are our friends, I wanted to remind her. Our real friends.
Instead I turned to Sarah Jane, gesturing grandly around the noisy restaurant. “So this is fame,” I joked. “All the nachos and quesadillas you can possibly eat.”
“I mean, we don’t usually go to places like this,” Kristin assured her from across the table. She glanced over at Olivia, who’d ordered a salad. “It’s almost impossible to stick to a diet here, you know? Even the cheese and whatnot they put on supposedly healthy stuff really adds up.”
“Olivia can eat whatever she wants,” I said loudly. Then, turning to the waitress, “May I please have extra guac?”
When I glanced back across the table I saw that Alex was looking at me, grinning. I turned away, but not before SJ saw and nudged my leg with hers under the table. “Who’s that one?” she asked me quietly.
“That one is Olivia’s crush,” I informed her, and SJ didn’t ask about him again after that.
“Me and Keith broke up,” she reported later, when I went outside with her for a smoke break while the boys demolished another plate of nachos and Kristin and Ash debated seriously the best technique for achieving pure vowels while singing. “For good this time. That’s why we’re going to Miami.”
I exhaled, sitting down on a wooden bench near the door of the restaurant. “Oh, SJ, I’m sorry.”
Sarah Jane shook her head. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s not, it sucks, but. Like I’ve been saying since freshman year, he’s an asshole. Anyway.” She blew a long plume of smoke into the muggy air. “No reason not to get away for a couple days, right?” She grinned. “You should screw this Popsicle stand, come down with us.”
“I wish,” I said. It sounded awesome, actually—sitting on the beach with no responsibilities, finding a couple of guys to buy us beers. No rehearsal. No pressure. No niggling interest in a boy who was decidedly off-limits; no feeling of always getting it wrong.
“So is this what it’s like all the time?” Sarah Jane asked, flicking her cigarette into a nearby ashtray and sitting down, neither one of us in any hurry to go back inside.
“Going out and stuff?” I shook my head. “Normally we’re rehearsing and learning lyrics and dances. Honestly, I’m usually passed out in bed by ten.”
“No,” Sarah Jane said, smirking a little. “I mean, is this what they’re like all the time?”
“They’re not so bad!” I said, and Sarah Jane laughed.
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“Fine,” I admitted after a moment; then, unable to resist, I told her about the matching forty-dollar T-shirts.
“For a T-shirt?” She gaped. “Come the fuck on.”
“Thank you!” I said, vindicated. “I thought it was insane, too.”
SJ shrugged, stretching her legs out in front of her. “They’re a different kind of girl, is all.”
“Yeah,” I fired back. “Rich.”
“Not even that,” Sarah Jane said thoughtfully. “I mean, like . . . sheltered. Used to having other people take care of them. You know I love Olivia, but she’s that way, too.”
I felt my back straighten, involuntary. “No, she isn’t.”
“She is,” SJ said gently, no judgment in her voice at all. “But you’re not.” She was quiet for a moment; cars pulled in and out of the parking lot, velvety night-blue sky and the smell of a storm coming. “Is everything okay with y’all?” she asked, sounding cautious. “You and Liv?”
“Yeah,” I said, too quickly; it sounded like I was lying, but I didn’t know how to try to convince her without making it worse. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah Jane said, frowning. “Just asking. Lots of changes.”
“Not that many. Come on,” I said, standing up and holding out my hand. “Let’s get back.”
I walked Sarah Jane and the others downstairs the next morning, sun glaring off the concrete and SJ’s pink sunglasses shoved onto her face.