“I wish you guys didn’t have to go,” I said, and I was surprised to realize that it was the truth. Since yesterday, I’d felt happier and more at home than I had since we’d gotten to Orlando. But how could that possibly be true—how could I possibly be lonely here? I had Olivia with me. My actual best friend in the world.
“Let me know if you need anything, okay?” Sarah Jane instructed, rolling down the window to look at me over the top of her sunglasses. “You ever want to be picked up, I can be here in a day to take you home.”
“I’m good,” I promised her. “But thanks.”
I stood in the parking lot, waved good-bye as they pulled out into traffic. I watched the car until it disappeared.
TEN
In Orlando, I was an insomniac. Physically exhausted as I was from our hours of rehearsal, every night it felt like it took me longer and longer to settle down. I’d been sharing rooms with Olivia for more than a decade, her deep, even breaths lulling me like a metronome; now, though, I stared at the ceiling for hours after we turned the lights off, my mind whirring with a strange new anxiety, with harmonies I had yet to properly learn. Ashley suggested hypnosis. Charla plied me with chamomile tea. But nothing worked.
I kicked off the covers and then pulled them on again, shivering in the chilly forced air as Olivia breathed deeply on the other side of the room. Finally I got up, put a bra on underneath my T-shirt, and headed downstairs to the pool. It was late enough that the college kids who were usually down here at night had all passed out, and save for a couple of empty beer bottles rolling back and forth on the concrete, it was quiet. The two cats that always hung out around the complex—Boy Cat and Girl Cat, the guys called them—skulked underneath the lounge chairs, their green eyes glowing in the dark. I sat down on the edge of the deep end, dangling my feet into the cool, still water.
The pool was lined with a couple of sad-looking palm trees and surrounded by rough, cracked cement. I hadn’t packed my bathing suit when we came here—I hadn’t known there’d be a pool—and it felt stupid to go out and waste money on one now when we hardly had any free time. The lights recessed into the walls of the pool turned the water pink and blue.
“Don’t get scared,” a quiet voice said, somewhere over my left shoulder. “It’s just me.”
I gasped and turned around, legs splashing in the water, scraping the side of my knee on the sharp concrete edge of the pool. There was Alex, sitting at one of the metal tables next to a giant freestanding ashtray, face half-dark and half-golden in the yellow glow of the bug-pocked lights.
“Jeez, Alex,” I said, louder than I meant to. “What are you, stalking me?”
“I was already down here!” he protested. “Maybe you’re stalking me.”
“Yeah, right. Don’t get scared,” I mimicked in a low, creepy voice, rubbing my skinned knee. “How am I not supposed to get scared when you say that?”
“Crap, did you actually hurt yourself?” Alex asked, getting up out of the chair and crouching down on the side of the pool next to me. His white T-shirt looked almost translucent in this light. “Shit, Dana, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said—it was, too, not even really bleeding, but Alex ducked his head to peer at it anyway, and when I looked up his face was right next to mine. “Hi,” I said, feeling like I might laugh.
“Hi,” he said back, and then we were just staring at each other, this charged moment passing between us that felt like shoving a fork into an electrical socket, which I had actually done once when I was three but didn’t really remember. This jolt I could imagine feeling for a long time.
“I should go,” I said, making to get up off the pool deck. “I’ll see you around, yeah?”
“Can I ask you something?” Alex looked at me curiously. “Why are you avoiding me?”
I huffed at that, shaking my head a little. Because I think you’re cute and weird and talented, I didn’t tell him. Because my best friend does, too. “I’m not avoiding you!” I said instead, trying to sound like I thought he was ridiculous. “I have rehearsal in the morning, is all.”
“Yeah. So do I,” Alex pointed out, shrugging. “How’s that going, anyway?”
“What, rehearsals? Fine,” I lied. In reality, Lucas had yelled at me for so long today that I thought it was a minor miracle he hadn’t burst a blood vessel in his eye. “How are yours?”
“They’re good,” Alex said immediately; then he grinned and shook his head. “Actually today was brutal. We had to do that breath control exercise for like an hour—you know, the one where you have to hold a scrap of paper against the wall for an eight count just by blowing on it? Have they made you guys do that? I almost passed out.”
“Yeah, so did Ashley,” I told him, leaving out the part where my vision got pretty spotty, too. But then I didn’t like that, the idea that I was trying to impress him, so I added, kind of abruptly, “I almost barfed.”
Alex laughed, but not meanly. “It’s so hard, right? I can sing and dance fine, but stuff like that kills me. Me and my brothers used to have these contests at the pool, you know, who could hold their breath underwater the longest? I lost every time.”
“How old are your brothers?” I couldn’t resist asking. Alex seemed like somebody who came from a house like Olivia’s—where everyone was neat and tidy, swing set in the backyard and all of them pressed and combed for church on Sunday. I wondered if he could tell just by looking at me that I’d never been inside a church in my life, and told myself I didn’t care.
“Nineteen and twenty,” Alex told me. “I’m the youngest. My mom had us all in a row.”
“Olivia and I are like sisters,” I blurted, desperate to work her into the conversation any way I possibly could. I felt myself blush, but Alex just nodded.
“You guys know each other from home, yeah?”
“She’s my best friend,” I told him. “She’s great. She’s the one who wanted to audition in the first place. I mean, you know how talented she is.”
“So you’re what, just kind of tagging along for the ride?”
That cut a little close to the bone. “I mean, I’m not party crashing,” I snapped. “I got picked same as everybody else.”
Alex turned ghost-white. “No, no, of course,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean—I just meant you kind of give off a different vibe than the other girls, was all.”
“And what vibe is that?” I demanded.
“No, I mean—” Alex huffed out a breath, then smiled a little. “I’m doing this wrong,” he said. “I noticed you, is what I meant. From that first night in the parking lot. You stood out to me.” He shrugged, glancing down for a second, then back at me. His eyelashes were as long as a girl’s. “In, like, a good way.”
“I—Oh.” I snorted a laugh of my own, then frowned abruptly: God, this was so, so bad. I started getting to my feet for real now.