“I’m sorry,” Liv said, putting the binder aside and coming to sit on the edge of my bed. “I didn’t mean that. I know it’s been harder for you than we thought since we got here.”
I sighed noisily, flopping back onto the pillows. I felt embarrassed and bruised and far from her. “Today sucked,” I said.
“Yeah,” Olivia said. “It kind of did, huh?” She lay back beside me, nudged me with her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she told me.
“I’m sorry, too,” I said to the ceiling. “I know you were trying to help.”
We stayed like that for a while, the silence not quite comfortable. I could hear the sound of her breathing, the air conditioner clicking on and off overheard. Suddenly Olivia looked at me, alert. “I’m an asshole,” she said. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
I hesitated. What I wanted to talk to her about was Alex, but now I didn’t know how. It felt like a weird fissure had opened up between us, and telling her what had happened would only widen it. “Nothing,” I promised, shaking my head into the pillows. “It wasn’t a big deal at all.”
TWELVE
“What are you doing tonight?” Alex asked me on Thursday afternoon at the studio, leaning against the wall beside the water cooler where I was refilling my bottle. He was wearing an old blue T-shirt from the Galveston Children’s Theater; he smelled like deodorant and clean sweat.
“Um,” I said, straightening up too quickly, splashing water all over my bare feet. I’d been dodging Alex all week, making sure we were never alone in the same place at the same time. “Hmm.”
“Yeeeeees?” Alex prompted, the hint of a smile teasing at the edges of his mouth.
I made a face at him. “Well, I’ve got a binder full of vocal exercises with my name on it,” I said. “So, you know. Probably that.”
Alex shook his head at that. “That’s too bad.”
I rolled my eyes. “Too bad, huh?”
“It is too bad.”
We looked at each other for a moment. I like you, his expression said. You shouldn’t, is what I was trying to tell him, but I must not have been doing a very good job because Alex smiled for real then, one of those silver-dollar grins that you could use to power a city or send rocket ships to outer space. It felt like hitting the lottery, Alex’s smile. It felt like getting picked to join a band. “I should get back,” I finally said.
“What you should do is come out with us tonight,” Alex told me, still leaning against the wall like he had no place in particular to be, even though I knew his rehearsal was going on just down the hall. “That’s what I wanted to tell you in the first place. Austin knows some bar near here that doesn’t card. We’re going to go around nine or so. It’ll probably be a total dump, but it might be fun.”
“It might be,” I agreed; in fact, I liked the idea of spending some time out with Olivia, for us to have a chance to goof around together like we used to back at home. And I liked the idea of seeing Alex, too. “But I don’t think the other girls are going to go for it.”
“You could come by yourself,” Alex suggested, and I snorted.
“Yeah, right.” I looked at him for another moment, debating. “I’ll float it,” I said finally. “Okay?”
Alex smiled again, pushed himself off the wall. “I’ll take what I can get.”
The bar Austin brought us to was a hot, tiny dive at the edge of a sketchy-looking strip mall twenty minutes from the apartments, with no windows and a big bald bouncer sitting on a stool outside the narrow door. He waved us inside without asking for ID, though, offering the girls and me an appraising leer as we passed. Cigarette smoke was thick in the air, coupled with the smell of old beer and something that seemed to be coming from the bathrooms.
“This is bleak,” Ashley announced, peering around the dark, windowless space at the neon bar signs and a huge, smudgy mirror stamped with a whiskey logo. Alan Jackson was clanging away on the jukebox. A couple of greasy-looking guys sprawled on stools at one end of the bar.
“What’d I tell you?” Alex asked me, his mouth tipped so close to my ear that I could feel his warm breath on the back of my neck, making all the tiny hairs there stand straight up. “Kind of fun, right?”
I swallowed hard, then glanced at Olivia, who was flagging down the bartender. I’d been surprised when the other girls had been so willing to come out, knew in the back of my mind it was mostly so that Olivia could hang out with Alex. I felt like the worst kind of traitor.
“Come on,” I said now, stepping away from Alex without looking back at him, grabbing Olivia’s hand and pulling her toward the jukebox. “Let’s dance.”
The bar wasn’t actually so bad once we switched the music up; I drank my Bud Light, danced with Olivia and the others to the Spice Girls and Mariah Carey. Even Kristin seemed to be having fun. “I really love you guys,” she promised as Austin spun her around and around, her dark hair swirling, the sentiment weird and out of character for her. “I’m sorry I was a bitch to you! We’re gonna get so famous, I can feel it.”
“What she can feel are those rum and Cokes,” Olivia muttered, and I laughed. It felt like she’d come back to me, like we could have been at a house party in Jessell, everything the same as it had always been.
The bathrooms were through a back room with a pool table and a couple of dusty old pinball machines, wooden floors creaking like your foot might fall right through at any moment. I was wiping my hands on my jeans as I came through the door—of course there were no paper towels—and almost crashed right into Alex, who was waiting outside.
“Hey,” he said. He was wearing jeans and a clean white T-shirt that made him look even more impossibly tan than normal, like someone whose body stored up sunlight.
“Hey,” I echoed, tucking my hair behind my ears, suddenly nervous. He was standing so, so close. We stared at each other for a moment; I thought again that it was easy to see why Guy had picked him for Hurricane State, why everybody said he was the star. Alex was the kind of person you wanted to look at. The kind of person you wanted to be near all the time.
The jukebox had changed over to Joe Cocker, a lazy kind of old-school rock and roll that begged for a slow dance. I wished it were something really unromantic, like Ozzy Osbourne. I wished it were a polka from 1935.