If we stood here another second, I was pretty sure he was going to kiss me, so instead I grabbed his wrist roughly and held it up in front of my face, examining the dozen friendship bracelets looped around it—the bright primary colors of the ones that were newer, and the faded blues and greens of the ones he’d obviously been wearing for a long time. The designs were complicated—not just the simple braids I’d learned how to do at recess when I was a kid but intricate knots and patterns, thick diamonds and chevrons. They must have taken forever. “Where did you get all these, huh?” I asked him, brushing my thumb over the hard knot of bone in his wrist before I could stop myself. His skin was very warm.
Alex tilted his head to look at me. “I made ’em,” he said.
I snorted. “You did not.”
“It’s girly, I know.” Alex shrugged. “I had this babysitter when I was a kid who taught me how, and I like to. It calms me down.”
“Does it?” I said distractedly. I wanted to bite him. God, I needed to get out of here before Olivia saw us talking, or worse. “Okay,” I said. “Well. See you out there.”
“Do I smell?” Alex asked me.
I blinked. “Pardon me?”
“I just— The way you’re running away from me all the time, I thought maybe I have a hygiene issue I’m not aware of.”
I blew out a noisy breath, checking over his shoulder like an instinct to make sure Olivia wasn’t watching. “Maybe I’m just not interested.”
Alex looked surprised at that, and a little hurt. “Is that true?” he asked, blue eyes narrowing, taking a step back like he was suddenly worried he was crowding me. “If that’s true, then my bad, I’ll get out of your hair.”
I glanced over his shoulder again, crossed my bare arms. “You’re not in my hair,” I said sulkily. “And you don’t smell. Overmuch.”
Alex smiled. “Okay,” he said, perching on the edge of the pool table, settling in. “So you wanna tell me what the problem is, or should I keep guessing?”
I hesitated. I wasn’t going to throw Olivia under the bus, not ever. But I also couldn’t bear the idea of Alex thinking I didn’t want him around. “One of the other girls here likes you,” I told him finally.
“Oh yeah?” Alex’s eyebrows went up. “Which one?”
I scowled. “Don’t be gross,” I said. “If you’re gonna be like that, then I’ll just go back out there and—”
“I’m sorry.” Alex scrambled to his feet so fast it was almost funny. “I’m just teasing, I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “Don’t go.”
I sighed noisily. “Okay. Well. In addition to the whole not-shitting-where-I-eat thing, which, honestly, would be enough of a reason to stay away from you, I’m not going to go around breaking the girl code the first chance I get.”
Alex nodded slowly. “Does it matter who I like?” he asked.
“Not particularly,” I told him.
“That doesn’t seem very fair.”
“Life’s not fair,” I replied. “You’re eighteen; you should know that by now.”
“I’m a young eighteen,” he said, taking a step closer.
I rolled my eyes. “That’s a fact.”
“Okay.” Alex took another step, smirked. Looked at me again. I shivered. I never knew that looking could do that before, that it could feel so obscenely intimate.
“Anyway,” I said, clearing my throat. “I didn’t, you know, call shotgun fast enough. So.”
“Call shotgun?” Alex snorted. “What am I, the front seat of your car?”
“I don’t have a car, remember?”
“Yeah, and I’m not claimed or whatever just because somebody else says I am.”
“That’s not—” I broke off, struggling. The real point was getting lost here, that Olivia was my best friend and worth more to me than some guy I’d barely met, no matter what kind of pull I felt when I looked at him. “I can’t do this,” I said finally.
“Look,” Alex said, “I hear you about not wanting to stir things up with your friends. So if you tell me to leave you alone, I will. But I don’t wanna play games with you, Dana. I like you a lot. I think you are, like, really pretty. And I’d like to hang out with you more.”
“Alex—” I broke off, huffing a bit, but I was smiling. I couldn’t help it. I could feel the electrons vibrating in the air between us, like they were buzzing loud enough to make a sound, like I could hear them over the music. “I’m sorry,” was the best I could come up with.
I looked at him one more time before I walked away.
THIRTEEN
I woke up the next morning with a beery headache pulsing behind my eyeballs, my stomach a swamp full of acid and bile. I could barely choke down a slice of toast. No matter how much concealer I smeared under my eyes, my face still looked swollen and puffy. “Are you hungover?” Kristin demanded in the bathroom, as I poked at my cheeks with a bronzer brush.
I didn’t understand how she wasn’t, frankly; still, considering the way she was looking at me in the mirror, there was no way I was about to admit that out loud. “What?” I said, trying to look alert and ready. “No, not at all.”
“You better not be,” she said, scowling. So much for last night’s drunken lovefest, I supposed.
“Drink water,” Olivia advised quietly, but all it did was make me nauseated. I could feel sour sweat prickling on my back as we crossed the parking lot to the studio.
“Pull it together, Cartwright,” I muttered, pinching my cheeks as we walked into the dance studio. I stopped like I’d been punched in the stomach: sitting in a folding chair in the corner was Guy Monroe himself.
“There they are,” he said cheerfully, standing up as we came in. “How you doing, ladies?”
“Guy’s here to check out your progress,” Juliet explained, crossing her arms over her perfectly starched button-down. “We’re going to have you girls put on a little impromptu performance today, show us what you’ve got so far.”
An impromptu performance? I gaped at them, a fresh wave of nausea cresting over me. Olivia’s lips had all but disappeared.
“I’m looking forward to you wowing me,” Guy told us. He smelled like aftershave, something lemony and faint. In the weeks since rehearsals had started, Guy had turned into a kind of storybook character in my mind, like Santa Claus or the Big Bad Wolf—larger than life but also not exactly real, something adults had invented to keep kids in line. Seeing him in the flesh again was kind of a shock. “Charla and Lucas tell me you’ve been working your asses off.”
Olivia was the first to recover, poised and pulled together. “We have been,” she assured him. “Definitely.”
I nodded in agreement, though I was barely listening, already running through a mental catalogue of my harmonies, going over and over the moves to our songs in my brain. Pop, arms, arms, hips, turn, turn, down, right, left—
Left, right?
Shit.
“All right, ladies,” Charla told us, pushing herself off the wall where she was leaning, clapping her hands together once. “I’m thinking ‘Only for You,’ ‘Across the Ocean,’ and ‘Slam.’ Ready to get started?”
“Olivia,” I whispered as we took our places. “In ‘Only for You,’ what order are the elbows?”
Olivia turned and looked at me like I was insane. “In—”