I froze for a moment, stunned and stupid and still somehow completely unsurprised that this was happening: of course it was. I felt my face, my whole body, flame with embarrassment and anger.
If I hadn’t already given myself away with the key in the door, I would have walked away right then, back down to the car and straight home to Jessell. As it was, I had to go inside. Ashley, Kristin, and—I realized with a dull thud—Olivia were all sitting in the living room, silent as stones and just as motionless, like somehow I’d accidentally cast a spell over them. As I came into the living room, it broke. “Hey!” Olivia said, too brightly, her wide-eyed gaze darting to the other girls, then back to me. “You’re home!”
“Hey,” I said slowly, putting my bag down on the sofa, not making any actual eye contact. For some reason I hadn’t thought she’d be in here with them. For some reason I hadn’t imagined that at all. “What are you guys up to?”
“We’re going to drive out to the mall and see a movie,” Olivia said, speaking for all of them; I couldn’t tell if this was a plan they’d actually made or if she was just making stuff up to distract me, compulsively filling the silence like she sometimes did when she was uncomfortable or afraid. Kristin was examining her fingernails. Ashley was looking at the floor. “You wanna come?”
“Nah,” I said, swallowing; for a second it felt like I might be about to cry, which was ridiculous. “I’m, um, pretty beat.”
I sat on the couch for a long time after the three of them left the apartment, staring blankly at the vacant TV and telling myself I was being dumb. Girls were bitches sometimes, was all, Kristin and Ashley in particular. It was weird that Guy had chosen me, frankly. And there was no reason to expect Olivia to defend me at every turn.
Still, our high school had been full of best friends who weren’t really, girls who talked behind each other’s backs and secretly schemed against each other, like happiness was a zero-sum game. Olivia and I had never been like that. We’d rooted for each other; we’d cheered each other on.
We’d been here all of three weeks, and already things were changing.
Finally, I got up off the couch and left the apartment. The air was even swampier than usual, thick gray clouds hanging low and suffocating. I stomped downstairs and crossed the parking lot, then climbed the flight to Alex and Trevor’s apartment, banging the tiny, useless knocker that decorated all the doors at this place.
Those girls from school made out with each other’s boyfriends, too, said a nasty voice at the back of my mind. I made myself push the thought away.
Alex’s eyes widened the tiniest bit when he answered the door, wavy hair damp and curling down over his ears. He was wearing a soft-looking gray T-shirt and looking at me like I was Cinder-freaking-ella, never mind that I was still in my sweaty rehearsal clothes, that I hadn’t showered or even combed my lanky, tangled hair. Nobody, not one other person, had ever, ever looked at me like that. “It’s you,” he said.
“It’s me,” I said, feeling my bad mood melt away at the sight of him, like a puddle of ice cream on the hot, steamy sidewalk. It was Saturday night, and we were eighteen. “You wanna get out of here?”
Alex grinned.
FIFTEEN
Alex was appalled that I’d been in Orlando this long and still hadn’t made it to Disney, so we did what felt like the obvious thing and drove all the way to the park before realizing that tickets to get in were, like, fifty bucks each. Instead we got King Cones and brought them back to his car in the parking lot as the sun sank behind the dark outlines of the roller coasters inside the gates. “I thought you were regionally famous,” I teased, bumping my shoulder with his. “You don’t have a personal in with Mickey Mouse?”
“Guy’s got us on an allowance,” Alex explained, looking sheepish. “I didn’t really think this plan through.”
“No, it’s perfect,” I promised him, licking my ice cream to avoid a drip—the inside of the SUV was immaculate, especially considering it belonged to a teenage boy, and I didn’t want to make a mess. “I’m teasing, really. I just needed to get away from the apartment for a minute.”
“How come?” Alex asked, seemingly oblivious to his own melty cone. “What happened?”
I shook my head, watching the steady trickle of park-goers through the windshield—couples and families, little kids in Mickey Mouse ears and old people in motorized wheelchairs. I didn’t want to tell him about Olivia and the others, what a disaster this all had turned into. How sure they all were that the only reason I was here was how I looked.
“Do you ever get nervous?” I asked instead, wanting to change the subject. “When you perform?”
Alex shook his head. “Nah.”
“Of course not,” I said, which made him smile. The hand that wasn’t holding his ice-cream cone was resting on my bare knee, his palm warm and heavy against my skin. It felt like every nerve ending in my body was focused in that one single spot, like iron filings rushing to a magnet.
“Seriously, though, what’s there to be nervous about?” Alex asked. It was just twilight, the last of the sunset casting the side of his face in pinks and golds. “You got this, Dana. Guy picked you for a reason.”
“He picked me because I’m pretty,” I blurted before I could stop myself, then blushed. “I’m not saying that to be conceited, I just—”
“That’s not true,” Alex said, then hurried to correct himself: “I mean, you are pretty. Really pretty. But that’s not all.”
“It’s not, huh?” I raised my eyebrows, not buying it. I wasn’t fishing for compliments. The truth was, my looks had gotten me plenty of stuff in my life so far: a C on a test I knew I should have failed in Mr. Lambert’s geometry class last winter; a simple warning from the store manager when I’d gotten caught shoplifting lipstick when I was thirteen. Being pretty, I’d learned, was enough to keep you in the competition for a little while. But it was never enough to win.
Alex was shaking his head, sincere. “I meant it, what I said earlier. You, you’re like—you’re the whole package.”
That made me blush. I couldn’t help it—it all felt like a lot all of a sudden, his hand on my knee and the close quarters of the front seat, the cold ice cream in my throat. “I already made out with you once,” I managed finally. “You don’t have to flatter me. When I actually stop and think about it for five seconds, I know there’s no way this is going to be an actual real thing that happens. It’s a nice diversion, being down here. That’s all.”
Alex wasn’t buying it. “So why even bother practicing?” he asked pointedly.
“Because I don’t want to humiliate myself every day if I can help it.” I shrugged. “But I’m not—I’m not the kind of person stuff like this happens to. Do you understand that?”
“Stuff like what?”