“Like being a pop star!”
“You are, though,” Alex argued. “The fact that you’re here at all means you are. You can have this if you really want it, there’s literally no doubt in my mind. You’ve got, like, that indefinable thing. The know-it-when-you-see-it thing.”
I was still blushing. I wasn’t used to the kinds of compliments Alex threw around like handfuls of confetti, didn’t know if he meant them for real or if this was just how he was. Either way, I wondered how you got to be that confident—in yourself or in anyone else. “I don’t know about that,” I said.
Alex nodded. “Trust me,” he said, and in spite of myself, I did.
He sat back in his seat then, eating the rest of his ice cream in three big bites like he’d suddenly remembered he had it. My skin buzzed hotly where his hand had been. “Can I ask you something? You said you didn’t even really mean to audition, right?” He tilted his head to the side, and I nodded. “So why did you decide you wanted to be in the group?”
I hesitated, looking around the Suburban. This SUV alone probably cost more than my entire house. Nobody here knew anything about where I came from except for Olivia. Maybe it was stupid, but I wanted to tell Alex. “It just felt kind of like a last-minute escape plan, I guess,” I said slowly. “It felt like a chance to get away.”
“To get away?” Alex asked, forehead wrinkling. “From what?”
I took a breath. “The rest of my life? I don’t know.” Alex was quiet, leaving space, and after a moment I continued. “I don’t—we don’t have any money, first of all. And my mom . . . drinks a lot. Like, a lot. And I graduated last month, and my job ended, and I—” I broke off. “It’s not like I had anything better to do, you know? I literally had nothing to lose.”
“Really?” Alex asked, looking at me curiously—and maybe with a little bit of doubt. “That’s how you wound up here?”
“Oh, yeah.” I nodded. “This was Olivia’s dream, always. Not mine.”
“What would you do if you weren’t doing this?”
“Be a waitress,” I said immediately.
“Okay,” Alex said. “But, like, if you could be anything in the world.”
I snorted. “Oh my gosh, please don’t try to talk to me about, like, my hopes and dreams.”
Alex’s brow furrowed. “Why not?” he asked, sounding sort of offended.
“Because it’s so corny!”
That made him smile. “I’m literally in a boy band, Dana. You think I care about being corny?”
“Clearly not.”
“Come on,” he pressed, nudging my knee with his across the seats. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know.” I thought about it for a moment. “I guess when I was, like, really, really little, I wanted to be a doctor. I got it into my head that my dad was one? Which is ridiculous for a lot of reasons, one being that I don’t know my dad and two being that whoever he was, he was definitely not the doctor type. I must have seen it on TV or something.” I paused, embarrassed for my past self, by how dumb it sounded now. “Anyway, that’s what I used to tell people. That I wanted to be a doctor.”
Alex nodded seriously. “Do you still want it?”
“No!” I laughed. “God, no.”
“Because that is, like, a perfectly attainable dream.”
“See, that’s exactly the kind of thing a person like you would say.”
“A person like me?”
I huffed a little. “I don’t need you to unlock my secret potential, Alex. I know what my potential is. I barely graduated high school. I’m not going to magically go to Harvard and become a brain surgeon. Like, it never even occurred to anyone who knows me that college was a thing that would ever happen.”
“So?” Alex shrugged. “I’d bet good money that it didn’t occur to them that this was a thing that would ever happen, either.”
“I bet you would,” I fired back. “Because money is probably something you’ve never had to worry about.”
I sat back in my seat, exhausted all of a sudden. I hadn’t talked that much about myself in maybe ever. My ice cream was getting everywhere by this point, and I ate the rest of it without looking up at Alex, who was silent. I didn’t want to see the expression on his face. It was one thing to make out in a pool after midnight. It was another to tell him the truth.
“Okay,” I said finally, wiping my sticky hands on my shorts. It was fully dark now, the sky a deep, velvety blue. “Sorry, did I freak you out with my trailer-trashiness?” I looked up at him then, shoulders squared and jaw set. “It’s fine, if I did. I get it.”
I was trying to make it sound like a joke, kind of, but Alex gazed back at me, calm and even. “No,” he said. “I’m not freaked out.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me, either.”
“I don’t feel sorry for you.”
I took a breath, feeling on the edge of tears all of a sudden and not wanting to cry. “Prove it,” I said.
“Come here.”
I shook my head, remembering all the reasons it was a bad idea for me to be here. “I can’t.”
“You keep saying that. Come here,” he said again, and this time I did, scooting toward him in my seat until our knees were touching. Alex put both hands on my face. “Come here,” he said one more time, so quietly, and when he kissed me it wasn’t any more careful than it had been the other night in the pool.
“Trust me?” he asked, pulling back and looking at me urgently.
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I—” I was about to say something else when a huge rumbling boom sounded out overhead. Alex’s face suddenly lit up in reds and purples and golds. I looked out the windshield and laughed.
“Fireworks,” I said, shaking my head as another blast exploded overhead, this one a dazzling white. I could feel the sound of it vibrate through my jaw. “Very nice touch.”
“Wha—I didn’t plan that!” Alex protested.
“Mm-hmm.” I was grinning. “Sure you didn’t.”
“I mean, unless you think it’s romantic,” he said thoughtfully. “Then I totally planned it.”
“It’s a little romantic,” I admitted, and leaned in to kiss him again. Kissing Alex made me feel like an electrical fire had broken out inside my body, the blaze everyplace he touched me. I wanted to get as close as I possibly could. “Hey,” I said after a while, sounding breathless, grabbing his hand and tugging him into the back of the SUV, where there was more room for us to move around.
Alex grinned as I climbed into his lap. “This is the real reason you want to buy a minivan, isn’t it?” Alex said, but I was too distracted to answer because he had taken my hand and was kissing the very tips of my fingers, sucking a little, his tongue warm and soft against my skin.
“You taste like King Cone,” he said.
I snorted. “You hungry?”
“I’m eighteen,” he said. “I’m hungry all the time.”
I laughed and tugged him closer. I closed my eyes and kissed him again.
SIXTEEN