Alex waved his arm at the empty parking lot. “There’s nobody here.”
“Somebody could walk by,” I said, knowing I sounded slightly hysterical. “I’m screwing up enough right now, you know? There’s no reason to antagonize everybody.” I took a deep breath, tried to pull myself together. “I don’t belong here” was what came out.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Alex said. He took my hand again, more gently this time. He tilted his head to kiss me, but I ducked away.
“We have to stop this,” I said, meaning it this time. “It’s not a good idea.”
“Just tell Olivia what’s going on,” Alex suggested. “Or I could, if you wanted.”
“What? No,” I said immediately, before I realized I’d given myself away. “How do you know it’s even Olivia who likes you?” I asked.
Alex made a face. “Because I’m not dumb, Dana,” he told me. “And I think she’s great, I think she’s awesome, but I don’t—I want you.”
I banged my head softly backward against the exterior wall of the apartment. “Don’t say anything to her,” I said finally. “I’ll handle it, but just—don’t.”
“I won’t,” Alex promised. “You’re the boss.” Then, looking at me a little closer: “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I hooked my index finger in a couple of his friendship bracelets, tugging gently. “Maybe I should start making these,” I told him, turning my hand and running my fingertips lightly across the sensitive underside of his wrist. “If they’re so soothing.”
Alex looked at me sideways. “I wouldn’t say I’m feeling particularly soothed right now.”
“No?” I asked, gazing at him from underneath my eyelashes. “How do you feel, then?”
“I don’t know,” Alex said, with a hitch in his breath that pleased me. I tilted my head up, pressed a kiss against his mouth.
“Five more minutes,” I said, pulling back to look at him. This close up, his blue eyes had tiny flecks of brown in them. “Five more minutes, then I’ll go inside and rehearse.”
“Five more minutes,” Alex agreed.
It was more like ten, truthfully, before I squeezed his hand and headed around the corner, feeling calmer than I had all day. Olivia was alone upstairs, after all; I could talk to her one-on-one, for real this time, try and set things right once and for all.
I turned toward the staircase and stopped in my tracks: there was Kristin, holding a pair of paper shopping bags, an inscrutable half smile on her face. “What are you doing?” I blurted out.
She shrugged, shiny blond hair and an opaque expression. “Oh,” she said breezily, turning toward the staircase, “just headed upstairs.”
SEVENTEEN
Rehearsals were totally miserable that week. It seemed like what happened with Guy should have galvanized us, made us a stronger team resolved to sink or swim together, but instead it just turned everyone cranky and short-tempered. Lucas was even more peevish than usual, carping every time I hit a bum note. Even Charla, who I could usually count on for some positive reinforcement, seemed frayed around the edges—making us spin until we were dizzy, then yelling at us because we didn’t spot. I hurt all over, my arms and stomach aching from our workouts; it felt like my leg muscles ought to peel right off my bones.
“Ice baths,” Kristin advised as we picked up our lunches—whole wheat wraps today, which seemed to be mostly full of spinach. I was starting to get the feeling that all four of us were on diets, even though nobody had said it out loud. I wanted to ask Olivia about it, but I was afraid it might upset her. “Fill a garbage bag down at the ice machine and dump it in the tub.”
“Seriously?” I gaped at her. “We’re not training for the Olympics.”
Kristin just raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t we?” she asked, and turned back to her lyrics sheet before I could answer.
“This makes me want to die,” I complained to Alex as we settled ourselves on the concrete steps around the corner where nobody could see us, midday sun beating down on the pavement even while the sky to the west took on a creepy gray-green tinge. In Orlando in the summertime, a thunderstorm was never more than fifteen minutes away.
“Aw, it’s not so bad,” Alex said, unwrapping his sandwich—the boys got ham and cheese, which bugged me—and offering me a bite, which I took.
“Not so bad?” I asked once I’d swallowed. “Kristin just suggested I submerge my naked body in a vat of ice, but it’s not so bad?”
Alex raised his eyebrows with interest at the word naked, but then he shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, taking a bite. “It’s kind of what I always wanted, singing all day. I’m into it.”
That made me smile, and also feel like kind of a jerk. “You are, huh?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to love something as much as Alex clearly loved this.
“Yeah,” he said, his cheeks pinking up a bit, either from the heat out here or from the idea that I might make fun of him. “My brain just gets kind of quiet when I’m singing. You ever feel that way?”
“My brain’s quiet all the time,” I joked. Across the parking lot, Mikey was juggling three clementines like he was considering joining the circus if all this didn’t work out. Thunder rumbled in the distance, the darkness crawling its way across the sky and that creosote smell getting stronger in the air. “Just ask Lucas.”
“You know what I mean,” Alex said, bumping my arm with his warm, slightly sticky one. “When I’m singing, or dancing, or whatever, it’s like all the sharp edges get filed down. Everything kind of makes sense to me that way.” He shrugged again, that bashful quality that I found so stupidly winning. “I used to get in trouble at school because I’d sing to myself, real quiet-like, during my math tests.”
I snorted. “You did not.”
“I did!” Alex said, laughing. “For a long time it was the only way I could do my times tables, was if I sang ’em. My mom had to come in and have a meeting with the teacher ’cause I was disrupting the other kids.”
“Well,” I said quietly, skimming my fingernail up the back of his calf. “You are very disruptive.”
Alex shivered. “Quit it,” he said, smiling, in a voice that did not in fact mean quit it at all. “I gotta get up and walk around in a sec.”
That got my attention. “Oh yeah?” I asked, teasing. “And why wouldn’t you be able to do that, exactly?”
“Shut up,” Alex said, reaching down and lacing his fingers through mine. Thunder rumbled again, closer this time; I rested my chin on his shoulder.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said, nudging my nose at his jawbone. He smelled like summer, like this place. “Tell me more about singing.”