“Can’t sleep?” Charla asked now, scooting over on the sofa to make room for me. I sat down beside her, a little cautiously. She and I hadn’t spent a lot of time alone together, but I liked her, I thought—she was only about ten years older than us, and sometimes felt more like a big sister than an actual adult. In rehearsal, she was the opposite of Lucas, big on praise and thumbs-ups.
“Nah,” I said. “I’m, like, an insomniac since I got here. It’s weird.”
Charla nodded seriously, like she was giving more weight to that throwaway comment than I’d meant for her to, and right away I wished I could take it back. “How you doing, Dana?” she asked, turning and pulling one long leg up onto the sofa, looking at me straight on. She’d washed her face for bed already, her hair spilling down over her angular shoulders. “You having fun here?”
“Of course,” I said too eagerly, nodding fast like a puppet on a string. “I’m great.”
“You looked good the other day,” Charla said. “When I saw you in the dance room. You’ve got real talent, you know that? When you’re on like that, you’re incredible to watch.”
I shook my head even as I felt myself flush with pleasure—embarrassed by the memory, that feeling of having been caught with my guard down like that. Still, it wasn’t lost on me that the compliment was similar to ones I’d gotten from Alex, all his talk about watchability and the X-factor. Maybe he wasn’t talking completely out of his butt. Still. “I was just screwing around,” I muttered. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” Charla said gently. “Diminish what you’re doing here, or make it seem like it doesn’t matter. The others certainly aren’t.”
It was making me kind of uncomfortable to be the focus of all her attention. “How’d you start working with Guy?” I asked.
Charla sat back against the cushions, took a long, quiet sip of her tea. “I had a couple bad stress injuries when I was still touring,” she explained, looking at me over the lip of her mug. “So I took some time off, started teaching at a studio in New York, working on some theater. And I had a friend who knew Juliet.”
I nodded, picturing it—a life that had turned out differently, maybe, than Charla had expected. “Do you miss performing?”
“Sometimes.” She shrugged. “Not as much as I would have thought. I didn’t have that special thing, you know? I blend in up there; I don’t stand out. Not everybody’s cut out to be a great performer.”
I wasn’t sure if she was trying to tell me something or not, if I stood out to her or I didn’t. If she would have said this exact thing to Olivia or Ashley, if they’d wandered out of their rooms. Over the white-noise drone of the air-conditioning, I could hear cars whooshing by on the highway outside.
“What about you?” Charla asked. “What would you want to be doing if you weren’t doing this?”
I shrugged a little, shifted in my seat. “Everybody keeps asking me that lately.”
“It’s a valid question.”
“Because I definitely shouldn’t quit my day job?”
It was the closest I could get to asking what she was really trying to say to me here, but Charla rolled her eyes. “Because I care about you,” she said.
The idea popped into my head again: I used to think I’d be a doctor. It was kind of the same as choreography, I thought—learning a series of steps and performing them in the exact right order. But Alex had been wrong, that night in the car. That idea was even dumber and more far-out than the idea of touring with Tulsa MacCreadie. It was completely and utterly absurd. “I don’t know,” I lied finally, looking at the TV and not at Charla. “I guess I can really only picture myself doing this.”
NINETEEN
The following weekend, we were all invited to a pool party at Guy’s house on the other side of Orlando. Kristin started getting ready bright and early that morning, slinging an L.L.Bean tote full of self-tanner and Sun-In up onto the vanity in the bathroom and getting to work. “I’m going to crap my pants,” she announced when I came in to brush my teeth, the fact that normally she didn’t have two words to say to me apparently forgotten in the face of this momentous occasion. “I’m going to barf all over him. I’m going to crap my pants; then I’m going to barf all over him.”
“What?” I blinked. Guy was rich, sure, but I didn’t see what there was to get so worked up about. “Who?”
Kristin looked at me like I was insane. “Tulsa!” she replied. “Obviously.”
“Relax,” Ashley said, dipping her finger into a tin of shiny pink lip gloss. “We’re going to be on the same level as him soon.”
“We are not on the same level as him now,” I pointed out, then felt stupid about it. I didn’t like to think of myself as the kind of person to fall all over herself in front of a celebrity.
Kristin wasn’t concerned about coolness, apparently. “I waxed my bikini line last night,” she announced, lining her arsenal of products up on the vanity. “Just in case.”
“Just in case Tulsa MacCreadie wants to have sex with you?” I snorted.
“I can hear you!” Charla called from the other room.
“Dana’s too cool to get excited about Tulsa,” Olivia said as she brushed on waterproof mascara, plucking at a clump and flicking it away. “It’s not her style.”
In reality, there was only one person I was really excited to see at Guy’s party, but I tried to keep my voice nonchalant. “Well,” I conceded, bumping her hip with mine, familiar. “I mean. He’s no Hot Rod Davison.”
Olivia laughed.
Guy lived in a gated community on the outskirts of Orlando, in a white stuccoed house with big fake Greek columns in the front of it. A fountain burbled away in the front yard. A housekeeper in an actual uniform answered the door, like something out of Jane Eyre, which I’d half read in English back in Jessell earlier that spring. “So nice to see you all,” she said brightly. “Follow me.”
She led us through a living room outfitted with a shiny grand piano and into a sleek white kitchen, then down a short flight of stairs to a rec room with a massive pool table, plus a Pac-Man machine and a jukebox that lit up red and green and gold. “He lives here by himself?” I asked quietly, as we trailed her through the cavernous hallways. Ashley shrugged.
“They’re out in the yard,” the housekeeper said, motioning at the sliding glass doors that led there. “If there’s anything you need, just ask.”
In the back was a massive pool landscaped a million times nicer than the one at the complex, complete with a waterslide and a fake grotto like the one I’d seen on a late-night special about the Playboy Mansion. A stainless-steel grill was built into a low stone wall on one side of the yard.