“Girls,” Guy said calmly, “I’m not fucking around here. I mean it. Thank you very much.”
“This is a joke,” Kristin said, shoving her chair back so hard it squealed against the tiles; Ashley jumped out of the way. “Seriously, this whole thing is bullshit.” She yanked the door open so hard I was half afraid she was going to rip it off its hinges, her ponytail swishing wildly. After a moment, Ashley followed her out.
Olivia and I made frantic eye contact, our fight momentarily forgotten. What the fuck, I mouthed.
“Now, you two,” Guy said, sitting back in his seat once Ash and Kristin had gone, the door shutting with a finality that made me think I’d never see them again. He crossed his arms, looked at us shrewdly. “You two, I’ll be honest, I haven’t quite figured out what the hell to do with. You’re not going to be a duo, that’s for sure. Sit down, Dana, you look like you’re about to run out the door.”
I sat just like he told me to, taking the chair Kristin had vacated, the plastic still warm with her body heat.
“I could keep you both as solo acts,” Guy said thoughtfully, “but it feels like shooting myself in the foot to be pushing two products in direct competition with each other at the exact same time. It’s bad business.” Products? Was that how he saw us? Was that what we were? “But that’s the problem,” he continued, like we weren’t even sitting in the room with him. “Which one of you do I keep?”
“Keep me,” Olivia said immediately, and I whipped my head around to stare at her. She didn’t look at me once as she continued, “I’ve got more training, I’ve got the better voice, I’m more reliable onstage. Keep me.”
Guy smiled at that, looking genuinely fond of her. “Well, somebody learned something yesterday, huh? Very nice, Olivia. You’re right, that how much you want it is going to be a big part of this. But it’s not gonna be quite that easy.” Guy sighed. “I think what I’m going to do is keep you both on for now. You’ll rehearse separately. We’ll try you out as solo artists. And we’ll see which one of you earns a spot on the tour.”
I gawked at him openly, my brain slow to make sense of what he was telling us here. “So, what?” I asked, unable to help myself. Twenty-four hours ago, the tour had been a sure thing for Daisy Chain, the light at the end of a tunnel lined with hard work and dedication. Now, suddenly, it was the prize in some kind of twisted popularity contest between me and Olivia? Just like that, all the rules had changed. “You’re just pitting us against each other?”
“I wouldn’t look at it like that,” Guy said. “But a little healthy competition never hurt anyone, I don’t think. My guess is that it’ll make you both better, sharper performers.”
Yeah, at what price? I thought of how excited I’d been to come down here at the beginning of the summer, how it felt like this gift Olivia and I had been given, a way to keep us together even as the universe was conspiring to split us apart. Coming here was supposed to mean I didn’t have to lose her. But when I glanced in her direction, she didn’t look like anyone I knew.
“I’ll show you what I can do,” she promised, now leaning forward eagerly, like Guy was a coach in some corny sports movie and not what he actually was: a businessman who looked at us and saw dollar signs and nothing more.
“Me too,” I heard myself say, then felt immediately embarrassed. It didn’t sound like me at all. But I did want to show him, I realized suddenly. In spite of everything, I wanted to prove myself now more than ever. “I’ll show you, too.”
“I’m sure you will. In the meantime, take the rest of the day,” Guy told us. “Come back tomorrow ready to work.”
Kristin and Ashley were gone by the time we made it out into the hallway; the studio was quiet and abandoned. Olivia and I stood at the top of the concrete stairs that led to the parking lot, waiting for Charla. It was raining, the pavement giving off a wet, smoky smell. Drops collected on our shoulders and in our hair, but neither one of us moved.
“Tulsa was part of a group at the beginning,” Olivia said finally, staring straight ahead at the parking lot and not at me. It was the first thing she’d said to me directly in days. “I forgot that until just now. There were five of them, like there are in Hurricane State, but Tulsa was the only one Guy kept.”
“What happened to the rest of them?” I couldn’t resist asking.
Olivia shrugged. “I have no idea.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. Olivia crossed her arms. We stood there for a long time, not talking, waiting for Charla to come and take us home.
TWENTY-THREE
We rode back to the apartment in silence, fast-food joints and nail salons blurring by outside the window. The sky was low with dreary, polluted-looking clouds. As soon as we got upstairs, Olivia stalked into our bedroom and slammed the door behind her, leaving Charla and me alone in the living room. We stared at each other for a moment. I felt like I’d fallen down a flight of steps.
“So,” Charla said finally, clapping her hands together, “want some lunch?”
She was kidding, trying to make a joke out of this whole absurd, horrifying situation, and I cackled one insane-sounding laugh before the shock wore off all at once and I realized how totally, enormously angry I was. I was livid—at Olivia, at Guy, at Charla maybe most of all. She’d spent the last month painting herself as our ally, as basically one of us: fixing our snacks, listening to our secrets, learning our stupid sleepover dances. But apparently she’d been double-agenting for Guy all along.
“Where are Ash and Kristin?” I asked, looking around the apartment with my arms crossed. “Already hitchhiking home, or what?”
Charla rolled her eyes at me. “Juliet’s going to bring them back to pack up in a bit,” she told me. “They’re signing some papers, getting their travel home sorted.” Then, more gently, “This is a business, Dana. People get cut. It happens.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “How long did you know it was going to happen?”
Charla exhaled and sat down on the sofa, motioned for me to sit down with her. I stayed exactly where I was. “I knew—” she began, then stopped abruptly as music came blasting from the stereo in our room, where Olivia had turned the volume on her Mariah Carey tape up as high as it would go. The doors and walls were wafer-thin in this apartment, and I thought Charla was going to tell Olivia to pipe down, but instead she just ignored the noise. “I knew he’d been thinking about it,” she told me, raising her voice a bit so I could hear her over the music. “But we just got the final word last night.”
“And you didn’t tell us?”